On the miseries of browsing for fic.

[antennapedia]

I have no fresh recs for you today, though I did a great deal of speed-reading through a lot of Mycroft + gen tagged fic on the AO3. This experience was miserable. Oh the badfic! Oh the fic that wasn't at all relevant to my interests despite its appearance in my searches

Comments

[antennapedia]

"Free-form" tags on AO3 mean tags that haven't been wrangled into official, canonical forms yet. Somebody has used them for the first time ever. This isn't necessarily bad; I used "blue jeans" the other day to tag the blue-jeans-focused kink meme fill I reposted there. This tag is free-form because nobody else had used it yet, but it's a reasonable tag for that story and you could imagine other stories being tagged with it. And readers looking for stories about ass-hugging buttery-soft blue jeans might search for it.

The really wild long tags are the ones that are more, um, controversial.

I have not read this story at all, but I found it while scanning for an example of freeform tags: check the tags on this one. Tags like "Of course Sherlock would get a question about the solar system" are what people are talking about. They can't be aliased to canonical tags like "Humor" or "Pottermore", also on that story, and they are most likely not used on any other story in the archive. And they never *will* be used on any other story on the archive, not even by the author who used them on that story.

They are Tumblr-style meta-commentary on the story, not tags intended to be used by a reader searching for stories to read. Many people loathe them. No need to explain why, I bet.

[elayna88]

Thank you! I've been wondering what free-form meant.

I've seen some of those really wild long tags and just... sorta blinked. They don't really encourage me to read the fic, as they make me think the author is fairly young. That may be a rude judgment of mine, but they just seem immature. Especially since the first ones I saw were the author denigrating herself or her writing.

[antennapedia]

I think think think there's another use of "freeform" that'll show up in AO3 tags. There's a Beatles fandom tag (things like fandom & characters & pairings are implemented as specially categorized tags behind the scenes). There is also a "Beatles" tag that means "this fic that isn't in the Beatles fandom has the Beatles in it for other reasons". That one will actually be wrangled to an official version that has the word "freeform" in it, to signal something to the tag wranglers. I *think*.

It is confusing.

Tumblr-style tagging drives me crazy on the AO3. It's NOT a blog. It is a FIC ARCHIVE. Tag to help readers find your fics. ARGH.

[elayna88]

I think I'm glad I can generally just search by pairing and my pairings are almost always the most popular OTP in the fandom.