Nominations clean up: the Comics Conundrum!

[aphrodite_mine]

Hopefully all of the nominations have been fixed aside from any issue caused by multiple tag associations (this happens when a character, say "Cassie Lang", is nominated under a particular category [Young Avengers] and already has tagged associations within the archive in other categories [Marvel 616, etc

Comments

[amathela]

That's a good point about the movies, too - if 'Marvel Cinematic Universe' is one fandom, it seems like the Marvel comics universe should be a single fandom also.

And I'd second the point about smaller fandoms not eliminating the problem of people only wanting/being familiar with one small part of canon; something like X-Men (comics) is hardly any smaller or more manageable than Marvel 616 as a whole, and the same principle is true even of smaller comics titles (like the Batgirl comics starring any of Cassandra Cain, Stephanie Brown, or Barbara Gordon, which are all distinctly separate titles, being lumped into a single "smaller" fandom).

[amathela]

I'd be happy with either solution, but it seems like the second option might be the more useful one - I think the possibility of "missed matches" is a definite drawback to the first option, though it would probably depend on whether there's an upper limit to the number of fandoms we can offer. At the same, removing the limit on the number of women we can offer within a fandom (yay!) means I can't see a particular drawback to the second option, though of course others might.

Basically, as someone who is planning to both offer and request comics women: I am familiar with most (but not all) of the women in each category, though I won't necessarily be offering the majority of them (with ~90 women between DC and Marvel, that'd be quite the feat); and I'd probably choose the second option, though I'm happy to go with whatever gets decided.

[ladymercury_10]

I'm not sure I understand the options. If you eliminate smaller subfandoms, will the characters in those fandoms that are not duplicates then get merged into the larger fandom? Or will some characters be lost?

Is there a way to do this like with meta-tags, or do those only work in searches and not in assignment matching?

[ladymercury_10]

In that case, I think the second option probably makes more sense, although I would be down with either.

[muccamukk]

I like just throwing everyone in together, at this point. It seems like missing matches would be the biggest problem. Just call the whole lot Marvel 616 and have done.

Hopefully taking the upper limit off wouldn't do horrible things to the server?

[muccamukk]

Like ten slots of up to 6 characters, or ten characters total?

[graycardinal]

I'd argue that the subfandoms are necessary, and that the phrase "missed matches" under the "#1" paragraph above confuses the case. Let me explain:

The bulk of my comics reading took place decades ago, and while I'm broadly familiar with the outlines of both Marvel and DC continuity, my specific knowledge of most characters is derived from particular slices of that continuity. For example, I know Barbara Gordon mostly from the various television series in which the character has appeared (Birds of Prey, Batman Beyond). So for the purposes of this exchange (and given the subfandoms included in this nomination set) if I offer to write Barbara Gordon, the Barbara I can write is the Batrman Beyond character; if I request her, it's that version that I want to see. Eliminate Batman Beyond as a subfandom, and I can neither offer nor request the character because (a) my knowledge isn't wide enough to write all possible permutations of the character, and (b) it isn't reasonable of me to expect an offering writer to know the particular,

[muccamukk]

Right, like Zarabithia said above, there's so much continuity it's really difficult to know exactly what people will want even if you break it down by title. You can pretty easily read everything Kate Bishop's been in, but someone who's been around for a bit like Wanda Maximoff? Yeah. Have fun with that.

I think most comics fans are pretty used to that. I'm willing to read up if someone wants a different period than I'm familiar with, (within the same universe. Good luck getting anyone to read Ults who doesn't want to.)

[graycardinal]

Let me lead off by admitting that I'm definitely much more conversant with DC than with Marvel (and most of my Marvel-literacy is derived from film and/or animated continuity). Having said that, two thoughts:

First, given the various recent makeovers on both sides of the DC/Marvel divide, I am not sure "main [insert publisher] comics universe" is an entirely meaningful term these days. (I know there is such a thing as the "New 52" on the DCU side of the fence, but I couldn't tell you what's going on in it, let alone how a given character's history has been retconned therein.)

Second, if I understand the situation correctly, I have the impression that the issues with comics-character tags (over which we evidently have some control) are to some extent intertwined with the AO3 tag-association muddle (over which we don't have control). That is, based on the comments to this point, it isn't clear to me whether we can rearrange the tags in a way that both (a) groups characters into one large print-comics fandom and (b), retains the