Be the meme you wish to see in the world

[healingmirth]

A thought I had just now, regarding the AO3 favorite tag feature that I mentioned earlier. Now I'm curious which tags y'all have favorited! (Or which tags you *would* have favorited, except you only browse them with something
filtered out.)

Photos optional! Full disclosure optional! Commentary optional! Optional things optional!

(Posting via email, for screenshot uploading purposes, so editing in of links, alt text, etc. to come in a bit)





I was trying to think if there's a freeform tag (alternate universe - coffeeshop, or what have you) which I love enough to scan through for the fandoms I recognize. I've definitely never bookmarked one, and actually I think I've only ever used a freeform tag sans fandom once - when I was trying to jog my memory recently for marriage of convenience recs.

I was also thinking about how I have thus far only favorited five tags. Could I fill it up? Not sure. Maybe, but I am also terrible at culling, so I'd rather add sparingly than have to kill a darling later.



The Breakfast Club (1985) - because sometimes people write Breakfast Club fic in, like, July rather than for yuletide, and I miss it.

British Comedy RPF - way low volume. Could probably just be the David Mitchell tag, but I recognize enough of the other folks that I branch out sometimes. And then the David Mitchell tag is usually on that page somewhere.

Hockey RPF - there is a lot of Kane/Toews out there, y'all. Not quite the drinking from the firehose level of Teen Wolf fic, but I'm impressed if anyone can keep up.

Jim Gordon/Alfred Pennyworth - please!

Tennis RPF - barely clicking on any of it, outside of Yuletimes, but I live in hope.

Comments

[marginaliana]

I have to admit, I haven't quite figured out what to do with favorited AO3 tags yet. I've added a couple as they occurred to me as 'oh, maybe I should favorite this tag' but so far they haven't added any utility. There are a couple of tags - like British Comedy RPF - that I follow already via rss feed to my DW reading page. So I don't think I'd want to duplicate those in my favorites. Hmmm...

[healingmirth]

Ah, yeah, I never got into RSS or ITTT feeds for fic.

I'm AO3 subscribed to many of the authors whose fic I like, for the ASAP updates, but I don't want to be surprised by intriguing-but-random fic when I'm in f-list catch-up mode. I lost that part of my brain somehow in the transition from mostly finding fic through community announcements to mostly browsing by fandom on AO3, and I'm not sure how to get it back.

[silverr]

I'm subscribed to a few authors, and have an RSS feed for certain fic categories that show up on my DW friends page, which is nice. (If you're interested I can give you the info on how to do it, it's actually pretty easy.)

I should probably favorite those few relationship tags that I'd read; they appear so infrequently that I almost never think to check for them.

[healingmirth]

I've got a few feeds that I read on DW - news blogs, mostly, but I'm going to keep passing on the fic ones, but thank you :)

Anything long or requiring thought that shows up on my reading page just ends up bookmarked or open in a tab that I never get back to, so I've finally learned myself well enough to admit that it's not a good fic-tracking method for me.

[dirty_diana]

the ability to search on tropes is pretty much my favourite a03 feature? Super specific stuff like deaf!Clint, A/B/O...it gets progressively more embarrassing after that tbh.

[healingmirth]

Oh, I absolutely love searching in the tags, but I was thinking, when I wrote this, that I'm not currently reading in enough fandoms (or the right megafandoms, I guess) for the general tag to be somewhere I would hang out. Too much noise-to-signal, or my first stop would just be to find them some other way.

Like, I love a Regency AU, and right now the first page of the Alternate Universe - Regency tag right now is some BBC Sherlock, Teen Wolf, MCU, XMFC, Inception, ASOIAF, something from Anime & Manga, few other things, from the last month.

So there's about 2/3 of that page which I know the fandom well enough to read it but I'm not sure my fannish reading whims ever say "I want to read [trope]" rather than "I want to read [pairing]" as a starting point.

But! Like, I had to give up on keeping pace with Teen Wolf fandom a while back - there was just too much fic pouring out for me to even bother browsing the AO3 tag, rather than subscribing to a few authors. I think that's a case where favoriting a fandom-specific tag for something I love might've been helpful? I don't know what the analogue to deaf!Clint would have been for me there, but if there was a niche trope I loved, this would've been a nice way to easily get back to it.

[dirty_diana]

I guess I sometimes filter down for the MCU if there seems to be too much other stuff to pick through, but some interesting small fandom stuff can pop up if you just skim? And frankly sometimes I am hungry enough for the trope to read anything where I recognise the names and don't actively dislike the source. Plus some tropes just turn up more in certain fandoms even if they're technically vague, I'd be surprised if TW didn't have any wolf-related tropes of that nature?

But I also don't feel too strongly about specific pairings (again, as long as I don't actively dislike an included character or their fanon characterisations). So sometimes great tropey fics cross my path using this method, that I wouldn't have found because of being gen or about a rare/abstract pairing/grouping I wouldn't have thought to search on. Like you say the A03 output for megafandoms makes it impossible not to miss stuff, so sometimes I find it pays to poke around.