i am serious about this

[esmenet]

I think the rubric for tagging characters in AO3 should be: if they have enough of a significant role that someone could look back at the story afterwards and go 'that's my favorite character in the whole fic!' then tag them. otherwise no.

Comments

[aris_tgd]

Man, I think tagging culture is divided between people who use tags to find things they want to read, and people who use tags to avoid things they want to not read. So people who really want to *find* fics including Rare Character A are disappointed when A only shows up in one minor scene, but people who really want to *avoid* A are irritated when ze isn't tagged.

Oh, fandom. You are difficult. I should probably tag more on stuff like kink fic and PWPs and tag less on huge epics, but in practice my tagging tends to be "how much effort do I want to go into at the exact instant I am posting something".

[esmenet]

The thing with AO3 is that it's not terribly easy to exclude character tags -- with Tumblr tagging a character to exclude them actually works, because you can use a third-party thing to blacklist it, but with AO3 it can be more difficult. So I think it would make more sense to put 'character A appears briefly in bits x & y' in the notes or summary or even just misc-tag 'character a' than it would to tag them in the character tags.

---Of course, this wouldn't be necessary if AO3 would add a way for authors to distinguish 'main characters of story' from 'briefly appearing side characters in story' to their story info system.