Fanfic Tags - Blog Posts

Just a psa for fic writers who use the “trauma bond” tag, please make sure you’re using it correctly. A trauma bond is not two people who experience similar trauma and bond over it. It’s a carefully curated, manipulative bond between abuser and victim to keep the victim coming back because of the addictive highs and lows that come with abuse.

If you want to tag two characters bonding over shared trauma, a good substitute tag would be “bonding over shared trauma.” Trauma bonding is, by definition, an abusive relationship and may steer people who have experienced it away from your fic. Please spread the word and happy writing!

The nightmare that is AO3 tagging

Okay, so maybe that's being just a touch dramatic. Seriously, though, it seems like there's a lot of tagging advice on Reddit, etc., that talks about not using a lot of tags, only tagging the really major characters, keeping the tags relevant and useful for sorting, and all that. I've kind of freaked myself by reading those conversations, and then looking at my own fic like... oh... dear... you have so many tags... do people find that obnoxious?

I dunno. Personally, I love all the fun, silly, casual, chatty, cracky, creative tags that authors use. Maybe they're not much good for sorting, but they make me smile. I don't mind reading through a huge block of tags, because apparently mine is a bit of a magpie brain, but instead of shiny things, it wants words. Plus, when there are a lot of tags, there's that much more opportunity to find a fun one!

It's also usually nice when there are a lot of characters tagged, because then I can see who all is in the story, not just the MCs. Same goes for relationships. When it comes to tagging my own fic, of course, I'm like, "Major characters? Important relationships? But they're all important! I want to tag them all!"

So, I totally don't blame people who do this as well. And if you prefer to be efficient and tidy, that works, too. Seems like, it's your story, and you know how you want to present it, so why not tag away as you see fit?

**Now that I think of it, though, there could be one very valid caveat to this perspective. Do the majority of AO3 tagwranglers find it frustrating to deal with the zany, one-off tags?

Tags don't concern me-nope!nvm, they do...

Am I the only one who doesn't read the tags for fics? like-it's giving myself a spoiler and I don't want it tbh.

like, i'll read the trigger warnings but I don't want to know who gets with who or who dies or sum. let it be a surprise(I want to suffer basically :3)

Until it comes back to bite me in the ass and I'm just kinda staring at my screen as I see the one ship I didn't want to become a thing, or for one of the sweetest characters to get whumped :p

but I'll never stop, cause I don't want to get spoiled, it shall be like that till the day I die(づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ