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Archive of Our Own
Contrary to my expectations, I *did* manage to get an AO3 membership request and creation working this time round: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Igenlode
And I managed to upload a trial chapter; one of the problems with not having access to my original home page is that I don't actually have a record of when the various works were initially written (as versus when the file on my hard disc was last saved, which can often be years later -- as in this case!) So I can't backdate them so that they don't show up as brand-new works, even if I wanted to.
I have to say I'm immediately reminded of just why I find AO3 so difficult to navigate -- because of the 'everyone tags everything' ethos, it's not practical to do a quick skim through ignoring every story with an explicit Erik/Christine tag [†], because it's all hidden within a massive list of characters and potential relationships. And of course almost all of them *are* Erik/Christine stories, because that's where the fandom demand is...
But it did work. Handling long freeform text tags without auto-complete is a complete pain (just try typing "Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms" with identically-placed spacing and accents, especially given that trying to highlight and paste keeps causing the clickable link to activate instead!), but at least they do allow the option to do it manually. Uploading a single chapter is very laborious, and I think I need to deploy one of the various form-filler apps if I'm going to do multiple chapters/stories, but to be fair it is actually *more* accessible than FFnet's approach, where I used not to be able to get past the fandom selection popup, and had to reselect the characters listed from the start for each story if anything else went wrong with the submission.
† Actually, you can -- the various filter links don't do anything, but if you type the text strings into the 'other tags to exclude' writable icon, that has the same effect, e.g. Exclude: Christine Daaé/Erik | Phantom of the Opera, M/M
On the whole I'm happier with the approach that displays everything and lets you 'filter' it visually according to the clues given and your own judgement -- that search link would exclude "Fraternité", for example -- but the option to do it via manual override is there. Now if only there were an option to search Dreamwidth tags for a combination of "fic-meta" AND "swedish", for example...
And I managed to upload a trial chapter; one of the problems with not having access to my original home page is that I don't actually have a record of when the various works were initially written (as versus when the file on my hard disc was last saved, which can often be years later -- as in this case!) So I can't backdate them so that they don't show up as brand-new works, even if I wanted to.
I have to say I'm immediately reminded of just why I find AO3 so difficult to navigate -- because of the 'everyone tags everything' ethos, it's not practical to do a quick skim through ignoring every story with an explicit Erik/Christine tag [†], because it's all hidden within a massive list of characters and potential relationships. And of course almost all of them *are* Erik/Christine stories, because that's where the fandom demand is...
But it did work. Handling long freeform text tags without auto-complete is a complete pain (just try typing "Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms" with identically-placed spacing and accents, especially given that trying to highlight and paste keeps causing the clickable link to activate instead!), but at least they do allow the option to do it manually. Uploading a single chapter is very laborious, and I think I need to deploy one of the various form-filler apps if I'm going to do multiple chapters/stories, but to be fair it is actually *more* accessible than FFnet's approach, where I used not to be able to get past the fandom selection popup, and had to reselect the characters listed from the start for each story if anything else went wrong with the submission.
† Actually, you can -- the various filter links don't do anything, but if you type the text strings into the 'other tags to exclude' writable icon, that has the same effect, e.g. Exclude: Christine Daaé/Erik | Phantom of the Opera, M/M
On the whole I'm happier with the approach that displays everything and lets you 'filter' it visually according to the clues given and your own judgement -- that search link would exclude "Fraternité", for example -- but the option to do it via manual override is there. Now if only there were an option to search Dreamwidth tags for a combination of "fic-meta" AND "swedish", for example...
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I'm not sure if backdating would be that necessary anyway - the stories showing up as new works are much more likely to get the attention of potential readers.
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(Possibly not the best test case, since the "Les Miserables" stories were among those that frequently got no traffic at all on FFNet, so getting no traffic on AO3 either doesn't necessarily demonstrate anything...)
As a posting process I don't think it actually saves any time -- I deliberately chose a short two-chapter story to test with in case it didn't work out, and although it did work I still had to do a lot of editing on the imported text, not least in order to strip out all the blog-style material surrounding the actual chapters. I recycled some of that as AO3 'notes', but it would really have been easier to start with a freshly-converted HTML file; most of the upload time is spent on trying to establish what the appropriate fandom tags etc. are (and trying to use Google Search previews to track down my original summaries, which I assumed would be in the document files but weren't!)
So given the difficulty of locating a set of chapters for a specific story on Dreamwidth anyway, I think I'll just go for uploading them as new stories and one at a time. It's just as well my fanfics tend not to have all that many chapters...
Newly-discovered (and probably connected) issues with AO3 and my browser; I can't dismiss the 'new user' banner, because clicking on "Dismiss permanently" ( https://archiveofourown.org/users/Igenlode/end_first_login ) redirects to an authentication error, and attempting to edit logged-in comments has the same effect. However, I can't edit comments I leave here (possibly for the same reason) and I'm used to living with the 'Please enable JavaScript' banner, so I can cope with another one as a permanent fixture :-p
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(I don't know if the email address I have for you is still active, though.)
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Could you send me the list? It would definitely be helpful -- I assumed I wasn't going to need that particular set of information as I already *had* copies of all my own stories, but it turns out the associated metadata is worth having as well!
(And of course I've lost access to all the past reviews on my stories as well -- even if several hundred of them were just spam....)
I don't seem to have been consistent about which stories I included the summary in at the beginning of the document and which ones I didn't. It may have depended upon what stage the summary got written at ;-)
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(And thanks for having the initiative to grab the entries from the old account, as well -- I'd forgotten about those!)
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The fact that the former is tagged for both Javert and Valjean and the latter for neither may have something to do with it :-P
(Also, I'm apparently the only person on the whole of AO3 to tag stories for the non-romantic relationships betwen Raoul and his brother and Cosette and Javert -- the latter doesn't surprise me (all that much, though I came across at least one other story based on a similar premise on FFNet), but the former does. Or perhaps it just says more about my stories!)
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(I'm WonderAndDoubt on there, if you want to find me...)
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Handling long freeform text tags without auto-complete is a complete pain (just try typing "Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms" with identically-placed spacing and accents, especially given that trying to highlight and paste keeps causing the clickable link to activate instead!)
One thing about AO3 is that because of the way the tags are curated you don't have to type the full exact official tag with all the accents if it's too much work: you can type "Phantom of the Opera - Leroux" and it will behave in all practical respects as if you'd entered the full thing.
(This works more conveniently with aliases that already exist -- you can find a tag's existing aliases on the tag's landing page, under the heading "Tags with the same meaning" -- because it will start working immediately. But fundamentally you can put in the fandom name however you like and as long as it's clear which fandom you meant it will sooner or later be hooked up to the rest of the fandom.)
Now if only there were an option to search Dreamwidth tags for a combination of "fic-meta" AND "swedish", for example...
According to the Dreamwidth faq, this ought to work: https://igenlode.dreamwidth.org/tag/fic-meta,swedish?mode=and
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Ooh, that's *very* useful! And I doubt I'd ever have found "the tag's landing page" by playing around at random (you basically have to click through twice from the link on a story; I was looking for something labelled 'landing page', but of course there isn't one).
It gives you all the existing forms of the character names, as well, so you don't have to search through other people's stories to find that Cosette is defined as "Cosette Fauchelevent" but the Phantom as "Erik | Phantom of the Opera" -- and it tells you the tag for the relevant general fandom, if any.
I need to bookmark that!
'mode=or' works, as well... I wonder if there are other options?
Where did you find it in the FAQ? I did look quite extensively a few years back, but the nearest thing I could find was the tag:subtag syntax.
This is an awful lot more useful than having to define an entire subcategory for fic-metas of each separate story, for example... (though I'm quite glad I did go back to subdivide all the fiction: categories)
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The information about searching for multiple tags is in the last paragraph of the faq page What are tags?. "and" and "or" are the only mode options that it mentions.
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In my defence, it looks as if that *may* be a new feature post-dating my last FAQ search in quest of such a thing -- it's a note at the bottom of a page that says it was updated as of 2018, while I was being frustrated by the inability to search for intersecting tags back in August 2017!
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So, I finally managed to log back into my Fanfiction.net account - after months and MONTHS of trying to log in, being able to see my account page while FF.net somehow indicating me that I wasn't logged in, which led me to not being able to do anything, so it seems like I wasn't the only person having problems, judging by your other posts :P
Regarding the massive list of tags for AO3 stories, I'll admit you'll mostly see them on stories rated as Explicit or those dealing with heavier themes, as a warning for the reader - I kind of understand why it's there and that dynamics with fanfic are different, but that does make me wonder at times how these people approach reading a book they'll grab at a bookstore and that they've (presumably) not read any spoilers about beforehand...
I'll also say that I wasn't too enthusiastic a few years ago (3-4 years from now) about publishing Phantom of the Opera fanfic on AO3, since there were only a few hundred posted and not a lot of variety, and the bulk of it was still mostly on FF.net. It didn't really surprise me since the last "big cultural event" for POTO was the 25th anniversary concert, which is turning 10 years old this year (HOW?!), so obviously, people are less interested now and moved on to other stuff. It does seem like it increased exponentially since, but given the current atmosphere in media consumption as of now (namely, that anything that can be viewed as slightly "problematic" gets stomped on by thinkpieces until it dies, which I've been guilty of but I've hopefully grown up since :P), I honestly didn't think there would be that much Erik/Christine fic and kind of expected a lot more Erik/Daroga... but guess I was wrong XD
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Fanfiction.net has been pretty messed up since the start of the year as they try to do 'server migration' -- most recently there was a bug where visiting your profile page would display someone else's details (I only got that one once). Ironically the clean wipe may have successfully reset your account.
They have now issued an official announcement that devices that don't support Javascript (or don't support the right parts of Javascript) are simply not permitted to access the site, or in other words they're not even going to attempt to fix that particular access issue but are going to concentrate on the others. I'm still not clear why they feel they need massive high-security protection before people are permitted to read bad amateur fiction for free -- not post it, not even comment on it, but just to read it...
The AO3 tag clouds remind me a lot of Tumblr, where people are effectively just sticking their 'tags' on as emojis or authorial comments: "it doesn't make a lot of sense either", "the series will have a happy ending tho", "overall just have fun", "im not kidding there a bunch of anxiety ridden kids" [sic]
And the general ethos reminds me a lot of Tumblr, possibly because it's the same generation of teenagers posting there. They manage to make different fandoms (e.g. Sherlock, Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera) sound pretty similar, probably because the characters are all being pushed through the same template of what is morally approved of and what the fans find sexually arousing, and because they're being presented as speaking with the vocabulary and mindset of a YouTube content creator (gross over-generalisation there...)
I've frequently wondered that. I think it's partly that fandom does tend to fetishisation and kink, and thus they're likely to be subjected to much cruder and more poorly-executed renditions of whatever it is they're trying to avoid (self-harm, for example), but I have a feeling that there is actually a sizeable online population that doesn't consume anything outside its self-curated zone at all, like the people who proudly eschew 'the mainstream media'. Partly the increasing bubble effect, where you can control your interactions so that you never have to hear anything from any viewpoint you don't already agree with, and partly the feeling of 'why would I pay for a commercial product that someone is trying to sell me when there is all this free content to download?'
It's like only reading 'Christian literature', which is apparently an entire genre in America. (though not free of charge!)
Quick check -- well, they've still only got three thousand or so, the vast majority of which post-date the FFnet ones (where the fandom was really big around 2004-5, for obvious reasons). But I was certainly surprised to see such a [relatively] high proportion of Raoul/Christine tags in the filters (though if you actually look at what is included under that heading, a high proportion are actually Erik/Christine as well or instead!)
Edit: oh, apparently "Raoul/Christine" is *not* the same thing as "Raoul de Chagny/Christine Daaé" for search purposes. I thought they were supposed to get 'wrangled' into equivalence :-(
I get the impression that a lot of the AO3 fic does come from Tumblr prompts - I noticed an increasing number of POTO stories on fanfiction.net mentioning it as well. Presumably because Tumblr isn't a very good place for archiving things...
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It depends a bit on how you're interacting with the tag, because they're trying to make a balance between linking together tags that mean the same thing and letting people use the tags they want to use. You managed to find one of the places where the gaps show: if you'd searched for the canonical tag, "Raoul de Chagny/Christine Daaé", it would have included all the variations, but searching for a specific variant tag only shows you results for that specific variant -- because, of course, there's an assumption that the autocomplete will have suggested the canonical search to you and you must have chosen to search for the specific variant instead...
(Clicking on a tag, when it appears in the metadata of a work, will always give you the canonical/all variants search result, regardless of which version of the tag you clicked on.)
There are 579 works tagged with some version of "Raoul de Chagny/Christine Daaé", of which around half are also tagged with some version of "Christine Daaé/Erik | Phantom of the Opera". This search result is the half that aren't (but does still include some proportion of works that have Erik as the focus and Raoul/Christine just background).
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I hadn't thought about the potential of auto-complete being available to present the 'preferred' tags first.
In the specific case of Raoul/Christine I can't think of any context *in this fandom* where it wouldn't be an absolute synonym of "Raoul de Chagny/Christine Daaé" (whereas "Erik Destler/Christine Daaé", for example, might well be something you might choose to differentiate from a general "Erik | Phantom of the Opera/Christine Daaé", since "Erik Destler" is a subset of all potential Eriks!)
Yes, I came to the conclusion back at the start that there was more point looking for works that were *not* tagged Erik/Christine (given that 'Christine is with Raoul but comes to her senses and realises whom she really loves' is a common fandom trope) -- interestingly, that's about half the works in the fandom. Although, this being AO3, Erik/The Persian is more popular than Erik/Meg or Erik/OFC -- and, disturbingly, Erik/Raoul is more popular than either of them. Presumably goes with the increased popularity of Raoul in the fandom, since if you like a character you want to slash him with your favourites, right?