Archive of Our Own

[igenlode]

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...

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[igenlode]

Welcome back -- little girl all grown up ;-p

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...)

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'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!)


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.

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...

[pedanther]

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 :-(

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).

[igenlode]

I did read all the way through the Wrangling Guidelines to try to work out what format I was *supposed* to be presenting tags in and what side-effects different forms might have (despite the airy assurances that it was entirely up to the user and someone would be along to fix it behind the scenes presently if necessary), but by the fourth page or so I could feel my brain filling up and refusing to digest any more...
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!)

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"

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?