Archive of Our Own
15 January 2021 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeContrary 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...
no subject
Date: 2021-01-21 02:20 pm (UTC)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?