Top four AO3 tags?

[melannen]

I keep seeing this on tumblr, so:

Go to your own Works page on AO3, and find your top four most-used "Additional Tags". What do they say about you?

What is left off of that list that ought to be on it?

If you don't have an AO3 works page with enough tags for this to be interesting, what would be the top four freeform tags on the AO3 page of your heart? Or you could do this with DW, Pinboard, your AO3 bookmark tags, or anywhere you do have a lot of tags.

Mine are Crossover (winner by a long shot, surprising nobody!), Yuletide, Alternate Universe, and Fluff and Epistolary tied. But AU only makes it on there because of all the works I tagged AU - Fusion, which is being double-counted with Crossover, so if you take that out #4 is Polyamory. And yeah, that seems like a reasonably good summary of what I post to AO3!

(Though I will note that of 7 fics I tagged Fluff, one is about a literally fluffy baby animal, four of them are to signal this is set in a "nobody dies" AU, and two of them are to trick Deadpool into participating in the fic even after he reads the tags on it.)

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

Since I already did this on tumblr, I can just cut and paste: if you include boring categorisations it’s Fanart(99), Fanfiction(92), Humor(57). If you don’t, it’s Humor(57), Fluff(20), Crack(13).

My art leans very heavily towards humourous gen fluff, since that's fun to draw. My fic isn't all quite as fluffy, some is even kinda dark, but either way the majority of my works are pretty light.

But if you like...multiplied each tag by the number of words associated, then you'd get a lot more "romance", "canon typical violence" etc. I have a lot of little fluffy fic and art, and a smaller number of much longer, less fluffy romances (which still generally have happy endings and humour)

And none of my 'fluff' tags are there to trick the characters :)

[china_shop]

My top one is Fiction, because for a while I was tagging everything either Fiction or Fanvid, but then I forgot and stopped. So ignoring that one:

Community: fan_flashworks (96)
Episode Related (84)
Established Relationship (71)
Crack (63)

Which, yeah, sounds about right. :-) I'm pleased to see I also have 53 works tagged First Kiss so far. *aims for an even hundred*

[alexseanchai]

Podfic Welcome
3 Sentence Fiction
Identity Reveal
(and if we sub in the tag I use for the tag it's synned to) Gabriel Agreste's A+ Parenting

…

sounds about right

mind you it says I've used Romance 9 times. if I actually filter my works to include only that tag, I get 31 results, because I like the Romantic Fluff and Romantic Angst tags. or rather, it said I've used Romance 9 times. now it would say 6 if that were still in my top ten, because I noticed three instances where I tagged Romance and Fluff separately and I fixed them. and now Romantic Fluff is in my top ten with 13 uses, and filtering to it gives me 16 results. uh??

(canonical freeform: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies; just saying)

[sodium_amytal]

Humor (36)
Fluff (29)
Alternate Universe (28)

Sounds about right.

[novembermond]

I only have three most tagged and they are:
Hurt/Comfort (7)
Angst (4)
Nightmares (4)

Honestly that's a fic prompt right there.
I think I'm generally bad at adding additional tags I never know what to put there so I don't have a whole lot.

[wolffyluna]

Fanart (14)
Fluff (13)
Angst (7)
Hurt/Comfort (6)

I have done much more fic than art, but I don't specifically tag for that. But I have done a fair amount of fan art than I've put on ao3, so that does make a certain amount of sense.

I'm a little surprised that fluff is higher than angst? But I think what's happening there is that my angst fics skew longer than my fluff fics, so I have more individual fluff fics, even though I think by wordcount they are much closer to even.

[schneefink]

Ignoring the boring "Comment fic", it's:
- Five things (7)
- Crossover (5)
- Friendship (4)
- Post-Canon (4)
- Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence (4)

I was surprised by the number of crossovers, but two of those are SGA/SG-1, and one of them is a podfic of my fic by someone else, so I'd only count 3. But otherwise, that looks about right.

[flo_nelja]

Mine:
Humor (208)
Angst (163)
Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot (136)
Dark (117)

Ha ha quite boring, but yeah, summarizes the tendances.

[lea_hazel]

I also did this meme on Tumblr, but here goes:

Community: purimgifts (20)
Canonical Character Death (18)
Arranged Marriage (11)
Established Relationship (10)

Other than "arranged marriage", I feel like these are mildly to moderately representative. The AM fics are all (or almost all?) part of the same ongoing fic series. The next tag is "friendship" which is much more representative, because if you include nested tags like f/f friendship and f/m friendship, it comes up to a whopping 36 works.

I guess there are all sorts of canonical freeforms that I could use but don't... I like looking at other people's lists, it gives me ideas.

[nyctanthes]

My fic record isn't long, but if you sort out the boring tags it's:

Friendship
Sibling Love
Parent-Child Relationships
Drugs

The last is there more as a warning. The sibling love is strictly of the & kind, but I'm not sure the tag gets this across. :P

Not mentioned as frequently as they should be, because I suck at consistent tagging:

- Coming of Age
- Road Trips
- Plot with Occasional to Frequent Porn
- Not angst, not fluff, just life

[monochromanium]

I don't have a lot of works on my AO3 yet, however I will still do it because it still summarizes me:

Fluff (6)
Smut (6)
Angst (2)
Humor (1)

Well, kinda. Considering I'm more of a humorous than angsty!

[forestofglory]

Well I don't have very many works so the only tags I've used more than once are food and cooking, which given that I love reading about fictional food makes a lot of sense to me.

For bookmarks my top four are alternative universe canon divergence, post-canon, fluff, and angst. Those last two are tied. I don't know what that says about me.

[primeideal]

Challenge Response -- this is mostly stuff from the Harry Potter Fanfiction Challenges forum on FFN that I cross-posted
Yuletide Treat -- yep, sounds like me
Post-Canon -- yep, also me
Humor -- I wouldn't have expected this so high, but it covers a lot, I guess.

If we filter out the first year of the account to reduce the effect of cross-posting, this becomes Yuletide Treat, Post-Canon, Alternate Universe-Canon Divergence (also plausible), and ... Community: makinghugospin. I was pretty active on the less-kinky side of the kink meme back in the day.

[sixbeforelunch]

I have 148 works posted and mine are:

Fluff (13)
Friendship (9)
Team (9)
Episode Related (8)
Vulcan Culture (8)

Fluff took top spot because I did Fluff Bingo last year, but I like it generally. Life's hard. I need some lightness in it.

Friendship and teams are definitely something I enjoy. I'm surprised I don't have more tagged that way, but I'm not always good about adding additional tags.

The last two are tied for fourth.

Episode related makes sense. I tend to hew pretty close to canon most of the time, and I wrote a lot of episode tags when I was in SG1 fandom. Again, there are probably more stories that deserve the tag than I've actually marked as such.

And the Vulcan Culture...I have an 67,000 word series with six stories (so far) that exists partially as an excuse to indulge my penchant for making up Vulcan headcanons. So...yeah.

[tei]

Hmm! I've realized that I tag so sparingly that there are barely any recurring ones. I don't tag for genre unless there's something about the fic that really doesn't line up with the tone of the summary. I don't tag for top/bottom and usually don't tag sexual acts unless a kink is the main focus of the story. Soooo a random smatterig of tags on my first page: coronavirus, peanut butter, spam email, defecation, medical school, spanking. 🤷🏼‍♀️

[monksandbones]

I only have 17 works posted, but my top tags are:

POV female character (7)
Angst (3)

and then a multi-way tie among tags I've used twice, including:

Crack (2)
Crusades (2)
Complicated Relationships (2).

Also special shout-out to my one, ahead-of-the-curve use of the "pandemics" tag in 2017!

[fullupwithfire]

My number of posted works is relatively low (71), but ignoring the "not beta read", because I kind of mean to go and take those off:

- Alternate Universe (14)
- Shared Universe (9)
- Character Study (4)
- Grief/Mourning (4)
- Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex (4)

(AU actually goes up to 24 uses if you filter by it, because I try to use the appropriate subtag when possible, but sometimes I write shit that doesn't quite fit in any existing tag.)

I am surprised I've written Rule 63 often enough for it to pop up, but I'm pretty sure 3 of those are for the same fic verse. Less surprising that mourning managed to wiggle it's way up there at some point, because it's become a common theme in my work.

The top four of my heart if only I could write more often, not counting those listed above because AU would probably still be first, is probably more like:
- Soulmate-Identifying Marks
- Slowburn
- Alternate Universe - BDSM
- 5 Things

[doranwen]

Of my 97 works…

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence (16)
Angst (10)
Drabble (8)
Episode Related (7)
Double Drabble (7)

So really, if you combine the drabble ones together, that's 15 (and I have 5 that are tagged with Triple Drabble, lol - apparently I really enjoy the challenge of precise wordcounts in small ficlets). And yeah, that is very much about right. AUs and Angst all the way. :D (And LOL, I just spontaneously wrote an angsty canon divergence double drabble last night! Three of those tags right there, hee.)

[impala_chick]

1. Getting Together
2. Banter
3. Pining & AU - Canon Divergence are tied
4. Post-canon

I'm actually surprised by the pining tag, considering I haven't been writing a lot of pining lately. The other ones are very on-brand, though. And most of my fandoms' canons have ended, so the post-canon tag makes sense too.

[pedanther]

My top 4 are POV Third Person, Present Tense, Prompt Fic, and Past Tense.

This tells you:

1. That I routinely tag my works with pov and tense, in case there's somebody who, say, really likes second-person, or can't stand present tense.

2. That a plurality of my works are third person, present tense.

3. That most of my works, at least of the ones that get finished and posted, are in response to a prompt meme or fest or challenge.


The only tag that shows up in the top 10 that's about the actual content of the fic is Humor, which surprised me a bit because if I'd had to guess I'd probably have said Crossover.

On investigation, crossovers probably do have the numbers, but uses of the actual tag "Crossover" are reduced a bit because three of them are tagged "Stealth Crossover" instead.

And the fact that I have three separate fics tagged "Stealth Crossover" probably tells you something about me, although I'm not sure what.

[delacourtings]

mine are:
drabble (22)
fluff (5)
coming out (5)
established relationship (4)

which is really interesting as i don't typically like reading established relationships and fluff and i didn't think i liked writing it either but apparently i do?

although, looking at the fics tagged as fluff, three of which were gifts for people, one of which is a close friend of mine who i specifically wrote a fluffy established relationship fic for because those are her favorite things. so that makes more sense now.

[dragoness_e]

I am easily confused, and did not see a listing of my tags on the Works page.

[thenewbuzwuzz]

It's in the sidebar that opens when you select the "Filters" button. If you pretend you're going to filter by Additional Tags, AO3 offers you a list of your most frequent ones.

[dragoness_e]

In that case:

Implied/Referenced Character Death (9)
Ghosts (8)
Non-Graphic Violence (7)
Tactile Sexual Interfacing (7)

[thenewbuzwuzz]

I'm curious about Deadpool's participation in your fic now, sounds cool.

Mine are "Poetry", "Crack", "Community: seasonal_spuffy", and "Angst"; the first three are deliberate. :D

[lannamichaels]

My top 4 are:
Drabble (215)
Alternate Universe (133)
April Showers 2011 (130)
Double Drabble (117)


So that's two where one is a variation on the other, and one thing that was me importing a lot of my backlog. I'm gonna average those out and jump down to include Comment Fic (99), which I feel deserves the place more than the fandom specific tag I skipped to get there (Time Period: Reign of Gregor Vorbarra).

Also this has taught me that I need to standardize how I tag crackfic, because searching crack in the tag got me 50 fics but it doesn't show up in the sidebar.