The reason that tag wrangling on AO3 should be a function that creators and viewers have immediate, front-end access to:

Because the people actually writing and reading (drawing, watching, editing) these stories are way more qualified to notice and appropriately associate an individual tag with the suitable parent/canonical tag than some random volunteer who just happens to like, or at least be willing to take on, the fandom in question.


Subsidiary reason: because hand-wrangling is going to kill the archive dead in its tracks with no capacity to grow much further before collapsing into chaos everywhere outside a few (western tv media) well groomed fandoms.


I am so intensely ticked off by the solipsistic, short-sighted, bad-design inertia of that project, there are really no words for it. And this, because I'd really love it if it worked. The current form is neither technically nor bureaucratically sustainable.

Turning off comments for the moment, because I'm so freaking pissed off I'd bite the head off even reasonably innocuous responses.

I've cast off from the latest round of perorations over m/m and/or slash vis a vis appropriation and queerness. The soapboxing has clearly shot any actual discussion dead. But something I saw at the con this past weekend reminded me of it.

There was a booth in the dealer's room that had a big rainbow flag up behind it. Now, normally I'm pleased to see the flag wherever it's shown, but not in this case. Because that booth was selling doujinshi and appliqued across the flag was the acronym "YAOI".

That. That right there is the line getting crossed. Because yaoi doujinshi in very particular are not about celebrating diversity or about gay pride. The vast majority of yaoi is direly heteronormative and doesn't even make a pretense at representing the shape or variety of gay culture (either in Japan or anywhere else they may be set). Printing "yaoi" across a rainbow flag is one of the most stunning examples of not-getting-it that I've seen in a long while, and something I have no hesitation to call both disrespect and defacement.

The issues surrounding representation and who and how don't always lend themselves to simplification, but I think one point does boil down very consistently:

My life is not your bling.

And if that thought makes me or anyone else uncomfortable to think while standing in the middle of an anime convention ninety-eight percent of which is distinctly not-Japanese-at-all, well it should. The lack of that thought and awareness is one of the reasons there are large sections of Western a/m fandom I don't engage with, that and the lack of the related awareness, "Liking it doesn't make you Japanese".

Kind of like having two dicks on the page doesn't make it gay. So get those grubby paws off my damn flag.

Informational note: if this is picked up by any of the link comms I will probably limit commenting to my circle, having no interest in hosting general idiocy.