BlackHeart Biohazards

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

In practice, ship tags on AO3 don’t really tell you anything beyond “these two characters are present in the same scene at the same time” (and sometimes not even that!), so the lack of them on an image-hosting site doesn’t result in any particular loss of granularity.

(Like, shit, at least searching by character tags on R34 offers a reasonable guarantee that those characters are in fact physically present in the resulting dirty pictures. Searching for a ship tag on AO3 if the ship in question is even slightly obscure is liable to leave you playing the “okay, do these characters actually appear on camera in this fic, or are they merely discussed?” game.)

Seriously, though, if you were actually looking for a well-considered opinion, for me it boils down to two points:

1. Having specific “character A x character B” ship tags potentially has value on a fanfiction archive (even if, as outlined above, that value often fails to present itself in practice), because knowing that character A and character B are present in a given fic doesn’t tell you anything about how those characters relate to one another within the fiction. On a pornographic image booru which tags individual images, conversely, if you know that character A and character B are present in a particular image, it’s typically going to be the case that they’re fucking, so having a separate tag for every conceivable combination of two or more characters specifically to indicate that they are in fact fucking would represent an enormous administrative overhead for very little practical gain.
2. More broadly, the expectation that each particular intersection of interests ought to be represented by a single hyper-specific tag which contains everything you want and nothing you don’t – and, concomitantly, the notion that it’s unreasonable ever to expect anyone to search for two tags at once – is probably a significant contributor to why fanfiction archives tend to use tagging so poorly.