This is the opposite of how AO3 works and you should NEVER, EVER DO THIS.
If you are talking about the relationship field on AO3, include one and only one if you are the author tagging your own work.
If you’re talking about the freeform/additional tags field, there may be reasons to specify other things, like which character tops.
What I think is going on here, @phantomkinoc13 is that you’re doing a text search, but the most effective way to use AO3 to find a ship is via tag filtering. For the latter, you just need to know how the tag is wrangled.
On AO3, the main bakudeku tag that is marked “common"—i.e. that appears in autocomplete—is Bakugou Katsuki/Midoriya Izuku.
Usually, these main tags are the characters’ full names written out, alphabetized by family name in English transliteration/this alphabet.
Clicking through reveals that all of those are currently synned to the appropriate main tags with the same meanings.
Literally none of these need to be searched on their own to find a different set of fics.
There are also a bunch of other tags that don’t have a category type and that are on bookmarks and a few freeform tags that authors have used, I think all on works that do also have the main tag.
If you go to the ’bumblby’ tag on AO3, you will see that it says:
bumblby – Relationship has been made a synonym of Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long. Works and bookmarks tagged with bumblby – Relationship will show up in Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long’s filter.
From there, you add filters until you find what you want. Since this is a popular ship with well-wrangled tags, you don’t search for other random-ass names for the tag. That is the opposite of the point of AO3’s structure.
All of those alternate spellings and names will appear in the same filter as the main full names tag.
It’s only when you go to the main page and put some words in the search box that you skip all of AO3’s most important features and do a plain text search.
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