wrangletangle: a lamppost in black and white (Default)
wrangletangle ([personal profile] wrangletangle) wrote 2013-02-02 06:06 am (UTC)

In my experience most fans themselves are more interested in gender first, number of participants second.

It's not that I think or don't think that's the case - it's that I don't care what "most" fans are interested in? The archive was designed primarily by people who think that way, obviously. I, and some other folks who prefer Poly to everything else, don't care so much about the gender of the participants compared to the number and arrangement.

For example, there are a lot of different dynamics with threesomes, and yet more different ones with foursomes, etc. I personally prefer the foursome and fivesome dynamics, but appreciate the dynamics of other types of Poly, including sharing without all participating. There's a lot of nuance there, and for me, what's interesting is the setup, not the gender. Frankly, I'm lucky if I can get Poly in a fandom I know the canon for, let alone in a specific gender combination. Gender just doesn't factor in usefully.

I find the slippery slope argument non-compelling for the usual reasons. Yes, we could make a ticky for crossovers. Does that have anything to do with Poly? Not really. They're separate requests with completely separate implementation methods on the coding side. You're welcome to add your voice to the many who've asked for it over the years, and I wouldn't argue with you at all.

(For kinks, no one that I know of has ever asked for kinks to be marked in any way other than the freeforms. How would that be uniquely useful to a specific set of users?)

One of my goals is to make users aware that the Poly, Threesome, and Moresomes tags even exist (many don't know, and so don't tag their works). I also want to encourage the wrangling staff to find a way to link these tags together usefully, as right now they're all completely separate (which is one reason Poly doesn't have that many uses). And yes, Poly shippers are a minority. So are Femslash shippers. I'm used to it. ^_^

However, I really don't think using freeform tagging numbers is a reasonable way to decide what gets a category. Femslash's freeform, even after I subtagged about 20 tags to it tonight, only has about 3200 works. One could easily argue that 40 or more other tags have higher uses, and therefore Femslash shouldn't have a category either. But because of the gender focus of most of the archive's designers, f/f does get its own category (which I'm very happy about).

So, well, I'm probably preaching to the choir anyway. Perhaps a Poly awareness month later in the year? *ponders*

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