Wrangle Tangle

(This month, I'll be contributing to #femslash february by highlighting female character-centric and femslash-centric tags at AO3. Today I'll start with the not-so-happy post, to get it out of the way. The shiny starts tomorrow.)

Any shared system of classification eventually runs into the problem that different people have different definitions of each item in the classification. Case in point: if you filter for F/F on AO3, you will get at least four separate things:

* Works where one or more canonically male characters have a (frequently magical) sex change in-work but are not portrayed as trans*,
* Works where one or more canonically male characters were born cis female,
* Works where two or more women are briefly together in the background, making up a tiny, tiny fraction of the whole work,
* and Works where two or more canonical women are actually involved in the primary relationship.

Generally, the first three categories will equal or even outweigh the fourth. Which is why the statement that F/F even makes up 29,000 works, or 5% of the archive total, is ridiculous to me personally, because my personal definition of F/F is so vastly outnumbered on that tag.

This is also why I've never subscribed to the F/F category, even though it was the first tag to be available via subscription. It's simply far less useful to me that the freeform tag. -_-,

(Incidentally, this is at least 10x more true for poly. I can honestly say I've never bothered to filter for 'Multi' after the first time; as a tag for any form of poly, it's always been useless.)

Starting tomorrow: Happier posts!

Freeforms of the day: Femslash, Polygamy, Threesome, Moresomes