Books vs Fanfiction

This example is a screenshot of the website Archive of Our Own, which hosts fanfiction. This is an example of the title, tag, and summary page of the fanfic All the Young Dudes. It is interesting to see how certain tags are prioritized in bold at the top of the tag list; this shows how these tags are important to creators and readers on this website, and they are some of the first tags that people will use to sort their fanfic. These particular bolded tags actually seem to be orientated toward excluding fanfics from search results, rather than including them, by labelling content that people might want to avoid while they are searching for fanfiction. It is also interesting to consider in general what is tagged on this fanfic, showing what is considered important and useful to tag at all. For example, characters and relationships are tagged, as well as some tropes and themes that the story follows, so that a reader can easily find or avoid this particular fanfic, depending on what they want to read. One more thing that is intriguing about this tag list is that it seems as though some of the tags are intended to be read once the reader is already on this page, rather than for getting the reader to find this page. For instance, the author tags “slow burn,” followed by the tags “so slow,” “it’s slow,” and “seriously.” These latter tags are unlikely to be used for sorting purposes, but they are still conveying information, and the author is using these tags almost as a way to talk directly to the reader.

This image is also a screenshot from Archive of Our Own, the fanfiction site, and includes some of the most popular tags that are used in general on this website, with bigger words indicating more instances of use of that particular tag. Something that is interesting to note about this tagging system is what types of tags its users prioritize. It seems like fanfiction, at least on this website, is sorted primarily by what tropes and themes the work contains, like “hurt/comfort” and “alternate universe.”  It also includes sensitive topics as well, presumably to allow for people to avoid those tags, like “death” and “alcohol.” Some of the tags can also get relatively specific, even on this overview page, like “shapeshifting.” Some tags pertain to length of the work, like “one shot,” which indicates a short story that only lasts for one chapter. Furthermore, one can see how authors use tags to talk to their readers even in this very broad look at tags on the site as a whole, with examples like “I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping” and “I’m sorry” showing up even on this “most popular tag” page. There seem to be a lot of varied uses for tags on this website, and yet most of them are somewhat unique to this site; published fiction books, for instance, typically have a much different tagging system.

In contrast to fanfiction on Archive of Our Own, published books seem to be categorized more by genre. For instance, this screenshot was taken from the Amazon homepage for books, and shows some of the main categories by which one can sort for books on this site. Again, it seems more genre-based, including tabs like “Romance” and “Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense.” As shown in the previous examples, fanfiction does not necessarily sort by genre; at the very least, the “genres” it uses are different and more expansive. Furthermore, Amazon does not seem to give any tag options with the intention or ability to exclude them, like how fanfiction does. One last thing to note about book tagging is that it is much more rigid, with each book having to fit into a certain preexisting genre. On Archive of Our Own, the author could tag their work with absolutely whatever they want, which could lead to a “messier” tagging system, but also allows more flexibility for the writer to tag what might be relevant. In contrast, with books, the writer might not even have any control over how their book is classified. If the author is not classifying their own work, others’ perceptions of the text could impact how it is classified. Both the fanfiction and book methods of classifying and sorting texts may be useful, and both may have different drawbacks, depending on the specific reader or author and what their goals are. When you are looking for a text, what would you prioritize? Do you think you would prefer either of these tagging systems, or do you like elements of each?