#i usually tag both sauron and halbrand for TROP Haladriel too if he's Halbrand in them

[conundrumoftime]

I love that AO3 lets us tag ships and characters, and I love that it lets us use additional-tags for background ships and characters, but sometimes it gives me headaches. Example, one of my own fics:

There are three people in that story. THREE.

So this is my usual thought process on tagging ships in my fic at the moment, although it's more a position I've drifted into and might yet change again rather than any settled firm stance:

Characters with multiple names: If it's some way relevant to the story and AO3 treats the character names differently (as a sub-tag, as a separate tag), I tag both just to be clear. This is a Silmarillion fic in 2nd-age Eregion where Sauron is presenting himself as Annatar and also thinking of himself as 'Annatar' in his own narrative, so: both.

Ships with more than two characters: I have seen people feel very strongly in both directions about whether to tag the component ships of an ot3. What I do is that if the story's just about a, b and c together, I'll only tag a/b/c; but if one of the a/b, b/c, or a/c relationships are important in some way, if there's interactions between them other than smut mechanics, I tag that too. So this story has all the component pairs tagged because there's interactions between all of them; my more recent short Rings of Power Celeborn/Galadriel/Sauron one only has the 3-person ship tagged.

Ship tags vs. adding a ship in the additional tags: my usual approach here is that if the ship is in the fic and is important to it in some way, it's in the main ship tags; if it's there but not really a significant part of the story I put it in 'additional tags', so it won't turn up if someone's searching for that ship but it's there just in case someone really wants to know it's there. (Also mentioning this here because not everyone knows this trick: if you want to filter AO3 for fics with only your preferred ship in them, filter for that ship and then add 'otp:true' in the 'Search within results' box.)

Ship order: I know that some people do this as a 'ranking in order of importance to the story' thing when there's multiple ships in the same fic, but I usually don't because this gets too subjective.

None of this is formal AO3 Rules obviously or me telling anyone else what to do; just my approach on all this because it came up a couple of times talking with writer friends about tagging and ships recently