#my one worry with this would be the nuisance it may be for tag wranglers

[spoonyglitteraunt]

I never considered this but it is interesting indeed. How one could avoid info dumping or being overly explicit about information that you want the audience to know but would not normally be known to the characters or part of normal conversation. That there are tags, and also author notes now I think of it, to do this job for you. I don't know how many people use them like this rather than just being labels to sort, but it's intriguing.

But this also makes me wonder how much you could do with them on a meta art kind of level. How they could come become almost part of the narrative itself.

This could be incredibly interesting to explore. Especially for canons that are already prone to meta storytelling.

Commentary, character voice, absurdist footnotes. You name it you could do it.

Add in that we know that a portion of the people don't always fully read the tags. Or one might not think to reread the tags each time a fic updates, but you can keep adding and changing as you go. Or who would say think to go read an author's note on an older chapter to see if something changed? What opportunities that would provide for serialised story telling. Almost like narrative treasure hunts in a way.

Granted this would work best the first go around and possibly only if you follow along from the beginning. But some art is just like that. And there are always ways to document the changes so someone could maybe not get the exact same experience later on, but get a sense of how it was read and still find enjoyment in it.

It's definitely wouldn't be a traditional fic, but it could be an interesting exploration of both the artform, the culture and the site itself.

you know what a specific thing I really like about tagging culture in ao3 fics actually. it’s that I always know there will be that metatext there and I can rely on THAT as an element of my writing. stuffed bird’s major character death tag is something I knew would be there as a sword of damocles over the fic. in my upcoming fic it allows me to exactly tell the audience who a character is without having to have a single person in the fic know it. like, it can be a surprisingly interesting tool for dramatic purposes. if all else fails “choose not to warn” and not tagging is always an option too! but there’s something about explicitly tagging something that the story itself won’t explain for quite some time that makes for an interesting narrative feeling, and one I maybe should play with more.