Rarepair NewYear 2024

Tagging

Tagging is of particular import for the purposes of this event. As such, certain Tagging Standards will be asked of all Event Participants. While not adhering to these standards will not immediately disqualify a Work (all works submitted which celebrate a confirmed rarepair, regardless of tagging, will still earn 1 Ticket), tagging does affect the eligibility of Bonus Tickets.

On Social Media Sites

Tagging conventions vary from one social media site to another. As such, the following guidelines should be taken with best practices in mind.

It is an Event Requirement to tag #RarepairNewYear and #RarepairNewYear2024.

It is not a requirement, but a suggestion, to tag the Fandom. Example: #Undertale.

If the ship features an AU, and all characters involved are from the same AU, it is recommended to instead tag the Disambiguating AU Name. (Example: #Underfell)

If the ship features multiple characters from different AUs, tag the character individually using both the AU modifier and the character's original name (a.k.a. the Disambiguating Character Tag), using the native conventions of the site in question. (examples: #UnderfellSans, #g!sans, #Underswap Sans).

Additional tags beyond this are up to the Event Participant's discretion.

On AO3 Tagging: General and Best Practices

For the sake of fairness and good faith, Bonus Tickets are essentially only affected by Ship Tags (both the True Relationship Tags and the Relationship-Disambiguating Freeform Tags). These best practices will, however, cover all relevant tags to give a better understanding of how and why the ship tags are asked to be the way they are.

AO3 Tagging is highly sophisticated for the purposes of functioning as an Archive. The following are expected practices to make full use of AO3 for the purposes of this Event, and are derived from best practices as found in AO3's own tagging instructions pages.

Researched pages include:

First when tagging on AO3, the Ratings, Archive Warnings, Fandom, and Category fields need to be filled out. As these are well explained by the UI help overlays, we won't go into them here.

The Entry Fields we will be paying attention to are what i call the Longform Tag Entry Fields. These consist of the Fandom Tag, Relationship Tags, Character Tags, and Additional Tags Entry Fields.

Disclaimer: These tagging guidelines and practices are comprised of research and observations from a front-end user of AO3. This Event is not affiliated with AO3, and no AO3 Staff are representative in the hosting, curating, or development of the Event or its guidelines. These guidelines are explicitly written by a user, for other users, for the explicit purpose of users participating in a Fandom Event, and are not to be associated with AO3 as an entity.

AO3 Tagging: Fandom

The Fandom Tag is the overarching Tag that identifies the work, or sets of works, which the fanworks under it transform, parody, reference, or otherwise celebrate. This usually comes out in layman as the Book, Movie, Video Game, Comic, or general media franchise that inspires the fanfic.

You will need to know your Fandom in order to determine if your ship is a Rarepair, as 'Rarepair' is a status that is observed in context of the overarching Fandom. This very metric is one reason why AO3 was chosen as the ideal standard: the site has a convenient count of how many fanfics are in any given Fandom.

Examples:
Bugsnax (Video Game)
DCU
Batman (Comics)
Venom (Marvel Movies)
Undertale (Video Game)
Five Nights at Freddy's
Spider-Man - All Media Types
Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey

Fandoms which have distinct iterations across multiple media types may have Media Designators by their names to disambiguate them from each other. These include, but are not limited to: Books; Movies; Video Games; Comics; and Cartoons. Different Media Types may have different common practices. Books, for example, may be disambiguated by Author name.

Fandoms will likely also have an over-arching master tag that signifies pulling from the lore of any/all media types, and this may be designated by an "All Media Types" suffix. You will note that this is not always true, by the example of DCU, which seems to be the equivalent for that fandom.

The Event recommends identifying your fandom by Wrangled Tag Name, either by clicking into the Tag Page from a pre-existing Fanfic, or by searching it up using the AO3 Fandom Browser. You may also find it with a basic Search.

You will need the number of fics listed under your ship's fandom. When working with a crossover ship, you will need to know the number of fics listed under all fandoms pertinent to the characters that compose your ship, and determine which fandom has the highest fic count.

The Characters Entry Field

First up is the Characters Entry Field. The purpose of this Entry Field is to be able to search for (or exclude) canonical characters in a broad stroke. When tagging each relevant Character in the Characters Field, use only the Source Material's Names of the characters involved.
Examples:
Sans (Undertale)
Asgore Dreemurr
Chandlo Funkbun
Talia (Valdemar)
Loki (Marvel)

The epithets Reader and the many flavors of "Original Character" (like Original Female Character(s), or Original Male Character(s), or Original SCP Character(s)) go here as well.

In the case of having (AU) multiples of a single character, there is sometimes an optional Character Tag that may be used as well.

Example: If the character is Sans (Undertale), the additional Character Tag is Sans Ensemble (Undertale)

For more about AU Tagging, see: AUs & Tagging.

The Relationships Entry Field

The next Entry Field of note is the Relationships Entry Field. This is used to search for (or exclude) (Relation)Ships in broad strokes. When tagging a (Relation)Ship in the Relationships entry field, use only the Source Material's Names of the characters involved, as one would use in the Characters Entry Field.

Example:
Alphys/Undyne (Undertale)
Sans/Sans (Undertale)

All Character Tags in a Ship Tag should be ordered Alphabetically. They should be alphabetized (1) by their Last-Name/Family-Name, then (2) by their First-Name/Given-Name. If the Character Tag has a Fandom Designator, then it should append after the last consecutive member of that fandom in a row, and reappear again if that fandom is represented later.

Examples:
Snorpy Fizzlebean/Chandlo Funkbun
W. D. Gaster/Grillby
Dib (Invader Zim)/Dipper Pines/Zim (Invader Zim)

NOTE: Ship tags will feature either a slash "/" or an ampersand "&" between Character Names. These are used by AO3 to differentiate between genres of relationships, and makes searches and exclusions more nuanced.

The Slash (/) is used to designate that the relationship between the characters is Romantic and/or Sexual in nature.

The Ampersand (&) is used to designate that the relationship between the characters is Platonic and/or Familial in nature.

For (Relation)Ships with more than 2 parties involved, it is important never to mix the use of the Slash and Ampersand in the same Tag.

Examples:
Alphys/Mad Mew Mew/Undyne (Undertale) is a valid relationship tag.
Flowey & Papyrus & Sans (Undertale) is a valid relationship tag.
Alphys/Papyrus/Undyne (Undertale) is a valid relationship tag.
Alphys & Papyrus & Undyne (Undertale) is a valid relationship tag.
Alphys / Papyrus & Undyne (Undertale) is NOT a valid relationship tag.

If the (Relation)Ship includes a broad Character-Type tag, as for an OC, Reader, or Self-Insert, the tag will always be formatted like:

[Source Material Name] (Fandom)/Original Character
[Source Material Name] (Fandom)/Reader
[Source Material Name] (Fandom)/You

- with whatever relevant variations, such as "Original Female Character" or "Original (Fandom) Character" qualifying a more specific niche (as mentioned above). These non-source material characters will always be appended last in the list of characters, regardless of alphabetical order.

Continue on to the AUs & Tagging page to read about Freeform Tags and AU-Related Ship Tagging.