The Official Rarepair New Year Event Raffle uses AO3 Tags as its metric to codify and define Rarepairs.

To make understanding this process easier and more intuitive, this page was written to give you a primer (or a reminder) on how AO3 Tags work, and put that into context for the Event's purposes.

This primer will help you figure out how you need to format your Ship Tag on AO3. Finding the Event-Standard ship tag is the first step to figuring out if your Ship is a Rarepair for the purposes of this event.

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

Researched pages include:

• FAQ on Tag Types
• FAQ on Relationship Syntax
• FAQ on Canonical Tags
• FAQ on How to Tag
• FAQ on Tag Suffixes
• Wrangling Guidelines on Characters
• Wrangling Guidelines on Relationships
• Wrangling Guidelines on Freeform Tags
• Wrangling Guidelines on Terminology

When tagging on AO3, the Ratings, Archive Warnings, 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. AO3's Tagging Guidelines and FAQ were available as quoted at the time of this site's publication, and non-quoted portions may have been paraphrased for the purposes of This Event.

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.

Before getting into the long-winded stuff, there are some terms you should be aware of.

A canonical tag is the master tag for a group of synonyms. Canonical tags will appear in the auto-complete and the filters. (Non-canonical tags won't appear in either tool, but you can use the Works Search to find works using them.) All synonyms in a group will lead to a Canonical tag. 'Canonizing' or 'canonicalizing' both refer to making a tag into a canonical.

Whether or not your ship's tag is a Canonical Tag (or the synonym of a Canonical Tag) has a huge influence on whether or not the Event will classify it as a Rarepair.

A synonymous tag is a tag that shares its meaning with other tags and is attached to a canonical tag. This includes tags that are related concepts, spelling variations, or shortened or expanded names. When a user clicks on any synonym in a group, the filter will bring up the merged Canonical tag and all its other synonyms. Sometimes shortened to 'syn' and used as a verb, e.g. 'syn AU to "Alternate Universe".

Being able to identify whether or not the tag you intend to use for your ship is synned to another tag is important, because it will be the 'parent' tag that we measure for our metrics.

Adding a qualifier to a canonical tag to distinguish it from a different but similarly named tagged (e.g. "X-men (Movies)" vs "X-men (Comics)"); sometimes shortened to 'disambig' and used as a verb. Fandoms are disambiguated by media, year, and country of broadcast or publication; other tags are disambiguated by fandom. Some tags that have a duplicate form in another category will have a "- Fandom", "- Character", "- Relationship", or "- Freeform" automatically added by the database.

Disambiguated Tags are going to be important when calculating whether or not your ship is a Rarepair (by the metrics of the Event) if your Rarepair is determined by Alternate Universes and fanon content. (Example: The UTMV fandom)

Because the Event relies so heavily on the Canonical status of a Tag, the rest of this page will be using language that heavily encourages using only Canonical Tags, or tags which follow the syntax of Canonical Tags as of the time of this writing. This is the Event's priority for the ease and convenience of the Coordination and Moderation of the Event.

The Event heavily encourages adhering to these tagging practices for the duration of the Official Rarepair New Year Event Raffle, but by no means does it posit that these practices are compulsory outside the Event.

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.

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.

The Additional Tags Entry Field is where Freeform Tags go. Freeform Tags are tags which cover any and all Tags which are not covered by the other types of tags. This includes (but isn't necessarily limited to): genre tags, kink tags, squick tags, trigger warnings, categorical tags, event and context tags, and AU tags.

If you are trying to tag for an UTMV Ship, Additional Tags are going to be heavily utilized.