Why AO3 Tagging
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 in the context of Alternate Universe shipping, 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.
This page is specifically written for the Undertale/UTMV fandom, and any fandom that also heavily utilizes Alternate Universes in a similar manner. It pairs best with the basic rundown found in the standard AO3 Tagging primer.
This page also lays out the policies regarding categorization, and what designators will and will not be recognized as disambiguating for the purposes of shipping unique ships during the 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
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.