It's FanChat Friday! This week's prompt is: What are your AO3 tagging pet peeves? What do you wish more people would tag or not tag for? How about on other websites that you browse for fanworks?
Reply or tag your response #FanChats16 so others can see. 
@FandomChats Tag your top/bottom/dom/sub dynamics!!! 😭 Readers (me) want to know!
@xieliansbignaturals @FandomChats
I'm curious about this--is this only for stuff that's really porny or deliberately kinky? Or do you even want it on stuff that's vague?
Because I just...don't think in terms of top/bottom. That's not how my brain works and it actively resists it, in fact (I hate the implication that I should care about this thing that matters not to me at all). I write a lot of T and M stuff that alludes to sex but isn't *about* sex, and it seems like false advertising me to tag for sexual stuff. If I see a top/bottom tag, I'm assuming it's going to have a lot of smut.
(When I do write E, it's almost always 'verse, and I do tag for that because I have had people come and whine at me about how "LWJ would never DO that" even though I SAID it was CQL verse and in CQL, yes, he absolutely would.)
@lirazel @xieliansbignaturals @FandomChats for me, if there is ANY sex happening, I want to know who is top and who is bottom. If there is mention of who fucks who, even if it's a passing reference, I want to know.
@gekidasa @xieliansbignaturals @FandomChats Can I ask why? Not to imply that you can't care about anything you want to (obviously you can), but to my ace mind, that's essentially equivalent to wanting to know who does the cooking and who does the vacuuming.
@lirazel@federatedfandom.net re: top/bottom:
As mura said, it is a way to screen for characterization. It *shouldn't* matter but for example, in genshin impact fandom, zhongli top, childe bottom tends to have the zhongli characterization I agree with (soft, virginal zl who is an airhead is fun but also not him).
As for when it comes to explicit fics, I just like how one configuration looks more than the other. Aesthetics~
@gekidasa@fandom.ink @xieliansbignaturals@blorbo.social @FandomChats@blorbo.social
@geraineon @xieliansbignaturals @gekidasa @lirazel @FandomChats
I think, to me, if a character tags "bottomX" it's *more* likely that they see bottom as a character trait and I won't like their characterization, so I if they tag at all, I tend to count it against the fic.
That said, sometimes "BottomX" means "I know y'all thinks X is exclusively a top, and I'm here to upend that convention and this is your warning!" which sometimes I really enjoy.
@lirazel @xieliansbignaturals @geraineon @Betty @gekidasa @FandomChats yeah i definitely find that if someone thinks its important enough to tag it’s either heavily impacting their characterization (which I am generally not into so its a handy warning haha) or it’s “unpopular” (which i probably am into) so those are both helpful?
but encouraging people who are just like “i see everyone as a switch but Character A happens to bottom in the one scene in this fic” to tag top/bottom would make it harder to parse out those semantics
@Satsuma @lirazel @xieliansbignaturals @geraineon @gekidasa @FandomChats It would be helpful if I knew which they meant!
@gekidasa @xieliansbignaturals @FandomChats @lirazel @Betty @geraineon yeah same though i dont think we’ll be able to solve this one through tagging 😂 maybe another point for going back to rec lists instead
@Satsuma @gekidasa @xieliansbignaturals @FandomChats @Betty @geraineon That’s my vote! I still find 90% of the fic I read by looking at the bookmarks of my favorite writers, which is essentially the same thing.