>>52882540>>52882547>>52882549>bullshit schema the userbase comes up withCharacter Tags are completely standard, as well as Pairings which are regularized to [Character A]/[Character B] for romance and [Character A]&[Character B] for friendship. From there, freeform tags (user submitted) are corrected/Linked by Tag wranglers to a standard form if they exist. If you tag something "[Character]'s Daddy Issues", your local tag wrangler will have that become a subtag to "Daddy Issues" and "Parental Issues", so if you search those tags, you'll still find the original fic. Mistagged fics are flagged by wranglers/standard users and the authors will be asked to fix them in egregious cases. If these things haven't happened, it's either because of the fic hasn't been gotten to, or the fandom isn't popular enough to have wranglers (who are just local fandom volunteers). Fandoms from there with very popular tropes or AUs will then gain fandom-specific tags. For the Pokemon anime " Ash Ketchum Has Aura Powers" is a popular tag, with a subtag "Aura Guardian Ash Ketchum" (since not every fic with Ash having Aura powers is him as an Aura Guardian). It also has a whole legion of synonyms that wranglers have tagged, such as
>Aura User Ash>aura user!ash>Aura!Ash>AuraAshAll of these were user-submitted tags that were made synonyms of the overarching tag for you to search. Any other tags from there are going to ones too specific to the story that the author still felt it important for you to know, which while yes can be excessive at times, does not make searching any harder.
Ao3 may be dense and the user tags at times way too long and unnecessary, however, finding what you like is not its problem in the slightest. Any issue that exists in Ao3's searchability is present in other sites as well. You just need to learn how to use its interface.
Source: Long time user of Ao3, Fimfiction, and FFN and former tag wrangler for the former.
