I wish AO3's tagging system could differentiate between leading characters and supporting ones.

[beatrice_otter]

So!  I am in the mood for some Lois Lane, Awesome Girl Reporter.  I take me to AO3, and find the Lois Lane tag, and sort it by kudos.  What do I find?

Pages and pages of Clark Kent/Lex Luthor slash (Smallville era) and Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne slash (current movies), with the occasional welcome break for Kara Danvers/Cat Grant femmeslash (Supergirl TV show).  In all of these, Lois is a minor background character who either a) gets our heroes together, b) is the obstacle to them getting together, or c) is off on the casefic aspect of the fic while the main focus is on our heroes getting together.

Now, it's nice to have the occasional femslash thing in there, so it isn't all "Lois Lane Pushed Aside for Whitecock," but still.  I'm not looking for Lois Lane, Minor Supporting Character (and shoved into a one-dimensional box to facilitate someone else's love story).  I want Lois Lane, Awesome Girl Reporter!

Going for the Clark Kent/Lois Lane tag does get me stories where Lois is actually a main character, although also a lot of stories where she's just there to be shoved out of the way for the whitecock pairing.  But while I love CK/Lois Lane fics, it's frustrating that either I'm limited to that or slogging through ENDLESS PAGES OF OTHER STUFF to get to what I really want, which is Lois Lane doing her job and being AWESOME at it.

This is also my problem whenever I'm in the mood for Sam Wilson fics.  In a very high percentage of fics, he is there to facilitate the Steve/Bucky angst.

And here's the thing: if AO3's character tags were broken up into "main character" and "supporting character," when I want stories focusing on Lois Lane or Sam Wilson or any of the host of interesting characters who get shoved aside in favor of the Major Pairing, I could easily find fics where they are the focus!

Comments

[the_rck]

I'm trying to stop myself from tagging for minor characters at all these days. I worry, though, that that means someone will get into a story and find a character they don't want even in a minor role. I should probably go back through my old fics and make sure I've changed those.

Is there much fic for the old Lois and Clark TV show on AO3? Those are likely to be shippy fics, too, but I'd expect them to be mostly het with Lois front and center. My slash googles aren't very good, but I don't recall seeing any m/m relationships in that that I'd expect to generate much fic. The non-Clark male characters either got very little screen time or were kind of repulsive or were Jonathan Kent.

[beatrice_otter]

Well, the thing is, tagging for minor characters can be useful because there are a lot of people who go, "well, there's oodles of Steve/Bucky fic, how do I narrow it down, I like Sam so let's see if he's in it, too." So there are a couple of reasons to tag minor characters. And some people tag "minor x", but that's only useful as a convention if everyone is doing it.

I never really watched Lois and Clark. And there's a lot about that universe that's fairly specific to it, actually, in plotlines and characterization. So it's a resource, but still not quite what I want.

[the_rck]

I think we're using slightly different definitions of minor characters. When I say I tagged for a 'minor character' I mean that they were in one scene and didn't say anything or said two or three lines and then vanished. They're in the sort of roles that, if they weren't named canonical characters, would just be Spearcarrier 1 and Spearcarrier 2.

I think the only times I've written in big fandoms has been for Remix, and those have been fairly tight little stories where it was clear who I needed to tag.

There are borderline cases-- I have a Problem of Susan Narnia fic that's a four things story, and her aunt and uncle appear in one section, fairly pivotally. I didn't tag for them, and I keep wondering if I should have.

I think I get what you mean about Lois and Clark. I didn't find it that far off from main canon when I watched it, but my formative Superman experience was the first two Christopher Reeve movies (I'm not sure I ever saw either of the other two). That gives me a different angle on the characters, I think, than if I'd come from comics or Smallville or anything else. Well, I did watch Superfriends in the 1970s, too, but I don't remember anything from that, so I'm not sure what impact it had. I'm not actually convinced that most of the superheroes in Superfriends had distinct personalities.

[beatrice_otter]

With Lois and Clark, it really depended on whether you're talking about the overarching plot themes--where it was really far off the main thrust of te canon--or the individual casefic-type eps, which were fairly close to canon.