Otter's Rock

I just finished reading the third (and last) Cemeteries of Amalo book the Tomb of Dragons! (This is the third Thara Celehar mystery, set in the world of The Goblin Emperor.) I have mixed feelings about it. I enjoyed it a great deal, but I can definitely see why other people didn't, and also it feels like a case of "this is the author's most popular series, and it's what the publisher wanted to pay for, but the author did not want to write it and didn't have any real inspiration for it and forced it out anyways." (Which dovetails with how Katherine Addison/Sarah Monette has talked about it in interviews--she hasn't said that outright, but she's danced around the edge of it a bit.) It's a bit rough around the edges, and I think there was a lot that could have been handled better to make the book hang together better. There's lots of scope for fanfic! Also, a lot of places where I would have had notes for the author if I was editing it. But I still enjoyed reading it, and will doubtless enjoy re-reading it.

(Here be spoilers)

( What the heck is the plot supposed to be anyway? )

Now that we've talked about the plot issues, let's talk about the problems with characterization and theme consistency.

( Characterizataion and Theme Issues )

All of this sounds really critical of the book, but I have to point out: I like the book a lot! I liked all the parts! I just don't think it fits together very well structurally, either plot wise or character wise. If this was a fic I was betaing, I would have a lot of comments for the author.

It was a great book for giving fanfic ideas, though. Things I'd love to see include:
( Tomb of Dragons fanfic ideas )

Most people (at least most Americans) have never been in a grand Stately Home of the scale Wayne Manor is supposed to be. We just don't know much about what they're like. There was a very brief era (the Gilded/Robber Baron age) where they were built. Rich people now who build grand piles tend to just do McMansions on steroids, and those are different than the earlier mansions, in a lot of ways.

The major difference is that building a house that big actually had a purpose in the pre-20th-Century era, so the layout of the house is going to make sense, and the rooms will be smaller, because they're built for purposes and not just "look at me, I'm fuck-off huge!"

( Historical mansions vs. McMansions. )

( Carnegie Mansion in New York: an example )

( Here's some considerations when thinking about Wayne Manor: )

AO3 has a proposed update to the Terms of Service, which you can read here and comment on here. For the most part, it is an improvement, and I like the clarity with which they have laid out why they're doing this and what their guiding principles are.

There is one paragraph I have a problem with, and the problem is a doozy.

In section II.H Harassment it says:

Real-Person Fiction (RPF)

Creating RPF never constitutes harassment in and of itself. Posting works where someone dies, is subjected to slurs, or is otherwise harmed as part of the plot is usually not a violation of the Harassment Policy. However, deliberately posting such Content in a manner designed to be seen by the subject of the work, such as by gifting them the work, may result in a judgment of harassment.

So even if someone creates a "fanwork" about a fellow fan in which that person is raped and killed, that fanwork is only in violation of the harassment policy if they gift it directly to the victim. (A later paragraph says that advocating for someone to be harmed is against the TOS. So you can gleefully detail a fellow fan being tortured to death as long as you don't say in an author's note that someone should totally do that in real life.) This is not a hypothetical, this has happened a number of times. In those examples, there's usually been harassment on other sites, and the "fanwork" is part of a campaign of harassment. There is room in this policy for AO3 to say "it's not harassment by itself, but it's part of a campaign of harassment, therefore it counts." But there's also room for them to say "all the harassment is happening on other websites, nothing that is happening on AO3 is harassment, therefore the "fanwork" is fine and can stay."

It is also further repeated in the FAQ:And the thing is, two paragraphs down from that FAQ statement, they say this:
"Any tool or feature" does not, apparently, include fanworks, the primary feature of AO3.

I don't know about you, but even if I never personally saw it because I had the author muted and blocked, AO3 hosting a work in which I was raped and murdered would create a hostile environment for me.

I think AO3 is missing a crucial distinction here, and in so doing it is going to allow AO3 to continue to be used by people to abuse fans, especially marginalized fans.

There is a very big difference between RPF of a public figure and RPF of a fellow fan, and the difference is, the public figure is almost certainly not going to see the RPF unless they themselves go looking for it. They are not part of the community where it is published and shared, and the fanwork-producing community is such a small proportion of the world (even today) that creating a really vile depiction of them is extremely unlikely to have any effect on them or their reputation at all, unless they go purposefully looking for it. It's a drop in the bucket. Even the worst RPF of a public figure is not harming that person. When there is a targeted campaign against that person that is large enough to cause them harm, the chances of the fic being a significant part of the problem--as opposed to the cruft pulled along in its wake--is very small. Abusive fanworks are merely a tiny drop in the ocean of public reactions to and treatment of public figures.

(Note: I think our society is really really awful in the ways we treat public figures, I'm not saying any abuse is ever okay, but when weighing the competing harms of "how do we prevent abuse" vs. "how do we avoid censorship" you have to ask how much harm is being done. There's no way to have a perfect answer to this question that is fair, harms no one, has no bad social effects, and is able to be implemented at the scale AO3 needs.)

And, again, even if the public figure is the target of a harassment campaign, they're not on AO3. A fanwork on AO3 can't be creating a hostile environment for them because ... it's not their environment. Professional hockey players are not on AO3, as a general rule. Nor are actors or politicians.

When fans are the target of similarly vile RPF, things are different. The scale of the situation is different, and the abusive fanwork is being posted in the fan's own community. Even if the fan being targeted has blocked and muted the harasser on AO3, the fact that the abusive fanwork exists is likely to create a hostile environment across fannish platforms. The abusive fanwork is highly likely to affect their relationships with other people in their fandoms, even if most people don't believe the lies in the abusive fanwork and think it's awful. It will serve as a lightning rod and encourage other toxic fans to harass the victim on AO3 and other platforms. Instead of being a tiny drop in a sea of content about the victim, such a fanwork can be a bucketful in a bathtub--enough to make a major difference. The balance of harm is fundamentally different.

I mean, in some ways it's a step forward because they're actually addressing that people do this (create "RPF" about doing awful things to fellow fans) and specifying that "gifting" such a work to the fan in question is harassment. It didn't use to be! Several fans have been driven off the platform because of this over the years. It's just not enough. And you can comment on it here.

One of the things I find interesting about the Rivers of London fandom is how some people take Peter's initial thoughts and responses to people as The Gospel Truth, and cling to that in a way that ignores when Peter's opinions and relationships change over the course of the series.

Peter Grant is a very perceptive, thoughtful person, and he's really good at picking up the vibes people give off. But nobody is ever 100% accurate in their perceptions of other people, especially when they first meet them, and Aaronovitch does a great job of portraying that. With the recurring characters, we regularly find Peter's relationship to them, and his understanding of them, changing over the course of the series. Sometimes, it turns out that his initial impression was wrong or was missing key information, or was based on things that have changed. Aaronovitch never has Peter think "oh, by the way, I was wrong about X! I used to think this way, but now I've realized it's this other way." Instead, we see that Peter's relationships with the people in question change, and his internal monologue about them changes. But a lot of people don't recognize that. They keep trying to fit things that happen in later books into the initial perception Peter has.

Seawoll is the one I've noticed this with most often. When Peter meets Seawoll, he doesn't know any of the context, but he does know that Seawoll is a) really incredibly competent, b) doesn't like magic, c) doesn't like Nightingale, and d) is really scary, partly because he will ferociously defend his protégés (and Peter isn't one of them). Seawoll and Nightingale have an antagonistic relationship at that point, and Peter is Nightingale's apprentice, so his experiences of Seawoll are filtered through that lens. I've repeatedly run up against people who think that the problem is that Seawoll just generally doesn't like Nightingale, and that that continues throughout the course of the series, and that he's hostile to Peter too.

That's ... not what the series shows. Seawoll is (and remains) a gruff, blunt person, but over the series he comes to like and respect Nightingale, and clearly comes to think of Peter as one of his protégés, whom he cares about like he cares about Stephanopoulos or Guleed.

Seawoll is, above all else, a professional, a good cop who wants to do things right and bring guilty people to justice through the criminal justice system. Seawoll may look, on the surface, like the old sort of copper who was easily corrupted and just wanted to bully criminals, but in fact he cares about justice and getting the right person, not the convenient person. He is, at heart, what we want a modern police officer to be, and the sort of copper that Peter wants to be. Moreover, he wants to train the next generation of coppers up right so that they, too, will be trustworthy custodians of the public good, and will care more about achieving justice than getting the easy (but wrong) arrest.

Seawoll doesn't like Nightingale at the beginning of the series because very few of those things are true of Nightingale. Nightingale is very competent at magic, but not at any of the investigative or bureaucratic things that make up the rest of the Metropolitan Police or the rest of the criminal justice system. There is little to no accountability, for Nightingale; he can break any rule or law he wants, and if he has a good enough excuse and there's enough magic involved, the Commissioner and the other powers will simply shrug and look the other way. When there is magic involved in a crime, there is no justice system, there's just The Nightingale's judgment. He is judge, jury, and executioner. The UK eliminated the death penalty in 1969, but Nightingale still executes people when he thinks it right ... and when the series starts, he doesn't have any provisions for any other response to a serious crime. There are no checks and balances before Peter, no second opinions, no other options. By Seawoll's standards, that's murder, not justice. And if Nightingale gets things wrong, well, that sucks for his victims. One of the many reasons to eliminate the death penalty is that if you execute someone and then realize you were wrong, there's nothing to be done. And Nightingale, like all people, is sometimes wrong. Consider the jazz vampires in Moon Over Soho. There was plenty of evidence that they were nothing like what Nightingale thought they were, and yet Nightingale's response was to conclude that they still had done things worthy of death and not consider any other options.

The other thing about Nightingale-as-a-police-officer is that policing requires you to know the community you police. Nightingale is utterly ignorant of about 99% of the demi-monde, and it regularly bites the Folly in the ass. Quiet People? Jazz vampires? Multiple other branches of Newtonian practitioners? Nightingale spent decades sitting in the Folly and waiting for other people to tell him there was a problem, and missed a hell of a lot. Which makes for compelling stories, from Peter's perspective, as he's discovering all sorts of interesting things. But also, a lot of the things Peter discovers are things Nightingale should already know if he'd been doing a decent job of policing the demi-monde all those years. Nightingale is very good at magic ... and very bad at being an officer of the law.

We see Nightingale through Peter's eyes, and Peter has a fair amount of hero-worship for him, especially at the beginning. But Seawoll has very good reasons to dislike Nightingale and be suspicious of him. It's not a clash of personalities, it's not irrational, their conflict at the start of the series flows directly from the attitudes and actions of the two men as we see them.

But we also see how things develop through the books. Over the series, Nightingale changes. He regularly bows to Peter's ethics and procedures. Nightingale allows Peter to get the Folly looped back into the rest of the Met, with oversight similar to other departments. Nightingale, at Peter's prodding, comes up with things to do with magical criminals besides "kill the really bad ones and then fudge the reports." Instead of Peter being trained into Nightingale's high-handed belief that he is above the law, Nightingale gets brought into line with the best of modern criminal justice ideals (or at least, the best ones that you can have inside a carceral system--remember that RoL is copaganda). As Nightingale's attitudes and actions change, so does Seawoll's opinion of him. By the time of Amongst Our Weapons, Seawoll and Nightingale respect each other and work well together with minimal friction. They're not bosom buddies, but there's no hostility on either side. Seawoll is gruff and blunt, but no more so than he is with people he genuinely likes. Aaronovitch never tells us explicitly their relationship has changed, but he shows us that it is different.

As for Seawoll and Peter, Peter started out a bit afraid of Seawoll because Seawoll is powerful and doesn't like Nightingale (Peter's mentor) and is therefore suspicious of Peter. But by Amongst Our Weapons, not only is Peter not afraid of Seawoll, but we see Seawoll treating Peter with the same sort of care and paternal protectiveness that he gives to, say, Guleed. Again, Aaronovitch never tells us explicitly their relationship has changed, but he shows us that it is different.

In both cases, there are people in fandom who have not noticed the changes. They assume that the hostility and fear of the first couple of books is still the dominant paradigm for the Seawoll & Nightingale and Seawoll & Peter relationships in the later books, and read every interaction through that lens.

One minor thing that always makes me roll my eyes is batfam fics where all the kids are expected to go to the Wayne Family Gala and not just go but stay for the whole evening. This is not a family party, this is a formal event. That isn't how formal parties work! Especially large ones held in the evenings! In most large formal parties, even the hosts do not bring their kids, because it is not an event designed for kids. The kids are going to be bored and unhappy at best, and disruptive at worst, and a lot of the attendees are going to be unhappy that there are kids present. And they have big enough houses that even a very large event will not fill the whole house, so the kids can stay in the family area and not have to deal with the guests, and there are staff to look after kids too young to be left alone.

If the host's kids are present at ALL, they will be present for a brief time early in the evening and then go back to their rooms and miss the rest of the event. The party in The Sound Of Music is actually a pretty good example of this. It's a large, formal party, and it's got dancing, dinner, and then (presumably) more dancing after dinner. The serious partying is going to start at dinner time. The kids are present when everybody's arriving and during the initial dancing, BUT they are not participating in the party; they are off to the side, watching it through the window. They are not in the ballroom dancing, they are not in the hall circulating with the guests and schmoozing like their father is, they are in nice outfits but NOT the formal wear that the adults are wearing. They are sent up to their rooms for the night before dinner. They have a short presentation before they go, of the "aren't our host's kids cute?" variety. Even the oldest, the sixteen year old Liesl, is too young to stay for dinner and the main party. Liesl is almost old enough to join the party, and if the Nazis hadn't come probably would have been allowed to participate in a year or so, but at sixteen she's still not old enough for the adult party.

So Damian is not going to be at the party, or not for longer than a brief "this is my son, isn't he cute" moment at the beginning. Tim and Steph and Duke probably aren't going to be at the party unless you're writing them as 18 or older. Jason would never have attended a gala before he died (except for a brief "this is my son, isn't he cute" appearance). If Dick is an adult, then he's old enough to attend ... but given how rocky his relationship with Bruce was when he came of age and moved out, he might not have been to very many of them.

Now, less formal events, they might have attended; they might have attended formal day events like garden parties. But even with day events or less formal events, they probably didn't attend many things that weren't specifically events for children. Because rich people usually don't bring their kids to events unless the events are specifically for children.

If you want something more realistic, you could have the kids doing something fun while Bruce (and possibly Dick) are stuck in the ballroom. Whether that fun is patrolling and foiling a criminal scheme or having a movie night or finding hiding places to watch the party and make fun of what people are wearing, there are a lot of options. Or maybe Bruce has a radio on so he can listen for danger to see if he needs to go change into the Batsuit, and the kids try and say the most outrageous things through it to try and get him to break character. There's lots of ways to handle it! And at this point, "the kids attend a gala" is a fandom trope, it's not going anywhere. It just makes me shake my head when I see it.

I've been reading through all the posts about internal AO3/OTW workings in the last month or so, and how horrifyingly awful it can be--ranging from "overwhelming" to "intentionally abusive." (synonymous has a great roundup here.) And I keep hearing things that bring to mind Issendai's excellent essay "Sick Systems," and also experiences I've had in my two decades working in/with various nonprofits (mostly Christian, but some secular). And I have some thoughts that current OTW volunteers might want to consider.

First, the essay. Sick Systems: How to Keep Someone With You Forever is excellent, readable, and very evocative. It helps you see how the sick system works, and why people stay in situations and relationships and jobs that are--from the outside--absolutely bonkers and harmful. If it has a flaw, it's that it presumes intentionality on the part of the people (whether employer or lover) who create the sick system. I have seen enough such systems in various nonprofits to know that most of the time they're not intentionally sick and awful. You don't have to try to be abusive and manipulative to create a system that is abusive and manipulative.

All you really need is some combination of: incompetence, lack of imagination, high value on "the mission," low value on the well-being of the people involved (at least compared to "the mission"), a feeling of pressure and scarcity (not enough time, not enough people, not enough money, not enough whatever to accomplish the all-important Mission), and an emphasis on measurable results over all else.

"Incompetence" is self-explanatory.

Lack of imagination means a lot of things, but the one most likely to lead to a sick system is that when there is a problem, you put a jerry-rigged patch on it and continue on, instead of figuring out how to fix the root of the problem, because you can't imagine any other way of doing things than the way you've always done it.

High value on the mission sounds like it should be good! But not if it leads you to forget why you're doing it or if that belief leads you down the road of "the ends justify the means." When you value the mission more than you do the people who are working on the mission or the people you're (supposedly) serving, it's a recipe for exploitation. "You should volunteer an unsustainable number of hours per week because The Mission is so important! You believe in The Mission, don't you?" And any criticism can be deflected because it is insignificant next to the all-important Mission. Or, even better, turned into criticism of the mission. "Oh, you think we should stop abusing and exploiting our volunteers? We can't be abusing or exploiting people because we're Good People doing An Important Thing! You're complaining about nothing because you want to see The Mission fail!"

A feeling of scarcity (whether real or imagined) means that you're under pressure to do what you can without stopping and thinking about the best way to do it. You can't do it the best way, you don't have the time/people/money/whatever! So you have to cobble it together out of what you can, and exploit what you do have to make up the difference. So, for example, if you feel like you don't have enough money, or like the money you have can't legitimately be spent on certain aspects of your work, you might fill the gap with volunteers. And if you don't have enough volunteers to do it, either, you'll do it by pressuring the volunteers to work more than they should.

An emphasis on measurable results, well, you get best at what you measure. And things like "the well-being of our volunteers" and "the goodwill we have created in the community" are really, really hard to measure even when they're absolutely crucial to the core of your mission.

Basically, you put all of these things together in varying proportions and you get a system where people feel trapped, overwhelmed, and yet willing to twist themselves in knots and harm themselves and others to accomplish the mission, and override every reasonable objection or suggestion because The Mission comes first and they can't imagine any other way to do things and even if they did they don't have the time or resources to implement it. And hey, it can't be that bad because The Mission is getting done and we're all Good People here, right?

None of this requires anyone involved to have any bad intentions whatsoever. In fact, it's more effectively harmful if everyone involved genuinely has good intentions and is not personally an asshole. Because if an asshole wants you to do something, even if you believe in The Mission just as much as they do, it's easy to stand up to them and say no if they're being unreasonable. But if it's a good person, a person you like, who is really genuinely sorry about it, but you're the only one who can do it, that's a lot harder to say no to. And then you end up with the sort of Sick System Issendai talks about, despite the fact that everyone involved has genuinely good intentions. (You know, those things they pave the road to hell with ...)

Which brings me to something they taught us in my management courses in grad school, which I have seen work wonders in such situations: Don't be afraid to let things fail.

Let me repeat that: Don't be afraid to let things fail.

Not the entire mission of the organization, of course. But parts of it. Projects. Events. Even parts of the organizational structure. If they can't be sustainably and healthily done by the organization as it exists now, stop doing them. Let them fail. Kill them if you have to. Yes, even if they're important. Yes, even if--especially if!--it feels like the world is going to end and the sky is going to fall and the entire organization/mission will die with them.

Because when you let harmful/unsustainable things fail, a world of possibilities open up. Here are some of them:

• People panic and redouble their efforts to re-create the thing that failed, except with even more pressure (this is by far the worst possible outcome, but it's also the only one that ends up as bad as where you started).
• You find out that when the pressure of "we have to keep this going no matter what!" is removed, people have more freedom to think and imagine and you figure out ways to improve and transform things before it actually fails. If you don't have to keep things going no matter what, you have freedom to try something that may not work. And maybe it'll make things worse, but maybe it'll make things better, and if it makes things worse then it's not the end of the world because the thing was failing anyway, you didn't kill it.
• You find out that the thing you thought was so vital to The Mission ... actually isn't. You might have needed it at one point, but you don't any longer. Now you're free to stop wasting energy on useless stuff.
• You find out that the thing you let fail actually is as important as you thought it was, and it really sucks that it's gone (for now). But now that you're not hustling to Make A Failing Structure Work, you have the space and time to stop and think and figure out a better and more sustainable way of doing it. Yes, some things got dropped through the cracks when you let the previous system fail, but let's be real. Things were falling through the cracks anyway or being done badly enough it might have been better if they had fallen through the cracks (the system was unsustainable and awful!) and once you get the sustainable system in place more things are being handled (and handled to a much higher standard) than ever before.
• You find out that the thing that failed did so because it was designed for very different circumstances than you're actually in. Maybe the people who designed it didn't realize what was actually going to happen, but maybe things have changed in ways you didn't notice while you were trying to prop up the sick system and wondering why it's not working. Now you can design your new system for the way things actually are now, rather than the way someone else thought they were going to be a decade ago.
• You find out that your organization actually has the resources you assumed they didn't. Maybe it takes a rethinking of priorities. Maybe it takes a concerted fund drive or reaching out to specific high-ticket donors. Maybe it takes a different way of recruiting and training and organizing your volunteers. Maybe a lot of things. But the limitations you thought were iron-clad were actually pretty flexible.
• You find out that there are other people in/adjacent to the organization who believe in The Mission, too, and have things to contribute in ways that weren't compatible with the thing that failed, but which you can use now that you're not wedded to The Way We Used To Do It.
• You find out that your organization doesn't have to do that particular thing by yourself. Maybe there are other organizations you can partner with. Maybe there are other resources in the community who are doing the same/similar work.

You think the sky will fall if things fail. You think The Mission will be irrevocably harmed if you stop grinding away at yourselves and others to make the Sick System work. You think everything will be over forever.

And yet, if you genuinely let something fail--not the whole organization, but a part of it!--you will actually be in a better position to figure out what needs to be done and how to do it in a sustainable and non-abusive way.

Quite often, when something gets dysfunctional, the easiest and quickest way to fix it is to let it fail (whether in whole or in part), take a breath, figure out a better way of doing it, and then rebuild something better in its place.

I'm not advocating for people to let the whole OTW collapse. The OTW has done a lot of great things over the years, I am grateful they exist, and for all the time and effort put into it by all the people who have volunteered. I hope the OTW and AO3 continue on for years and decades to come (albeit in a better/healthier way). But specific projects or committees might benefit from being allowed to collapse and then seeing what new thing can and should be done to replace them.

At the very least, the freedom to take a deep breath and say "if this particular part of the mission fails--whether temporarily or permanently--the sky will not fall and the world will not end" makes all the difference in the world.

I love superhero stories, and Batman and Superman are my faves by far. But I have been having a problem reading Batman fic recently because too much of it uncritically accepts the underlying premise, that you can scare or hurt people into not doing evil. Especially with Red Hood: that Jason killing people and/or brutalizing them will stop the violence, that he can control things that way, that he can threaten people into backing down and it will be a permanent solution because he's so good at violence that people will accept his dictates. Jason believes that, and the fic often backs him up. (So does canon, but that's another can of worms.) Problem is, that's just not the way people work.

Before covid, I volunteered at a warming center, a place where homeless people can spend the night in a warm, dry, safe place when it's really cold and/or wet. And sometimes people are homeless because of bad luck, but sometimes people are homeless because they're assholes and nobody wants to deal with them. So while most of our guests are polite and well-behaved, some of them are just awful. And we have to deal with them, hopefully calming them down so they can stay without hurting or harassing anyone, and throwing them out if not. Every year at new volunteer training, there's at least one brawny guy who's really eager to volunteer to be the bouncer, the one who goes up to the assholes causing trouble and intimidating them into behaving. And every year, the director has to explain that no, the ideal person to handle things and take point in dealing with the assholes is a level-headded woman, preferably a small one. Because if you have a violent asshole, and a big man comes up to him, the violent asshole is going to take that as a challenge and escalate things further. Even if it is obvious that he is greatly outclassed by the bouncer! Sometimes especially if he is obviously outclassed by the bouncer! A levelheaded petite woman can go over and, through being firm and not backing down, often get the asshole to either stop or leave, because she doesn't register as a challenge. But a big dude is a challenge! If you let it be about dominance and top dog and machismo and violence or the threat of violence, people (especially men) don't back down. They escalate.

And this is true in other settings, as well. It's one reason why negative discipline and physical punishment never result in long-term behavioral change. You may stop the initial problem behavior, but you won't stop future problem behaviors, because you've turned it into a pissing match instead of an opportunity to change. Or in a turf battle, whether between rival ethnic groups or rival gangs, when things turn to violence it never results in lasting peace or lasting dominion by the group that is initially most successful at violence. Because the other groups retaliate! Even if you have overwhelming force to begin with, you haven't taught the other group "we should just let them rule us because it's too dangerous to resist" you have taught them "violence works, we just need to be more violent than the other guys, time to up our game."

So, back to Batman. It is understandable if Batman thinks that fighting people will bring lasting change to the streets, though he's wrong. It's even more understandable if Jason Todd as Red Hood thinks that fighting people will bring lasting change to the streets, or at least if he's nihilistic enough not to care that it won't change things in the long run, just make him feel good and solve his temporary problems. It is completely understandable if the cops believe, from Gordon on down, that violence will solve things, because that's a typical cop belief in real life. What's much harder to swallow is if the narrative backs up this belief, or if social workers/nonprofit workers in the story accept this belief in the ability of violence to solve problems.

On AO3, when a fandom has multiple different media/divisions within it, there is always a meta tag that encompasses all of the possible aspects of the fandom. Sometimes it's simply the broadest name of the fandom. Sometimes (especially if the fandom is older, or the relationships of fandoms within it are complicated) it will be "[Fandom Name] - All Media Types." Sometimes, if the canon has multiple different names, it will be "[Fandom Name] & Related Fandoms."

Meta tags are a thing the archive does as a way of grouping similar tags. So, for example, if Spock is a character tag, it will be a meta tag for every variation of "Spock"--girl!Spock, genderbent Spock, Spock Prime, and every other variation of the Spock character anyone has ever tagged on the archive will be wrangled such that Spock is the meta tag. Which means that if you click on the Spock tag you will get fics tagged with every type of Spock there ever has been whether or not the "Spock" specific tag is used. If it's just tagged "genderbent Spock" and not "Spock" the work will still show up in the Spock tag. If you click on the genderbent Spock tag, you will get only works tagged with that specific tag, but clicking on the general Spock tag will bring up canon Spock and genderbent Spock and every other Spock anyone's ever tagged.

The same is true of fandoms. If you tag something as only "Star Trek: The Next Generation" it will appear on the works page for both the TNG tag and the general Star Trek tag. If you tag something as only Batman: Under the Red Hood, it will show up on the works page for the Under the Red Hood tag and the Batman - all media types tag. It doesn't hurt anything to add the meta tag, I hasten to add, it's just not adding to the discoverability of your fic.

But from the perspective of the reader, if you like all the different media types and canon divisions, and want to read fic from them, it helps to be able to identify what the meta tag for the fandom is, so you can find all the fic. Here's how!

First, if there's an "all media types" or "& related fandoms" tag, that's easy, that's probably it. (The actual meta tag may be something else, as "all media types" used to be the default but they've changed that, but if so "all media types" will be synned to the actual meta tag, which means they are actually the same tag for all practical purposes and "all media types" will still function as the meta tag.)

But if there isn't one of those, a little tag exploration may be required.

• Go to a work in a subfandom, and click on the fandom tag. That will take you to the works page, where it will say "1-20 of [size of fandom] Works in [Sub-Fandom Name]".
• The name of the fandom will be a link. Click on that link, and it will take you to the page for the tag, where it lists alllllll the tags that are connected to it in SOME way or another. If there is a meta tag, there will be a special section labelled "Metatags" and any metatags that fandom belongs to will be listed there.
• Click on the applicable meta tag, and it will take you to the tag page for that tag.
• Up at the right-hand corner is a button marked "works" which will take you to the works page of all works tagged with that meta tag or any of its subfandoms. (If there are one or two fandoms in that meta tag you're not interested in, you can filter it out using the filter bar on the right.

Really great essay on why stories about "the chosen one who will save everyone/fix everything" are so popular, and why that can be such a toxic fantasy. Here's my favorite bit:

Homophones are words that sound the same but mean different things (and are usually spelled differently).  They are the bane of writers, ESPECIALLY in the modern era, because spellcheck often doesn't catch them.  So if you aren't sure which one is which, or just make a mistake ... your first line of defense isn't going to help.

Anyway!  Here is a list of common homophone fails.  If you aren't sure of something, you can check it here.
 

( Commonly Confused Words Ahoy! )

 

Rebloggable on tumblr.