Tagging characters on AO3

[sholio]

This has to do with the story I posted earlier ... but it kinda made me wonder how other people handle this issue on AO3. The story has most of the major characters in it, but not in major roles, and all of them were hovering right around or below my "enough of this character to tag for it" threshold. I ended up tagging just for Neal and Peter, the most pivotal characters and the only one who are in the whole story, mostly because I figured that if someone is looking for a Mozzie story and clicks on the Mozzie tag, finding out that he's only in one scene would be really frustrating.

But now, for people who look at tags as a guide to content, the tags are somewhat misleading, because while the story is focused on Peter and Neal, it's not just them and has quite a bit of ensemble as well. Tagging just for the two of them implies a different story focus than tagging for the whole set. But tagging for the whole set doesn't convey that some characters have a far more prominent role in the story than others.

... I guess this whole issue would be solved if AO3 eventually implements major/minor character tags (note: not a complaint; I know they're busy and it's not an important feature, just a nice bell'n'whistle!), but in the meantime I'm wondering -- how do other people handle it?

Comments

[meridian_rose]

I do agonise over this sometimes. Generally if someone gets a line of dialogue or is mentioned a lot in the story (eg Peter thinking about Neal and their friendship, even if Neal doesn't appear) I tag them. I do sometimes think it's misleading though - minor/major would be a great feature, and it's a good idea to use the ensemble freeform tag (which I use in my own headers but somehow hadn't thought of using at the archive) so thanks for posting about this.