Organizing Gundam: Internal Consistency vs. User Experience

Meta
Title:	Organizing Gundam: Internal Consistency vs. User Experience
Creator:	Kalloway
Date(s):	2016-03-05
Medium:	online
Fandom:	Gundam
Topic:	AO3's tagging system for Gundam fandoms
External Links:	on AO3
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Organizing Gundam: Internal Consistency vs. User Experience is a 2016 meta essay by Kalloway addressing the poor tag wrangling of the Gundam franchise on Archive of Our Own she had been struggling with since 2012.

The essay was posted on AO3 with the summary, "A meta essay discussing how Gundam fandoms are inconsistently named, defined, and wrangled on the Archive of Our Own, including documentation of support requests for corrections"

It was tagged with these fandom tags:

• Gundam & Related Fandoms
• Gundam SEED & Cosmic Era Gundam
• Gundam 00 & Anno Domini Gundam
• Gundam Wing & After Colony Gundam

Topics covered

• The difficulty of browsing and navigating AO3's Anime and Manga section
• Inconsistencies in canonized fandom names, making it hard to guess under what name a given series will be canonized
• What counts as a "related fandom"
• What makes one fandom separate from another such that they deserve different canonized fandom tags
• Inconsistencies and inaccuracies regarding which fandoms are synned and what they're synned to.
• Difficulty getting any information or resolution from AO3 Support
• Lack of fan-outreach to see what structure and canonized tags would would best for the user base.

Excerpts

Gundam, as a long-running franchise, can be difficult to pin down and organize. What started as a single continuity - Universal Century - spun off multiple series unrelated except by common themes and the use of the titular mecha. Aside from anime, there are dozens of manga sidestories, novels, photonovels, video games, and even model kit supplements that all build onto canon. Each manga, novel, etc. can feature an original cast with an original story telling a part of in-verse history.

The question, then, is whether a side-story, spin-off, or additional canon in a different medium can and should be counted as a different fandom worthy of its own common tag on AO3.

If Gundam SEED Astray, despite taking place at the same time as the main anime canon, was split off into a separate top-level fandom (and a sub-tag of Gundam SEED, though it shows on the main Anime & Manga page), as was Gundam SEED Destiny, a direct sequel to Gundam SEED, why can't a prequel set in a different medium be a sub-tag and top-level fandom?

Number of works doesn't seem to be an affective quality - Gundam SEED Astray was split off with only one work.

If, quoting from the response from support, it has to do with each new story being "all direct prequels/sequels/missing scenes of the main storyline; i.e. they’re set in the same universe", then there should only be one Gundam SEED category. There should also only be one Mobile Suit Gundam category for all Universal Century works, instead of ten separate top-level fandoms all appearing in the Anime & Manga category, plus a tag for 'Universal Century' that they all fall under.

With Frozen Teardrop synned to Gundam Wing, characters have also been synned incorrectly with multiple characters being synned to one tag in more than one instance.

Also within and synned to Gundam Wing is 'Gundam Wing Dual Story: G-Unit | Gundam: The Last Outpost'. Localized without explicit reference to Gundam Wing in the title, the introduction flat out states that while it happens during the events of Gundam Wing, it's an independent story and no knowledge of Gundam Wing is necessary to enjoy it.

Because of the synning, it's not possible to say how many works for G-Unit/Last Outpost exist.

How is 'majority of users' being defined? I doubt that can be answered.

As for the structure of the fandom tag tree, which has been two months in discussion already, there are two potential solutions, aside from leaving things the way they are with fandoms incorrectly synned, no internal consistency, and fandom shorthand names being used over canon.

The first solution is the one presented earlier where there are only top-level tags by overall universe. All of Universal Century gets synned together no matter where in the 200 years of in-verse story a fanwork is set. It's all the same, according to the wranglers, except when it isn't, also according to the wranglers.

All of Cosmic Era Gundam, which is the universe reference for Gundam SEED, would be merged as well.

This is not an ideal solution for obvious reasons including both previous precedent and also what it could mean for other, completely unrelated fandoms.

The second solution involves research on behalf of the wranglers and possibly interacting with the fandom being wrangled. If two months of discussion haven't yielded a solution, taking the questions to the fanbase would be a good next step.

Comments

Early 2016

With Frozen Teardrop synned to Gundam Wing, characters have also been synned incorrectly with multiple characters being synned to one tag in more than one instance.

And when we don't have problems like Cyrene Wind (formerly known as Zechs Merquise/Milliardo Peacecraft/Wind) and Frozen Teardrop's Zechs Merquise (a new character) lumped under the same damn tag, we have problems like FT's Father Maxwell (adult Duo Maxwell) being basically untaggable -- since I've discovered that the canon tag on AO3 ("Maxwell Shinpu | Father Maxwell" is dumping my FT character into being synned to the priest who raised Duo in the Episode Zero Wing stories --! *tears out hair*

This is a really elegant suggestion for a Gundam tagging system; I'd love it if support got back to you and took your suggestions into account.

I'm not in Gundam Fandom, but as someone who's dealt with very similar frustrations in other Japanese fandoms you guys have all of my sympathies. Honestly, I'm not even sure it's worth trying to get any of this fixed, though I certainly salute you for trying--when I tried to have an incorrect character tag for a game I'm fannish about fixed, they told me they wouldn't be fixing it because other games entirely had made use of similar tags in the past. (Though they did make it possible to search on the character's actual canonical name, which is nice. That said, even two weeks later the change still hasn't been updated to include most of the relationships that character's a part of.) I've honestly given up entirely on trying to report any issues I see; one of my ships in a fandom of mine returns either a hundred works or less than forty depending on which name order you search on, and at this point I've just thrown my hands up about it.

And it's not that I don't have sympathy for the wranglers--I was one myself for about a year before I burned out due to both personal reasons and a complete lack of support. It's an frustrating, thankless task, especially if you're not in one of the popular AO3 fandoms where the wranglers all get to talk amongst each other. That said, there is (or was a year and a half ago, at least) also a huge issue with lack of clear guidelines for non-Western fandoms and a big problem with people who are unfamiliar with the fandoms (and anime/video games in general, I occasionally suspected) trying to help by snatching up and wrangling small fandoms in a way that's objectively and obviously incorrect to those more familiar with the material.

[Reply from Kalloway]

Thank you. And trust me, I have come very close to just throwing up my hands and walking away - I'm just too invested/morbidly curious at this point, I suppose?

I was a little surprised, while writing this, that it was 2012 when I mentioned how difficult it can be to browse/visually search through the anime/manga section because of the absolutely haphazard alphabetization/inconsistent use of Japanese text/etc. and it's all still exactly the same. I don't know the degree of server strain that fixing it would cause, but it would have been a lot less four years ago, I'm sure.

Late 2017

So THAT's where that nonsensical "Gundam & Related Fandoms" tag comes from! Answers one "why", I suppose, but it only raises a dozen more. Wow, what a mess. :\ The deliberate inconcistencies are just... mind-bogglingly frustrating. Especially compared to some other fandoms I'm in. *eyes the MCU. and Tron. and the .hack// franchise. and the Fate/ franchise. and Pokémon. and even goddamn Cassie Clare*

I don't suppose there's been (much) improvement since you posted this? Not in the GW fandom tags, from the looks of it. Hmpf. *removes all my "Episode Zero" freeforms and adorns over 30 applicable fics with a "Gundam Wing: Episode Zero" fandom tag purely on principle*

...this makes the prospect of trying to get that horribly wrong wrong WRONG "Newtypes (Gundam Wing)" tag fixed even less appealing, though. Damn.

[Reply from Kalloway in 2018]

Sorry. ^^;; I mean, I'm not 100% sure it's my fault but it appeared not long after my comments.

Yeah, it's a really curious mess, isn't it?

No, there hasn't. I'm waiting to see how they work with some of the newer Gundam series but so far I've unfortunately seen more First Gundam weirdness, with The Origin being synned to Mobile Suit Gundam (TV Series) when they really should possibly both be under a more generic Mobile Suit Gundam/UC tag of some sort.

Thanks for the support!