more AO3 thoughts

[lirillith]

I love the tagging system.  Ages ago, I remember posting on my writing journal about what constitutes gen.  When I write a fic about Locke and Terra with no distinct romantic bent, but thoroughly focused on the importance of their relationship, is that gen?  Even though they're my OTP?    Now I can just whap the "pre-relationship" tag on it!  Problem solved!  I also enjoy some of the silly content tags, like sticking the "airships" tag on many of my Setzer fics. 

But every time I see the "female characters" tag, I wonder why it exists.  My FF.net profile has 33 fics included; only 7 of those have an exclusively male POV (not counting ones with multiple points-of-view, both male and female.)  All of them feature a female character in some context.  And my two primary fandoms are games with predominantly male casts.  I mean, I realize a lot of slash-heavy fandoms don't have much fic about female characters at all, but I find the whole idea of writing female characters so seldom that you tag them as something out of the ordinary to be really alien. 

I really don't write male POVs often.  It's not so much out of discomfort or fearing that the male POV will be unconvincing, anymore - it's just that female characters are usually my gateway into the material.  Maybe once I get to writing Tiger & Bunny fic that'll change, I dunno.  

Comments

[quicksilver_ink]

I suspect/hope the "female characters" tag exists either as a result of people posting genderswap 'fics about canonically male characters, or people posting 'fics written for female character-focused ficathons/festivals/etc, which are usually proposed to rectify gender imbalance in male-character-heavy fandoms.

"Pre-relationship" is a wonderfully useful tag.

[lirillith]

Oh, I know a lot of sections of fandom just ignore female characters entirely in favor of slash about the guys. That's just the part I don't get. I couldn't get into something like Hetalia with its lack of female characters, even if it wasn't, you know, Hetalia.