stardust_rifle

Kind of went down a rabbit hole on how Ao3’s tag system handles plural characters. Findings so far:

If the headmates are clearly differentiated in canon (having canonical names as separate identities seems to be the dividing line on this) they’re classed as completely separate character tags with as much relation as other characters from the same source. (Examples: Shu and Madmoiselle, Natsuki and Satsuki Shinomiya, Hallelujah and Allelujiah Haptism)

However, if the headmates don’t seem to have canonical names as separate entities, they all get synned to one character tag. (Examples: No differentiation between Bokushi and Oreshi in the “Akaashi Seijuro” tag, no differentiation between Aokoto and Akakoto in the “Kayano Mikoto” tag)

And a weird outlier appears to be the wrangling of Uendo Toneido’s character tag, as all the other headmates are wrangled as subtags of the main Uendo Toneido tag.

I wound up stumbling across this one Old Internet Article about soulbonding and soulpuppeting; you can read it here.

And I sort of got to thinking about (note; i will be using the term "soulbonder" in a pretty weird way here, so if that bothers you, feel free to peace out) the difference between authors who's characters talk to them, and authors who's characters...don't. (Or, for the purposes of this discussion, "soulbonders", and "soulpuppeters", respectively.)

Because I've seen discussion from the latter, of them sort of assuming the "my character did X" was just an elaborate metaphor, or people being cutesy, and getting horribly shocked when they get it explained to them that no, for some authors, their characters do literally have their own opinions on things and make decisions on their own that their authors have no control over. (And then some of those soulpuppeters accuse soulbonders of lying or being mistaken or trying to seem special.)

And I think it's a really interesting neurotype difference! It's weird as fuck!

Inviting comments on the topics below the cut:

( Read more... )

i was going to post "why is it that all of the weirdly good multiplicity rep is in dating sims" but. this may be influenced by the fact that i play a lot of dating sims.