Tag Nominations Guidelines

[tavina]

Tag Nominations Guidelines:

General Nominations Information:

We have two tagsets, one for characters and relationships and one for freeforms. This will allow us to reuse the freeform tagset for future years so we don’t have to nominate all our AUs again as well as keep the fandoms/characters/relationships up to date and current.

Each participant can nominate up to 20 AUs as freeforms in the freeform tagset, and 10 fandoms with 10 characters/relationships each.

There are no rarity requirements to nominate a fandom, ship, character, or type of alternate universe freeform.

Original Work and Creator’s Choice of Fandom (CCOF) will not be allowed.

Real Person Fiction (RPF) is allowed. All people nominated for RPF must be famous in their own right and 18+ for modern RPF. The mod reserves the right to remove any tags they feel would be out of scope for a fanwork exchange.

Crossovers are allowed. Please nominate them under “Crossover Fandom” so that they are easily locatable, except for crossovers that take place entirely within the Star Wars Universe. In that case, as per the franchise post, please nominate them under Star Wars - All Media Types.

Franchises will be accepted into the tagset based on the Franchise post, found here. If you have a fandom that is a large and sprawling franchise of many parts, check the post to see how to nominate, or inquire on that post or with the modmail if you don’t see your franchise there and think it should be split up in some way.

Nominating Characters and Relationships:

The tagset interface to nominate characters and relationships is here.

Please disambiguate your relationship and character nominations with the relevant fandom in parentheses. This helps us to track down wandering tags and reassociate any tags that fall out of their correct associations.

Nominate single characters with the prefix: 1: such as 1: Jiang Cheng (MDZS - MXTX). This assumes that the work you receive will primarily be about the nominated character, but does not mean that they will not have significant relationships! Please DNW any specific characters or ships you would not like to have in a gift. 

Nominate platonic relationships with & and romantic/sexual relationships with / such as: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens TV) or Sherlock Holmes/John Watson (ACD).

Please alphabetize your nominations by family name/surname (or only known name, if a character has no family name/surname) for both platonic and romantic/sexual relationships to prevent duplicate tags such as: Wei Wuxian & Jiang Cheng (CQL) and Jiang Cheng & Wei Wuxian (CQL) from getting into the tagset. If this does happen and you spot it, please comment on any nominations clarification post, or this post and I will get it during tagset cleanup!

Please reduce piping whenever possible to improve tagset readability. For example, nominate: 1: Wei Yingluo (Yanxi Palace) instead of 1: Empress Wei of Qing | Wei Yingluo (Yanxi Palace). If you have reason to believe that piping is essential for your fandom, please feel free to contact the mod either on the dreamwidth comm or by modmail to discuss!

Please also do not purposefully add diacritics to your nominations as this makes it harder for other participants to use the dropdown. For example, nominate: 1: Lan Xichen (MDZS - MXTX) instead of 1: Lán Huàn | Lán Xīchén (MDZS - MXTX). This might be unavoidable as some fandoms are plagued with ao3 canonicals with diacritics, but please don’t nominate like this on purpose! I will do my best to reduce the number of diacritics we find in our tagset to keep things tidy and also findable, but there may be some that slip through.

Nominating Freeforms:

The tagset interface to nominate freeforms is here.

Nominate fandom specific freeforms (ie. canon divergence AUs) with the fandom prefix, such as: MDZS: No Golden Core Transfer or Good Omens: Different Antichrist so that they are easily searchable. These should only be requested and offered with the specific fandom, or very closely related fandoms such as Game of Thrones (GOT) and A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF) or Modao Zushi (MDZS) & The Untamed (CQL). 

Nominate non-fandom specific freeforms with the prefix “ALL” such as ALL: 1920s AU or ALL: Vampire AU or ALL: Rule 63 AU. These can be requested with any fandom.

Also nominate fusion AUs such as a Hunger Games fusion in this format: ALL: Hunger Games AU. Fusion freeform nominations are assumed to be "I would like an alternate universe based on the setting or character dynamics of what's in the nominated freeform tag" and not meant to be full crossovers with the characters of one story interacting with another. For crossovers, please nominate the character(s)/relationships(s) in the characters and relationships tagset under "Crossover Fandom." 

Freeforms without some kind of prefix (either fandom specific or ALL) will not be accepted. Freeforms not related to an alternate universe of some kind will not be accepted. The mod will assume good faith when it comes to freeform nominations, and will reach out to query in a clarifications post if anything appears unclear.

Comments

[chacusha]

I have a question about fandom nominations. When it comes to AUs, I'm often more interested in what the canon as a whole would look like in a particular other genre rather than specific characters and ships. I was wondering what is the best way to nominate for a fandom in the following scenarios: (1) I am open to creator's choice of characters and/or ships. (2) I am open to a work with a general ensemble focus (although creator can choose a certain character or characters to focus on).
1: Creator's choice of canon character?
1: Ensemble?
1: Any main character(s)?
Nominations like this not permitted?

[tavina]

Hmmm. I think in this case (and please correct me if I'm wrong!) what you're trying to prompt for is more... worldbuilding focused than specific character or relationship focused. Largely because this is the first year that this exchange is running, I haven't thought a lot about how to incorporate worldbuilding focused alternate universe nominations in the way that you're suggesting them - it feels like it might have a lot more ambiguity than other types of nominations for this exchange - and may be out of scope to nominate into the tagset/create confusion wrt to how to interpret the tags. (We can discuss how worldbuilding nominations might work in the tagset more in depth perhaps for the next round of this exchange!)

I think for this year your best bet might be to nominate as "1: [specific character]" any characters that you think would be good for the sorts of aspects of the world you'd want explored and request those specific characters + prompt for more worldbuilding related elements that you'd like to see + DNW romantic relationships as a focus.

[chacusha]

Yeah, I'm not sure if "worldbuilding" is quite the right word to use because I might be interested e.g. in what a sci-fi cast of characters would look like in 20th century Europe, or baseball team AU, or, like, a western or noir genre movie, and I'm not really interested in the worldbuilding aspects (especially for mundane/real life settings) but just how the cast would slot into a fairly established world and character archetypes. So it's a bit of an unusual use of "worldbuilding" in that case where the world is already pretty established and worldbuilding isn't a focus. But yeah, I get what you mean!

Anyway, thanks! I will do what I did with AUEx and just nominate a range of characters who could be interesting but say I'm not particularly picky what characters/ships are focused on.

[lailah_tov]

Are relationships of the format "A/B/C & D & E" permitted? (D and E are the children of A/B/C.)

[tavina]

Hi! I would prefer no mixed / and & nominations because it can be very difficult to figure out if a work has fulfilled that tag or not!

[lailah_tov]

Hello! Just a note that you have both ALL: University/College AU and ALL: College AU in the tagset.

[tavina]

! I will make a note to correct this when we do tagset cleanup! Thank you!

[zabbers]

Are nominations of canonically-existing AUs allowed? I'm thinking of nominating some under their specific fandoms, rather than as types of AUs for the ALL category. I could see it not being "AU" enough--since we really see it in canon already! And a fic satisfying such a tag could easily be canon-compliant in every way because of that. But at the same time, they are AUs that I'd like to see explored further.

[tavina]

Hi! I think at this point during nominations it might be a bit out of scope for this year's AU5k since it sounds like you'd want something set in the canonical AU (which feels pretty canon to me!) instead of like "I would like an AU where the people in the canonical AU are now coffee shop owners" but I'll keep thinking about how we might include something like this in the next round!

[zabbers]

That's fine with me; thanks for thinking about it! It looks like I did put one in before realizing I should ask that ended up going through your queue, so I want to mention it in case you don't want to keep it--I see this one as more of a real AU though. It's:

Stargate Atlantis: SG-1 Road Not Taken AU

For context, this is a thing from a Stargate SG-1 episode, and I'd like to see it applied to Stargate Atlantis and find out how that AU would happen to those characters. So it's usually tricky asking for it in a non-AU exchange because most of those AU-version characters really aren't canonical? But there's overlap?