ficinabox | Nominations Clarification 2

Entry tags:

2021

Nominations Clarification 2

Links: Nominations Form | Tagset | Relationship Field Nominations Guidelines | New Mediums Nomination Post

Nomination clarifications are queries and updates about tags we find confusing. The goal of nominations is to create a tagset of unambiguous, easy to understand tags that will be useful to participants and solidly within the scope of the exchange.

Tags are separated by query vs rejection notice, form vs AO3 nomination, and then by fandom. You can respond anonymously to this post or logged in. If you are not the nominator but have relevant fandom knowledge about something, please speak up! If you have questions about nominations not covered in this post, please ask!

Special reminder: Please check that your nominations are properly capitalized. For google form nominators, please double check going forward. For AO3 nominators, please literally go check your nominations page right now. Some of your tags (if they've been approved into a tagset or used on the archive with incorrect capitalization before) will automatically revert to the incorrect capitalization, but if they're new tags we would like the capitalization to be correct.

Queries

Google Forms nominations

Charmin "Bears" Commercials: Red bears & Blue bears (Charmin) — Are these original bears, or unnamed canon bears? We would like to approve as either "Original Red Bear(s) & Original Blue Bear(s) (Charmin)" or "Creator's Choice of Red Bear(s) & Creator's Choice of Blue Bear(s) (Charmin)"
Charmin "Bears" Commercials: WB: History of bears (Charmin) — This is definitely broad enough but we wondered if it might be a little ambiguous...the commercials are, as far as I remember, just about various bears thinking their new toilet paper is super great compared to the other stuff. Are you interested specifically in how bears came to have a modern society with toilets and plush toilet paper, or would you be satisfied with a fanwork exploring the way bears have historically lived in the past (eg, shitting in the woods, stealing honey through the ages presumably) with no reference to the toilet paper that most of the canon revolves around?
Humans Are Space Orcs (Meme) : all tags — We would like to accept your nominations as "Original Human(s)" and "Original Alien(s)" rather than just "Humans" and "Aliens" to make it clear to anyone who hasn't run into Humans Are Space Orcs before that there's no canon characters to catch up on. We would also like to remind you that you can be more descriptive if you want (eg, we would accept "Original Male Human Space Marine & Original Alien") and to say that we would love to see a promo post for this canon, if you have the time!
Vampire Academy Series - Richelle Mead: WB: Feeders (Vampire Academy Series) — Like "Guardian Council", this seems like it probably refers to a group of people. Are you looking for worldbuilding about feeders as individuals (eg, how they became feeders) or are you looking for more general worldbuilding about the group as a whole (eg, how feeders are percieved/treated by non-feeders)?
Vampire Academy Series - Richelle Mead: WB: Guardian Council (Vampire Academy Series) — This seems like it could also be an ambiguous group. Are you interested in the personal backstories of the characters on the Guardian Council, or more interested in the group's history/function in society/something else?

Ao3 tagset nominations

A Circlet of Oak Leaves - Rosemary Sutcliff: Ships involving Young Dacian Medic and Young Sensitive Auxiliary Cavalryman — We googled around a little but can't tell if these are canonical but unnamed characters or if they're original characters. If they're OCs we'd like that reflected in the tag somehow, if not we'll accept as-is!
Crossover Fandom: Creator’s Choice of Character(s) or Ship(s) (Beyond Evil) & CCoCoS (Law School) & CCoCoS (Stranger) — We appreciate this attempt at our preferred phrasing, but gosh it's hard to read. How about "Any Character(s) (Beyond Evil) & Any Character(s) (Law School) & Any Character(s) (Stranger)"? Assuming you want to primarily request this, you can just opt into also recieving any ships in your optional details.
Frontier Wolf - Rosemary Sutcliff: WB: Emperor Constans' historically accurate sexy barbarian bodyguards (Frontier Wolf) — We love this nomination but feel it would be best as an ambiguous group Solo: tag unless there's some specific facet of the sexy but historically accurate bodyguards you feel you need a WB tag for, in which case we would like the tag to be rephrased to focus on that thing. If we don't hear from you we will accept as "Solo: Emperor Constans' historically accurate sexy barbarian bodyguards (Frontier Wolf)"
Miraculous Ladybug: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir (Miraculous Ladybug) — It's our understanding that the only canonical alternate universe version of Adrien Agreste is the one that got akumatized into Chat Blanc in season 3 episode 22. Did you mean to nominate "Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Adrien Agreste | Chat Blanc"? This is the only Adrien self-cest ship we will accept.
Only Ever Yours - Louise O'Neill: all tags — Thank you for disambiguating! You haven't capitalized any of the character names or given them last names. Unless there's some reason related to the canon that the names need to be all lower case, please properly capitalize all of your submissions and please add last names if the characters have them. (We know they might not, but without reading the book ourselves we can't be totally sure.)
Original Work: Male Warlord & His Bastard Half-Brother/Female Rival Warlord He Gifted Him To As A Concubine (OW) — We have two issues to clear up with this nomination. The first is that we're unsure if you mean both male characters should be shipped romantically/sexually with the female character, and the second is that because of pronoun ambiguity we're not sure which of the brothers gave the female character as a gift. Generally speaking, mixed nominations (ones with both / and &) have the romantic ships first and then the platonic ships. Usually this is where I would suggest one or several tag rephrasing but without knowing what you want I'm really not sure, so please let us know!
原神 | Genshin Impact (Video Game): Morax/Zhongli (Genshin Impact) — AO3 thinks that this ship is the same as Zhongli/Zhongli (Genshin Impact). Are Zhonjli and Morax the same character?
魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù: Jiang Cheng & Wen Ning & Jin Ling/Lan Sizhui & Lan Wangji/Wei Wuxian (MDZS) — Do you mean for JC, WN, and JL to all be shipped with Lan Sizhui, or only Jin Ling? Generally speaking, mixed nominations (ones with both / and &) have the romantic ships first and then the platonic ships, so if you don't want three people all shipped with Jin Ling, Jiang Cheng and Wen Ning should be moved to the end of the ship. (If you do want all of them shipped with Lan Sizhui but not with each other then...I dunno! We'll have to ponder it together.)

You have 48 hours to respond/edit your nominations.

Rejected Tags

Google Forms nominations

Ao3 nominations

Crossover Fandom: HanJoonhwi&SeoJiho&JinHyungwoo&YangJonghoon(Law School) & HanYeojin&HwangSimok&SeoDongjae(Stranger) — We can't accept this tag because it lacks spaces, but since you disambiguated we will give you 24 hours before we reject so you have a chance to use the slot for something else.
Fruits Basket: all tags — We didn't hear from you so we've rejected your tags. However, the google form nominator got back to us and 2/3 tags are now in the tagset under the 2019 anime. We will add your third tag, "WB: Post-curse-breaking (Fruits Basket)", under the 2019 anime for you as well if you would like.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Male Warlord & His Bastard Half-Brother/Female Rival Warlord He Gifted Him To As A Concubine (OW) : Nominator here! The intent is that the male warlord gifts his brother to the female warlord as a concubine, and that there is no sexual relationship between the two warlords or the two brothers (only between the female warlord and the male warlord's brother).

So, obviously the current phrasing is confusing and does not work! Not sure how to rephrase it...

"Female Warlord/Bastard Half-brother of Rival Male Warlord Presented as a Gift & Rival Male Warlord" maybe?

I saw your re-worked nomination and it was much clearer, thank you! It's been accepted. \o/

The Only Ever Yours nominations are mine! It's a dystopian novel where the female characters canonically don't have capitalized names, and these specific characters are never given last names.

Amazon page, for reference.

Excellent, these have been accepted! They came in with a batch of lapslock nominations but you bothered to capitalize the fandom and Solo: so I was like "...I should query these, maybe they're valid".

I'm sorry for the weird formatting!

MDZS: I forgot that usually mixed noms are /-first but I thought of a slightly better way to phrase what I'm asking for, so I've currently changed the nom to "Jin Ling/Lan Sizhui & Their Uncles" because I was imagining "Jiang Cheng & Wen Ning &" plus "& WangXian" to basically be all Jin Ling and Sizhui's Uncles in an & relationship with the JL/LS couple. Thanks for telling me the standard for mixed noms for the future!

Crossover Fandom: I'm aiming to request, yes, and I'm happy with any character combos from those three fandoms so I'll readjust my nomination so that it's Any Character. Thank you for all your effort on this exchange!

Thank you for getting back to us! I've accepted you crossover nomination. MDZS is extremely buried under a pile up of other noms, so it will be awhile before it can make it into the tagset. I want to make sure you're aware that we won't be able to enforce all of the uncles actually showing up in your gift because "& Uncles" is an ambiguous group — and it will leave you open to Lan Xichen and Jin Guangyao in addition to the characters you mentioned.

Hello! I'm the nominator of both the self-cest ships.

Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir
Chat Blanc is the only canonical alter ego shown on-screen in the show, but since Chat Noir's real identity is a secret, the Miraculous Ladybug fandom has a history of creating in-universe RPF featuring Adrien Agreste/Chat Noir which assumes they're different people. That was one of the main reasons I nominated the ship, since in-universe RPF is a medium opt-in and it seemed fitting! Aside from that angle, though, I'm always looking for self-cest works in more traditional fic/art mediums where the creator just makes another version happen somehow - whether through time weirdness, a convenient plot device, whatever else, or even just leaves it completely unexplained, regardless of any kind of canonical basis or lack thereof.

If possible, having made my case, I'm hoping that the nomination can be accepted as-is, but if the final stance is that the only version that will be accepted is Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Adrien Agreste | Chat Blanc, I'll accept that as a second best.

Morax/Zhongli
As above: yes, they are the same character; I nominated it specifically as Morax/Zhongli because Zhongli has a specific outfit/appearance associated with the name Morax (this one) as opposed to his regular playable version, and I was hoping to use the nomination to specify that I'm interested in works where the two designs appear side-by-side. Again, Morax and Zhongli refer to the same person and the identities don't separately appear in canon, but my intention in nominating the ship is for self-cest works where the creator makes another version happen, however that's achieved. (Also: same as above, Zhongli actually being Morax is a secret to the general public with only a few people knowing the truth, so in-universe RPF would be a possibility too.)

I'm happy to have it changed to Zhongli/Zhongli and keep the Morax part to optional details if mods think that would be better!

Edited 2021-08-07 00:15 (UTC)

Unfortunately we're not accepting selfcest ships unless they're comprised of canonical alternate versions or duplicates of the character involved. Selfcest for the same character or multiple versions of the same character should be prompted in your optional details after requesting a "Solo:" tag — we would like to avoid including prompts within relationship-field tags outside of WB tags. We will accept the ML tag as Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Adrien Agreste | Chat Blanc but will unfortunately not be able to accept the Genshin Impact tag unless you would like us to accept it as a Solo: character tag for Zhongli.

We realize this is not currently laid out in our nominations guidelines and will fix that in future rounds.

Oof. Requiring people who want selfcest to request it under "Solo: Character" seems designed to make sure they don't get it -- "Solo" is what you offer when you don't want to make ship stuff at all. It's not remotely likely to get a requester a specialty, niche-interest ship.

What's the actual problem with allowing selfcest ships, anyway? All other combos seem to be allowed without any kind of rules about who can be shipped with whom or how....

Hi! Thanks for the response and for letting me know.

I'll admit this is a really disappointing answer to receive, because as the anon above me mentioned, I don't believe most people offer a Solo: Character tag with any kind of expectation of creating self-cest.

I also don't really understand where mods are coming from in terms of interpreting self-cest as necessarily 'including prompts within relationship-field tags outside of WB tags'; how is it any more of a prompt than any other ship tag? Some ships are more difficult to achieve than others, but I don't really see how a selfcest ship is any different from, say, any rare pair ship who may not have met canonically and don't really have a canonical reason to meet? Both types would probably require either a certain amount of buildup or setting/background changes. In that way I view selfcest ships as pretty much the same as other "arguably illogical" rare pairs, so it just seems like an odd distinction to draw if rare pairs are generally allowed.

Also, why is there a 'must canonically exist' policy for self-cest only when the tagset allows Original Characters, which obviously don't canonically exist?

I really hope that mods can reconsider this policy - I'm not really following the justification for banning it, since I don't see how it includes a prompt, and unless I was also interested in the actual Solo part of a Solo character tag, it would be extremely bad faith of me to request the Solo tag for self-cest only.

We aren't making the judgement based on how difficult they are to achieve for the creator, but more on how difficult to verify they are for the mods. We ran into issues last year where we needed to read through some works to verify the relationship tag was hit since it wasn't tagged as it appeared in the nominations. Because of this we want all of the characters within a tag to be different characters (or canonical different versions of a character). We're aware that might seem unfair if your fandom is one where self-cest is always tagged how it appears in the tagset, but that's not the case with all of them.

Solo: requests are for people who want to create a work focused on a specific character and are not strictly for gen creators, however you're right that it would probably be a bad idea to request a Solo: tag with optional details that prompt for self-cest only if that's the only thing you're interested in with these two characters. It might just be that this just isn't the exchange for these specific requests.

This isn't an attempt to softban or pass judgement on self-cest, there's self-cest in the tagset and one of the mods requests it pretty frequently for one of her fandoms, it's just the modding requirements of this exchange mean that we sometimes need to take a second look at things that most exchanges might not be concerned with.

Sorry, I'm still confused. Anyone could tag their work differently than it was nominated or fail to tag something. It's not limited to self-cest. In terms of making sure the requested relationship tag is being hit, how is it any more difficult to check than a Character/OC work? I don't really understand what's meant by the first paragraph.

If the problem is checking a work to make sure both names in the tag appear, isn't specifically nominating a character with a second name (such as the Morax/Zhongli nomination), which asks the creator to use those names, solve the problem?

Plus, even if the intention is that Solo requests aren't strictly for gen creators, that's what the tag ends up being used for in practice, unfortunately.

Also, apologies, but it does feel like a judgment, especially with the goalpost moving from 'we don't want prompts in relationship tags' in the first reply to 'it's a matter of mod verification' in the second - and it's a really strange line to draw. I don't understand what's the problem with, specifically, self-cest, as compared to any other ship.

Debirlfan (sorry, not signed in)

I'm the guilty party behind both the Charmin bears and the Humans are space orcs noms.

As to the bears - I was thinking the red bears and/or the blue bears that appear in the commercials. And by history, the history of the Charmin bears as opposed to bears in general - whether that be a few exceptional bears living essentially as humans, or an entire society of educated bears. I'm flexible. Not sure how you'd like to list that? Whatever you think.

For space orcs, original humans and original aliens are fine. I thought the meme was fairly well known, as it's been requested in a number of exchanges, but I'll see if I can come up with a promo for it.

Sorry for being a pest. :)

You're definitely not a bother!

It sounds like the canonical bears in the commercial don't have names, so we will approve as Creator's Choice of Red Bear(s) & Creator's Choice of Blue Bear(s) (Charmin)!

For the WB tag, how about "WB: History of Bear Civilization?" That way you won't risk getting a work about non-civilized bear history.

Creator's choice is fine.

On further reflection, how about WB: Backstory of Charmin bears or WB: History of Charmin bears?
I'm willing to see the Charmin bears as an exceptional group living among human society in addition to the idea of a whole bear civilization.

Thank you! We put it in as "WB:" History of Charmin Bears"

Am I missing something? I'm not seeing either the bears or the human space orcs in the tag set?

Hm, you're right, they didn't make it in! I'll try again in the next batch and then hit the tagset with a big stick until it works.

Just so I've got this straight: "Do not nomination "WB: Any", this will be added by the mods to all fandoms"

That will happen at the end of nominations phase, not right now?

Thanks for all your work!

Yes, we'll use a spreadsheet to generate a "WB: Any" tag for every fandom and then batch load those tags in all at once after nominations but before sign ups. It'll probably take about ten minutes and most of that will be spent waiting for the tagset to load, haha.

FYI: "Lan Wanji & Nie Huaisang (The Untamed)" has a typo, it's "Wangji"

Thank you! That's fixed now

for: Jiang Cheng & Wen Ning & Jin Ling/Lan Sizhui & Lan Wangji/Wei Wuxian

just a question re: "Do you mean for JC, WN, and JL to all be shipped with Lan Sizhui, or only Jin Ling? Generally speaking, mixed nominations (ones with both / and &) have the romantic ships first and then the platonic ships, so if you don't want three people all shipped with Jin Ling"

Since they have "&" between JC & WN & JL, isn't it guaranteed this will not be a ship thing? So how could they be shipped with JL if they are connected with an &? Because & should not be a ship thing and I made some requests assuming that I will receive "A & (B/C)" style fic, and I definitely do not want any configuration of A/B or A/C or A/B/C.

We have seen a few instances in other exchanges (H/C 2021 comes to mind) where a nominator nominated "A & B/C" under the assumption that it would get them both A/C and B/C, while avoiding A/B. Neither of the mods particularly feel that that's actually the best way to request that, because you're right that reading it as "A & (B/C)" is also very natural, but because it's ambiguous to some people we are trying to make sure mixed requests wind up in the A/B & C format, which no one seems to have trouble understanding. I have "look for A & B/C tags" on my list for nominations cleanups (especially since there might be some from last year, when we didn't know it was potentially a problem) but we would be happy to change any tags you've nominated/come across in the tagset ahead of time.

I’m the Vampire Academy nominator. Sorry for any confusion, I’ve never nominated world building before.
The feeders are a huge group of people with almost no named characters and only one speaking character in the series, so I think general world building (which is what I intended) would be assumed by anyone familiar with the books.
I can see that the Guardian Council could be confusing though. I was going to ask for general world building here as well rather than personal backstories, but would be happy with anything the creator wanted to do. I could narrow it down if that’s easier though. Would having separate nominations like WB: Guardian Council within Politics, WB: Guardian Assignments and WB: Guardian Exams be clearer?

Edited 2021-08-08 14:29 (UTC)

Thank you for your response! I will accept the feeders tag as-is. I think the split nominations for Guardian Council sounds good. I'll add them for you, if you'd like! Let me know if those are the only three you want or if you think of more.

That’d be great, thank you!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Nominations Clarification 2

Queries

Google Forms nominations

Ao3 tagset nominations

Rejected Tags

Google Forms nominations

Ao3 nominations

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

MDZS & Crossover Fandom

Re: MDZS & Crossover Fandom

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject