Tag Changes are Coming to The High Republic

Hello! In the very near future, the Star Wars wrangling team is going to be doing what people have been asking for: we’re making The High Republic novels into series instead of individual book fandoms.

These fandoms are going to be:

Read on for more details about this decision and all the related tag changes we’ll be making to help ease this transition.

This week in fandom: new Star Wars, new Harley Quinn, squee about baby Yoda, and more: https://otw.news/twif127

Updates to the Star Wars Legends fandom tags

Hi Star Wars fans!

You may have noticed that the Star Wars fandom tags on AO3 can be a bit difficult to navigate. We don't want to make you feel like you're doing a Kessel Run every time you post a Star Wars fanfic, so we've decided to clear a path for you by moving a few black holes around -- namely, the Legends Era tags. If you have been tagging a specific series or using the "Star Wars Legends - All Media Types" tag, you probably won't notice any changes.

Era tags were our (failed) attempt to use the established canon eras to divide 26,000 years of Star Wars history into chunks. The Eras are, in practice, hard to define and were based on major in universe events. Several of the books and games fall into multiple eras, straddle the division between eras, or span all eras. To add to the confusion, several of the Legends eras have the exact same names as the Disney canon Eras. To be frank, the situation has become untenable.

What are we doing with them? Most of the Legends Era tags are going to be merged into "Star Wars Legends - All Media Types". New Jedi Order is going to be kept separate and renamed to a Series tag, as it's essentialy been used as a series already. We're also moving "Star Wars Legends (Dark Horse Comics)" and "Star Wars Legends (Marvel Comics)" into the "Star Wars Legends - All Media Types" tag and subtagging a couple of fandoms that were accidentally connected to another series.

If you think a work will get lost in the AMT tag, you can always change the fandom tag to a specific book, game, or comic series. For example, if a work stars X-wing pilots in the New Republic Era, consider changing the fandom to "Star Wars Legends: X-Wing Series - Aaron Allston & Michael Stackpole".

Hopefully, when we're done the Star Wars tree on the Archive will make more sense and be easier to navigate for all involved.

May the Force be with you, The Star Wars Legends Wranglers

Changes to the Star Wars Fandom Tags on AO3

Hi Star Wars fans! As we bask in the glow of new canon, your excited wrangling team would like to walk you through some upcoming shifts in how Star Wars fandoms are organized on the Archive.

As anyone in the fandom knows, there's over forty years of Star Wars content, both canon and Legends, across a slew of different eras. Since the Archive opened, we've been canonizing each individual book, movie, or other piece of canon separately, but that has resulted in a very large tree. Large tag trees are bad for the Archive's servers and they've been increasing errors for users, including error messages, slow browsing, and works missing from the filters.

In order to keep the servers from crying, we're going to be streamlining some of this tree so the fandom tags for individual pieces of series will be merged with the other parts of their storyline, as other fandoms on the archive do. The first step in this process is going to be folding the individual saga movie tags into their respective trilogy meta tags (i.e., Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy).

You'll still be able to use the individual movie fandom tags on your works! The tags in the trilogies will simply be merged as a family, so A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi will all be part of a single fandom.

You can also use the Additional Tags field if you want to highlight an individual film in your work. We have canonicals for all eight already (for example, Movie: Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.)

This will be happening over the next month. We really hope the reduced server strain makes for a smoother Archive experience for everyone.

May the Force Be With You,

The Star Wars Tag Wrangling Team

From time to time, ao3org posts announcements of recent or upcoming wrangling changes on behalf of the Tag Wrangling Committee.