#bc as is it feels like both ships are being shoved down my throat (steddie especially) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

infestedguest · 1 year

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Something I’ve never heard anyone talk about that bugs me is that on stranger things ao3 crosstagging has rendered the stancy tag functionally useless without filtering.

I would not be surprised if the vast majority of fics in the stancy tag are steddie and/or ronance or harringrove.

I have the most recent page of the stancy tag open in a different tab right now. 4/20 of those are actually stancy fics. I don’t even mean that it’s just a background ship for most of the other fics, 15 of those 16 remaining fics clarify in their other tags and in their summaries that they are about a different ship involving Steve or Nancy and are only using stancy as a narrative device to further the romantic storyline of the ship the fic is actually about. (In the 16th fic stancy was a background pairing, but even that one is also tagged “Nancy and Steve don’t stay together.”)

Some of these fics have additional tags that either:

Express the author’s distaste for stancy

Explicitly state that it isn’t a stancy friendly fic.

The latter of which completely baffles me! Scratch that, both baffle me! Do these people not realize that people who ship stancy use the stancy tag? Honestly I’m not sure if some of them are aware that people who ship stancy actually exist.

Yes, I can just filter out other ships, which I do, that feature is a godsend, but I shouldn’t have to plug in every single ship involving Steve or Nancy into the filter just to be able to see more than one stancy fic in a row in the stancy tag.

This isn’t a problem for a lot of the other ships in the fandom (thought definitely not all of them). Hell, I haven’t encountered anything like this in the twelve years I’ve been reading fanfiction, it’s ridiculous.

To those considering crosstagging stancy in their steddie/ronance/etc. fic: just tag it “Minor Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler.” I don’t care if they’re relationship/breakup is a major plot point, it still doesn’t belong in the actual stancy tag. When you go into the steddie/ronance/etc tag are you looking for fics where that ship breaks up in order to progress a different ship involving one of its characters? Because that describes a good 80% of the stancy tag right now.

“Minor Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler” is better than “Past Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler” in my opinion, since last time I checked fics tagged with the latter still show up in the stancy tag.

Edit: I have been informed that “works tagged "minor [pairing]" are wrangled into that pairings tag if it's in the relationship tags. Has to be in Other Tags to not get wrangled there.” Thank you @monstrous-femme for your ao3 tagging wisdom.

#kind of a vent #the st fandom has a crosstagging problem #stancy #I honestly think that I wouldn’t resent steddie/romance as much as a do if people tagged their shit better #bc as is it feels like both ships are being shoved down my throat (steddie especially)#crosstagging #cross tagging #stranger things #stranger things fandom #stranger things fandom meta #stranger things fanfiction #stranger things fanfiction meta #st fanfic #st fanfic meta #st fandom #st fandom meta #steddie #ronance #harringrove #fruity four #st4 #steve harrington #nancy wheeler #eddie munson #anna talking about stuff #rant

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