Fandoms for works that have no "fandom"

[elf]

I've recently uploaded a handful of filksongs to AO3, in light of franzeska's clarification of the TOS FAQ saying that the important measure of "fanworks" is that they were "created in a fandom context for a fandom audience." Yay!

Um. So... how do I tag them? I wrote filk for kink_bingo. Is kink_bingo the *fandom?* That seems... wrong. Is the original tune the "fandom," which would mean adding half a dozen new single-work fandoms? I wrote filk about coffee. Not about sentient coffee (in which case, it could go under "anthropomorphic"), but about coffee. No fandom. No characters. No pairings. It's to the tune of & in the style of a popular Pagan song, which is probably unknown outside of Pagan circles. (The Pagan song is ttto a traditional tune, but it doesn't match the original tone or style.)

I'm not posting to say "help me figure out how to tag my weird fanworks!" They can remain under "no fandom" for all I care; I'm happy to have them all in one place next to my (tiny selection of) fic. But AO3 is eventually going to host art and vids and maybe other stuff, and SSBB fic, and other things that don't easily fit in the category of "what movie, book, game or TV show inspired this?" (*Ponders some of the multi-fandom vids being tagged with every fandom. Shudders.*)

I could put "filk" in the fandom field, potentially along with other fandoms (I have Harry Potter filk), and let that wind up with a category in "Other Media." (That's kinda what I'm leaning toward, actually.) But I'd love to see other people's ideas... what would you like AO3 to do with fanworks that don't fit in the traditional categories? Can you think of other fanworks that don't fit well in the current system?

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

Well, there's a "multifandom" tag which might be applicable for things that crossover numerous fandoms or are applicable to numerous fandoms. Also, I'd guess that as the archive begins to host more than text there will be growing use of format tags so that a post of filk lyrics would be different from a filk recording. But one could simply label it as Filk. And wouldn't kink_bingo be the Collection? I'm not that familiar with it but I gathered it's a sort of ongoing challenge community?

[elf]

There's no kink_bingo Collection, but there is a tag for "community: kink_bingo" and I've used that. (It's a semi-ongoing challenge community; it has a month or so of inactivity every year.)

I'd forgotten the Multifandom tag--but that still doesn't go in the "Fandom" field, the one that sorts it into one (or more) of the fandom page categories.

Eventually, I expect that media type will be a strong sorting criterion. I expect to be able to sort by fic, art, vid, podfic, music recording, etc. Right now, there's no system at all for sorting those, because everything other than text is hosted elsewhere, and sorting out how to organize different media is big enough that they don't want to come up with some stopgap method that everyone will have to unlearn when they can do their own hosting.