Today I feel like talking about cats, because (a) they are adorable, and (b) it will reveal fascinating things about fannish trends and wrangler standards. Or maybe not. The cuteness should still be worthwhile in its own right, I say.
There are
two canonical freeforms containing "cats", one being "
Cats" and the other its sub tag "
Alternate Universe - Cats". Cats are one of the things that inspire very excited tagging. The current list of merged tags is as follows:
also a cat
angry feral cats
Cat
cat fic
cat fic!
cat!fic
cat-fic
catfic
catfic!
cats & kittens
cats are cats no matter what planet they come from
CATS OMG
EXTREME kitty-fic
FIC WITH CATS IN
Giant Demon Cats
gratuitously named cats
kitties
kitties!
Kitty - Freeform
kitty cat bonding
kitty!
Kitty!Fic
original feline character
There is a cat
too many cats
totally counts as cat-fic
Unimpressed Cats
Adorable. And that's not even getting into the tags synned with "
Kittens".
Searching for
canonical freeforms containing "cat" pulls up a separate list, including the following kittyfied versions of characters:
Freeform: Cat!Charles (22)
Freeform: Cat John (0)
Freeform: Cat Tony Stark (0)
Freeform: Cat Loki (4)
Freeform: Cat Castiel (2)
Freeform: Cat Derek (0)
Freeform: cat!Sherlock (25)
Freeform: Cat Tony (1)
(Note that the number is for how many times that exact tag appears, not that tag plus all its variants. "Cat John" is the canonical that's been instated to cover "cat!john" and "John is a Cat". Still, the number of works that are brought up in filtering isn't high for any of them.)
Breaking it down by fandom...
Marvel Movies: Charles Xavier, Tony Stark, Loki
Teen Wolf: Derek Hale
BBC Sherlock: Sherlock Holmes, John Watson
Supernatural: Castiel
Homestuck: John Egbert
Stray observations (no pun intended):
-- There's still no pan-wrangler consensus on how to standardize these tags. We have "cat!NAME", "Cat!NAME", and "Cat NAME". Even within fandoms, it's not necessarily consistent. The question of what standard form we should use for these things has come up on the wrangler ML before, and probably will again.
-- Not a lot of disambiguation going on here. Canonizing "Cat!Charles" without making a sub tag for "Cat!Charles Xavier", for instance. I'm torn between "eh, it's a small trend, even the Cat John people aren't going to have trouble finding the fandom they want in a list of 7 fics" and "but, best practices!"
-- All the characters on this list, except John Egbert, are often-slashed white males [or at least played by white males] in popular modern Western media fandoms. Is cat!fic mostly a trend in this arena?
-- But wait: if you look through the
non-canonized freeforms with "cat" or "kitty" in them, you'll find feline versions of Tina Cohen-Chang (Glee), Belle (Once Upon a Time), Mir and Afrien (the game/anime MapleStory), Natasha Romanoff (Marvel movies), Nino (the band Arashi), and a bunch of Star Trek and Harry Potter characters. Perhaps often-slashed white males from popular modern Western media fandoms just happen to have the most enthusiastic tag-canonizing wranglers.
-- And that's not even counting fic that doesn't follow the same tagging conventions. The "Alternate Universe - Cats" tag contains several fics from anime and games that don't bother to also tag with "cat!NAME".
-- I love cats. I love every kind of cat. But not quite enough to try to get an even broader range by going through everything in the "Cats" freeform, then everything in the "Werecats" freeform, then maybe everything with "cat" and "kitty" that turns up in a search of character tags. Someone else will have to take that on.
-- I wonder what the "Mice" tag looks like...
