mindcracklove | AO3 and Mindcrack

This post can easily be subtitled: Your Fandom Needs You!

Hi guys. Some of you know me from way back when as an early member of Salad and possibly the first major Vechsteau shipper on Salad - or maybe you know me as the author of the Zisteau and Nebris primers - or maybe as the first member of Salad to meet a Mindcracker and make an appearance in a video being referred to as such. Maybe you don't know me or have only gotten to know me through my recent returns to Salad Skype chat. It doesn't matter if or how you know me, though, because I have a problem and I need your help to fix it.

A lot of you probably know about AO3. It stands for 'Archive of Our Own' and, as part of the Organization for Transformative Works, has a goal of being a repository for all fan work ever created. AO3 is huge and magnificent and I've been a user basically since it started, and I love what it does for fan work and fandom. However. There is one problem.

Tags on AO3 are managed by a group of people called Tag Wranglers, and while these people do their best they don't all know everything. I suspect Mindcrack's problem came from the fact that a FLoB fic was entered into AO3 first, establishing kurtjmac as a character tag within "Minecraft" before the first Mindcrack fanfic was posted to AO3 (which, as I recall, also contained kurtjmac). A logical person like these tag wranglers therefore probably assumed that Mindcrack was synonymous to Minecraft (the words are quite similar), and that was fine for then because other things like the Yogscast were also considered to be such.

It's been a long time since then, though, and the Yogscast, Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunters, Game Grumps, and even Team Crafted have been de-synned from Minecraft while Mindcrack remains a sub-fandom. The Mindcrack fandom is currently not considered by AO3 to be its own fandom, and as such will not ever get its own tag wranglers, its own tags, or its own place in the list of fandoms - it is merely a synonym for the Minecraft fandom.

Obviously this is incorrect and I've emailed the tag wranglers about it, but my one voice didn't seem to do much of anything. So I need your help to get Mindcrack considered as it's own legitimate fandom by the most important repository of fan work on the Internet today.

Rachel, that sounds like a great cause, how do I help? Well, you go to the Support page and send feedback. Make sure to select 'Tags' from the menu of what your feedback is about, and tell the tag wranglers that Mindcrack deserves it's own fandom! Tell them about how Team Crafted and Yogscast are so similar but have their own tags and how it is not only unfair but straight up wrong that this fandom, with its huge following, giant subreddit, and fanfic community of two years at least isn't treated like a thing independent of the game that started it and we don't want it to be that way anymore. I want us to be considered as our own fandom for instances of prompt memes, Yuletide, ship tags, and more, but we will never get that until we are recognized as an actual fandom.

Thanks for your help and feel free to comment or PM me on Skype or tumblr if you have any questions!