Nominations - queries post #1

[worldbuildingmod]

Here are the things that have arisen in the first day-and-a-bit of sorting through the tag set.

Missing character tags

All fandoms must have the two character tags "Any or No Characters (Name of Fandom)" and "Original Character(s) (Name of Fandom)" nominated in order for them to be approved, in addition to any other characters the nominator is interested in being able to request/offer. The following fandoms currently lack them:

• Black Jewels - Anne Bishop
  
• Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey
  
• Ever After Academy (Visual Novel)
  
• Fate/Grand Order
  
• RWBY
  
• The Elementalists (Visual Novel)
  

Disambiguations

Many tags still awaiting approval for other reasons are also missing disambiguations (the name of fandom in parentheses after the tag). I am able to add these as I approve, but it does slow me down significantly (especially if AO3 starts putting drop down menus in my way), so if nominators are able to add them on their end it would be much appreciated.

Crossovers

Crossovers are not on topic for worldbuildingex, unless the crossover exists in canon. If the crossover does exist in canon, or two canons are part of the same universe, please nominate under a fandom tag that encompasses all the relevant source material for worldbuilding that you want to be included. There are currently two worldbuilding tags that talk about crossovers (I suspect from the same nominator?):

• Star Trek - TV Shows - WB: Crossovers Between Shows Welcome
  the idea that creators might draw on more than one show is already implicit in the fandom tag; perhaps a tag like "Interactions between different crews" would achieve the desired effect?
  
• Middle-Earth - J.R.R. Tolkien - WB: Crossovers with Other Tolkien Welcome
  this one I am less clear about; "Middle-Earth" as a fandom tag already encompasses all the different Middle-Earth source material (see also the following section), but if the intention is to encourage crossovers with non-Middle-Earth works like Farmer Giles of Ham then I'm afraid that would not be on topic for worldbuildingex unless a convincing argument can be presented for shared worldbuilding.
  

Tolkien

Currently nominated Tolkien fandoms are:

• Middle-earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
  
• Middle-Earth - J.R.R. Tolkien
  
• The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. R. Tolkien
  
• The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
  
• The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
  
• The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
  

I am planning to approve all of these (merging the first two by making the capitalisation and spacing of the initials consistent) but I did just want to ask about the final one - so far, there are four nominators for this fandom, using slightly different disambiguations. Some tags are disambiguated as "Silmarillion" and some as "Silmarillion/HoME" - my instinct is to adjust things so that they're all to "Silmarillion/HoME" on the off-chance someone later comes along and wants to nominate just-the-Silmarillion, but I would be interested from hearing the views of nominators on this.

Specific queries

In these cases, I have approved the fandom overall but have questions about individual tags:

• The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco - WB: Second Book of Aristotle's Poetics (Name of the Rose)
  As best I can tell, this is a real thing which is now lost and, while it clearly plays a key role in the novel, I'm not sure that this worldbuilding tag doesn't stray into requesting real world research (in this case, trying to reconstruct it), rather than fictional worldbuilding (which is the reason RPF is not on-topic for this exchange) - however, I am open to persuasion on this point. How much fictional(ised) information is given about it within the novel?
  
• Granblue Fantasy (Video Game) - WB: Astral Society (Final Fantasy XIV)
  this looks like it's probably a tag that accidentally went in under the wrong fandom, but there seem to be "Astral" things in both games so I'm wondering if it's a mistake in the disambiguation.
  

Comments

[raininshadows]

On the Granblue Fantasy thing: I don't know anything about Granblue Fantasy but I do know FF14. There is no "Astral Society" in FF14. "Astral" is a part of FF14's magical element system, and it's rarely if ever used to refer to people. So my money's on "disambiguation error".

[fawatson]

Not the original nominator but I've added the Any or No Characters and Original Characters to my own nomination for Black Jewels. Can that now please be approved as then I can check the other characters who have already been nominated and amend my nominations form to add in more if the ones I want are not already in the tagset?

[narya_flame]

On the Tolkien ones:

- Crossover point: I'm not the nominator for this tag, but I would argue there is at least some shared worldbuilding implicit across many of Tolkien's works. For example, Ilbereth, the Elf in The Father Christmas Letters, signs his name in Tengwar at one point, which is the script used by the Elves of Middle-earth; Roverandom is taken to the edge of the world to see a land heavily implied to be Valinor from the Middle-earth legendarium; The Adventures of Tom Bombadil contains some poems that are explicitly set in Middle-earth and some that are not. I would have taken this tag to be an invitation to explore these connections, some of which are more obvious than others.

Tolkien's view on The Hobbit, LOTR and the Silm was that they represented a lost historical period for our own Earth, so theoretically any of his fictional works set in our world or a version of it (which is most of the smaller canons) could be linked to Middle-earth.

- Silmarillion disambiguations - no strong feelings either way. HoME technically also includes The Book of Lost Tales, but I deliberately nominated BoLT separately, because that version of "canon" is so wildly different from the drafts that followed and many of the characters never appear again. (ETA - it technically also includes early drafts of LOTR, but realistically I think most LOTR fans would just look to the LOTR tag set for prompts.)

[(Anonymous)]

As another Tolkien nominator, I would probably not read the disambiguation “Silmarillion” as just including the book unless it was explicitly included in the tag as something like “Silmarillion (single book only)”. I would catch it after reading the post here, but I don’t think it’s an obvious difference at first glance.

Trying to avoid becoming overwhelming with details, but Silmarillion as a term in both the books and scholarship often refers to both Silm and HoMe (along with other books like Unfinished Tales), outside of other context. The same has been true in many parts of fandom I’ve been in. I would worry that someone not reading back to this post would miss that it’s being used that way in this exchange.