I guess I'm not really interesting in arguing whether or not AMVs and vids are different types of fanworks? I see them as different, but I can see cases made for either side of the argument. I think that what's probably best is to choose a term that describes both but isn't explictly connected with either tradition, so people on either side of the argument are happy.
As for the things that AO3 has done in the past ... I don't really have the time to dig up links for all of this, so this is just from memory. If anyone is passing by and knows more/has clarifications/corrections/links, that would be great.
--There's been a lot of discussion over how anime/manga/manhwa and other animated/drawn mediums are categorized. For a while there was an implicit "if it's Asian and a comic it's manga" which is, of course, false. Right now there is a category change workgroup, I think that is looking into recategorizing stuff. I've seen several different proposals and different fans (not just anime/manga fans) have different issues with all of them. --From what I undertand there are issues with how tags are wrangled when it comes to non-Western names or names that don't use the roman alphabet. My understanding is that there is a bias towards Western naming conventions (personal name, family name) and roman letters. I think this also relates to fandom names. I believe this is being worked on. Clearly this also affects more than just anime/manga. --There was this whole thing about the development of different skins for AO3. One of the skins that was promised was an anime skin. As ar as I know it's never been made or there was one made but it was inaccessible/terrible. I've read different accounts of this, so if anyone could clarify that would be great. --While this isn't strictly AO3 related ... there has been some wank in the past over the Yuletide exchange and how it determines rare fandoms on the basis of what's posted to AO3 and how that lets large anime fandoms in. I think that many people take their frustration out at Yuletide and blame the OTW/AO3. --There was some other more ephemeral wank at the beginning of the life of the AO3 that I think soured some anime/manga fans to the archive and has left the archive very little leeway in making mistakes with that demographic.
I don't think it's so much that the technical issues are different (though in the case of translations/names it sort of is) but that in the past the archive hasn't always been the most welcoming or aware of non-western fannish traditions. While some of the wank has seemed overblown IMO I definitely think that the AO3 needs to be better about imagining the different communities that might use it, and, for example, choose a term that encompasses both AMVs and vids instead of just one.
Some of this was well before my time, so I'm just going to respond to things I know about.
--From what I undertand there are issues with how tags are wrangled when it comes to non-Western names or names that don't use the roman alphabet. My understanding is that there is a bias towards Western naming conventions (personal name, family name) and roman letters. I think this also relates to fandom names. I believe this is being worked on. Clearly this also affects more than just anime/manga.
The guideline now for Non-English canon character names is the name order followed in canon. We still use Romanization systems because as far as we know as wranglers, the Search sorter has foibles with extended character sets. There's also a running debate about pairing order in the Relationships tags: the guidelines say that A/B and B/A should be synned, though some fans consider them two different Relationships.
--There was this whole thing about the development of different skins for AO3. One of the skins that was promised was an anime skin. As far as I know it's never been made or there was one made but it was inaccessible/terrible. I've read different accounts of this, so if anyone could clarify that would be great.
The skin in question is Panda Madness: the accessibility is within web use guidelines (as to quality, that's your judgment). From what I've heard, the skin was intended as one of the proofs-of-concept of the flexibility of the skin system, but that whole deploy (November 2011) became a learning experience in communication.
Yep, I'm agreed that it would probably be wise to choose a neutral term. And thanks for the detailed response.
I did see the discussion over categories, and the whole thing is awk. It does seem a bit unnatural to have a division there, and it gets complicated when dealing with works not in English or Japanese. Like, a Chinese animation is "anime" but a French animation is a "cartoon"? That doesn't seem to make sense. On the other hand, I feel in favor of giving anime fans their own space.
I saw in the tagging guidelines that names were supposed to follow the cultural conventions of the source material. That's how it is in the anime fandoms I've posted in, surname first, given name second. If the tag wranglers aren't using the correct form for the canonical tags in a fandom, that's an enforcement issue rather than a policy issue.
I can see how Japanese-speaking fans might prefer non-romanized names, but I think that not romanizing anime characters' names would effectively make anime fandoms inaccessible to large numbers English-speaking anime fans, and would make the site unfriendlier to anime fandom, not friendlier. Unless they were both used in the canonical tag or something? IDK, it didn't scare anime fans off FFN.
I remember the Yuletide thing too, but I thought it was actually an effort to build and support the anime community on AO3, rather than alienate it. Is it just that it was poorly handled and caused resentment from non-anime fans, who were then rude to the anime fans or something?
When I talked to a friend whose main fandoms are all anime/manga, she wasn't interested in AO3 because she said AO3 was all Sherlock crossovers and stuff. She was also disappointed that some of her smaller fandoms didn't even have categories yet. It was less about policy and more about community. That can be frustrating to change, because someone has to start posting/reviewing works and get the ball rolling.
I got the naming convention thing wrong -- see SamJohnsson's reply above. I knew going from memory could be dangerous. But there is a bias towards romanizing names which, personally, I am pretty ambivalent about, mostly for the reasons you state, but that I have seen some discussion/criticism of.
I think that your friend is right, too, that there just hasn't been a critical mass of users moving to AO3. There are probably a bunch of reasons for that, most of which have nothing to do with things that AO3 has or hasn't done, but I'd like to think that AO3 will win them over eventually.
I'm here since January, so I don't have very many experiences here yet. However, I can't say that I never noticed that there are issues with how anime/manga are handled. Sure, there is more stuff of Western works here and anime and manga is kind of underrepresented, but other than that, I don't see what's the big deal.
-Categorizing should follow interest groups. It makes sense to split off anime and manga from other comics and cartoons, since the fanbases are mostly different. It doesn't make much sense to split Japanese, Korean or Chinese comics, since the fanbase is mostly the same. Of course, not every manga-fan also likes manwha (and how many have even read one manhua?), but there is a certain overlap of interest.
Due to this, I sometimes wonder whether American superhero comics shouldn't be split from other (non-superhero and non-American) comics, since the former is very popular and the latter (sadly) horribly underrepresented. There isn't much interest overlap there either.
-While I prefer Japanese-style name order (Chinese names are never swapped either), I don't see it as a big deal. But I find complaining about romanizations more than a little ridiculous. This is an English-language site, after all, the members shouldn't be expected to be able to read more than roman letters. How many here can even read kana? I certainly can't and I'm sure that's the same for most people here, no matter whether they are anime-fans or not. Translations of mangas never leave names in Japanese letters either, not even the most japanophile scanlation.
This actually my main issue here. Unless I really misunderstood something here, I don't understand how anybody could complain about romanizations of names.
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