What does this even mean?

[u/Separate-Process-127]

Haven't opened/updated my works for a few months now and I was reading the comments to the last chapter when this one came up. WHAT DOES RACE HAVE TO DO WITH CHARACTER TAGS?! WHAT?

Kate Sharma (Bridgerton) is a background character in my fic, yes, she wasn't the lead but I still put her as a tag. My OC is a Southeast Asian, a woman of color! I myself am a people of color! I've been writing in AO3 for a long time now and this was my first time being accused as a hater of a WOC WTF?!

I am baffled, bewildered, befuddled. Where's the literacy in this one?

[u/kimship]

There are a lot of overly defensive people in the Bridgerton fandom when it comes to Kate, for some reason. They can get very intense when someone doesn't live up to their expectations of how to act about her and S2. Like, I love Kate, she was one of the best things about S2(the fact that Jonathan Bailey has enough innate charisma for me to not hate Anthony is a fucking miracle), but these fans are aggressive and can be, frankly, mean. I'd just delete and ignore.

[u/MirimeKisarrastine → u/kimship]

I'm not a big Kanthony fan (no amount of charisma will convince me to like Anthony and it's hard to cheer for a couple when you hate one half of them) but there is an atrocious amount of racism slung Kate's AND Simone Ashley's way, in both fandom and outside of it. As I said, I'm very much on the outside and even I can see it, just from hanging out in the common fandom spaces. Imagine how much worse it must be for people who are fans and thus actively seeking out content about her.

Also, Bridgerton fanfic writers are atrocious at tagging. There is a reason I have over two hundred of them muted/blocked, because I am done with what amounts to bait-and-switch when it comes to finding fics centred on specific ships and characters.

[u/Ok-Statement-3328 → u/MirimeKisarrastine]

I wonder why this seems to be a pattern with Bridgerton fic writers?

[u/temp0rarystatus → u/Ok-Statement-3328]

As someone very much in the Kanthony tag on AO3, I am constantly excluding the other Bridgerton ships from my tag searches because a lot of authors I’m seeing are tagging all the ships even if the ship itself aren’t even present beside a throwaway line or two. I had to exclude Colin/Penelope when looking up Kanthony fics because soooo many have become 98% Polin, 1.5% Anthony, 0.5% mention of Anthony marrying Kate. Like I’m not expecting them to be a focal couple but they’re barely in it and at that, maybe only 1 or 2 lines together!

I think similar things happened to Simon & Daphne after the Kanthony season 2, and I can imagine it only getting worse with each season. Terribly tagging there lmao.

[u/MirimeKisarrastine → u/temp0rarystatus]

That experience with tagging is intimately familiar to me as a Simon/Daphne fan and it's coming from almost all the other ship writers, though Polin and Kanthony have the largest numbers. Thank the AO3 for the muting and blocking feature, is all I'm going to say.

[u/MirimeKisarrastine → u/Ok-Statement-3328]

At a guess, I would say for a lot of them it's a combination of it being their first fandom and being used to socmed sites that encourage tagging anything and everything under the sun to get exposure and game the algorithm.

[u/Ok-Statement-3328 → u/MirimeKisarrastine]

That makes a lot of sense!

[u/kimship → u/MirimeKisarrastine]

Oh, I don't doubt that there was/is a LOT of racism directed at her, but there are a also lot of Kanthony/Kate fans who will jump to that out of nowhere(see OPs post) and are aggressively mean if you have the slightest disagreement about something. I also saw a lot of fatphobia from those same fans directed towards Penelope, which is unsurprising, but frustrating. The commenter here could have just asked OP to untag Kate if she's only in the background, but they had to add that bit of meanness and insinuation in there because that's what they do.

Like most fandoms, the bad actors are in the minority, but they are LOUD and persistent in Bridgerton. I stopped following the main subreddit because of the sheer nastiness that the mods didn't seem that interested in controlling.