Nominations Guidelines - Spring 2025

[littlefics]

Nominations are now open for the spring 2025 round of Seasons of Drabbles!  Nominations will remain open until signups close on Monday, April 28.

Important Reminders

• We added a rule last round that we would not approve broad writer's-choice character nominations (e.g., "Creator's Choice of Demon" or "Any Star Trek Captain"). This is because it requires the mods to have fandom-specific knowledge when checking that gifts are for a requested character during approvals. Instead, please nominate specific characters.
  
  For example, we would not approve "Creator's Choice of Jedi" under Star Wars because it'd require the mods to know/find out which individual characters in a gift are Jedi or not. Instead, we'd ask you to nominate specific Jedi characters. The only fandoms where such broad nominations are permitted are the "Creator's Choice" fandoms (e.g., "Female Character"), since by their nature, character nominations cannot be specific.

• All character nominations should be disambiguated, for example: Steve Rogers (Captain America (Movies)). Not doing this slows the approval process significantly, so please disambiguate! Characters may be nominated in any/every fandom in which they appear.

General Guidelines

• You may nominate up to 10 fandoms with up to 10 characters each.

• With some exceptions, both umbrella fandoms and sub-fandoms are allowed. For instance, you may nominate under Marvel Cinematic Universe or Star Wars - All Media Types. You may also nominate under sub-fandoms such as Thor (Movies) or Star Wars Original Trilogy.
  
  Please remember that if you request Any for an umbrella fandom, you will be requesting any character who appears in any of the fandoms below the umbrella - NOT just characters in the tagset. So if you plan to request Any, you may want to request under a specific sub-fandom rather than the umbrella.

• RPF is allowed. Nominated RPF characters must be famous in their own right, and must be 18+ for modern RPF.

• Crossovers are allowed. Crossover fandoms should be nominated as Fandom A/Fandom B. Character nominations for crossovers should be nominated as Character's Name (Fandom A/Fandom B). For example, if nominating Luke Skywalker for a Narnia/Star Wars crossover, the fandom would be nominated as Chronicles of Narnia/Star Wars, while the character would be nominated as Luke Skywalker (Narnia/Star Wars).

• Recursive fandoms are allowed. The required format is Recursive: Fic/Series title - Creator. Recursive fandoms may be nominated under two circumstances: 1. the creator has posted a blanket permission statement, 2. you are the creator. In either case, please contact us when nominating so that we have the pertinent permissions. Characters nominated under recursive fandoms should be disambiguated with the title of the recursive fandom.

• Since we will be re-using the tagset all year, recursive fandoms will be removed on an as-needed basis between rounds (only if a blanket permission statement comes down, or the creator asks for it to be removed).

• Original Works are allowed. When nominating characters, please disambiguate with (Original Work). If an original character's gender is important to you, please specify it in your nomination. An example nomination: Original Nonbinary Character (Original Work)

• Original characters may also be nominated in existing fandoms. When nominating an original character within an existing fandom, please disambiguate with the name of the fandom. If an original character's gender is important to you, please specify it in your nomination. An example nomination: Original Anbu Character (Naruto)

• Objects/concepts/etc. may be nominated in the character slot for any canon in which they appear. For Original Works, you can make some up if you would like. Some example nominations: Cursed Hat (What We Do in the Shadows (TV)), Magic Mirror (Original Work)

Comments

[littlefics]

Dropping a note here that there are a few fandoms with wandering tags. Thank you to those who have pointed them out! They'll be fixed within the next 24 hours, likely sooner.

[quailfence]

Another wandering tag spotted - Alphys (Undertale) is under Deltarune

[littlefics]

Thanks, should be fixed!

[(Anonymous)]

In the tagset, it looks like all the tags from "薬屋のひとりごと - 日向夏 | Kusuriya no Hitorigoto | The Apothecary Diaries - Hyuuga Natsu" are wandering into "薬屋のひとりごと | Kusuriya no Hitorigoto | The Apothecary Diaries (Anime)"

[littlefics]

Thank you, those should be fixed now!

[sleepyquail]

It looks like some of the FFXIV nominations have had their first letters cut off - it's the below ones, along with what they should be:

anivien de Haillenarte (FFXIV) -> Stephanivien de Haillenarte (FFXIV)
gnai Oronir (FFXIV) -> Magnai Oronir (FFXIV)
ien Rijin (FFXIV) - Hien Rijin (FFXIV)
mmanellain de Fortemps (FFXIV) -> Emmanellain de Fortemps (FFXIV)
ymeric de Borel (FFXIV) -> Aymeric de Borel (FFXIV)

[littlefics]

Oh man, thank you for pointing that out! Should be fixed now.

[sleepyquail]

Thank you!

Can I also offer an amendment to the Devil May Cry nominations too - the Vergil and Dante noms have been disambiguated with the reboot shortening - the fandom is "DmC: Devil May Cry (Video Game 2013)" (shortened as DmC) rather than "Devil May Cry (Gamesverse)" (shortened as DMC) and since they're very different, I don't want there to be any confusion over what's being requested.

Can those two be updated to the below:

Vergil (DMC Gameverse)
Dante (DMC Gameverse)

Thank you!!

[littlefics]

Thank you for pointing that out! Unfortunately, for noncanonical tags, AO3 sticks with the capitalization from whenever the tag was first used, so we're not able to change the lowercase m to a capital one without changing the tag otherwise.

We've instead added them as Vergil (DMC (Gamesverse)) and Dante (DMC (Gameverse)). Let us know if that works or you have other suggestions!

[kat_lair]

Hello! I tried to nominate the same character in two different versions of the canon and the form did not like it! Character: Perrin Aybara. Fandoms: Wheel of Time (TV-Show) + Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan. I just deleted one of them in order to submit but would quite like Perrin in both canons! Am I being dim and missing a trick here, or...?

[littlefics]

Hi, you would need to nominate them with different disambiguations! Example: "Perrin Aybara (WoT Books)" versus "Perrin Aybara (WoT TV)". If an identical tag is nominated, AO3 won't accept it.

I'll also note that we require all nominated tags to be disambiguated with their fandom, so just "Perrin Aybara" would need to be changed to include the fandom in parentheses.

[kat_lair]

Aha. For some reason I read the nomination forms saying that it would insert the (exact canon in parantheses) automatically after you just picked the character from the list... But you do have to put the parantheses part yourself, yes?

I don't think I can go and add that now after I've already nominated once?

[littlefics]

Yes, that's correct, you need to add it yourself.

You can go back to your nominations at any time during nominations period to edit them (so long as the tags haven't already been approved/rejected) and nominate additional tags (so long as you have slots left).

Let us know if you have any further questions.