Interesting to see the results on which characters we tend to tag in memes!

We're more likely to tag canonmates than any other sort of character.

The top result for less likely to tag is "Characters I don't know", whereas the top result for would never tag is "AU characters"

I'm still working through the data, will share the full results as soon as I can!

that's really interesting!

the amount that icons count surprises me

but I guess in memes, you literally do have to judge a book by its cover

somebody with lousy icons of a character who's been widely iconned or pirated icons covered in text or brush stamps/weird coloring/&cet. sends a message about whether they're in step with dwrp as a whole

that should be outdated, not pirated, lmao

Definitely. All I really care about is 1. that the icons aren't insanely pixellated/don't have weird aspect ratio and 2. that they aren't covered in weird filters and old text we thought was hilarious in 2008, but I do care

no one has to conform by any means, but low quality icons can be a marker of somebody who might not be familiar with basic community values like "don't godmod" or "don't harass someone who opts out of playing with you"

One more piece of data that I was very interested in... How players spend their RP time:

I imagine if you filtered players in games and players not in games into two distinct group, you'd get two quite different results.

Definitely would've been worth filtering by that I think, but wow

That first graph illustrates exactly why I go out of my way to tag OCs when I find them on memes that interest me. No one else does.

Which, incidentally, has led to several of my best meme interactions ever and I've gone on to play further PSLs with a couple of them (and i play from canons, myself) so... don't be so afraid of OCs, basically. /drops two cents and wanders off

funnily enough, most of my favorite meme interactions have been with either characters i don't know or characters i vaguely know of by fandom osmosis

so i actively go out of my way to tag people i don't really know, interesting (though expected) that most people tag canonmates

I would have been surprised if canonmates didn't get a really high number there since it was a "pick everything that applies" kind of question, and I think most people are generally happy to find other people who definitely know their fandom

most people definitely are, going by how trawling bakerstreet generally looks like. always makes me worried as someone who prefers crosscanon/crossmedium though :<

Yeah, a lot of people seem to be afraid of tagging (or even tagging <i>back</i> sometimes) anything they aren't already familiar with... Pretty frustrating.

That would have been any interesting question, about how people react when these different categories tag them.

I have no idea why I just tried to use html there... I'm tired and forgetting which medium I'm talking on apparently

To be honest, I suspect a lot of the "less likely to tag characters I don't know" comes from the fact that most memes require the person tagging in to write the starter.

It's hard to write starters for unfamiliar characters, especially if the meme implies that your two characters are already supposed to know each other well.

Yeah, I would expect that to definitely play a part in the 'how do I start this off?'

oh definitely

It's not a matter of disinterest in the unfamiliar so much as it is that, from a practical standpoint, it's much more work for a more uncertain payoff -- whereas if you know the character's canon or know them from a game/because your friend plays them, the barrier's much lower!

And for castmates, most of the time I figure with cast, it's finding cast to throw characters at which I don't already have in games, or characters I might have in a game but without that particular castmate. Which could easily be someone I don't know playing them or not.

If that makes sense in explaining the cast thing from my end at least. Otherwise if it is friends I'm usually in a game with them or psl things anyway.

it makes sense, definitely. i just prefer crosscanon due to having to either make a world on the fly or adapt, and it's totally just a personal preference

Yeah, I adore the cross canon cr and interactions from games a lot, which is why I don't entirely mind if I'm lcw.

worldbuilding is my favorite part (i'm interested in knowing those results too because i'm pretty sure i remember a question on this in the survey? maybe i'm misremembering though) so i like hashing out history and etc together

i actually find it harder to meme with canonmates, more because i don't know how they play their muse and there can be 3820341 ways to interpret any character

but i know i'm in the vast minority

either way i just also want to +1 the "don't be afraid to tag ocs" bit

Or some from more obscure canons. I'd love to play a couple of mine more but they're more obscure/rare.

to add to that: if you play an oc, please put info on your journal

yeah i wonder if memes where the person posting writes a starter other people tag into might help, since games do kind of work like that

Definitely! I love playing with OCs myself, and reading about other people's (I came from tabletop and so fun original characters are my absolute favorite.)

actually, even playing a canon character, I wrote up a short summary on my character's journal to help anyone canon unfamiliar

-- I do agree that memes where the person posting writes a general starter are much easier to tag unfamiliar characters and OCs on

because you can adapt your character, who you do know, to what they've provided for their character

Because that kind of barrier is what I was thinking about, not knowing another's canon while also having to write a starter

i almost never tag memes, but if i ever saw a castmate i'd be there in a flash...obscure canon life

yeah i do a small writeup on my characters' journals too, even if there is a wiki (i feel wikis can be hit or miss too, one of the ones for one of my canons is really sparse and wouldn't help someone who wanted to tag them much)

(setting memes, like the Train to the Afterlife one, are also easier to tag unfamiliar characters on than memes that assume a relationship between your characters.)

i wish we could have more of those ):

this is what tfln basically is too, but it would be nice to see it with longer form starters

Yeah, I tend to look into canons so I have some idea for planning crosscanon things?

Personally, part of the problem with tagging characters I don't know is that when I click on their journal there is no information so if I want to find more out about a character in order to tag them, I have to google and that's more work than I want.

^ oh man do i have this problem though, yeah

even with characters i do know i like knowing prefs esp if it's a shippy or smutty meme, and more often than not i find an empty journal and empty profile

yeah i'm more likely to tag someone on a shippy/smutty meme if they have preferences listed than ones who don't

^^ This, pretty much. If you give me information about your OC's background and personality, then you're in the same category of 'will I tag this?' as characters I recognize.

I'll tag cross-canon if I know the characters, or if there's a good wiki I can raid for a summary.

But if there's zero info on the page, or the wiki's a morass of self-references that assumes only canon familiar people are reading it.... I got nothin'

A fair number of the OCs I've seen around Bakerstreet at least have some kind of summary, but yeah. not always, and most canon characters don't unless they have an app posted, which may or may not be helpful.

And may or may not be way more full of spoilers than you want.

Realising I should probably make a summary thing for the canon character I occasionally toss at memes recently. I spent a while trying to put relevant information or some kind of general starter in my initial comment for the reasons people are saying here, but it never seemed to actually do anything.

Since basically no one else does that I have to wonder if seeing one entry with some information on it just reads as "This person is a special snowflake" idk