Anonymous: I'm trying to understand AO3's tag synning, but I'm honestly lost. Bratting is a canonical tag. Brat Taming isn't marked as common and can't be filtered on, and it's linked to nothing else. But (slight) Brat Taming is not only marked as common, but it's also synned with Bratting? I don't think I'll ever understand.

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What’s not to understand?

Tag wrangling is done by specific humans on specific dates. So is the tagging of works.

No doubt, someone used the synned tag a long time ago when wranglers were allowed to go mess with those tags. Later, there was a freeze on wrangling the pan-fandom trope stuff because 1. it was slowing down the archive for technical reasons and 2. there were a bajillion internal wanks about trying to standardize rules and make actual guidelines. Some of this was dumb fandom drama. Some of it was trying to get clueless but well-meaning people to stop repeatedly synning shit like ‘asexuality’ to shit like 'sexless’.

The other tag must have come in later when nobody was allowed to touch it.

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That said, nothing can be both marked as common and a syn. It’s one or the other.