Webcomics

The next round of Syn Hunters has started…and I did not sign back up this time. I have a bunch of other obligations in the next few months (including my next BackerKit campaign, which just got accepted into Printopia 2026!) — I wouldn’t have enough energy to dedicate to syn-hunting, not without slacking off on other important tasks.

So here’s a post about a different tag-wrangling thing.

I did a thorough trawl of my fandoms list, and this time I kept track of “which bins can I actively not clear out right now, and why?”

Turns out I have 19 of those! (As of the time I finished counting. The number may have flexed by the time you’re reading this.)

Here’s the list of my fandoms with lingering tags from an un-canonized crossover:

1. Christmas Tales & Traditions – Crossover tags from Weihnachtsmann & Co KG
2. Fried (Webcomic) – Tags from Static – Fandom…not even sure what the intended canon is for that, so it’s no wonder the fandom-canonizing wranglers haven’t sorted it
3. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) – Crossover tags from Neurotically Yours – Fandom
4. How the Grinch Stole Christmas! – Dr. Seuss – Same
5. Haunted Housemate – Bloopsalot (Webcomic) – Crossover tags from several places, there’s a big multifandom series
6. Inside The Lines (Webcomic) – Same multifandom series
7. Kraken Watch (Webcomic) – Same multifandom series again
8. 사랑은 환상! | Love is an Illusion (Webcomic) – Crossover tags from 다이아몬드 더스트 | Diamond Dust (Webcomic)
9. Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story – Crossover tags from 12HC – CLC Link (Chuyên Lào Cai)
10. Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica – Same…also from Shoujo city 2d…and Mahou Shoujo Kokone wa Kakukatariki…and a few more things on top of that, Madoka fans love to make everyone become meguca
11. Strangers With Candy – Crossover tags from Gym Teacher: The Movie

There are a couple different techniques wranglers can use to handle these. For instance: in some cases, the non-canonized works will have related fandoms that can “babysit” their tags. Christmas Tales & Traditions is actually one of those — it’ll take “characters from miscellaneous Christmas-themed fandoms that haven’t been canonized.”

That’s not an approach I personally go for. As new fandoms get canonized, I’m always paranoid that I won’t remember which ones have tags that need retrieving from somewhere else, and then they’ll be lost forever. I’d much rather have them “stuck on the to-do list” until I can put them in The Right Place.

Here’s the other list: my fandoms with tags from at least one crossover fandom that is canonical, but the tags are new:

1. Frosty The Snowman (1969)
2. Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
3. Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon (Anime & Manga)
4. Dracula – Bram Stoker (Novel 1897)
5. Hellsing (Anime & Manga)
6. Rankin-Bass Holiday Specials
7. Religion & Lore – Ambiguous Fandom
8. The Wizard of Oz & Related Fandoms

Wranglers aren’t required to check on their fandoms every single day. I have a once-a-week reminder scheduled for it, and I think that’s pretty common. When a crossover fandom has its own wrangler(s), you’re supposed to give them at least 2 weeks to pick up their tags.

During the COVID lockdowns, we got an official policy notice of “listen, everyone is stressed as hell right now, let’s all give each other 4 weeks.” I’m…not actually sure if that ever got switched back? I still usually wait 4 weeks, anyway.

Along with those 19, there’s 1 last fandom where I could clean the bins, I just haven’t gotten to it:

Emmy The Robot (Webcomic) is a series about a cute android maid, with a fandom that loves to create Original Cute Android Maid Characters. So there are a bunch of “might be OCs, might be minor canon characters, gotta do the research to find out” tags in those bins. This was not a week where I felt like doing the research.

There’s a good chance this will hit the point of “too much ongoing hassle to keep up with, I’m just dropping the fandom” pretty soon. Maybe when I get to the end of the alphabet in the current “getting my numbers down by yeeting 1-work fandoms” streak.

Miniminuteman (Milo Rossi) on Youtube does fun long-form videos about “why this pseudo-archaeology conspiracy theory is wrong, and how the actual archaeology of the site they’re talking about is cooler anyway.”

Specific rec: his video about the Bad Dürrenberg skeleton, which was originally spun as “a mighty white male Aryan warrior,” but turns out to be a woman, dark-skinned, and unusually-inactive, possibly because she was so rich and important that people brought stuff to her. (Wikipedia article on her, if you’d rather read than watch/listen.) She lived around 9,000 years ago, and was buried with so much stuff. Milo explains it as “she might have been the richest human alive in 7,000 BCE” levels of stuff.

There’s a lot of suspicion that she was some kind of religious figure. She had a skeletal malformation that meant she could probably cut off a blood vessel to her brain by holding her head just right, which is a perfect recipe for “the ability to open a connection to the spirit world, i.e. induce hallucinations, on-demand.”

(There was also an infant buried with her. Not her biological child, but a close-ish relative. Nobody seems to have any solid theories about that part.)

What gets me is:

Along with some of the possibly-religious ornamentation buried with her, there were similar decorations buried a few feet away…that tested as being from 600 years later. As in, maybe the religion she represented (led?) (started??) was still going strong for the next 6 centuries.

And then another 8+ millennia went by, and present-day humans dug her up, with absolutely no idea what this religion was. Digging up this skeleton is the only reason we know it existed at all.

If these were already a feature of human culture in 7,000 BCE — before the invention of writing! — how many others do you think we’ve had and lost?

Somewhere in Plato’s realm of forms, there’s a graveyard for all the gods humanity has invented, sustained for centuries, and then abandoned so completely that there’s not a speck of knowledge about them left in the physical world.

And it’s a big graveyard.

PSOH reread continues. This is the first point where Tokyopop and Seven Seas have different chapter orders. SS volume 5 started with all the chapters from TP volume 7, but now we’re jumping back to the bonus story that was at the end of TP volume 6.

Originally liveblogged on Mastodon / Bluesky. Collating it all together here. Affiliate links for the whole Collector’s Edition, in case you want your own.

Flowers and the Detective 3

Opens with D getting an airmail package from Japan, sent by Grandpa D. (…Considering this opening splash page, I’m still convinced Akino hadn’t decided on a certain little mascot critter’s Secret Backstory yet.)