I’ve gotten in the habit of adding a tag that says “inspiration for” before I tag something with a fic name of mine. This is because I’ve gotten paranoid since an instance a couple years ago when the author of a fic some fan art was made for came after me for tagging it with my fic name.

For the record, since it bears repeating after awhile, my blog is for me. I’m a scrupulous tagger in part because I’m an obsessive archivist and hate the idea of losing track of a post. But the tags are MY folder system, not a declaration for my followers except insofar as it helps them blacklist. It’s for me. I routinely go back through tags like “Kidnapping au” when I get stuck in the story because the tag is basically my inspiration scrapbook and it helps me get in the mood to write or reminds me of images/moods I want to incorporate in the story. It is never a claim that the art or gifset or whatever was made for my story. If that were the case I would tag it “Kidnapping au fanart” for example.

The author wasn’t necessarily in the wrong to alert me of their concerns that I was somehow erasing the fact the art was made for their story. I apologized for the confusion and re-established the tag saying the image reminded me of a scene in my story but was created for a different fic. Since then I’ve been pretty scrupulous to clarify if something is an inspiration to me for my work, rather than that it was created for that work.

The more you know~~~