cahn | (no subject)

cahn

People who know more history, more Schiller/Verdi, and more about AO3 tagging than I do (*cough*

selenak,

zdenka, and others??), I need your help!

The wonderful

isis is wrangling Don Carlo(s), and ~~because I am very loud about Don Carlo(s)~~ asked me the following:

(1) whether the opera Don Carlos characters and the play Don Carlos characters should be shared

I say yes to this; I am pretty confident about this one. It's like sharing characters between Les Misérables the book and musical -- sure, there are differences, but they're mostly meant to be the same.

(2) whether the opera/play characters should be shared with their historical counterparts (Carlos de Austria, Felipe II de España | Philip II of Spain, Élisabeth de France, etc.)

This I'm not so sure about and was wondering what you guys thought? My inclination is to say they should be, as I think Schiller/Verdi were at least... kind of... trying to have characters who were resembling the historical ones. But on the other hand, for example, Carlos in the play/opera doesn't resemble historical Carlos really very much at all (except in certain opera productions, I guess). I think it's more like Hamilton (where it shares the historical tags) than like Reign (where the characters are sufficiently unlike their historical counterparts that they are tagged specific to that show) but... maybe you guys have stronger opinions?

Also,

isis pointed out that opera fans wouldn't necessarily recognize the dropdown. On one hand, I'd figure out who Élisabeth de France was pretty quickly, but, yeah, I'd definitely have a moment of "who are these people and why are they showing up??"

(3) What about all those French and Italian pipes?

She suggested adding disambiguating subtags with French for opera, and German for Schiller? and subtag to the historical character? This would probably be the most transparent for people in the opera/play fandom!

isis says she can answer wrangling questions but can't go counter to policy, thank you!! All hail to the tag wranglers, this seems much more complicated than I would have thought, knowing nothing of tag wrangling :P

(Also, thank you to

mildred_of_midgard, who got tired of my procrastinatory ways and sent in the support ticket for "Ridrigue," which is probably what kicked this whole thing off :) )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

selenak

I'd vote for Verdi and Schiller to continue to be shared, on the Les Mis precedent. (I'm also not sure whether there are different tags for the various incarnations of, say, The Three Musketeers, despite the characterisations - and even the stories - sometimes being widely different, and I don't think, say, Richelieu has a separate tag for the historical character as opposed to Dumas' depiction.)

From a purely selfish perspective, I hope the sharing with the historical counterparts continues because that means some opera/play fans might read my Catherine de Medic & Daughters story as well. ;) Good point about this being more like Hamilton than like Reign, too.

(This reminds me: the stories written for Shakespeare's history plays certainly share tags for the historical people, despite there being a gigantic difference as to whether you go ith good old Will's Yorks and Lancasters or, let's say, other versions...

She suggested adding disambiguating subtags with French for opera, and German for Schiller? and subtag to the historical character? This would probably be the most transparent for people in the opera/play fandom!

This idea I like very much. And yes, hats off to the tag wranglers in general, and all their hard work!

From:

cahn

Thank you! I really wanted you to weigh in as I knew you would have a good handle on how it should be handled with respect to the historical counterparts :) The Hamilton/Reign analogy was

isis's, and I just put in my opinion where this fell :)

Ha, yes, I don't know most of the history plays very well, but Richard III also crossed my mind as one where Shakespeare might have some different opinions from others... :)

I like the subtags idea too!

P.S.

isis has a Schiller question below that I think you can probably answer :P :)

Edited Date: 2020-09-01 04:06 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

Alas, I haven't read Die Malteser, which only exists in fragments - Schiller never completeted it (remember, he died young).

Edited Date: 2020-09-02 04:16 am (UTC)

From:

isis

Yes, that's the support ticket that started this - a staffer started to take care of it, noticed that the fandom was a bit of a mess, and appealed to the historical RPF wranglers to handle things. Since I'm a co-wrangler on the hist RPF metatag (that is, bare "Historical RPF") and on 15th-19th centuries, and I knew I could use you as a resource :-) I volunteered.

Basically I want to know if you guys find the French | Italian piping useful (it was put in place by the wrangler in 2010) or if things would be recognizable just using French; if the characters are intended to be their historical counterparts (I'm feeling the answer is yes, I think?); if it's reasonable to share tags with the Schiller version. And anything else you'd like to complain about, though as

cahn says, I only have a certain amount of autonomy here in that there are guidelines that I need to follow. (In particular, we are now making canonicals for historical characters in their native languages, piped with their English or otherwise more-recognizable names, which is why the bit about Élisabeth de Valois, who in French Wikipedia is called Élisabeth de France.)

(The 'native language' bit is why I'm thinking that if I do disassemble the pipes - and I'd like to hear from the fandom if you want this or not - I'd use French rather than Italian, since that's the original libretto version. But since it's more commonly performed in Italian, that might not be what you want?)

From:

cahn

Basically I want to know if you guys find the French | Italian piping useful (it was put in place by the wrangler in 2010) or if things would be recognizable just using French

So after thinking about this overnight, I think if you go with the disambiguating subtags (which I think is the best idea) that the French | Italian piping probably ought to stay; the problem is, as you noted, that the French is original but the Italian is much more commonly performed. Though I think it would be recognizable using French. I'm going to see if I can ask a couple more people about this who are more familiar with the Italian (

zdenka, I guess not you ;) )

if the characters are intended to be their historical counterparts (I'm feeling the answer is yes, I think?)

This was the one I thought yes but I wasn't quite sure about, but I knew

selenak would know, and indeed she says yes, so: yes! :)

if it's reasonable to share tags with the Schiller version.

Yes, this one I'm confident about :)

Thanks again!

From:

isis

Oh, it will also be helpful if anyone who is familiar with the Schiller work Die Malteser could help me out - there's a crossover with characters from both, I think?

From:

cahn

So I have read the fic in question and found it again today. I don't know Die Malteser, but it looks like from the notes that it depicts the Battle of St. Elmo. In Schiller's Don Carlos (maybe I should call it Don Karlos to distinguish from the opera?), the character Rodrigo is said to have fought in that same battle, so the author wrote a crossover.

That is to say:

Fic: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4780508
Characters from Don Karlos: Rodrigo de Posa (also Carlos, in the relationship tag)
Characters from Die Malteser: Crequi, St. Priest
Not sure if it is a character in Die Malteser, but probably: La Valette, who might either be or be related to this guy? At any rate this is definitely not a character in Don Karlos

I think the author is on tumblr and I can also probably contact them if you need more details :)

Edited Date: 2020-09-01 08:11 pm (UTC)

From:

isis

It's not needed, since I see the info is in the endnotes, though it's a pity the links aren't actually links.

From:

zdenka

Ooh, I'm very happy this is getting sorted out! And I feel like

isis has come to the right place. :D

She suggested adding disambiguating subtags with French for opera, and German for Schiller? and subtag to the historical character?

Sorry, can you give examples? I'm not quite picturing what that means.

I don't know the play well, so I'll yield to others on whether it's good to combine the opera character tags with the play. As long as it doesn't wind up with the opera using German canonicals? Because I feel like that would be confusing.

My own feeling is that 1) the opera characters should not be synned to their historical counterparts, and 2) the opera character canonicals should either be piped French | Italian or Italian-only, with the French names synned.

Concerning 1,

isis, could you explain what the guidelines are for synning or not synning a fictional version of a historical character? How would subtagging work in this case? (I might change my opinion once I understand better.)

Concerning 2), I'm an opera/language geek who likes listening to operas in different languages and comparing them, but it's possible to be familiar with the Italian version and not the French version -- I knew the Italian version for years or even decades before I ever heard the French version. The other way around seems much less likely. So I'd say the Italian versions should have priority over the French if one is chosen as the canonical. I'm not a big fan of piped tags myself, so my preference would lean towards Italian-only as the canonical.

Thoughts? Anyone agree or disagree?

From:

el_staplador

I'm ambivalent on 1) and definitely with you on 2). I see from other comments that some of Shakespeare's historical characters are synned to the RPF, and this would seem to be a parallel situation. But I'm not sure that I would make that same choice either...

If I were coming to the fandom fresh, I'd be able to work out who the French names referred to, but it would confuse me.

From:

cahn

*nods* I agree with both of these. (2) yes. And yeah, I am ambivalent about (1) too, because on one hand I feel like they're very different from their historical counterparts, but on the other hand AO3 precedent seems to be that if they're fictional but recognizable that they get synned to the RPF...?

From:

isis

The disambig language issue isn't quite right (probably my fault in not explaining properly). I'm planning on disambigging everything that needs it with (Don Carlos), as that's the fandom name in front of the pipe, and will use it for both opera and play. I was considering undoing the pipes for the opera and just listing the characters in French, but after reading the responses here I think I'll just leave them piped - it's easier for me, and the only reason I would change it is to make it less unwieldy for you (though of course things should just show up in the dropdowns).

Let me copy from the original email I sent

cahn: What we usually do for fictional works based on historical characters is share the historical tags, unless the character is very very different (e.g. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter) or the spelling used is very different and we need to make sure that taggers can find what they want (e.g. Aelswith (The Last Kingdom) is Alfred the Great's wife Ealhswith), in which case we create a disambigged canonical for the character and subtag to the historical char. The musical Hamilton, for example, shares the historical tags, even though one could argue that they are quite different; on the other hand, the decision was made at some point to make Reign characters all specific to that show as (to quote one of the wrangler tag comments) "I'm fairly certain it's only meant to bear a passing resemblance to historical fact."

I think in general these characters should be shared. However, we have certain guidelines governing canonical tags for historical characters, and I think some of the characters in Don Carlos fall under the exception that the 'proper' historical tag won't be the name in the opera, and so subtagging will be the way to go.

In addition, after checking out the existing tags I think (not definitely sure, but pretty sure?) that most of the relevant characters actually are not tagged for in historical RPF (yet). We don't create metatags until they're actually used, so this means that e.g. 'La princesse Eboli | La Principessa Eboli' is going to stay that way (with a disambiguation added), because nobody's yet tagged for the real historical character (who would be 'Ana de Mendoza de la Cerda Princesa de Éboli').

The only character/person for whom multiple canonical tags exist now (part of the mess I'm going to clean up) is 'Philippe II | Filippo II'. I can add a disambig and subtag him to 'Felipe II de España | Philip II of Spain', or just syn him. It's really up to you (that is, to the fandom) which you prefer - I'm tracking comments here, so I will pay attention to what you guys say!

(Also, we're doing a new round of recruitment this month, so if any of you have interest in wrangling...)

From:

cahn

No, this is my fault -- I should have just copied your original email and put it in the post :)

From:

cahn

Hee, I was thinking you would be in favor of French canonicals! But yeah, I agree with your (2).

Like

el_staplador, I am ambivalent about (1) which is why I asked, but I am leaning towards thinking that AO3's precedents make it likely that this would fall into their "should be synned to historical character" bucket, like Shakespeare's historical characters.

(Also, I think it is totally awesome (and kind of hilarious) how everyone is "well, yeah,

cahn's place is where to hang out for discussion of Don Carlo" :D )

From:

mildred_of_midgard

(Also, thank you to mildred_of_midgard, who got tired of my procrastinatory ways and sent in the support ticket for "Ridrigue," which is probably what kicked this whole thing off :) )

Pleased to have made a small contribution to this fandom I'm not in but know about!

Also, props to you for writing the pinch hit that I went to admire, which led me to the tag discovery. And props to the wranglers for their work on the 18th century tags I had spotted issues with a while back, and for giving me a good experience so that I was quick to file a similar ticket. :)

From:

isis

Thanks on behalf of the 18th C team! We aim to please.

From:

iberiandoctor

Arriving late, as always ;) I always side-eyed the "Ridrigue" tag, but never got off my arse to do anything about it (plus, I did kind of use Philip and Carlos and Rodrigo interchangeably and not very accurately), so, hurrah for AO3 finally getting down to this!

What did we decide to do, in the end? disambiguating subtags with French for opera, and German for Schiller, but keeping the opera's French and Italian pipes? I mean, that would work for me. Just in time for Yuletide, too ;)

From:

isis

Hi! What I ended up doing is keeping the piped tags, disambiguating with (Don Carlos) - disambiguations for fandoms with piped names are made with the portion in front of the pipe - sharing those with the Schiller (so e.g. 'Carlos | Carlo (Don Carlo)'), removing the historical tags from the opera and the opera tags from historical rpf, creating a new historical tag for Élisabeth de France, and subtagging the opera versions to the historical versions of characters. (Carlos has no historical tag currently, because nobody's tagged for him in a historical rpf (only) fic.)

(If you're interested in a peek into the nitty-gritty, I wrote about disassembling the 'Élisabeth de Valois | Elisabetta di Valois' tag in my journal.)