On Your Left! — Changes to Captain America Fandom Tags

Hello! In the near future, Marvel tag wranglers will be updating fandom tags on AO3 to separate the upcoming Captain America movies featuring Sam Wilson as Captain America from the trilogy of films with Steve Rogers as Captain America.

To do this, we will be renaming the fandom Captain America (Movies) to Captain America (Chris Evans Movies) and creating a new fandom named Captain America (Anthony Mackie Movies). Both will be made subtags of Marvel Cinematic Universe and Captain America - All Media Types.

In summary:

Fans interested in reading about both movie series can include both Marvel Cinematic Universe and Captain America - All Media Types in tag filtering. The current fandom tag for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (TV), which is a subtag of Marvel Cinematic Universe but not Captain America - All Media Types, will also be unaffected by these changes. We’ve included more details of our reasoning below, which better explains why we’re making this change.

We here at End OTW Racism oppose this decision.

Not only is this inconsistent with their existing policies, but it’s also unnecessary, unasked-for, and causes issues for those already writing about Sam Wilson as Captain America. 

Primarily, we’re concerned that there are many Sam Wilson fans and many MCU fans of color in the comments declaring that they oppose this decision, which raises questions: who asked for this? How did this become such a pressing concern that it needed to happen now? Who decided this? Given the cultural context of pushback against having Black actors cast in roles originated by white actors, including the #NotMyCap movement, this decision seems to cater to the worst of fandom, further marginalizing stories about Black characters and treating stories about white characters as the “neutral default.”

We, the team behind End OTW Racism, wanted to speak on this issue not because we're personally invested in the MCU fandom, but because we wanted to use this opportunity to highlight how AO3 specifically (and the OTW generally) makes institutional decisions that uphold racist biases, perhaps without even intending to do so. We’re also concerned at the lack of transparency behind this decision - there is no indication how or why this decision has been made, nor by whom and what spurred them to decide this now, in a current cultural and political climate that’s grown ever more hostile to Black people.

Regarding their existing policies: they cite James Bond as example, but James Bond films often change continuity with each successive actor, and Sam Wilson as Captain America exists in the same continuity, timeline, and universe as Steve Rogers as Captain America in Disney’s MCU. Moreover, there are several counter-examples where fandoms aren’t split off into a new tag when a new lead is introduced to the same storyline/continuity - as mentioned in the comments on this post, AO3 hasn’t done this for Bridgerton or Doctor Who (among others). 

The Bond parallel is further irrelevant because the actors are all playing a character with the same name. Captain America is a title that multiple characters have assumed. In other fandoms, when there are multiple characters with the same title (such as Doctor Who and Black Panther), current practice seems to be to use character and freeform tags to disambiguate, which many commenters on this announcement confirm.

The cited existence of non-MCU Captain America films also doesn’t hold water, as The Flash seems to be disambiguated just fine with its myriad of tags, including The Flash (Movie 2023), The Flash (TV 1990), and The Flash (TV 2014). Many other comic books and comics adapted into tv and film likewise don’t seem to suffer from having multiple continuities and multiple actors as leads of similarly-titled projects, sometimes released simultaneously. Changing the tag to “Captain America (MCU films)” would disambiguate between MCU/non-MCU film continuities very well, without needing to isolate “Sam Wilson as Captain America” stories away from the rest of the MCU films in which he plays such a prominent role. 

This decision also seems to default all existing MCU Captain America stories to the Chris Evans as Captain America tag, which requires all authors who’ve written about Sam Wilson as Captain America to do the labor of “fixing” their stories, as if they’ve been the ones to mistag their work. This also doesn’t take into account the many Alternate Universe stories and such that may feature Sam Wilson as Captain America prior to him taking on the mantle in canon, putting those authors in a bind as to where their stories “belong.”

We encourage those who are similarly opposed to this decision to write to AO3 with their concerns: https://archiveofourown.org/support

If you need a sample script, you are welcome to use or adapt the following: 

Dear Tag Wrangling Team, 

I am writing to you to express disapproval of the planned changes to the Captain America tag by splitting it into "Captain America (Chris Evans Movies) " and "Captain America (Anthony Mackie Movies)" and to encourage the OTW to change the tag to "Captain America (MCU)" instead. 

Sincerely, [Your Name]