(no subject)

[soc_puppet]

My kingdom for a way to differentiate primary ships from secondary and background ships on AO3 🙄 I keep running into one that's not a NoTP, but also definitely not ever something I want to read as the primary focus of a fic. Meanwhile, fans of side-pairings that are popular in the background but not as often in the foreground are usually stuck sorting through dozens and dozens of fics with a given fandom's Uber-Ship that happens to have their preferred ship paired up on the side, and summaries aren't always as helpful as they could be in denoting who, exactly, a given fic is actually about.

Anyway, that's my tiny gripe for the day. I'd say to tune in next time, but I've no notion when that'll be, so I guess you're on your own.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

I hear this and I am zero percent competent at anything like the sort of coding that would be necessary to take the source code and make one that's better (and I wouldn't want to compete with AO3 anyway, I like OTW better than that)

[satsuma]

Oh yeah theres so many fandoms I've been in that would have been so much easier if we could all tell what fics were actually about. I seem to be a chronic shipper of side pairings, so theres always some juggernaut filling the tags with ‘your ship gets one line’ fics

Its not just relationships though, I remember someone (possibly on tumblr?) had a whole thing about finding fics where bruce banner is actually a major character, because his tag is so clogged w/fics where he’s only featured in passing

[krait]

I'll add my kingdom to the reward heap. :D

I don't have NOTP problems so much as I have "the ship I want shows up as a two-sentence mention in Chapter Eight of a 50K work" problem, which is the curse of loving secondary characters, but could definitely be helped by having separate tag fields for Major Relationships / Minor Relationships.

[kitewithfish]

There's a cudgel-y way to do something similar, but it's experimental:

https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/10851

"Works
"As before, you can use all of these suggestions in the main search box (in the site header), the "Any field" box in the work search, or the "Search within results" field in the filters. Keep in mind that this input is case-sensitive and the space after the colon is non-optional. Just copy-paste what you need, mix and match as you like, and bookmark the result in your browser for quick access to fanworks perfectly tailored to your tastes!

"Work Properties
....
"otp: true for works tagged with only one relationship (experimental!)
can be used by itself or in combination with a specific relationship tag (e.g. chosen from the filtering options)
will exclude all A/B works where A/B might only be a side pairing, but also all A/B works with other side pairings
will include works with multiple relationship tags if they're all synned to the same canonical tag"

It's not perfect by a long shot, but I feel like there's some experimentation there to be done that might filter out at least some of the annoying options.