catgirl-catboy:

lierdumoa:

One problem with AO3 tag searches is they make it basically impossible to find fic that centers common background ships.

For example, if I look for Teen Wolf Scott/Allison fic I’ll just get a bunch of results for Sterek fic that have Scott/Allison as a background pairing. If I exclude the Sterek tag, then I’ll miss out on any Scott/Allison fic that list Sterek as a baground pairing

Now some people argue the answer is to just not list background pairings, and only list the central ship, but I don’t think that’s a solution at all.

It’s very important to me that I can filter out my NOTPs.

There are a lot of ships I loathe with every fiber of my being, and there’s nothing more annoying than getting midway through a fic and discovering it contains a background ship I specifically excluded from my tag search. That shit will absolutely ruin a story for me.

That’s not the only reason I want to filter out my NOTPs. Background ship tags can also be a good indicator of what fanon universe astory is set in.

What I mean by fanon universe is a collection of popular fanon headcanons that feature in a lot of stories.

For example, there’s a popular MCU fanon universe in which Steve and Tony are married and Peter Parker is their adopted son. And I hate it so much. The people who write fic for that fanon universe even have the unmitigated gall to tag it #Superfamily. Excuse you?!? Lex Luthor didn’t steal Superman’s DNA and splice it with his own to make a test tube baby named Connor Kent so y’all could tag your MCU fic #Superfamily — how dare you.

There’s a lot of Spideypool fic set in this MCU fanon universe. I love Spideypool fanfic, but only if it’s based on the comics where Spider-man and Deadpool team up, or on the Spider-man from the 2012 movie starring Andrew Garfield. I won’t touch any Spideypool fic based in this MCU fanon universe. And if a Spideypool fic has Steve/Tony as a background ship, that’s usually the best indicator that the fic takes place in the fanon universe I just mentioned. So it’s very useful to be able to exclude that tag from my search results even when it’s just a background pairing.

So that’s why I think tagging background ships is a good thing that people should keep doing.

But that leaves us with no way to deal with the problem I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

I know this post is way longer than it should be. It’s almost over.

The thing is people already naturally list the primary ship first, and background ships after, so if you could filter search results to only display fic that lists your preferred ship tag first, ahead of all other ship tags, it would make it a million times easier to find fic that actually centers less prominent ships that people usually only include as background ships.

How hard would it be to code something like that?

OP, have you tried using Ao3 first tag search for firefox? (sure there’s a chrome equivlant, but I don’t know it.)

It does exactly what you’re talking about.