video description: an ao3 tutorial on tiktok, narrated by a female voice. This is in answer to a comment saying, “Is there a way to find a fic with a characters name in which they are the central focus and not just a tag mention?”
The screen shows the tag search results for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“It can be really difficult when the character you’re looking for is always tagged in fics and also barely in those fics. This is sometimes referred to as the Bruce Banner Problem.”
The narrator opens up filters and says that first she is going to use an Include filter for Bruce Banner as a character. This will guarantee that he is tagged in the fics.
The character names that are automatically populated in the Include/Exclude filters are the top 10 most popular characters. If the character you are looking for is not listed, you can type their name in the box labelled Other tags to include and choose them from the dropdown.
“To increase my chances that he actually shows up in the story in a significant way, I’m going to come down to Search within results.”
The narrator then types
summary: bruce
into the text field box. She says that doing this will combine with the character to tag to result in fics where Bruce Banner is tagged as a character and also his name appears in the summary.
After filtering, she shows that the number of works has decreased from nearly 58,000 to just over 8,000. There will still be instances where he’s not a major character, but the chances have significantly improved.
A commenter on the tiktok pointed out that they do an OR search on the summary to also allow for his last name being used.
summary: bruce OR summary: banner
Another commenter stated that it’s also worthwhile to check if there is a character-centric additional tag that you could search for as well.
Discussion ¬