I think a way to flag a character tag as a “main character”, “supporting character” or “background character” and be able to search by that would massively improve AO3.
Like, to be able to search for only fics that flag Blorbo Bleebus as a focus main character, and disregard fics that flag Blorbo Bleebus as a supporting character or background character.
Maybe the same for ships.
There’s a Firefox extension for that (unsure about other browsers). It’s called ’AO3 Primary Ship Search’ and it allows you to filter your AO3 search results to only show fics where that ship is listed first!
(Not sure about one that filters specific characters first, but this at least does the ship part!)
There is another one that also changes the size of the tags text scaled to how many times that word appears in the fic, indicating how often characters are referred to in the text body itself.
Oh I need that one. Any idea where to find it or what it’s called?
Good news and bad news boss: After much searching, i have found it. Tag Word Cloud. The bad news is it’s a lot more clunky than i remember.
This works via a browser extension called Tampermonkey, which runs custom scripts on websites.
You’ll need to install the Tampermonkey extension however you do that in your preferred browser. The script can be installed here once you have tampermonkey.
Once it’s on you should see this button and be able to click it to run the word cloud.
The only problem is i’m running into random errors only on SOME fics, claiming there’s a cookie issue. I’ve given Ao3 full exceptions but it still does this sporadically for most of the fics i click.
Also, it used to be you clicked the button once and it changed the whole page to word cloud. Not sure if this is because i use Firefox now and when i first used it i was using Chrome? If anyone knows a solution to this i’m all ears.
Anyway, when it works it looks like this:
I recommend checking this list out as there’s a LOT of other good ones that seem great for readers AND writers (there’s one that claims to fix a formatting issue with italics when pasting from google docs.) I also found Follicule on another site which lets you add or exclude tags AND filter word counts or even chapter counts using little buttons next to each tag. Looks like this:
Thank you so much for tracking this down!
I already have tampermonkey installed so I’ll probably give this a look in any case, but it looks like there are probably better resources out there.
Thank you so much for your diligence here I really appreciate it.
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