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fic fishing (fic-shing?)
Feb. 12th, 2022 11:24 pmYesterday I went fishing in the soukoku tag and found a fucking fantastic fic. I felt like I had struck gold and thought this would be a fun post: how to fish for fics! (tentatively calling this "fic-shing." It's a work in progress haha). I mostly read slash fic, but this could ask work for gen too!
If you're starting from ao3 itself: ao3 makes this as easy as they can for you, and the biggest advice I can give is: filters filters filters. I tend not to read wips, so I always filter for fics that are complete. I also don't read crossovers very often, so I filter those out, too. Now, the soukoku tag is an ocean: 15k fics and counting at the time of writing this (and if I procrastinate long enough on my hxh big bang fic, there might be another one joining that number shortly). But anyway, in order to slim down the results for a massive pairing like this, I filter for works that are 1. complete 2. not crossovers 3. in English. That's your base, your stock for your soup, the clay ready to mold, if you will. Then, depending on what mood I'm in, I'll filter for additional tags. I usually start with the most popular tags; for soukoku, "angst" is at the top bc they are Like That. The thing to be careful about with the "include" section is that it actually slims down the results very fast, so if you're looking to get a wide variety of results to choose from, clicking too many might not be helpful.
From there, you can also choose what to exclude. I tend to avoid MCD like the plague, so I always exclude that. Now, the exclude tag is great because it doesn't slim the results down as fast as the include function, and honestly? Most of the time I don't know what I want, but I sure as hell know what I don't want. So basically: filters are your friend.
All you really need is to catch one "good" one ("good" meaning What You Are Looking For)--the thing about authors is that they tend to write about things that they like, so there's also a good chance that they'll have a couple of bookmarks of that thing you both like. Which leads me to: bookmarks bookmarks bookmarks. You will find treasure troves of fics in other user's bookmarks. The great thing about ao3 is that it's an archive, not a social media site, so everything you see will have been hand-picked by a real live person. Sometimes they have hand-picked thirty pwp oneshots, and you will feel like you've just won the fucking Olympics. Sometimes it's six wips that haven't been updated since 2013, and that's okay too. Either way, the thing I love about the ao3 bookmarks system is that it functions as a kind of word-of-mouth community. The best bookmark collections are even tagged and meticulously labelled with summaries, commentary, and keyboard smashes. All hail a good bookmarks collection.
There are also collections! Now, I haven't had as much success with these because it's a lot easier to just bookmark something than ping an author for permission, but often times Big Bangs and zines will use this function and you can find some really good stuff. It's just a little harder because, unlike bookmarks, you often have to find the collection from outside ao3, which requires a little more knowledge about the fandom/community (which in turn can be difficult if you're a newcomer). But still, collections are also a possibility!
Outside ao3, there are also lots of tumblr blogs and twitter accounts (for example) that act as libraries/resources for recs; most of them also allow users to submit recs, which are then lovingly labelled/tagged for you to peruse. I've had great success with accounts like these as well, although some of them may be older/haven't been maintained in a while, so if you're looking for more recent stuff, you might have to scroll through a broader fandom or ship tag to find more recent ones. The great thing about blogs like these is that they often take requests, so if you're looking for a specific fic that you can't remember the name of, or you don't want to go through the trouble of doing a bunch of filtering yourself, there's a community who's already done a lot of the work for you. Nearly every fandom with a healthy ao3 tag will have at least one of these floating around, so it's a great place to start, especially if you're new! When I get into a new pairing, or even when I revisit an old favorite, I'll often just Google "[pairing] fic rec list [year]" and bada bing bada boom I'm on my way.
And finally, the best piece of advice I can give for finding good fics is: patience patience patience. I usually know within a few paragraphs of a fic if it's something I'd be interested in (I tend to click on fics with all-lowercase titles, a one or two sentence summary, and economical tag usage, so that eliminates a lot just from the results page), but I do end up closing out of a lot of fics early on. It's nothing personal to those writers!--I just know what I like and sometimes it's not this (but I try to remember to leave a kudos even if I didn't read the whole thing; it's still a nice gesture imo). But having a little bit of patience will go a long way--after all, you really only need one fic that you really, really like, because in addition to the author, often times the people in the comments section will have bookmark collections, too. And if you both really like X in this fic, well hot damn--there's a good chance they have a bunch of other fics bookmarked with X in in them too.
This was fun!! Now I'm gonna go check out today's catch :3
If you're starting from ao3 itself: ao3 makes this as easy as they can for you, and the biggest advice I can give is: filters filters filters. I tend not to read wips, so I always filter for fics that are complete. I also don't read crossovers very often, so I filter those out, too. Now, the soukoku tag is an ocean: 15k fics and counting at the time of writing this (and if I procrastinate long enough on my hxh big bang fic, there might be another one joining that number shortly). But anyway, in order to slim down the results for a massive pairing like this, I filter for works that are 1. complete 2. not crossovers 3. in English. That's your base, your stock for your soup, the clay ready to mold, if you will. Then, depending on what mood I'm in, I'll filter for additional tags. I usually start with the most popular tags; for soukoku, "angst" is at the top bc they are Like That. The thing to be careful about with the "include" section is that it actually slims down the results very fast, so if you're looking to get a wide variety of results to choose from, clicking too many might not be helpful.
From there, you can also choose what to exclude. I tend to avoid MCD like the plague, so I always exclude that. Now, the exclude tag is great because it doesn't slim the results down as fast as the include function, and honestly? Most of the time I don't know what I want, but I sure as hell know what I don't want. So basically: filters are your friend.
All you really need is to catch one "good" one ("good" meaning What You Are Looking For)--the thing about authors is that they tend to write about things that they like, so there's also a good chance that they'll have a couple of bookmarks of that thing you both like. Which leads me to: bookmarks bookmarks bookmarks. You will find treasure troves of fics in other user's bookmarks. The great thing about ao3 is that it's an archive, not a social media site, so everything you see will have been hand-picked by a real live person. Sometimes they have hand-picked thirty pwp oneshots, and you will feel like you've just won the fucking Olympics. Sometimes it's six wips that haven't been updated since 2013, and that's okay too. Either way, the thing I love about the ao3 bookmarks system is that it functions as a kind of word-of-mouth community. The best bookmark collections are even tagged and meticulously labelled with summaries, commentary, and keyboard smashes. All hail a good bookmarks collection.
There are also collections! Now, I haven't had as much success with these because it's a lot easier to just bookmark something than ping an author for permission, but often times Big Bangs and zines will use this function and you can find some really good stuff. It's just a little harder because, unlike bookmarks, you often have to find the collection from outside ao3, which requires a little more knowledge about the fandom/community (which in turn can be difficult if you're a newcomer). But still, collections are also a possibility!
Outside ao3, there are also lots of tumblr blogs and twitter accounts (for example) that act as libraries/resources for recs; most of them also allow users to submit recs, which are then lovingly labelled/tagged for you to peruse. I've had great success with accounts like these as well, although some of them may be older/haven't been maintained in a while, so if you're looking for more recent stuff, you might have to scroll through a broader fandom or ship tag to find more recent ones. The great thing about blogs like these is that they often take requests, so if you're looking for a specific fic that you can't remember the name of, or you don't want to go through the trouble of doing a bunch of filtering yourself, there's a community who's already done a lot of the work for you. Nearly every fandom with a healthy ao3 tag will have at least one of these floating around, so it's a great place to start, especially if you're new! When I get into a new pairing, or even when I revisit an old favorite, I'll often just Google "[pairing] fic rec list [year]" and bada bing bada boom I'm on my way.
And finally, the best piece of advice I can give for finding good fics is: patience patience patience. I usually know within a few paragraphs of a fic if it's something I'd be interested in (I tend to click on fics with all-lowercase titles, a one or two sentence summary, and economical tag usage, so that eliminates a lot just from the results page), but I do end up closing out of a lot of fics early on. It's nothing personal to those writers!--I just know what I like and sometimes it's not this (but I try to remember to leave a kudos even if I didn't read the whole thing; it's still a nice gesture imo). But having a little bit of patience will go a long way--after all, you really only need one fic that you really, really like, because in addition to the author, often times the people in the comments section will have bookmark collections, too. And if you both really like X in this fic, well hot damn--there's a good chance they have a bunch of other fics bookmarked with X in in them too.
This was fun!! Now I'm gonna go check out today's catch :3
