Fictional Fans

Hmm, that'd be a trickier one. The themes section (which is where things like "time travel" and "canon divergence" and any trope I tagged for would appear) is completely separate from the times, which is also (naturally) separate from the major ships. I can include info on any of them with the others, but I haven't included all the themes with any list of recs because it'd be super spoilery.

And there's absolutely no way to easily generate posts which sort first by certain themes (since that's a many-to-many relationship, fics could appear multiple times on a list like that that went through every theme individually). Ships are simpler because most fics have none or one major ship, maybe two. Three is quite rare so far that I've seen. But *most* fics are tagged with at least two themes, a fic can be tagged with seven or eight themes, and I use the themes option to tag for person and tense as well, for instance (present tense, first person, etc.). It'd be completely illogical to separate out each combo of tags since so few would have more than one fic under them.

Obviously, that's doable with a recs list generated manually. But manual takes an eternity for me, which is why I've been putting stuff in a database and rec'ing that way. (Without the database, I always forgot some of my favorite fics, I just have so many I love or think are really good, and I struggle to remember all the authors and titles. The database makes it possible to remember all of them.)

So my compromise regarding themes has always been that I'll happily generate a list of the themes for each of the fics in a post if someone requests it (so far no one has, but I'm pretty sure not enough people have seen the posts for that to have a good chance of happening). Also, it's dead simple to pick a theme and make a post of all the fics for a particular theme. (I can go a step further and limit it to specific theme + time, that's easy enough to write the SQL for.)

That makes sense about the fandom dependency, though. I'd manually created a specific TV show (Rookie Blue) recs post by hand years ago (all my favorites) and organized that by time in canon, plus one or two slots at the end for rare ships, because *every single fic* otherwise was for the main pairing (something like 99%). Whenever I get that fandom into the database, I may want to post it twice because I can't sort by both ships and times simultaneously. (Someone trying to find fic for a rarepair is in a different position than someone who wants canon divergence for a particular episode.) Thinking through that issue with another TV show (one with quite a bit more variety in the major ships in fics I've got saved and would enter into the db) also leads me to the same dilemma. Whereas I posted these posts for that film series a couple months ago and it only now occurred to me that it might be useful to have a post that's sorted by time (and I was unsure enough that I wanted to see what people thought in general).

Thanks for your comment! It's gotten me thinking more. :)