Doranwen (
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fictional_fans2022-02-26 09:31 pm
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Recs organization
I realized I had a question about how to organize recs and thought "where can I ask it?" Of course, the answer was "at fictional_fans". :)
If you're looking through a recs list for a fandom, one which is more than just a tiny handful of fics, how do you want to see the fics ordered? By the main ship(s)? By where it occurs in canon? Does it depend on what the canon is? (For instance, I could imagine fic recs for a TV show might be more useful organized by where each appears in the show, compared to those for a film.) Do you like to see both ways, depending on what you're looking for? (e.g. anything that features your favorite ship vs. fics set within the first season only because you've not seen the rest yet) (I presumed that within those two categorization methods, one would organize the fics by author and then title.)
See, I'd set up my master recs post by fandom, and the posts for each fandom large enough to get its own post (or more than one), I organized by ship. The biggest one (which required four separate posts to get them all in) being a series of movies where at least half the fics are shippy for a single pairing, I figured that made the most sense. But my fic database *does* let me tag fics for their position in canon (and I do that for each fic), so it's quite possible for me to set up posts organized by "times" such as "pre-film 1", "post-film 1", "during film 2", "AU", "distant past", "future", "multi", "indeterminate", etc. Whether I *should* do so or not was the question I could not answer, because I don't know whether people would want to browse fics that way.
Note that for a post organized by time in canon, all fics would also be marked with which major ships were present, they just wouldn't be *grouped* together by ship. The reverse would not be true, however - at least, I haven't marked times for individual fics in any post yet. I *could*, though. (Possibly relevant - of the other four fandoms which got their own posts, two are TV shows, one's a film, and one's a film and book combo where the two mediums were similar enough that I combined them into one post.)
So I welcome your input. (If you never read recs posts at all, I'd also be curious to know why.)
If you're looking through a recs list for a fandom, one which is more than just a tiny handful of fics, how do you want to see the fics ordered? By the main ship(s)? By where it occurs in canon? Does it depend on what the canon is? (For instance, I could imagine fic recs for a TV show might be more useful organized by where each appears in the show, compared to those for a film.) Do you like to see both ways, depending on what you're looking for? (e.g. anything that features your favorite ship vs. fics set within the first season only because you've not seen the rest yet) (I presumed that within those two categorization methods, one would organize the fics by author and then title.)
See, I'd set up my master recs post by fandom, and the posts for each fandom large enough to get its own post (or more than one), I organized by ship. The biggest one (which required four separate posts to get them all in) being a series of movies where at least half the fics are shippy for a single pairing, I figured that made the most sense. But my fic database *does* let me tag fics for their position in canon (and I do that for each fic), so it's quite possible for me to set up posts organized by "times" such as "pre-film 1", "post-film 1", "during film 2", "AU", "distant past", "future", "multi", "indeterminate", etc. Whether I *should* do so or not was the question I could not answer, because I don't know whether people would want to browse fics that way.
Note that for a post organized by time in canon, all fics would also be marked with which major ships were present, they just wouldn't be *grouped* together by ship. The reverse would not be true, however - at least, I haven't marked times for individual fics in any post yet. I *could*, though. (Possibly relevant - of the other four fandoms which got their own posts, two are TV shows, one's a film, and one's a film and book combo where the two mediums were similar enough that I combined them into one post.)
So I welcome your input. (If you never read recs posts at all, I'd also be curious to know why.)
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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. :)
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I think recs organised by episode/movie for fandoms with multiple canons would make the fans who find these lists so happy!! I know that more than once, I've desperately wanted to start consuming fic before finishing canon, but stepping on AO3 means encountering spoilers whether you want to or not so it's a tough decision. (Last time I did that I saw the "Character X Lives" tag and left sobbing 😂)
I like ship-based recs list but I'm also a heavy multi-shipper so I'd be just as happy to see a recs list by episode/theme/timeline as long as there's a ship indicator where relevant on the rec itself, too. Good luck with your project!!
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So for the shows, at least (and maybe the films too, especially considering how recently the new Matrix one came out), it would make sense to make posts of the recs organized by time as well as keeping my posts organized by ship. Then there'd be options for the fan who wants to read one way or the other. It's nearly impossible to include any descriptions of the fics themselves if there are too many, so that wouldn't spoil anyone. And I always mark ships *somehow* so people who really don't like a particular ship don't have to read about it. If the recs are organized by something else (or like the tiny fandoms, sharing a post with other fandoms, so that the post is organized simply by fandom), then the major ships are listed beneath the rec in a list so the reader can make their decision as to whether to click or not.
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That is dedication 😂 And probably the only safe way to do it, without a rec list by episode or clear tags to navigate a fandom!!
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I like them organized by pairing and by length. Also by author. It's nice to have the time in canon in the summary.
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I hadn't thought of sorting by length. Recthething had a theme-focused month once where each week had different themes, and one of those was fics under 1k, another was long fics - but other than that I haven't tried to sort that way. I always list wordcount for every fic, but don't group by it. I could easily do so, but I wouldn't want to post recs multiple times on the same comm, and I don't think I have enough people wanting to follow mine just for recs posts, lol. But if someone asked me to make a post with that organization, I would totally do it - it'd be simple!
Author's always a given, within the overarching organization system, I always have fics by author and then title.
Hmm, I wonder if I ought to be putting times with the fics that are grouped by ships? It would make things simple for people wanting to know what they're about - but it'd be a bit of work to set up for existing posts (there are close to 1000 Matrix recs in those four posts).
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I like notes about tropes or themes (like, angsty vs fluffy vs mysteries/casefic vs smut-focused). The point in canon a fic occurs rarely matters to me beyond pre-canon/during canon/post-canon; most fics that care more specifically than that call it out their chronological relationship to canon in the tags/summary, anyway.
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I can either include *all* the themes or none of them whatsoever, that's the challenge (at least, when one's trying to do so for nearly 1000 fics at a time). And the way I describe some of the themes might not make as much sense to someone else. :/ Like, if someone described "hey, I'd love all the fics that have this sort of thing in it", I'd know what equivalent theme I tagged with that would match (or even combo of themes) and it would be easy for me to generate a list of all fics that had that theme tagged for it, but I'm not sure they'd always recognize it if they saw the list themselves, if that makes any sense? It's an interesting problem that I don't yet have a good fix for.
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Some other comments are commenting that point in canon works well for them (at least to group things by installment), and I'm thinking I might do that - and sort by length beyond that, to give people other options for finding fics besides my ship -> author sorted posts.
Part of it, see, was having a way to group stuff from all over the Internet, so I have links to fics that people might otherwise not find at all, either because they never venture over to ff.n, or haven't stumbled across this person's LJ or Tumblr or whatnot. So I was partly trying to have a main "here's a large portion of the fics worth reading to get started with", and then they can explore the sites themselves for the rest, since there *are* ships and themes I won't read.
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I gave up on AO3 a long time ago because I had so many fics from so many places - LJ, Tumblr, old sites that may or may not exist only in the Wayback Machine, lol, etc. - and I didn't see an easy way to organize all the fics in one spot. Not only that, but the other sites generally have poor to nonexistent tagging systems (ff.n's is anemic compared to AO3, and that's the best of the others that I can think of). And even the fic on AO3 has very inconsistent tagging because everyone's tagging methods are idiosyncratic. Someone might mark Choose Not to Warn for a major character death and yet *I* want to have that noted in my organization!
So the more I thought about it, the more I realized I needed my own database to make things easy to find and more consistently tagged. (I was having the trouble of "what was that one where X happens" and an author/title organizational system does NOT help with finding fics like that!) So I taught myself how to build a database (with lots of help from volunteers on the OpenOffice forums) and built one. It's only been in the past year or two that I've been experimenting with creating recs posts from it, and have some awesome SQL queries that will pull fics with all manner of combinations of restrictions on fandoms, major ships, characters, themes, etc. Currently I've got over 1700 fics in the database and that's only the beginning - there are soooo many larger fandoms I want to add eventually, like the LOTR and Narnia and L&C and SV fics I have saved. (Another bonus is I can put in the link to the saved fic on my hard drive so I can launch a fic from the database itself.) I'd be farther except the Yahoo Groups project's been sucking up all my free time. *sigh*
Yeah, organizing by time works for several of the fandom posts I have up (so I'm posting new posts that will give readers the option of "how do I want to browse the fics"), but I realized for Fried Green Tomatoes, it didn't make much sense, so I won't be posting that fandom by time/length as well. I'll play it by ear, I guess. For longer fics where I put them tends to be the jumping off point - a lot of them diverge from canon then - and *how* I categorize time depends on the fandom as well. For a TV show like FBI, for instance, I generally have fics by episode, a general S1, a post-S1, etc., an AU category (for fics that diverge before the show begins in some way), and so on. And I always have an "indeterminate" one for fics that aren't necessarily located in a specific time, and "multi" for ones that span multiple times (ficlet collections or "five times this happened" fit into that). It tends to work out pretty well. But for something like LOTR (which I have not added to the db yet except for a tiny handful of crossovers), I'd group things more like First Age, Second Age, Third Age pre-Ring War, Third Age during Ring War, Third Age post-Ring War, Fourth Age & beyond, etc. With Push (a sci-fi film) I set the time categories as pre-film, during film, post-film (within the first year after), future (several years or more after the film), and of course the AU and multi and indeterminate that I end up using for just about every fandom. I generally don't have much trouble with finding a spot for each fic.
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Aww, I know the "why did I wait so long" feeling. In my case, most of the fandoms I've gotten into were either fairly small even in their heyday, or were too late for Yahoo Groups to have much on them (and yet the fandom is dead now). Alas!
Hey, when we get to the tagging, we can definitely use help by people who know those fandoms! Every last group has to be tagged *before* they get sorted and uploaded, so if you're at all interested, please consider joining the Discord so you'll be alerted when tagging starts. (Though if you don't do Discord, you can always subscribe to my DW as I'll definitely post there, or follow the Yahoo-Geddon Tumblr.) We need so much fandom knowledge (and languages, too), as I'm seeing tons of groups for fandoms I'd never heard of before. It'll go far faster if we have people who know the fandoms checking over them and tagging. I should have some tabs ready to go in around three months. (Yes, it'll take that long to finish fixing the mojibake in the metadata. *sigh*)
Interesting, I'd never thought of location! I don't think I'd find it that useful, but I might create some themes that I only use with specific fandoms to tag for stuff like that. Like, LOTR tends to be pretty location-driven depending on which races of characters you focus on. Assuming one sticks with Third Age fics (the other ages are generally Silmfic), there's tons of hobbit fic, elven fic, the human fic is split into Rohan vs. Gondor vs. Dúnedain of the North, generally, and I suppose there's also dwarf fic. And even with the elven stuff, you've got at least three different locations that the fics can be focused on (Rivendell, Lothlórien, and Mirkwood). I'll probably need to add a theme just for each race/location, because they're like a half dozen different fandoms rolled into one, each location feeling so individual that a lot of people tend to enjoy one or two but not the others. (Me, I love the human fic best, then hobbit, elven, and dwarf in that order. But I'll generally try reading anything LOTR as long as it fits some of my other criteria.)
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Thanks! I hope I'll be able to finish in the three months I estimated - I wish I could snap my fingers and get it done so badly but there's no path other than the long slog so I keep going (there are 1.1 million groups in the metadata - over 960k of which we actually saved data for - so that is a LOT of rows to fix encoding in, and it's not something I can outsource to anyone else due to several reasons). I'm not sure which of the two newcomers you are, so don't mind me greeting you as I usually do any new potential volunteers joining the server. :)
I'm afraid mostly what you'll see me post these days… are the recs posts, LOL. I have a few prepped and ready to go, organized by time and length per the discussion here, but I make good use of cuts so hopefully they won't clog up your reading page. XD But when I get done with the metadata fixing, I'll make a post about it on DW as well.
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I wish it were easier to sort by general theme! (You can see some description of the difficulty in some of my other comments.) I could easily do a "here's all the canon divergence fics for X fandom" post, but there's no easy way to generate posts that include *all* the fics for a fandom but yet group them by themes, due to the sheer number of themes tagged for a fic. For a small set of fics that I hand-create, yeah, but I'd definitely miss good fics that way.
But that prompted me to add a paragraph in my master recs post inviting people to ask for a recs post to be made. Since I *can* easily generate one any which way someone wants, that way they could say "hey, I'd love all the time travel fics for any fandom" or "could I get all the canon divergence for this fandom?" and I can make that. I can make them all in a snap (as long as they align to a theme or combination of themes that I have in the db), I just don't know which ones people would want! Hopefully someone will take me up on that someday and I can make ones that would be useful to someone.
Thanks for your feedback! Everyone's comments have been very helpful.
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Yay recs! :-)
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I get overwhelmed when people want a lot of specifics on why I like this or that - because I like So Many! How does one do that for several *hundred* fics? (I've got 265 fics marked favorites in my database right now - and there's only 1700-ish fics in there. Sooooo many more fandoms to get to, and so many other projects I need to work on, alas.) I could do a post of only favorites *and* exceptionally well-written, but I do mean that "exceptionally" - many that don't have it are quite well-written, they just don't have that extra "wow" factor to me. I wouldn't want to try to fine-tune the quality rating beyond that, as that can be a YMMV thing so much. So that's why I just use an icon to mark the favorites and exceptionally well-written fics (and WIPs, while I'm at it, so people can avoid if they don't want to read unfinished stuff), and otherwise it's just a catalog/semi-comprehensive list. (I wouldn't say it's completely comprehensive, because my fanfic db is limited to the stuff I wanted to save. There are ships and themes I won't touch and those don't get saved or recorded anywhere - it *is* MY database, after all, lol. But I figure a lot of what I liked others might like too, hence making these posts.)
I do like recs requests (because then I can tailor to exactly what the person might like to read), but I haven't really gotten any (unless you count a friend of mine who likes to know whenever I've got new emotional h/c fics added, and I just give those to her on Discord) - and I suspect that's because I'm not into a lot of the popular fandoms, and no one knows about my DW. *shrug* I do have at least one or two people I know of who've found my Matrix lists useful, so I figure that's good.
I probably ought to make some posts of "my favorite emotional h/c fics" or "my favorite canon divergence fics", etc. That way there is a "here's part of why I like this fic" and limiting to favorites only makes it more of a recs list.
Several people here have commented that they do like fics organized by "what works exist for this installment/episode" so I will make some posts for that as well. I reorganized my master recs post to allow for multiple posts of the same fics for a canon. Then people can choose to visit whichever post they wish, by how they're organized.
Thanks for your feedback! :D
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Even thinking of longer canons, I think things like place-in-canon would be easily conveyed in notes - I'd probably just sort by featured characters or pairings, then have 'post-canon' or 'x-arc' in the notes, along with any content warnings.
A lot of recs I see just use the AO3 tags as well.
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I started posting my recs posts using pairings to organize by (and author within that), and based on some of the feedback above, I'm now creating some posts that will organize the same fics by episode/film/time in canon, depending on the fandom (at least one fandom I'm positive would not benefit from being organized that way - TV shows and film or book series are the most likely ones there). Place-in-canon is *most* of the time indicated in notes, but not always, and if someone's wanting to read fics before they've finished watching a show, for instance, they can avoid spoilers that way (since I've seen fics that have stuff in the description like "what happens after X did Y", and if the reader hasn't actually yet *seen* the episode where X did Y, they've just gotten spoiled).
Part of the beauty of the database is I am not tied to the tags the writer chose to use, lol, so I can pick a tag that I apply consistently to any fic that has that theme (since people vary considerably in how much they tag). I can see that just copying the AO3 tags would be pretty quick, though. I've toyed with listing all themes below the recs, but it would spoil some people *too* much. So I just give people the option of asking for it, and make it clear I'm happy to create such a list for them in the comments that would include all the themes for each fic.
Thanks for replying! It's very helpful to see everyone's different perspectives.
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Thanks for commenting! :)
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My thought about length is that I've sometimes seen rec posts that focused on that such as "long reads" or "quick bites" or that sort of thing. So if there was an easy way to sort them by length then it would be easier to assemble "themed" posts focusing on that.
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I agree that within a rec post on, say, some other theme or for a single fandom, I can easily scan for the word count and I wouldn't consider organizing by that important unless it was a very long list.
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