Doranwen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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fictional_fans2022-02-26 09:31 pm
doranwen) wrote in fictional_fans2022-02-26 09:31 pm
Entry tags:
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.)
no subject
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.