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
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. :)