Recs organization

[doranwen]

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.)

Comments

[kalloway]

Hmm. I don't think I've seen a rec post for any fandom I'm active in at any point in the last decade+ though I do sometimes look at people's recs after exchanges reveals. Those are generally sorted by fandom only.

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.

[doranwen]

*nod* One of the other commenters used a phrase that I really liked - a "catalog of fanworks", basically. My lists are halfway between that and a recs list. I mark fics I consider favorites (in other words, I like re-reading them), and fics I think are *exceptionally* well-written (they've got a wow factor that stands out to me), but otherwise they're all the fics for a fandom that I've saved to my hdd and added to my fanfic database (my solution for wanting to find fics to re-read using criteria such as "the one where X happens", in an author/title organizational system on my hdd). They're not everything - I don't add fics that are too terribly written, or ones that have ships or themes I don't care for - but they can be the bulk of the fics for a smaller fandom, in one easy-to-browse location (at least, I'm hoping that they are - I know some people have been enjoying my Matrix fic posts).

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.