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

[yourlibrarian]

Haha, yes, what counts as a long read definitely varies by person! I'd say 20,000 is a fair benchmark. I am happy to read 100k works but those are relatively few, and to me a short read is anything under 5k.

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.

[doranwen]

*sheepish grin* My lists *are* rather long sometimes. (All 265 Push fics that aren't crossovers are in a single post, and I have nearly 1,000 Matrix fics which are split between four posts - two posts of which are JUST Neo/Trinity.) I probably ought to post a set by ship/length!