transformativeworks:

porcupine-girl:

starrysummer-nights:

I hate when people who are new to a fandom/ship ask for fic recs and are IMMEDIATELY shut down by someone snarkily saying “Just go to AO3 and search then filter by kudos duhhhhhh 🙄”

Because that’s a fucking stupid way to find good fic.

Because sometimes, the most kudo’d fics??? Aren’t the best fics. Or even the most in character or canon-compliant. They’re just the fics that have been around the longest, that were written while the fandom was still young and the show new and these are the “fandom favorites” but they may not be all that great.

I want the fic that has half those kudos but spot on characterization that I wouldn’t find by searching for the “most kudos”. I want the fic that hasn’t gotten that much love and you’re screaming by the time you get done because holy shit!!! What an amazing fic!!! I want to hear what someone else liked and why. I want to take the path less traveled when it comes to fic because that is new and exciting and a breath of fresh air and a new take that, unfortunately, no one reads because when people look for fic, they go by kudos.

So yeah. Rant over.

Also annoying when people make rec lists that might as well just be a list of the top 10 most-kudos’d fics, and every single rec list looks exactly the same.

If you’re going to bother with a rec list, either go with a specific theme (not just a pairing, especially if that pairing has more than like 1000 fics for it) or try to rec stuff that you think deserves way more kudos/hits than it already has.

And as for just browsing in AO3, I like to pick a kudos threshold (500, 1000, whatever – type “kudos>500” or whatever in the “search within results” box) and sort by date posted. That way you see the stuff that didn’t just spend three years slowly accumulating kudos by virtue of existing, it burst onto the scene and people loved it so much it shot to the top. Either that, or I look for stuff with not many hits but a good number of kudos per hit – so, say, (for zimbits, which has a higher kudos/hit ratio than Sherlock or SPN, so you’d have to adjust for those fandoms) “hits<2000 kudos>300” to find stuff that hasn’t gotten much attention, but the people who did read it liked it.

AO3 searching tips! ❤