I want to bring the excellence that is the ao3 filtering system to everyone’s attention. Asking for recs is fun and allowed, of course, but sometimes the posts I come across here are asking for things that aren't difficult to filter, so I hope this helps someone. And helps you find those “hidden gems” you’re not likely to find on the usual rec lists.
With currently over 70k works in the wolfstar tag it can sometimes be hard to find what you want to read. That’s where tags and filtering come in.
On the right-hand side of the page you’ll see this (on mobile, it will be on top just under where it shows how many works there are. Click “Filters” and this will pop up)
As we can see, you can filter for a lot of things and you can open the drop-down and it will show you the most popular tags for each section.
Now, let’s say I’m in the mood for some angsty wolfstar with hurt/comfort, no smut and no MCD.
Let’s do an example search.
We’ll put the “Angst” and “Hurt/Comfort” tags in the “Include” section (these are popular tags so they’ll be right there):
And exclude “Explicit” rating and “Major Character Death” warning:
Hit “Sort and Filter” and the amount of fics we get now is significantly lower:
Over 5k is still a bit too much to manage, right? Perhaps I want the angsty hurt/comfort to also be a lie low at Lupin’s fic? Good news! That is a tag we can add to the search! (It’s not as popular a tag as something like “Angst” so we’ll need to add it to the “Other tags to include” section):
When you start writing in this box it will start suggesting tags. We’ll pick the first one and hit “Sort and Filter” again.
Now the amount of fics coming up is only 86! You can stop here and see if any of them seem interesting to you.
“But I only want to read completed fics”
Scroll down and you’ll see this:
Click “Complete works only” (and for the heck of it, put the language to English if you want to only read fics in English) You can also exclude or include crossovers here, set a preferred word count…
Boom, 71 fics that use the tags “Angst”, “Hurt/Comfort” and “Lie Low at Lupin’s” and exclude the rating “Explicit” and the warning “Major Character Death”. That is 4 pages of fics to look through, which to me isn’t that much but if you want to you can include and exclude tags to your heart’s content until you only have one fic left. These are also in the order of “Date updated” (the very first thing at the top of the filter box) which is the default. It will show the newest fics updated at the top. You can choose to sort by kudos, bookmarks, comments…
Perhaps you’ve read a fic you loved and want to find
something like it? Have a look at the tags they used and filter with those, with 70k fics for this ship alone, it’s highly likely someone else has also written something similar.
Happy filtering!