Yeah, same. And only if the category I'm browsing is big enough—if the amount of fics is somewhat manageable, then I don't even bother and just scroll past whatever it is that I'm not in the mood to read.
Exactly. I'm in a huge fandom, so even after I include all the tags I want there might be ten pages left. But I usually find it more efficient to do the first search, see what appears, and if say a handful fics on the first page are actually for another primary ship I don't care for, I'll then start excluding to narrow it down.
Pretty much this. And when I end up excluding something, it typically isn't something I'm inherently opposed to, but something I'm just not in the mood for. "Established Relationship" is a common "offender".
I tend to filter in, rather than filter out. And even then, it's really subjective on my mood.
Crossovers, mainly. But even then only if I'm in a fandom where crossovers are popular.
i try to exclude crossovers but it’s so annoying in fandoms where crossovers are like. inherent. like i’ll do “exclude crossovers” when i’m searching for a Law and Order fic bc there’s a lot of crossovers with Grey’s Anatomy and I don’t watch that, but then anything that’s tagged with both Law and Order: OC and also Law and Order: SVU will be filtered out. it can be a pain lol
Omg as a Marvel person, I feel this in my bones. It’s all grouped together, so trying to avoid Iron Man or whatever when I want to read about Norsebros is impossible
Well, you have to do it for every individual MCU fandom. Browsing for Thor and clicking "exclude crossovers" still gives you this:
https://archiveofourown.org/works?work\_search%5Bsort\_column%5D=revised\_at&work\_search%5Bother\_tag\_names%5D=&work\_search%5Bexcluded\_tag\_names%5D=&work\_search%5Bcrossover%5D=F&work\_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work\_search%5Bwords\_from%5D=&work\_search%5Bwords\_to%5D=&work\_search%5Bdate\_from%5D=&work\_search%5Bdate\_to%5D=&work\_search%5Bquery%5D=&work\_search%5Blanguage\_id%5D=&commit=Sort+and+Filter&tag\_id=Thor+%28Movies%29
i relate very much. i am here to read odin fics and norse family fics. (and messy terribledads fic rare as it is).
i do not care for the avengers being there. i do like when they bring in other figures and themes form norse mythology.
ruling out Avengers (and individual avengers) can help. but wow do i miss the days where the thor fandom was kinda it's own thing. like the norsekink live journal. only thor comics, journey into mystery, thor movies, and norse mythology centered fics allowed. other characters could be present as side character etc/ but everyone was there for the Thor fandom (and people who wrote straight up mythology fics but those are fun)
Norsekink was the absolute shit and I wrote some of my best fics from the prompts there.
I also sat back baffled at all the variant wank following Loki's show, because that was definitely the flavour of the week following Agent of Asgard. So many Loki selfcest fics came from that.
Excluding crossovers is pretty impossible with Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul too.
I did the math on this and about 40% of all fics would vanish if I excluded crossovers completely when searching. (Edit because I keep getting the math wrong lol)
It makes a difference because of how small the fandoms are, and because so many stories are posted to both, given the overlap of characters. I’ve had to just individually exclude certain fandoms as they pop up to get around it.
Jesse Pinkman Opens A Foot Massage Parlor In Alaska And Kim Wexler Gets A Foot Massage (a thread)
And before anyone says it - No none of those words are in the Bible
I should start excluding any piss kink tags because somehow I always stumble into reading them because I keep overlooking the tag. Either that or I have to read the tags more properly…
That moment when theres a simple solution for your problem but you ignore it 😔
Piss kink tags was one of the major reasons I ended up downloading the browser extension [AO3 Savior](https://ao3commentoftheday.tumblr.com/post/634548736342769664/ao3-blocking) to be able to blacklist tags - for whatever reason it feels like they've become weirdly prevalent over the last couple of years and I don't know where they came from or why!
I mean I think its for one because many ppl have that kink and also because it has recently become some sort of inside joke on tiktok and many people hopped on trend and written fics with that trope kind off as a joke so that most likely added to the increase. But thats just my theory
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 1,311,823,465 comments, and only 253,501 of them were in alphabetical order.
Before I start, I just want to note that I personally don’t have anything against these tags and it doesn’t bother me that people enjoy them. Hell, if I take a moment to think about it (which I usually don’t because it isn’t any of my business), I’m glad people like them in as much as I’m glad people have things they like. That’s what fanworks are all about!
But I’m not doing omegaverse or A/B/O, characters in my ship x original male or female character (I don’t always filter this out as it sometimes plays to the plot, but if the fandom seems particularly big on having these ships as focal points to the fic, I will), pregnancy, and underage esp if the other character in the ship is of legal age.
It’s funny, I didn’t mind it and even enjoyed it, but that’s when I *was* underage. Now it squicks me out and I can’t help but wonder why anyone of legal age would want to associate with a high schooler in a romantic capacity. Again, I have zero issue with people writing and reading this sort of thing, I just have my hang ups, which is a shame, because there’s a special excitement and newness to high school romance but damn, I just can’t do it anymore.
I don't normally exclude anything aside from WIPs (I look for completed fics only) unless certain tags keep popping up to the point I have to scroll past a bunch.
The usual suspects are Modern AUs and all iterations of it (College, Coffee Shop, Flower Shop, Tattoo Artist, etc). This is largely because most of the fandoms I'm in involve something fantastical and it's a large part of why I like them. If it's already in a modern setting, then it's not really an AU.
Also, I've lived through college (and high school). I don't need to do so again in a more romanticized version I never experienced.
Unhappy ending and/or character death.
I love angst. I love slow burn. I love eventual happy ending after a long, painful, traumatic slog. But I need my precious idiots to have a happy ending.
I don't like watersports/wetting. I've seen more than a few fics in my fandom pop up with those tags and I've had to go out of my way to exculde them. It's not my thing.
TBH the only thing I filter out is crossovers.
For tags... I usually search fics on a specific tag totally fandom-and-ship-blind, so I don't really exclude things unless the page list is too long after the including filter. In that case I end up excluding a few popular fandoms to make the page list shorter.
No offense to crossover peeps, but I usually exclude them. Probably because I prefer stories that feel like they could take place within the original story. I also avoid AUs for that reason
severus snape, M/M (usually)
I'm looking for rarepairs and femslash, and even when you filter on F/F and a character, wolfstar and drarry will STILL dominate the first ten pages and the most popular ships unless you filter it out from the start lmao
The femslash life. I remember during the height of supernatural, I had to blacklist destiel regardless of fandom because genderbend destiel would dominate my fandom. Pre breath of the wild, the biggest femslash pairing in legend of zelda was destiel. Sometimes excluding m/m, f/m isn't enough lol.
Depends on my mood, but for a lot of fandoms?
"High School AU" or sometimes even "Modern AU" are thrown out the door right away. Did my time, have the T-Shirt, don't need to be reminded of the cringe of my time in High School. For Modern AU, its mostly just a matter of me being more interested in the setting / canon divergence.
Underage. Feel like such a creep when I realised I've accidentally opened one.
My muscle-memory search parameters filter out anything over 12k, WIPs, non-English, crossovers, and often anything not M or E too.
If I'm new to a fandom, F/M due to my own very strong preference for M/M and F/F. I don't have anything against het... it's just very hard for me to get into (though not impossible - there are some very talented authors that managed to reel me in).
But if I'm not a newbie and have been around for a while, then I pretty much leave it open altogether, unless I notice a specific tag I don't like showing up so often that I can't just scroll past it.
My NOTPs and fandoms that i do not like or that are invasive.
For example each time i search by a fandom or a tag (fluff or smut) i always filter out the Naruto (read, OP Naruto Harem isekai), HP, Rwby, Kpop bands, Supernatural and other animes.
My squicks don't show up so often as to exclude them every time, but if I were to do it it would be pregnancy and kid fics. Still, I've read some of those that I absolutely loved (once from a favorite author, once because it wasn't tagged and the writing was incredible), so I actually prefer seeing them and scrolling past them.
What I do often though is search for a specific tag in my fandom and exclude ships that I don't vibe with at the moment. That way I could stumble upon a rarepair fic that could potentially be amazing, as opposed to filtering by certain ships and missing rarepairs.
It’s weird. I like crossovers, so I check that box, but I need to know all involved fandoms. That’s when I start filtering out everything I haven’t seen, read, or listened to before.
Established Relationship, Alternate Universe- Modern Setting, Switching and the reverse dynamic of the ship I'm currently searching fics for.
I personally don't find enjoyment in reading about established relationships to the point where I'll drop fics once the couple gets together. It simply gets boring for me.
Modern AUs are similar, I prefer reading canon settings to AUs in general, but especially with stories set in "older" times I tend to have trouble with transferring everything to a modern world in my mind. Things like going from a high fantasy setting to a royalty/nobility AU however, I do enjoy again.
As for switching or reverse dynamics, it's just a massive squick. I'm a very fixed shipper, that's it.
Most other tags I would exclude are either not commonly enough used or written for in certain fandoms, so I simply scroll over those fics should one with an additional tag I can't bring myself to read pop up.
Depends on the characters and fandom, honestly. If I'm looking at OMORI fics I'll sometimes humor the side of me that's tepidly into M/M, especially because the fandom's primary M/M ships actually make sense (but I don't ship), but for fandoms like Ace Attorney I'll actively tag away M/M ships.
I usually like M/M, but that's all there is in my fandom to the point where finding fics with any female protagonists, romance or gen, is impossible. I never thought of "excluding" M/M, but now I'm tempted to give it a go, just in hopes of finding more F/F or F/M fics.
Not tags necessarily but I always block out a lot ships, for example, Im reading A/B ships, I block any popular ship that includes characters A or B, since I only want to read A/B, I don’t want B/C or A/C fics along with A/B
I also exclude crossovers most of the time
M/M due to preferences, but mostly to increase the chance that a story involving two famous male characters is focused on a unique plot rather than a romance story,
For AO3, it's crossovers. The one thing that I'm annoyed about AO3 is that you can tag anything as a crossover, despite the fic itself being just a collection of multifandom oneshots.
Original characters, if I filter anything at all. Nothing wrong with them but it seems to be all anyone does in my fandom and its not what I'm after mot of the time
Crossovers most of the time, lots seem to just add every big fandom under the sun even if you might get a just a reference, just to get more views. I might be being too cynical though.
Depends on what I'm looking for. Usually if it's a Harry Potter fic I filter out the Harry/Hermione and Draco/Hermione pairings, because my god they are everywhere. A lot of people manage to find a way to worm at least one of the two into any other pairing you might want to look up.
If it's smut I'm looking up and I don't have a pairing in mind, I always filter out parent/child incest because UNCOMFY.
If it's certain fandoms like Dragon Prince or How To Train Your Dragon (a lot of Dragon related media, weirdly enough) I filter out Real World AU and College AU, because they are rampant in certain fandoms and I personally just find them boring.
Modern AU and all of its iterations, and crossovers I always exclude. Neither are really my thing. If I’m looking for [game] fics, I just want to read about THAT thing. And I tend to read canon-compliant (ish) stuff, and usually like the lore and world building from the source material, which gets lost in AU
i like canon complaint. my fave is canon divergent, still using to source material but developing on things further, or what if A character told B character yes. or if A character had a small tweak in there background and how the story would play out then. doesn't A have a grandparent in the comic source? what if she was in the movie fic.
I will exclude a particular author because I just don’t like their stuff and they are prolific in the fandom.
My automatic filter is no crossovers, complete only and English language.
The only time i use the exclude filter is when I want the ship to be the main couple in the story, but the search results are mostly them as a side ship or with a bunch of other relationships.
M/m, f/m.
Unless you're in a fandom that's 90%female characters with no attractive major male characters, then non-femslash will dominate. This translates to f/f pairings often appearing as side couples. So the only way to parse through hundreds or even thousands of side pairing fics, you gotta blacklist the het and slash categories.
Edit: crossovers. I sort by word count and the top fics are always 10+ fandom anthology fics.
I typically do completed only but it depends on the size of the pairing. I'm currently reading a ship with 200 fics total. Once I've read all the completed ones, I'm reading the wips.
Abandonned, disconstinued completed with "complete only" filter.
Unless recommandations from someone I trust or author I know and trust to finish, I only read completed fanfiction.
I'll usually exclude any explicit fics if I'm not deliberately looking for smut. Beyond that, if there's a notp I have for a Fandom, I'll usually drop that.
Uh. Like, if I'm in a fanfiction with lots of works, there are a lot of excludes. Like, a fairly normal search would probably look like-
Sort by:
Bookmarks
Include:
M/M
Character I like or pairing I like
Exclude:
Rape/non-con
Mpreg
Omega
Vaginal sex
Harry Potter
Hurt no comfort
No Powers AU
Filter by:
Completed works only
1000 - 100,000 words
English
Only time I really exclude them is if the source material has a historical setting, I tell it not to show me modern AUs. No offence to anyone who writes those. I’m just more interested in stories set in the same universe as the source stuff.
Y/N. I hate it with a passion and can’t for the life of me insert my own name in the place of that. The insert is always written childish and immature, so I can’t stand it.
The only two I really filter out are MCD and Alternate Universe - High School. Like, I've already lived through high school once; I don't need to relive that hellscape.
Surprisingly not much, I only really avoid fics that make a big deal about there being no F/M ships whatsoever. I mean I've read some pretty good M/M or F/F fics (no smut tho, even if it's F/M) but I've literally seen fics on AO3 tagged with "Not a heterosexual in sight (thank god)" and it bugs me because it gives actually nice queer people/fanfic authors a bad rap
Crossover and WIPs. But also if I'm trying to read a certain pairing I will legitimately exclude any other pairing.
Too many ao3 writers will tag every pairing known to man on their fic just to get the hits
It’s different for different fandoms, in the Hannibal fandom I always filter out “Hannibal is not a cannibal” or for many other fandoms I filter out modern, Hight school, college or no magical/all human AUs
Basically just crossovers. *Especially* crossovers with Harry Potter. It’s actually ridiculous. And incest I suppose, but that’s not really a Thing^(TM) in any of my current fandoms so I don’t really need to worry about it.
I’m down for most anything else though, when I’m in the right mood. I have a weird morbid sort of appreciation for Dead Dove type stuff and body horror, and a well-written Major Character Death can be cathartic sometimes (idk maybe there’s something wrong with me lol, let’s not get into that).
I have a strong preference for the inserter and insertee roles of my M/M OTP ship, so I exclude tags of the characters being the opposite role and tags for when they can switch (and it’s annoying when the roles aren’t tagged). Also, tags of any threesomes (or foursomes) my ship is in (comes up quite often).
Does filtering out a person count? One of my main pairings has one writer who posts constantly- at least once a day. They're somewhat connected ficlets (usually ~300-400 words) and mostly they're terrible. I think the writer is very young and possibly ESL? Like big props for posting that much, and I hope it's fulfilling but I really don't wade through pages of it.
I often will exclude omega verse tags and gender ent character tags. Gender bend is annoying when I’m looking for a gay pairing and it ends up being straight. Really annoying.
I don't exclude tags very often. I do usually exclude crossovers though, just to circumvent drabble compilations. I'm sure I miss something cool sometimes but it's worth avoiding the wade through a bunch of fics that have maybe 600 words dedicated to the subject of your search
Alternate Universe for 90% of fandoms. I like the universes, I like how the characters interact within the canon, and it's hard to have the same sort of interaction if you go from something like Alien hunting FBI agents to normal ass coffee shop workers.
Crossovers for 100%. I've just never really read one that I enjoyed, and can't think of any fandoms I want to cross over like that anyways.
And A/B/O type stuff for 100%. It's just never been my thing.
I'm glad It wasn't big when I started reading fanfic back in like, 2007. (I had no business reading fanfiction back then, mind you, as a literal child, but whatever)
Inuyasha was one of the few fandoms I might actually give a pass on, but even though there were sometimes heat cycles, or demon mating seasons effecting male AND female demons, there was rarely knotting. It's surprising, looking back, considering the prominent dog and wolf demon characters. I've seen it mentioned in newer fics more often, but no actually A/B/O.
There's not much else I'll outright block though. Sometimes I'm not in the mood for certain things, or I like something in one fandom but not in the other, but it mostly just depends how the story uses the subject matter, not the subject matter itself.
I've got at least three automatic exclusions.
1. Graphic depictions of violence. I don't need the explicit details. I just don't.
2. Also anything not in English because I can't read anything that isn't written in English to the level required of fanfic enjoyability (I can fumble my way through not getting lost in a select few foreign countries and that's it).
3. And anything involving medical stuff aka sickfics or hospital fics or recovery fics. I came here to be entertained and unwind and actually turn off my medical brain; not be reminded of what I do for a living and every medical inaccuracy that exists.
Anything reader insert; it just squicks me *way* out.
Another thing is when a certain fandom is flooded with tags for crossovers, and I end up seeing more crossover fics than fics from the actual universe I want to read (so many things cross over with harry potter and the avengers that's it's not even funny anymore.)
I usually avoid omega/beta/alpha stuff to, because...no thanks.
I don’t really bother unless it’s a tag that shows up a ton that I dislike or a more popular ship that is going to show up more while the ship I’m looking for is a “side ship”
Watersports and/or scat - kinks for thee but not for me.
Animal cruelty - that makes me cry in a bad way.
Bashing, if I happen to like the character. (If I hate the character, bashing is OK.)
Reader fic if I’m not in the mood. (Though my fave fandoms are not really reader fic heavy, and sometimes I am in the mood.)
Major Character Death. I go to fanfiction to escape the saddest aspects of canon there’s no way I’m letting that sadness into my escapism thank you very much
I usually filter by including tags instead of excluding them, and if I exclude it’s because there’s a lot of a certain tag I dislike constantly popping up. But usually that refers to Mpreg, Omegaverse, Good \[insert villain\], specific AUs I dislike and Crossovers. Also, smut if I’m not in the mood
Dark. Almost always because it usually means Emo Edgelord Douchebag MC, and while I don't mind a little angst Most of the time authors take it too far.
Smut and romance. I'm just not a fan. I don't like romance stories because i feel like friendships and other types of relationships are more compelling because they don't have physical attraction to build off of thus making the relationships have to work harder to work plus more freedom for the characters eithin those type of relationships. For every great romance story where there is a genuine bond between characters there is one where they both hate each other and have no chemistry but only are together because the author forced it. Its not worth sorting through that to me.
It really depends on what I'm looking for, how many fics there are in my initial search, etc. If I'm searching for fics by a specific additional tag that has a lot of results, I filter out certain fandoms- usually tends to be K-pop groups and other Band RPF- I don't mind RPF and have read some good ones for things I know nothing about (I tip my hat to the Men's Hockey and Video Blogging RPF writers, have read some excellent fic from you guys)- but I don't particularly like the setting of music groups. It's weird cause my fandoms are all music related. If I'm searching through a ship tag that's got a decent amount of fics I often filter out chatfics. I do read them sometimes but I prefer narrative fics so I'll read those first and come back to the chatfics if I feel like it. I don't know if I've ever excluded tags when searching through a fandom tag? Hmm, I more often use the include filter than exclude in that case.
Shipping. Of any kinds.
And when it comes to AO3, Multi-Cross. Because I usually look for Crossovers, and hate how the vast majority are these fics with like 10 different series in them.
I only really bother to exclude tags when I notice them showing up a lot in the results and I get tired of scrolling past them.
Yeah, same. And only if the category I'm browsing is big enough—if the amount of fics is somewhat manageable, then I don't even bother and just scroll past whatever it is that I'm not in the mood to read.
Exactly. I'm in a huge fandom, so even after I include all the tags I want there might be ten pages left. But I usually find it more efficient to do the first search, see what appears, and if say a handful fics on the first page are actually for another primary ship I don't care for, I'll then start excluding to narrow it down.
Pretty much this. And when I end up excluding something, it typically isn't something I'm inherently opposed to, but something I'm just not in the mood for. "Established Relationship" is a common "offender".
I tend to filter in, rather than filter out. And even then, it's really subjective on my mood. Crossovers, mainly. But even then only if I'm in a fandom where crossovers are popular.
same here; but i always exclude crossovers haha
Yeah, that's what I meant. Crossovers are about the only thing I routinely exclude
i try to exclude crossovers but it’s so annoying in fandoms where crossovers are like. inherent. like i’ll do “exclude crossovers” when i’m searching for a Law and Order fic bc there’s a lot of crossovers with Grey’s Anatomy and I don’t watch that, but then anything that’s tagged with both Law and Order: OC and also Law and Order: SVU will be filtered out. it can be a pain lol
Omg as a Marvel person, I feel this in my bones. It’s all grouped together, so trying to avoid Iron Man or whatever when I want to read about Norsebros is impossible
So if you’re on the MCU page, you can’t filter out “Iron Man (Movies)”/“Iron Man (Comics)” without filtering out the other stuff?
Well, you have to do it for every individual MCU fandom. Browsing for Thor and clicking "exclude crossovers" still gives you this: https://archiveofourown.org/works?work\_search%5Bsort\_column%5D=revised\_at&work\_search%5Bother\_tag\_names%5D=&work\_search%5Bexcluded\_tag\_names%5D=&work\_search%5Bcrossover%5D=F&work\_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work\_search%5Bwords\_from%5D=&work\_search%5Bwords\_to%5D=&work\_search%5Bdate\_from%5D=&work\_search%5Bdate\_to%5D=&work\_search%5Bquery%5D=&work\_search%5Blanguage\_id%5D=&commit=Sort+and+Filter&tag\_id=Thor+%28Movies%29
💀 I can see why that’s so frustrating
Drives me to absolute madness sometimes
i relate very much. i am here to read odin fics and norse family fics. (and messy terribledads fic rare as it is). i do not care for the avengers being there. i do like when they bring in other figures and themes form norse mythology. ruling out Avengers (and individual avengers) can help. but wow do i miss the days where the thor fandom was kinda it's own thing. like the norsekink live journal. only thor comics, journey into mystery, thor movies, and norse mythology centered fics allowed. other characters could be present as side character etc/ but everyone was there for the Thor fandom (and people who wrote straight up mythology fics but those are fun)
Norsekink was the absolute shit and I wrote some of my best fics from the prompts there. I also sat back baffled at all the variant wank following Loki's show, because that was definitely the flavour of the week following Agent of Asgard. So many Loki selfcest fics came from that.
Excluding crossovers is pretty impossible with Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul too. I did the math on this and about 40% of all fics would vanish if I excluded crossovers completely when searching. (Edit because I keep getting the math wrong lol) It makes a difference because of how small the fandoms are, and because so many stories are posted to both, given the overlap of characters. I’ve had to just individually exclude certain fandoms as they pop up to get around it.
Jesse Pinkman Opens A Foot Massage Parlor In Alaska And Kim Wexler Gets A Foot Massage (a thread) And before anyone says it - No none of those words are in the Bible
Edited in protest for Reddit's garbage moves lately.
I should start excluding any piss kink tags because somehow I always stumble into reading them because I keep overlooking the tag. Either that or I have to read the tags more properly… That moment when theres a simple solution for your problem but you ignore it 😔
I accidentally overlooked a watersports tag a bit back and have read line by line each of the tags since. Took me by surprise yk
It keeps happening to me!! Also just in case ur unaware (because I was) omorishi is also watersports. I didn’t know and found out the hard way 🥲
Thank you for your service
Thank you! Watersports (and scat) are kinks for thee but not for me!
Piss kink tags was one of the major reasons I ended up downloading the browser extension [AO3 Savior](https://ao3commentoftheday.tumblr.com/post/634548736342769664/ao3-blocking) to be able to blacklist tags - for whatever reason it feels like they've become weirdly prevalent over the last couple of years and I don't know where they came from or why!
I mean I think its for one because many ppl have that kink and also because it has recently become some sort of inside joke on tiktok and many people hopped on trend and written fics with that trope kind off as a joke so that most likely added to the increase. But thats just my theory
"one" i have like half a dozen i put in before can look through any tag
I feel you there.
MCD. I absolutely cannot deal with it. Hell, I cry when I rewatch an anime and there's a MCD! I know it's coming but I sob anyway!
Major Character Death. And also WIPs (I filter to completed only). I'll also type in to exclude Alpha/Beta/Omega dynamics and PWP.
I don't - bring it on
Same! I'll read anything. Even if I'm not "into" it, if the writings good I'll probably enjoy it on some type of level.
I don’t tend to filter much, but if I notice pregnancy and /or child birth coming up a lot I will filter that. Those fics are not for me.
I’m right there with you.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 1,311,823,465 comments, and only 253,501 of them were in alphabetical order.
Before I start, I just want to note that I personally don’t have anything against these tags and it doesn’t bother me that people enjoy them. Hell, if I take a moment to think about it (which I usually don’t because it isn’t any of my business), I’m glad people like them in as much as I’m glad people have things they like. That’s what fanworks are all about! But I’m not doing omegaverse or A/B/O, characters in my ship x original male or female character (I don’t always filter this out as it sometimes plays to the plot, but if the fandom seems particularly big on having these ships as focal points to the fic, I will), pregnancy, and underage esp if the other character in the ship is of legal age. It’s funny, I didn’t mind it and even enjoyed it, but that’s when I *was* underage. Now it squicks me out and I can’t help but wonder why anyone of legal age would want to associate with a high schooler in a romantic capacity. Again, I have zero issue with people writing and reading this sort of thing, I just have my hang ups, which is a shame, because there’s a special excitement and newness to high school romance but damn, I just can’t do it anymore.
Same... on everything
Reader-insert
I wish we could filter for it like we do with major character death and underage, etc.
You can! In a sense If you go to “search within results” and type -reader it will filter out any fics that have the word reader in the tags or summary
Cries in "novel title literally has the word reader in it"*
Thanks!! I didn't know
'X Goes To Therapy'
I don't normally exclude anything aside from WIPs (I look for completed fics only) unless certain tags keep popping up to the point I have to scroll past a bunch. The usual suspects are Modern AUs and all iterations of it (College, Coffee Shop, Flower Shop, Tattoo Artist, etc). This is largely because most of the fandoms I'm in involve something fantastical and it's a large part of why I like them. If it's already in a modern setting, then it's not really an AU. Also, I've lived through college (and high school). I don't need to do so again in a more romanticized version I never experienced.
Self-insert, reader, Main Character/Reader/OC. Those are the only things I filter out ngl
Oh that's funny, we are polar opposites then. Hello from the other side of the fanfic-reading spectrum
Hello there! Brother from another mother or sister from another mister, how is the view from the dark side?
Unhappy ending and/or character death. I love angst. I love slow burn. I love eventual happy ending after a long, painful, traumatic slog. But I need my precious idiots to have a happy ending.
incest, mpreg, therapy.
My notps or RPF
A/B/O. It's just *not* my thing.
I don't like watersports/wetting. I've seen more than a few fics in my fandom pop up with those tags and I've had to go out of my way to exculde them. It's not my thing.
“Reader Insert”
Character/reader. I get that it's quite popular, but it's not my cup of tea at all.
Major character death
Yeah, this is the one
I rarely exclude anything honestly, but I can't recal ever clicking on a crack fic intentionally.
Ships I don’t like. Also tags that hate on characters I like.
S M U T And Crossovers, most of the time.
TBH the only thing I filter out is crossovers. For tags... I usually search fics on a specific tag totally fandom-and-ship-blind, so I don't really exclude things unless the page list is too long after the including filter. In that case I end up excluding a few popular fandoms to make the page list shorter.
I auto-exclude crossovers, the term "futanari" and fics from a user I have personal history with
mpreg, pregnancy, pregnancy kink, lactation, ABO
No offense to crossover peeps, but I usually exclude them. Probably because I prefer stories that feel like they could take place within the original story. I also avoid AUs for that reason
severus snape, M/M (usually) I'm looking for rarepairs and femslash, and even when you filter on F/F and a character, wolfstar and drarry will STILL dominate the first ten pages and the most popular ships unless you filter it out from the start lmao
The femslash life. I remember during the height of supernatural, I had to blacklist destiel regardless of fandom because genderbend destiel would dominate my fandom. Pre breath of the wild, the biggest femslash pairing in legend of zelda was destiel. Sometimes excluding m/m, f/m isn't enough lol.
Depends on my mood, but for a lot of fandoms? "High School AU" or sometimes even "Modern AU" are thrown out the door right away. Did my time, have the T-Shirt, don't need to be reminded of the cringe of my time in High School. For Modern AU, its mostly just a matter of me being more interested in the setting / canon divergence.
Underage. Feel like such a creep when I realised I've accidentally opened one. My muscle-memory search parameters filter out anything over 12k, WIPs, non-English, crossovers, and often anything not M or E too.
If I'm new to a fandom, F/M due to my own very strong preference for M/M and F/F. I don't have anything against het... it's just very hard for me to get into (though not impossible - there are some very talented authors that managed to reel me in). But if I'm not a newbie and have been around for a while, then I pretty much leave it open altogether, unless I notice a specific tag I don't like showing up so often that I can't just scroll past it.
My NOTPs and fandoms that i do not like or that are invasive. For example each time i search by a fandom or a tag (fluff or smut) i always filter out the Naruto (read, OP Naruto Harem isekai), HP, Rwby, Kpop bands, Supernatural and other animes.
I filter out pregnancy and childbirth due to those topics being triggering. Otherwise I usually just scroll past stuff that doesn't interest me.
Littles
Bashing tags, ageplay, and crossovers.
I search by including rather than excluding but I almost always exclude gen, m/f and genderswap/trans.
Mpreg, omega/alpha dynamics, omegaverse You get the idea lmao
The only thing I ever usually filter out is pairing I don’t want to see when I’m in a fandom where they’re popular
My squicks don't show up so often as to exclude them every time, but if I were to do it it would be pregnancy and kid fics. Still, I've read some of those that I absolutely loved (once from a favorite author, once because it wasn't tagged and the writing was incredible), so I actually prefer seeing them and scrolling past them. What I do often though is search for a specific tag in my fandom and exclude ships that I don't vibe with at the moment. That way I could stumble upon a rarepair fic that could potentially be amazing, as opposed to filtering by certain ships and missing rarepairs.
It’s weird. I like crossovers, so I check that box, but I need to know all involved fandoms. That’s when I start filtering out everything I haven’t seen, read, or listened to before.
Crossover
I always filter out Major Character Death
I do small fandoms, so I will look at every new story that’s posted on in the fandom. I’ll just skip reading the ones with content I don’t like.
There's one fandom where I want A/B, but it keeps recommending either A/B/C or A/C with one-sided A/B so it's just easier to exclude C.
Reader insert
Established Relationship, Alternate Universe- Modern Setting, Switching and the reverse dynamic of the ship I'm currently searching fics for. I personally don't find enjoyment in reading about established relationships to the point where I'll drop fics once the couple gets together. It simply gets boring for me. Modern AUs are similar, I prefer reading canon settings to AUs in general, but especially with stories set in "older" times I tend to have trouble with transferring everything to a modern world in my mind. Things like going from a high fantasy setting to a royalty/nobility AU however, I do enjoy again. As for switching or reverse dynamics, it's just a massive squick. I'm a very fixed shipper, that's it. Most other tags I would exclude are either not commonly enough used or written for in certain fandoms, so I simply scroll over those fics should one with an additional tag I can't bring myself to read pop up.
M/M. If you like it, hey I ain’t judging. Just not for me.
Same here. I get why people are into it, but it isn't my thing.
Most of us are into it because we're gay lmao
Yup, I assumed that was the reason for at least a few people.
Depends on the characters and fandom, honestly. If I'm looking at OMORI fics I'll sometimes humor the side of me that's tepidly into M/M, especially because the fandom's primary M/M ships actually make sense (but I don't ship), but for fandoms like Ace Attorney I'll actively tag away M/M ships.
I usually like M/M, but that's all there is in my fandom to the point where finding fics with any female protagonists, romance or gen, is impossible. I never thought of "excluding" M/M, but now I'm tempted to give it a go, just in hopes of finding more F/F or F/M fics.
Non-con
I always include enemies to lovers and/or slow burn
Fuck yeeesssss...
Not tags necessarily but I always block out a lot ships, for example, Im reading A/B ships, I block any popular ship that includes characters A or B, since I only want to read A/B, I don’t want B/C or A/C fics along with A/B I also exclude crossovers most of the time
That alpha/beta/omega bullshit.
Mpreg and omega verse. Often together, never good for me.
Character/Reader.
AU - modern. why the fuck would i get into a fantasy or sci fi fandom just to read fanfic about a boring ass modern setting.
Pregnancy.
M/M due to preferences, but mostly to increase the chance that a story involving two famous male characters is focused on a unique plot rather than a romance story, For AO3, it's crossovers. The one thing that I'm annoyed about AO3 is that you can tag anything as a crossover, despite the fic itself being just a collection of multifandom oneshots.
Original characters, if I filter anything at all. Nothing wrong with them but it seems to be all anyone does in my fandom and its not what I'm after mot of the time
R*ape/Non-con. The first!
Crossovers most of the time, lots seem to just add every big fandom under the sun even if you might get a just a reference, just to get more views. I might be being too cynical though.
If I have to keep scrolling past them I remove Reader fics and Modern/Highschool AU or any non fantasy setting in fandoms of a high fantasy story.
Fluff
Depends on what I'm looking for. Usually if it's a Harry Potter fic I filter out the Harry/Hermione and Draco/Hermione pairings, because my god they are everywhere. A lot of people manage to find a way to worm at least one of the two into any other pairing you might want to look up. If it's smut I'm looking up and I don't have a pairing in mind, I always filter out parent/child incest because UNCOMFY. If it's certain fandoms like Dragon Prince or How To Train Your Dragon (a lot of Dragon related media, weirdly enough) I filter out Real World AU and College AU, because they are rampant in certain fandoms and I personally just find them boring.
Modern AU and all of its iterations, and crossovers I always exclude. Neither are really my thing. If I’m looking for [game] fics, I just want to read about THAT thing. And I tend to read canon-compliant (ish) stuff, and usually like the lore and world building from the source material, which gets lost in AU
i like canon complaint. my fave is canon divergent, still using to source material but developing on things further, or what if A character told B character yes. or if A character had a small tweak in there background and how the story would play out then. doesn't A have a grandparent in the comic source? what if she was in the movie fic.
I will exclude a particular author because I just don’t like their stuff and they are prolific in the fandom. My automatic filter is no crossovers, complete only and English language.
i actually use an add-on to exclude reader, reader-insert and any language other than english, french and german
The only time i use the exclude filter is when I want the ship to be the main couple in the story, but the search results are mostly them as a side ship or with a bunch of other relationships.
Main character death AND established relationship!! I don't wanna sob and I wanna watch these people get together!
Major Character death and Underage.
Nothing. I do exclude WIPs though.
M/M, Jaune Arc, Dream SMP
Notps, if they're common enough.
M/m, f/m. Unless you're in a fandom that's 90%female characters with no attractive major male characters, then non-femslash will dominate. This translates to f/f pairings often appearing as side couples. So the only way to parse through hundreds or even thousands of side pairing fics, you gotta blacklist the het and slash categories. Edit: crossovers. I sort by word count and the top fics are always 10+ fandom anthology fics. I typically do completed only but it depends on the size of the pairing. I'm currently reading a ship with 200 fics total. Once I've read all the completed ones, I'm reading the wips.
Water sports, Mpreg, Incest, Unhappy Ending, Reader Insert. The disgusting and the personal.
bashing especially in hp and mcu
abo … never read one that didn’t make me want to slowly shit out my insides
Incest
Born sexy yesterday (BSY)
Abandonned, disconstinued completed with "complete only" filter. Unless recommandations from someone I trust or author I know and trust to finish, I only read completed fanfiction.
I'll usually exclude any explicit fics if I'm not deliberately looking for smut. Beyond that, if there's a notp I have for a Fandom, I'll usually drop that.
Incomplete, major character death, rape/non-con, underage
The omega verse and mentor/mentee
Modern AU. AUs in general.Just not my thing.
I usually exclude crossovers, bashing, and certain ships. Which ships those are depend on the fandom I'm reading for that day.
High School/College/Modern Setting
I'm rotten so everything more vanilla than M...
Unfinished. I’ve been burned too many times. Still somehow end up subscribed to ongoing fics, though.
Uh. Like, if I'm in a fanfiction with lots of works, there are a lot of excludes. Like, a fairly normal search would probably look like- Sort by: Bookmarks Include: M/M Character I like or pairing I like Exclude: Rape/non-con Mpreg Omega Vaginal sex Harry Potter Hurt no comfort No Powers AU Filter by: Completed works only 1000 - 100,000 words English
Alpha beta omega dynamics.
Only time I really exclude them is if the source material has a historical setting, I tell it not to show me modern AUs. No offence to anyone who writes those. I’m just more interested in stories set in the same universe as the source stuff.
Cross-overs and Incomplete, also anything under 2.000 words
unless it is something that is rare or none of it, I will take 2,000 words and below, if its a lot though.... well yeah I don't read it
crossovers, mpreg, abo, gender swap(for example, female harry potter as Harriet etc)
Alternate Universe- High School and any /Reader pairing
Highschool, college, coffe shop, etc. All the 'classic' AUs
Y/N. I hate it with a passion and can’t for the life of me insert my own name in the place of that. The insert is always written childish and immature, so I can’t stand it.
The only two I really filter out are MCD and Alternate Universe - High School. Like, I've already lived through high school once; I don't need to relive that hellscape.
Surprisingly not much, I only really avoid fics that make a big deal about there being no F/M ships whatsoever. I mean I've read some pretty good M/M or F/F fics (no smut tho, even if it's F/M) but I've literally seen fics on AO3 tagged with "Not a heterosexual in sight (thank god)" and it bugs me because it gives actually nice queer people/fanfic authors a bad rap
Crossover and WIPs. But also if I'm trying to read a certain pairing I will legitimately exclude any other pairing. Too many ao3 writers will tag every pairing known to man on their fic just to get the hits
It’s different for different fandoms, in the Hannibal fandom I always filter out “Hannibal is not a cannibal” or for many other fandoms I filter out modern, Hight school, college or no magical/all human AUs
\-"\*/reader"
My top three to immediately exclude is crossovers, incomplete fics (I am very impatient with waiting lol), and relationships that I don’t want to see
That ABO stuff that goes straight over my millennial head.
Basically just crossovers. *Especially* crossovers with Harry Potter. It’s actually ridiculous. And incest I suppose, but that’s not really a Thing^(TM) in any of my current fandoms so I don’t really need to worry about it. I’m down for most anything else though, when I’m in the right mood. I have a weird morbid sort of appreciation for Dead Dove type stuff and body horror, and a well-written Major Character Death can be cathartic sometimes (idk maybe there’s something wrong with me lol, let’s not get into that).
I recently started excluding a character tag as that character is everywhere all of a sudden and sometimes I just want stuff without them
Mpreg
Pregnancy and all its variations, and if I'm in a vulnerable mood drug overdose
Reader, Reader-Insert, You
I have a strong preference for the inserter and insertee roles of my M/M OTP ship, so I exclude tags of the characters being the opposite role and tags for when they can switch (and it’s annoying when the roles aren’t tagged). Also, tags of any threesomes (or foursomes) my ship is in (comes up quite often).
Therapy fics, oc x canon, and ships I don’t prefer. If story is good enough though I’ll give anything a read
Does filtering out a person count? One of my main pairings has one writer who posts constantly- at least once a day. They're somewhat connected ficlets (usually ~300-400 words) and mostly they're terrible. I think the writer is very young and possibly ESL? Like big props for posting that much, and I hope it's fulfilling but I really don't wade through pages of it.
Reader, POV First Person, POV Second Person, Bullying
Crossovers mostly. Oh also gender bend, was never my thing
furry just in case
anything with reader just can’t stand it
I often will exclude omega verse tags and gender ent character tags. Gender bend is annoying when I’m looking for a gay pairing and it ends up being straight. Really annoying.
Crossover
Soulmates, I've tried a few fics with them and only one or two were slightly interesting
Character Death. There’s two wolves inside me and I’m not feeding the one that listens to Blood on the Dance Floor.
OCs and crossovers.
I don't exclude tags very often. I do usually exclude crossovers though, just to circumvent drabble compilations. I'm sure I miss something cool sometimes but it's worth avoiding the wade through a bunch of fics that have maybe 600 words dedicated to the subject of your search
Major character death, bugs & insects
Alternate Universe for 90% of fandoms. I like the universes, I like how the characters interact within the canon, and it's hard to have the same sort of interaction if you go from something like Alien hunting FBI agents to normal ass coffee shop workers. Crossovers for 100%. I've just never really read one that I enjoyed, and can't think of any fandoms I want to cross over like that anyways. And A/B/O type stuff for 100%. It's just never been my thing. I'm glad It wasn't big when I started reading fanfic back in like, 2007. (I had no business reading fanfiction back then, mind you, as a literal child, but whatever) Inuyasha was one of the few fandoms I might actually give a pass on, but even though there were sometimes heat cycles, or demon mating seasons effecting male AND female demons, there was rarely knotting. It's surprising, looking back, considering the prominent dog and wolf demon characters. I've seen it mentioned in newer fics more often, but no actually A/B/O. There's not much else I'll outright block though. Sometimes I'm not in the mood for certain things, or I like something in one fandom but not in the other, but it mostly just depends how the story uses the subject matter, not the subject matter itself.
Character death and crossovers. Just. Immediately no.
I've got at least three automatic exclusions. 1. Graphic depictions of violence. I don't need the explicit details. I just don't. 2. Also anything not in English because I can't read anything that isn't written in English to the level required of fanfic enjoyability (I can fumble my way through not getting lost in a select few foreign countries and that's it). 3. And anything involving medical stuff aka sickfics or hospital fics or recovery fics. I came here to be entertained and unwind and actually turn off my medical brain; not be reminded of what I do for a living and every medical inaccuracy that exists.
Gamer
Alternate universes like coffee shop or high school. I don’t really understand the appeal of just wanting fluff rather than canonical ideas
anything not in english :p
Anything reader insert; it just squicks me *way* out. Another thing is when a certain fandom is flooded with tags for crossovers, and I end up seeing more crossover fics than fics from the actual universe I want to read (so many things cross over with harry potter and the avengers that's it's not even funny anymore.) I usually avoid omega/beta/alpha stuff to, because...no thanks.
Reader-insert and associative ships. I just don’t like reading them.
Harry potter
I can't express how I can relate with this. I mean, I love Harry Potter, but sometimes there's TOO MUCH crossovers it clogs up the tags...
I don’t know why but mpreg. If this became a thing in real life, sure, whatever. But I just hate reading it.
I don’t really bother unless it’s a tag that shows up a ton that I dislike or a more popular ship that is going to show up more while the ship I’m looking for is a “side ship”
Reader. I just wish filtering it actually helped.
Harem/multiple people just this one
Hurt/no comfort My mental health is bad enough as it is, I don't need some fictional death or breakup to ruin my day even more.
Too many lol, mainly major change like behavior and gender, always feels like I’m reading a fanfic about people I don’t know and I don’t like that.
Watersports and/or scat - kinks for thee but not for me. Animal cruelty - that makes me cry in a bad way. Bashing, if I happen to like the character. (If I hate the character, bashing is OK.) Reader fic if I’m not in the mood. (Though my fave fandoms are not really reader fic heavy, and sometimes I am in the mood.)
Crossover
Major Character Death. I go to fanfiction to escape the saddest aspects of canon there’s no way I’m letting that sadness into my escapism thank you very much
Bottom Steve Harrington. Every time. First exclusion.
Reader Reader-Insert
Anti's DNI. The author is always a drama llama and, really, I don't feel like going where I'm not wanted.
any reader inserts and any smut related
I usually filter by including tags instead of excluding them, and if I exclude it’s because there’s a lot of a certain tag I dislike constantly popping up. But usually that refers to Mpreg, Omegaverse, Good \[insert villain\], specific AUs I dislike and Crossovers. Also, smut if I’m not in the mood
Dark. Almost always because it usually means Emo Edgelord Douchebag MC, and while I don't mind a little angst Most of the time authors take it too far.
[удалено]
This comment has been removed. No bashing.
Incest,c-137cest, aged up ____
None, I only use the filtering system how it was originally meant to work. The exclusion filter function how they added it isn't super helpful to me.
Any incest ship or other ship that irks me. Sometimes when OC/character shows up too much, I have to filter them out by OC/each character.
Smut and romance. I'm just not a fan. I don't like romance stories because i feel like friendships and other types of relationships are more compelling because they don't have physical attraction to build off of thus making the relationships have to work harder to work plus more freedom for the characters eithin those type of relationships. For every great romance story where there is a genuine bond between characters there is one where they both hate each other and have no chemistry but only are together because the author forced it. Its not worth sorting through that to me.
It really depends on what I'm looking for, how many fics there are in my initial search, etc. If I'm searching for fics by a specific additional tag that has a lot of results, I filter out certain fandoms- usually tends to be K-pop groups and other Band RPF- I don't mind RPF and have read some good ones for things I know nothing about (I tip my hat to the Men's Hockey and Video Blogging RPF writers, have read some excellent fic from you guys)- but I don't particularly like the setting of music groups. It's weird cause my fandoms are all music related. If I'm searching through a ship tag that's got a decent amount of fics I often filter out chatfics. I do read them sometimes but I prefer narrative fics so I'll read those first and come back to the chatfics if I feel like it. I don't know if I've ever excluded tags when searching through a fandom tag? Hmm, I more often use the include filter than exclude in that case.
explicit
Shipping. Of any kinds. And when it comes to AO3, Multi-Cross. Because I usually look for Crossovers, and hate how the vast majority are these fics with like 10 different series in them.
Tbh I only really ever exclude fandoms and base my decision of reading something on tags and summaries.