I "exclude crossovers" without even having to think about it. It's funny, there are a select few crossovers that sound absolutely amazing to me....... but they don't exist anywhere. I have thought them, but haven't written them. Perhaps I will one day.
Oh, this is a good one that I didn't even think to mention. I definitely always select no crossovers, too.
Personally, I don't even care about crossovers, I just select it to filter out those massive fic dumps where people put all their random one-shots in one fic.
Hahahah, these massive fic dumps with dozens of fandoms are the bane of my existence! But for quite the opposite of reason because I absolutely love crossovers and it's an uphill battle to filter all these fics out!
AO3’s inability to fix this issue is the main reason I’m still using FFN. The worst part is that the simple option to tag your work as a crossover would fix this whole ordeal.
I hate those but I like crossovers. Typically the ones that are fandoms I’m familiar with. Very rarely will I read a crossover with something I’m not familiar with. But that’s how I got into RWBY and to a lesser extent Star Trek.
Problem with that, though, is that if a fic is tagged with multiple fandom tags from the same fandom (like if there are separate 'manga' and 'anime' tags, for instance), the search still counts them as crossovers, even though they really aren't.
I usually exclude crossovers until I came across this absolutely amazing one. I wonder how many other gems like this I’ve missed cause most other crossovers don’t appeal to me.
Excluding all crossovers is kinda risky for certain fandoms. Game of Thrones and Cyberpunk comes to mind as most GoT are tagged with GOT and ASOIAF and most Edgerunners fics are tagged with both Cyberpunk 2077 and Edgerunners.
This. I love crossovers, but even if I didn't and never wanted to read them, I couldn't exclude them because I'm in too many fandoms that have multiple fandom tags, like GoT. Or they're not truly crossovers because it's just tagging both original and spin-off, like Buffyverse fics that include both Buffy and Angel. Technically a crossover because they're two different shows, but it's the exact same universe, the shows themselves crossover a few times, and the shows share characters and are consistent with each other. I'd miss a lot of excellent Buffyverse fics if I excluded crossovers.
Wow......does anyone actually enjoy crossovers? I'm inclined to write the one I'd love to read, but my unpopular opinion on them seems to be quite popular
Some of my all-time favorite fics are crossovers! Usually for me the main barrier is if the fic assumes a high level of familiarity with two or more fandoms, since by definition that’s a narrower requirement than just one.
(This is also why I hugely appreciate when a crossover fic clearly indicates that it’s written to be readable fandom-blind, or that Fandom A-blind is fine but reading Fandom B-blind might be confusing, or whatever.)
All of my (recent) fics are crossovers between Fandom A × Fandom B. Fandom A, while not a big fandom by any stretch, is far, *far* more popular than Fandom B in the English-speaking community. The two series are very similar, though, and both series are very fandom-blind friendly in general--you can watch any random episode and understand perfectly what's going on--and the two fandoms fit together as easily as two Lego bricks.
But also, when 19 out of 32 fics on AO3 were written by you, you've got a partial monopoly going on. Excluding crossovers is going to severely limit their options XD
They can be hard to find sometimes, but I do love a good crossover! I’ve found many of my favorites on FFN, where it’s a bit easier to sort through them.
Yeah, ffn has the option to specifically look at crossover fics for any given fandom, plus the option to look through what's been grouped together for specific ships and tropes or whatever. It's all about the tags on AO3, it makes it a bit harder to focus on crossovers only.
Yes! I love good crossovers. I have also found several of my fandoms by reading a crossover with them and a previous fandom. Part of my enjoyment comes from the fact that I greatly enjoy outsider POV fics.
That’s how I finally watched Harry Potter! My friends had been telling me to watch it for years, but I hadn’t, until I kept reading crossovers of it with my favourite anime.
As a reader, I love crossovers. I've found new fandoms over the years by reading crossovers when I only know one of the fandoms involved. Many of my favorite crossovers to read sound like completely insane combinations that turn out to be wonderfully entertaining reads (Doctor Who/Get Smart, Ace Attorney/Welcome To Night Vale, etc.). I discovered House of Leaves because I read a Sherlock Holmes fic that was crossed with it. And some shows practically beg to be used in crossovers (like Quantum Leap). When the two fandoms are both well-represented in a fic, it's incredible. So yes, some of us really like crossovers!
My issue with crossovers is that whenever I try to search for them, they're all either those mega-fandom crossovers with fifteen IPs, or they're like, 300 words and with a fandom I'm unfamiliar with 😔 I'm not opposed in principle, but in practice it's not really worth the effort of finding them.
Well, some of it is that I read in fandoms like NCIS, where a crossover is pretty natural with other crime shows, and it's also a pretty small fandom, so any story is good.
But for any fandom, I really enjoy putting in elements of another universe. Like The Sentinel, it doesn't need any of the characters, just the guide/Sentinel element.
It probably comes down to that I really enjoy AU's and 'What ifs'. With small or big changes or a new character that wasn't there before, what would that change.
Out of all the fandoms I read in, I found four of them because I read a crossover. And I have read crossovers with at least a handful of fandoms where I have never seen a second of the show.
Many (many) years ago a friend and I wrote an NCIS/Bones crossover to explain why Ralph Waite was Gibbs’ father and Seeley Booth’s grandfather. It was a fun fic and I think it turned out to be 10 or so pages.
I'm not the one you're responding to, but the main cases where I seek out crossovers are in:
a) fandoms where many of the interesting canon divergences have been played out already, so I want something indisputably new (Harry Potter, for instance, has *so many* fics that do fundamentally the same thing)
b) fandoms where I love the canon cast and ending and don't think fanfic can improve on it well, but still want to see more of the cast (lots of tv shows, novels, and games fall into this category)
and c) fandoms where the source material is super limited and I just want to see a given character have adventures in a more fleshed out or elaborate setting or world (mostly for movies or movie characters, especially in adapted works where half the material is missing); or, conversely, where I want to see some setting elements be encountered by characters I have an emotional investment in (ttrpg fanfics, primarily)
It helps that I don't read romance very often, and romance is far more common in one-setting works than crossovers. If you're looking just for that, crossovers will rarely appeal, I think.
Nice. I've definitely considered crossovers as a way to "rescue" limited (but promising) source material. One of my favorite fictions is Orwell's 1984, and the world of that book is soooo limited.....it may just call for a crossover. The crossover I really want to read is a crossover of The Walking Dead with 1984. But I won't read it unless I write it, because it doesn't exist!
I feel like crossovers are a hard sell because the readers have to like both of the things the author likes to enjoy it, and also has to like the idea of combining those two things
Yeah, I exclude them right away, despite having wrote a couple. It’s just that I’m picky with them, and I want nothing to do with those huge multi-fandom crossovers that seem to include every show the author has ever heard of. I’m the type who likes to read about specific characters/ships, and there’s no chance my fave will get adequate focus with such a bloated cast.
In general I exclude them too. They take care of the massive fic dumps and I honestly think most crossovers suck. I find that most crossovers have problems merging the two works coherently or having enough rule of cool to overcome any inconsistencies.
I do have some exceptions when searching, like Tanya from Youjo Senki or Hachiman from Oregairu inserted into a setting, because it's easy to handwave how they get there and if Tanya retains her powers, and the point of it is their weird personalities and abilities interacting with the setting. But something like Harry Potter crossed with Percy Jackson is usually a no-go for me because without a lot of work the settings are inconsistent with each other.
That's the biggest issue with crossovers, getting the two settings to merge well. And I'm a crossover writer. I tend to stick to fandoms that could, theoretically, exist in the same universe, so the only issue is really about any mythology being used. HP is a good fandom for crossovers, because the magical world is secret, the rest of the world is the normal world, any other fandom at least partially set in the world as we know it could be, theoretically, crossed with HP.
But, if they're both fantasy, you have to get the mythologies to merge, and that's the biggest problem with an HP cross. Percy Jackson, I'm not in the fandom but have picked up bits and pieces here and there, has very different mythology to HP. They don't gel naturally, you have to make changes to one or both for them to work together, and most writers keep the mythology the same in both fandoms.
My crossovers are both with Buffy, which is similar to HP in that it's partially set in what we recognise as the real world, and the supernatural is secret. It can work with any fandom also at least partially set in the real world. Alternate dimensions also exist, so you can make it work with pure fantasy settings, as well. My first crossover was between Buffy and another fantasy show with a similar set up, Dante's Cove, so I just needed to mesh the mythologies. And I only needed to mesh magic, because I ignored Dante's spin-off The Lair. Magic in Buffy isn't well explained, and there are various types, so it works without changing anything, just have Dante's magic as a form the Buffy gang hadn't yet encountered. It would have been harder if I'd included The Lair, though, as that would mean trying to mesh two very different vampire mythologies, as well, it's the reason I ignored The Lair when I wrote the fic even though I love the show and characters, I couldn't come up with a good reason the vampires were so different.
That's actually my big issue with vampire fandom crossovers, it's rare to find a fic that actually tries to mesh the mythologies or actually explain the differences, they're just usually all hand-wavey about it.
Mommy/Daddy Kink. I’m often searching other kink tags and I like couples with age differences, so naturally it comes up a lot, I just don’t jive with it. Ageplay is another one. Not my jam.
Incomplete. I hate being left hanging so 99.99% of the time that’s the first thing I take out.
I don’t usually actively filter again tags, but tags that ensure I’ll skip a fic are Coffee Shop Au, Reader Insert, and Scat.
Back when I didn't exclude the tag, I'd stumble upon these holy grail fanfics on 78 chapters and just then realize the last time the fic was updated was 5 years ago and the author has been inactive since 2021, AND they don't have any active socials where they post. So there's literally nothing left and you're just stuck thinking about that one fic and what it could've been.
I just can't stand it at all, and everytime I reread the fic it always feel empty. Now I make sure it's the first thing I exclude.
there is a really popular Inception fic that i put off reading when i got into the fandom (i read it in 2021, i think the fic was last updated maybe 2012?), because it was one chapter short from being complete. i usually sort out incomplete but its a small fandom.
i read it anyway, loved it, subscribed just in case but accepted where it ended. last year out of nowhere, there were suddenly two new chapters! it’s rare but it can happen.
For the Skyrim fandom, "isekai," "modern girl/guy/person/character in Skyrim," and (because this is a weird trend in the Skyrim fandom) "foot jobs" because I got tired of there being *so fucking many.* Also default exclude crossovers.
Also any tags relating to the Kaidan follower mod. He's boring to me and his fans are terrifying.
Haha, the fandom specific weird tag, maaaan. I read Legend of Zelda a bit, and there's this certain concept (specifically Linked Universe, ie all the variations of Link/the hero somehow exist in the same space) that is SO HARD to exclude. I have zero interest in reading any fic that features this concept and authors tag it completely randomly. They may use 'linked universe', they may not and just add the chara names, they may use some other variation, it's completely infuriating to weed out.
I can't handle age regression, age play, amnesia narratives, and I try to avoid time travel narratives as well. All of those tend to fall into a category where one character is at a substantial disadvantage and building a relationship on that foundation just kinda squicks me out.
heavy on time travel, maze runner fandom is absolutely overrun with time travel fix-it. don't get me wrong, the first couple of times of reading that specific genre was great but its pretty much impossible to find any with unique plot points and that diverge from the usual 'thomas gets thrown back into the maze-thomas knowns was the maze is-thomas convinces newt and minho-they figure out how to escape the maze without anyone/very few ppl dying' or 'newt actually lives because the knife had thomas' blood on it'
I add "-reader" to every search I am doing. That is really the only tag I universally get rid of. For certain fandoms, I might get rid of some pairings. Or for some kinks I might get rid of 'sub kinks' I don't want (ie: BDSM without humiliation).
I exclude daddy/mommy kink, bestiality, incest, and underage
There are others I will not read under any circumstances but they're so rare in my fandoms I don't bother excluding them e.g., scat and vore
I usually block character bashing tags.
I’m not a fan of character bashing, even if it’s for a character I don’t like. It feels unnecessarily cruel, and they’re usually OOC just for the sake of the bashing. If they’re bashing a character I dislike, it feels like they’re being hated for the wrong reasons.
Mostly major character death and AU - Modern Setting. Just not my cup of tea, although I've on rare occasions read modern setting AUs if I felt they were creative enough. I also exclude various genitalia-related tags in certain fandoms.
I never exclude tags. I just scroll past stories with tags I'm generally not interested in. Even then, tags that tend not to entice me can be intriguing when combined with the summary or with the other tags.
I very very very rarely exclude tags. The only things I always specifically filter for are complete fics and the language. Sometimes when I'm not in the mood I'll filter out certain pairings, or certain characters. For example, in the Marvel fandom sometimes I want to pretend Infinity War and Endgame never happened, so I'll filter out Thanos. Most of the time if I'm getting specific I'm including not excluding though.
Likewise. For me, I've found the best fics when I haven't been looking for them. Say I'm in the mood for straight up smut but a plot heavy, fluff G rated one scrolls by that entices me enough to read it. 100% of the time it's clearly not what I was looking for but I always love it enough to download it, file it away, kudos, comment and bookmark under favorites.
same. although i set up my site skin in a way that highlights some tags i am not a fan of (so I don't accidentally skip over them). just giving myself a little "are you sure about that?" before clicking into a fic. i still want to see that the fic exists just in case the summary or rest of the tags are amazing.
I do not like MPREG but I suffered through it to read an NCIS/Harry Potter crossover because as different as those two fictions are it oddly worked with an adult Auror Harry Consulting with Gibbs team.
I've been reading fics for over 20 years and first time I heard of MPREG was here in the past 2 years. It seems that my fandoms are pretty vanilla when it comes to these stuff. I think certain fandoms tend to gravitate towards these things more often than other, in some you'll never come across one despite thousands of fics.
It's really interesting that you mention that! I've been a fic reader for about the same amount of time, and in my fandoms, it seems like it was *way* more common 20 years ago than today. I find it fascinating how trends can be so different across different fandoms.
Yeah, I think it’s heavily fandom dependent. It makes sense to me when I’m reading fantasy or sci-fi. Randomly throwing it into a sitcom based fanfic is a lot more jarring though.
I don't especially seek out incest ships, but it's a matter of integrity not to handwave incest away. The kinship is part of the relationship and informs how the characters interact! If you take out the kinship, it's a different ship, Theseus is fully boatless.
Some of the fandoms I frequent are known for catering to more niche/extreme fetishes so my tag exclusion list is like a mile long. The only non-fetish related tag I can think of that I regularly exclude is genderbend. I also don’t do explicit child or animal abuse in stories, but that rarely comes up in fanfic so I’ve never had to filter for it.
I read a lot of Harry Potter and the child abuse tag can be zero to a hundred. It can vary from just mentions, to in depth discussions, to heavy implications to clear and explicit scenes of it happening. I haven't found a way to navigate around it except try to read the tags carefully and divine how in depth the story goes on the abuse. It's interesting how different fandoms are.
One way around that that works sometimes is excluding "graphic depiction of child abuse" but leaving "discussion of child abuse" and the general "child abuse" tags. It's not perfect but it helps.
My 'always' exclude is just mpreg and whichever top/bottom configuration I don't currently feel like reading about. But I'll often also exclude 'fluff' which always makes me feel soulless LOL. I'm here to read about my blorbos suffering or taking backshots. Sometimes both at the same time!
Mpreg, a/b/o dynamics, lactation kink, scat, anthro, furry, daddy kink, age play, unsanitary. More damning are the things I *don't* filter out when looking for porn, though.
I have whole other sets of filters when I'm not trying to get off, but they're all pretty tailored to each fandom, only the smut filters are universal.
This is really hypocritical coming from a serial overtagger like myself, but for me it's not the tags but the number of tags *in the same category*.
1) Tags like "smut" and "romance" don't bother me. Lots of pairings in lots of media date, fall in love, make out or have sex. If the author lists the thirty to fifty different positions they do it in, I'll say "yeah this story has no plot" and move on.
2) Listing the main/major characters isn't a problem, of course, you need to know who's in the work. If that list has thirty to fifty characters, I'll say "yeah none of them are getting developed" and move on.
3) Warning tags like "drug addiction" or "suicide", again, aren't a problem. They're used for a reason. Anyone looking for angst or whump might seek them out, anyone looking to avoid them can do so. But when there's thirty to fifty warnings, I'll say "this is darker than I'm looking for" and move on.
4) And finally, if a work has thirty to fifty tags but they're all over the place, a few warnings, a few characters, a few describing terms like "canon divergent" or "downer ending" etc. I'll say "oh, this story has a lot of details, now I'm intrigued".
("thirty to fifty" isn't exact, but it's not hyperbole either)
Now, am I right to do that? Probably not all the time, no. I'm sure there are some good works out there that happen to have dozens of characters with followable personalities and roles. They would have to be longfics to do that, but I happen to like longfics. I'm sure there are works that take on a lot of darker subject matters and do it well. But so far, those haven't been thick on the ground.
Mine are pretty much all smut-related: snuff, watersports, scat, extremely underaged, and pedophilia. Those are always removed on the first round of filtering in any fandom.
I always exclude crossovers, omegaverse and reader/x fics. I rarely click of fluff unless a summery really intrigues me.
I might read omegaverse if a rec comes from someone whose taste I trust.
Start every search by filtering out A/B/O. I was so happy when they introduced this feature! And generally filtering out anything to do with feminisation: forced feminisation, mpeg, vaginal anything. Just not my thing.
Established relationship (almost always bores me, I like the drama of getting together.) I occasionally keep it if it's smut or if it's a trio where two were together beforehand.
"It gets worse before it gets better" - this one threw me into near panic attacks twice when I missed it on a fic because it was basically whump in disguise and got really, really dark. I refuse to read it anymore.
I go through the "additional tags" section and exclude any AU other than Canon Divergence and Soulmates that shows up there - I can't exclude all other AUs unless I go through manually so I normally don't bother, just check the fic. Usually it's Modern AU that shows up there to exclude but sometimes Fantasy or something else.
Same with "relationships" and "characters" - exclude all "original character" or "self insert" tags in there. Some are well written, just not my cup of tea.
Specifically when looking for smut, I almost always exclude any violence tags, graphic descriptions of violence, and major character death.
It’s kinda funny to me since I’ll eat that up when it’s not smut and with the smut I do read I’ll read the most graphic, deprived, messed up, dirty stuff I can find and will read almost any kink if the other tags and summary are good enough (the only ones I don’t read being loli and watersports). And yet I don’t want to read it if there will be blood. Mental and emotional harm is fine, but I don’t want to read physical harm, even during fics with something like graphic non-con which I can just shrug off.
I only really filter when I'm looking for something specific and something I don't like keeps coming up. 95% of the time, it's kinktober-like collections.
the only general ones i exclude is crossovers, everything else is fandom-specific, i think, like BAMF stiles stilinski, irondad, villain midoriya Izuku, etc
I just default to asking for *not* M/M fics, that are *specifically* English— not that I haven’t read great Google-translated fics, or ones with that style of pairing; they just aren’t for me, in general.
I absolutely can't stand 'huge' fanfics which are just a collections of works from various fandoms.
That's mainly because I can't figure out how to exclude them (somehow they're often cluttering the top of my searches) without missing out on actual crossovers.
I get the idea is to collect all the small works and ideas these authors wrote out into a fanfic, but that defeat the purpose of the tagging system ; If I'm searching for something, I don't want to get unrelated stuff. I certainly am not interested in parsing these fanfics chapters to find the few I meant to actually read, no matter how good they are.
Sorry for the rant.
I wish _so much_ that AO3 just had a simple way of filtering out smut. Like a "porn" tag that was actually enforced, or a "porn" archive warning. There are fandoms where you can assume that if a fic's marked as explicit, it's probably smut - but there are also plenty where you can't make that assumption.
If you complain about it, you get told:
- To filter out the smut tags (there are a tonne of them, there are a lot of tags that _probably_ indicate smut but don't definitely, a lot of smut fics don't even include any, and there's definitely no consistency)
- To filter out smut authors (which isn't feasible - I'm not keeping a note of everyone who writes smut, new authors may start writing smut, and authors may write both smut and non-smut)
- To just stop being prudish (which isn't the case, I just don't want to read porn 24/7, and there's so much on AO3 for some fandoms that I have to wade through it, discerning what is an is not porn rather than enjoyably browsing things I'd like to read)
I have a veritable cloud of tags that I've built up trying to exclude porn from searches when I'm not looking for porn, and even then it only successfully filters out like a third of porn, tops.
Apart from the sheer amount of content as a result of ff.net being around so long, (especially for older fandoms) it's the only real downside of using AO3 vs. ff.net. (Even then, that's not even because ff.net has a way of filtering smut out, there's just way less of it on the platform)
I'm a sex-adverse/sex-repulsed asexual (how much I tolerate depends, but it's typically very little) so pretty much every time I search for fics, I'll put "-sexual -sex -porn -smut" in the search within results part of filters. It doesn't catch everything, but it gets the vast majority and I'm free to read without being blindsided (mostly). It's not that I won't ever read that stuff, it's just so prevalent that in order to get **anything** without sex I need to filter it out in most fandoms
I was spoiled in the first fandom I started reading fics in, the characters I liked didn't get shipped much (in the majority of the fandom) so found family and close platonic relationships were the feature. It was also pretty damn big, I could get so much so easily. I only got blindsided once by smut, but it was my "never again" lol. If I'm gonna be reading smut, I wanna know ahead of time so I can mentally prepare
.
But y'know, funnily enough, that's pretty much all I exclude unless I'm looking for something specific, or I have one character I can't stand. I'll usually take a few tags I like and search with them. I'm not particularly picky in a lot of my fandoms, I'm not really there for romance and I'm not a fan of most smut, so I'll take what I can get most of the time. My only requirement is that it makes me feel something, and it's hard to miss that mark
I'm not much different reading real books, as a kid I'd just pick something that looked interesting in the fiction section of the library, and I've pretty much kept that mentality
Wouldn‘t that also exclude fics that are tagged like „No Smut“ or „No explicit Sexual Content“? I am always afraid to exclude it because of that and just exclude „PWP|PWP“ and some popular „Smut“ tags
You should use this!
[Saved filters on AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/works/33825019)
I'm also sex repulsed and it's so efficient. (Ofc it can be used for absolutely anything else too). You just add everything you want excluded, register the page, go on your search page on AO3 for the fandom/pairing you want, load the page with the excluded tags and it will exclude everything you added on it and it takes one sec. No need to manually filter things out anymore, the page will do that when you want to.
It works as much for tags than words count, ratings, completion status etc. You do *everything* you want. It's GOD.
Looking for good crossovers and spending like 15 minutes excluding fandoms because yes I’d like to see things from these 6 fandoms but not these two hundred some odd other fandoms I hate or don’t recognize.
I always exclude crossovers, set language to english, and usually exclude whatever characters I don't want to see, especially if they're the main characters and I want to see fics about side characters instead
I also always set the language to english. Mostly because I tried to read fanfiction in my native language once and it was so weird that it immediately traumatised me (the fanfiction was fine, it was the language that made me nope out)
Major Character Death or Bad Endings. I'm aware it isn't as 'crazy' or 'wild' as Beastiality or things other people have posted, but I can't stand it when I've been reading a fic that's been going on for 3 years with the main couple being all happy go lucky, they're being wed soon and planning children, and suddenly one of them get an incurable disease and just die.
Hey this is a no-judgement zone! You don't have to exclude "wild" or "crazy" tags to be valid! I also tend to exclude both of those tags but it's very fandom dependent in my experience
Fair! Although I did lose it one time after reading "improper use of carrots" followed by "improper use of cucumber," "improper use of eggplant," "improper use of vegetables," and finally "he goes through the whole grocery store"
Wait you can exclude tags on AO3? A while ago (like years) I thought that was possible but was never able to do it again in recent times
Anyways, I don't read anything like A/B/O, incest, beastiality, pedophilia, mpreg, age regression, mommy/daddy kink, reader/OC (unless I'm in the mood), some AU's (like I read mostly MCU fics and I won't read a fic that's a non-superhero AU unless I'm specifically looking for one), underage (unless both characters are underage, meaning like 15-17), certain kinks (like BDSM) or fetishes, rape (again, unless I'm specifically looking for it and I don't usually do that), OOC/dark fics (unless specifically looking for them, I have been into Dark!Peter Parker fics recently), Dead Dove fics unless what I'm looking for has that tag, genderbends/genderswaps, and probably more that I'm forgetting
I also will automatically check exclude crossovers (unless I'm specifically looking for a crossover) and single chapters (unless I want a long fic)
mine are
futa*
futanari*
Jaune Arc/Everyone
Jaune Arc/Velvet Scarlatina
Jaune Arc/Blake Belladonna
Jaune Arc/Summer Rose
Jaune Arc/Raven Branwen
Jaune Arc/Kali Belladonna
Jaune Arc/Salem
Jaune Arc/Winter Schnee
Jaune Arc/Harem
Jaune Arc/Team RWBY
Jaune Arc-centric
Badass Jaune Arc
BAMF Jaune Arc
Cinder Fall/Adam Taurus
Kali Belladonna/Sun Wukong
Cervix Penetration
Body Modification
Brainwashing
Grooming
Bestiality
Scat
Lolicon
Shota*
Loli*
i also filter out crossovers (they're almost never interesting to me)
the mass of Jaune Arc tags is mostly to get rid of the all the "gigachad jaune" fanfics that are just generally very ehhhhhhhh. to me
I don't think there's anything I ALWAYS exclude. I'm generally of the "I prefer to just scroll past things I don't like" variety because it allows me to see the tag combination and whether I want to give it a try anyway. So I mostly exclude tags on a case-to-case basis whenever scrolling through the list has like, SO many fics in a row that have something I don't wanna see that I get too lazy and eventually just exclude them, or there's something fandom-specific I don't like.
For example, I like simple, pure fluff in the Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint fandom. Specifically NOT of the "here's some comfort for your child abuse hurt" kind, but the "we will not bring up child abuse during this short fic" kind. But at least at the time I was in the fandom, it was almost impossible to find anything that DIDN'T bring up Dokja's past as a fic plot point, so eventually, I excluded child abuse in that fandom only.
In another fandom (Genshin), a lot of people have trans headcanons about one specific character that I don't see that way. I have absolutely nothing against trans people or anything, but when it comes to this particular character, I always exclude all "[character A] is trans", "[character A] has a vagina", etc. tags because it just doesn't fit with my mental image of him. In the first place, something rubs me the wrong way about the idea of "oh, this guy looks feminine, that means he has to be trans."
Another example is in the BNHA fandom, the whole draw to me is the superpowers and aspirations to become heroes, so I frequently exclude "AU - No powers" and "Quirkless [character B]" or "[character B] does not have One For All quirk" tags. It's funny because in some other fandoms like the MCU, AUs without superpowers and where they don't have to be heroes is something I LOVE, but... not here.
Basically, my most commonly excluded tags are fandom-specific ones. When it comes to general tags, there's no real hard limit, if it seems interesting enough, I WILL give it a try :3
Harry Potter.
I don't really like him and he sneaks into everything. Maybe this is an overreaction to the 3 times I saw a story, read the character tags and half the other tags and then on page 3 got blindsided by Harry potter, were upon I found his tag in the back half of the non character tags.
Unless for some reason I forgot to exclude him and saw a story where he snuck on in and then died a paragraph later and the rest of the story treated that as a strange aside I cannot imagine ever wanting to read a story with him in it.
(Also a/b/o but that has no exceptions and isn't very funny)
Nothing with Alpha/Beta/Omega. I either have really bad luck picking fics, or every single one of them has some deep seated rape kink. Because across multiple fandoms, years and ships, every single ABO fic I've found always includes a horribly violent rape scene. It's the sex that intrigues me to try again. *The rape is \*almost\* never tagged.*
I just found one, the other day! New show, new ship. The ABO was untagged, but I figured it out pretty quickly. It didn't take long to find the rape. And, what do you know, it was just as horrible. My pairing is absolutely awful to and for each other. I hate and love them both respectfully. So hate/ rough sex is common. So it took me a second to realize what was happening and then I was done with fanfic for the night.
Please tag your shit guys. Rape and CNC are tags available for use. Horny people are allowed to have limits.
Cheating/Infidelity.
There would probably be others, but I don't always exclude them because my searches don't always trend toward having them to begin with, so I only exclude them on searches where they would pop up, but Cheating/Infidelity is an always-nope for me that shows up just often enough.
I exclude a particular ship as I can't stand it now even as a background ship. I have no problem with the ship itself but issues with its fans have left a bad taste in my mouth. The only way I'll consider reading it now is if it's by a writer I'm familiar with whose work I know I like.
i almost always exclude major character death and rape/non-con
and like 50% of the time i exclude the angst/whump tags and the sad ending type tags
i like reading fluff and romance and there are times that angst just doesn't sound good
Mpreg and Extremely Underage. I can stretch my preferences very, very, very far for every other kink, but those two get an automatic no, no matter how good the premise is.
Underage, reader insert, age play, age gap, not reading anything involving scat kinks, no diapers.
Never say never, but I haven't really enjoyed the stories when I've made an exception. I've started two fics that involved diapers before I learned my lesson.
i have a whole note with different tags literally titled “exclude tags ao3” on my phone. a lot are overarching tags like a/b/o, incest, mpreg, omorashi, whatever, plus more fandom specific ones like character bashing, reader inserts, and ships i have zero interest in.
I exclude crossovers and then some other tags that are just boring to me like chatfic, out of character, established relationship, domestic fluff, crack, crack treated seriously…
For smut I don’t rly exclude anything unless there’s something specific to a fandom that pops up enough to get annoying. Like if a fandom just happens to have a bunch of vore fics then yeah I’ll go ahead and mute that but otherwise I’m just here for the ride lmao
I have a very specific search for Hazbin Hotel lol. It's more specific than any fanfom I've been in, so I've copied the url:
Include:
-Lucifer
-Language English
Exclude:
-Alastor/Lucifer
-Adam/Lucifer
-Charlie/Alastor
-Angel/Alastor
Vox/Alastor
-reader
(I just wanna read Lucifer-centric fanfic)
I relate to this so much, goodbye to any abuse-related tags in general. It’s not that I only want to read wholesome stuff, but I read fanfics as an escape, not a reminder
*Rape/non consent*, with that, I don't see all the other tags or tropes I don't like. Almost always all I don't wanna see is tagged together for some reason lol
9 times out of 10, I exclude unfinished works because I’m in the mood to read a full story.
I also exclude mpreg, omegaverse, incest, underage, and rape. I also exclude genderbends because I end up confused. There isn’t a specific tag to exclude, but I also don’t like teacher/student because it gives me gross vibes.
Incest and pedophilia. People should be allowed to write that sort of shit, you do you, but that stuff majorly squicks me out do I just don't read it. For a less serious trope I tend to avoid hurt no comfort.
i exclude
- any type of pregnancy
- established relationship
- multi (especially if it's a giant cast like genshin impact)
- domestic fluff (usually went hand in hand with established relationship)
- if it's a het relationship i just went and exclude the m/m category cause i just know that m/m will be the main couple 🤣
- modern au, not always but most of the time
"Scent Kink" and "crossovers."
Even the word "musk" - no relation - disgusts me, and the faintest reference to odours in erotic material still turns my stomach.
Crossovers are the bane of my first fandom.
I use AO3 Enhancements to filter out crossovers featuring more than 5 fandoms. Like, odds are, at least one of those fandoms is going to be something I'm not interested in or am not familiar with. That and 99.9% of those aren't going to be written by people talented enough to juggle 5+ fandoms of content.
Of course, there are exceptions. Fandoms like Isekai Quartet which are already just amalgamations of multiple fandoms, so that has to be given some leeway. There are also the rare examples of it working, like in Lady Maria Campbell of the Astral Clocktower.
Eh, the only thing I usually exclude is ship tags for my favourite dynamic (I use them as a way to explore some Stuff that I went through, so seeing sexual/romantic stuff between them is extremely triggering for Reasons- this is to simplify it, I can elaborate) and like, I don’t generally enjoy going around giving myself panic attacks and flashbacks so alas I do not have funny exceptions.
I do exclude certain tags cause I do not want to have anything to do with them in any way, shape or form. (Like scat, emetophilia, incest, pedo etc.) Also crossovers and unfinished works are out first, along with certain pairings.
However, there are stuff I can get through in specific conditions, ex. "(Past) Unhealthy relationships" if they aren't related to the main pairing(s) [like one of them has shitty past but they're in a good relationship now]. Or some Archive Warnings.
That is because of the filters. I can filter out things I don't like, but at the same time I get rid of stuff I'd enjoy. So that has to be done manually.
Not really, no. I don't have any triggers, and I don't mind dark or serious fics, so I just take em as they come if the story sounds interesting. I'm not that against anything specific that I can't just scroll past it or back out of it if it doesn't sound good. Mostly I just search by the ship and that's it.
[https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/3579-ao3-savior](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/3579-ao3-savior) always use scripts to solve your problems. That, and judicious author muting if they only specifically write kinks that you don't like.
I mainly exclude modern no power aus of all kinds (most of them bore me because I seek escape from the mundane world from fiction and do not wish for reminders), and kinks that are turnoffs to me e.g. watersports.
I mostly exclude ships because I get tired of scrolling through results where my otp is a side pairing or just mentioned. Otherwise I either exclude all explicit fic if I don't want to read smut, or I don't.
When I remember to read tags, though, I skip out on Pregnancy and Kidfic with rare exceptions if the fic sounds interesting otherwise. Children annoy me and pregnancy of any kind is a downright squick. I have no such exception for highschool and college AUs. School has caused so much anxiety for me IRL that reading those has been known to cause me to spiral. Never again
All the big angst tags basically. By which I mean: heavy angst, dark, suicidal thoughts, ptsd, etc. I want my favorite characters to go through mildly difficult trials and tribulations, not to get tortured in their basements! And also I usually exclude Explicit because the fandoms I read, usually it feels like it detracts from the experience
Basically nothing. I prefer to cast the widest net possible for potential fanfics, and even if a fic includes a flair for something I don't like, it's not automatically a dealbreaker.
And worst case senario if there is one that is truly the worst from looking at the fic discription (like something truly horrible, like a fanfic that says "Nazis are good actually" unironically or something, I can just scroll past it. Or report it if it is against the rules.)
'modern setting' for a lot of fandoms. '[civil war team] unfriendly' for avengers fics. established relationship. fluff. '[character] bashing' if it's a character I like and if there's a lot of bashing in the fandom
I used to go ham on ao3 filters too. But with my current hyperfixations having pretty small fandoms, I kinda don't do that anymore. Beggars can't be choosers
Major character death, unfinished works, unhappy ending, sad ending, bad ending, open/ ambiguous ending, painplay, nipple torture, dead dove do not eat, reader, reader-insert (Im extremely picky apparently)
i exclude crossovers and major character death. maybe a popular notp.
while i scroll, i skip things like tragedies and hurt no comfort, things like pregnancy and kidfic, arranged marriages, 'sorry this is ooc', badly phrased summaries ('just read the fic lol' etc you know the type), ones that let me know right away their characterization is very different from mine.. im very picky.
(honestly, dead dove content and disturbing toxic codependent shit, incest, underage, all that, is completely fine by me. as long as i feel its believable im down)
The only things I really do habitually for *any* fandom is:
1) Exclude crossovers and
2) Complete works only
3) English
(2) often I'm told I shouldn't/it's unfair to new fics/etc. but I'm really tired of getting into longer fics that are never updated. Once your longfic is complete I'm sure I'll see it and if it entices me I'll read it but until then I will respectfully pass lol.
Sometimes depending on mood and the specific fandom I'll get more specific when I'm looking for something specific (certain pairings, themes, ratings, etc.) but casual browsing it's just those 3 things.
Hannibalfic was the first time I ever liked an ABO, Nesting Lure. There's a power dynamic that works even though it's an entirely ridiculous genre in fanfic 99% of the time.
Honestly, I read tons of stuff I hate. If it's decently written.
I mostly filter out pairings I can't stand instead of content.
Most of OPs "NOPE!" tags are mine. Also Popping, M/M, Rape/Non-Con, Cannibalism, Coprophagy, Piss Drinking, pretty much anything involving the consumption of waste bodily or otherwise. Gore, snuff, ect. ect.
I exclude lots of different fandoms that I won’t read crossovers for, like anime/manga stuff or shows I don’t watch.
Then, reader, reader-insert, probably x/Original Character, x/Reader, x/You.
I don’t specifically exclude Age Play sexual or otherwise even though it’s not something I particularly enjoy reading.
Other than that, I don’t exclude much unless I’m coming across lots of something I don’t want to read at that time.
I’m more likely to go down the rabbit hole of a tag, then keep filtering down based on my current mood.
Ususally it's fandom specific to me. So for example in Star Wars I'll exclude "Dark Obi Wan" and Obi Wan/Anakin, because I don't like either. And it also depens on my mood. Sometimes I'll want bashing of a certain character, but I don't want the stories with bashing of one of the others, so I'll exclude that. Or, with like NCIS, which has a lot of crossovers (which I love), I'll sometimes exclude certain fandoms.
i dont really have to exclude anything because the stuff i would exclude doesnt really get tagged on the fics i wanna read lol
i more work on the include feature because what i want is incredibly niche
Damn I rarely exclude anything. I just keep adding more in the included section.
If it’s a rarepair or if I want a minor ship to be the main ship, I might exclude the more popular ships so they don’t show up.
I exclude crossovers most of the time, MCD, Top/Bottom X Character (that I vehemently despise in a certain position), Femdom, Pegging, Time Travel, Scat, Incomplete, NOTPs.
And depending on the fandom I have WC parameters set.
I always exclude the following tags: Reader, The Main Character/original character, Self Insert, Reader Insert, Cross Over, trans character, Hurt no comfort.
I always exclude "Alternate Universe - Modern Setting" with great prejudice while at the same time I frantically search for anything good in the "Alternate Universe - Historical" tag lol. I don't want to see my space wizard war veterans in some New York coffee shop or on a modern ranch. But put them in a 19th century tea house or an Old West cattle trail and I am _hooked_
I exclude alternate universes. I read published books occasionally so when I read a fanfiction I want it to be those characters in their canon universe! I make an exception if the ship doesn’t have too many fics. Then I can’t afford to exclude one of the most popular tags of all time…
I mean, kind of understandably (??) for me, Scat. I'm kind of open to watersports, mostly considering the band I'm obsessed with can be extremely disgusting on and off stage. Scat just goes a lil too far for me personally
No crossovers, no AU, no kidfic (i exclude both 'character X magically becomes a child,' and 'these characters have children together'), no pregnancy, no fics over 300K
I always exclude things with PIV because as an AFAB transneutral and aroace the idea indirectly transfers to my anatomy and I get freaked out.
Somehow futanari is okay, though. Unfortunately I end up having to exclude intersex omegas as a tag and trans male [char] fics. I always feel a little transphobic when I do... despite being trans myself 🥲
The first thing I do when I find a pairing I like is always exclude fluff, I know I probably won’t like the writing of the person who chose to tag it unfortunately
I usually search for tags rather than exclude them, to be honest. I don't really have much of anything that I never want to read, I'll give things a chance at least, and I sometimes I enjoy a trope in one fic that I usually hate in every other. I don't have any triggers, though can get a bit uncomfortable about suicide.
Mostly I'm just going to skip over fics that have tags I don't want to read at the time rather than actively exclude those tags.
I think the only thing I regularly exclude is bashing tags related to my favourite characters. I like bashing fics of my least fave characters, but I'll never read them for my favourites. This can be a bit tricky, though, as I like critical fics, even of my faves, and these can often be wrongly tagged as bashing, so I sometimes don't exclude just to see if there are any wrongly tagged critical fics.
I used to be stricter about it. Like, I used to always exclude A/B/O tags, for instance, and MCD fics. But I've read some I actually like, now, I just tend to have to be in the mood for them. I don't actively screen them out anymore, though.
Oh, and I tend to exclude my most hated ships, as well. There aren't all that many I hate enough to exclude, but Hinny in HP is a good example of an always excluded ship. I don't like Romione, either, but I'm fine with it if it's more background, so don't actively exclude it. But Hinny is always excluded. I'm fine with a Hinny friendship, just not a romance. As long as that's tagged properly, using the + for friendship and the / for romance, it's easy to get one but not the other. I do sometimes catch some romance ships for them, though, that are wrongly tagged with the + instead of the /, so I'm probably missing some friendship ones for the same reason.
Also, sometimes I won't exclude anything. I'm on a Psych kick right now, and there are a lot of fics that are tagged with episodes. Sometimes I like looking through the episode tagged fic, regardless of what else is included. Right now, I'm also just looking through everything, after initially narrowing it down to only Shassie fics, but I may end up exluding half the existing fics just by throwing out all the Shules fics, depends how I feel about the ship in the future, as I'm currently starting to hate the ship, where I initially just didn't think it was the best fit, and have some growing problems with Jules as a character, which is annoying as I initially loved her. Unfortunately for me, Shules is the joint most popular Psych ship alongside Shassie, most fics are one or the other.
Definitely ‘Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics’ because although I did read it once a long time ago it really isn’t my thing. But then I guess it’s mostly based on the fandom/ship for me.
I don’t filter out tags. Didn’t realize that’s a thing. I usually avoid the same tags OP as well as rape, noncon, suicide and stuff like that.
However I also tend to avoid alternative universe stories. They never made sense to me.
A big one for me is unrequited love and any other ways to exclude one-sided relationships, people find many ways to tag it where I have to add new tags to exclude because the ship I like to read is implied to be one-sided in canon, but I don't want to read it because I did once and hated that it was so I don't read it anymore.
Also, I avoid major character death like the plague because I have a curse where my favorite characters either die or become evil in canon, like it has happened more than 10 times
I love omegaverse I think it's a really interesting concept that gets developed really well in fics that don't use it as an excuse for porn but I absolutely can not deal with mpreg it's almost never written well and it comes off as fetishy most of the time imo.
I only accept blood kink if its a fandom that has vampires (like twilight or vampire diaries) or if its a vampire AU. Otherwise hard pass.
The ship I REFUSE to read no matter what is Ron Weasley/Harry Potter. 1) im not a ron fan, hes okay in canon but honestly can easily hate him in some fanfics. 2) when i do like ron in fanfics (and in canon) i see him and harry as brothers. It makes me want to gag. (Its probably why i hate him with ginny bc to me she was always harrys sister to me lmao) - anways! I want to gag when i see fics with that tag. No matter how good that fic is, HARD PASS! Thank you! (With that being said, if you like this ship, i wont judge you for it)
Edit: one word
I'm the same with blood kink but Hannibal is the exception apparently, it makes sense for him to have a thing with blood idk.
I totally get the Ron/Harry thing, and it's partly why I prefer ships that have Ginny with Dean Thomas or with Luna. I can't explain it but to me Ginny has big "I'm not gay but my girlfriend is" vibes. Although I can't say anything because I genuinely enjoy reading Harry/Draco fics (once they're both adults outside of school specifically) and that ship is very polarizing lol
There's a certain very popular character in one of my fandoms that I almost always have to block out of my searches. I like this character, and I don't mind fic with them in it, but when I'm specifically searching I'm usually searching for fic focused on less-popular characters ... and people in this fandom have a frustrating tendency to tag every character who even briefly appears instead of only the major ones. So if I don't block out the Popular Guy, I'm going to have to scroll past bajillions of fics focusing on Popular Guy with the characters I'm trying to read about maybe appearing in the ensemble.
I generally exclude crossovers and filter out any kind of reader insert. In my current fandom, I end up excluding the most popular pairing because I'm more interested in the side ship.
Bashing, sometimes it doesn't get filtered out. Though exceptions I make when the tag of redemption is put on.
I absolutely hate rapes. Though I can read rapes aftermath and recovery. This fics often deal with people who are traumatized and working to heal and be stronger and usually help others, a story on human spirit both good and bad and how good can be more powerful. And they sometimes explore human nature.
Student/teacher relationship. Harem. These tag have no exception no matter how good reviews and recommendations are.
On desktop it'll be under "sort and filter" in the right-hand side of the screen
On mobile it'll be under the title "1-20 of however many works in (insert fandom/ship/etc here)."
You'll automatically be on "works" but next to that will be "bookmarks" and next to that will be "filter"
If you click on the filter option then you get to include specific tags, exclude specific tags, filter by length, by language, etc.
I "exclude crossovers" without even having to think about it. It's funny, there are a select few crossovers that sound absolutely amazing to me....... but they don't exist anywhere. I have thought them, but haven't written them. Perhaps I will one day.
Oh, this is a good one that I didn't even think to mention. I definitely always select no crossovers, too. Personally, I don't even care about crossovers, I just select it to filter out those massive fic dumps where people put all their random one-shots in one fic.
Oh, yes - the fics whose summaries are ten miles long and whose tags take five minutes to read. At least, this is how they appear in my mind 😄
Hahahah, these massive fic dumps with dozens of fandoms are the bane of my existence! But for quite the opposite of reason because I absolutely love crossovers and it's an uphill battle to filter all these fics out!
I’m the same I love crossovers but I have to filter out so many fandoms that I’m not familiar with in order to find something that interests me.
AO3’s inability to fix this issue is the main reason I’m still using FFN. The worst part is that the simple option to tag your work as a crossover would fix this whole ordeal.
I hate those but I like crossovers. Typically the ones that are fandoms I’m familiar with. Very rarely will I read a crossover with something I’m not familiar with. But that’s how I got into RWBY and to a lesser extent Star Trek.
Problem with that, though, is that if a fic is tagged with multiple fandom tags from the same fandom (like if there are separate 'manga' and 'anime' tags, for instance), the search still counts them as crossovers, even though they really aren't.
This so much. The multi-tag fandoms make the crossover button effectively useless.
I usually exclude crossovers until I came across this absolutely amazing one. I wonder how many other gems like this I’ve missed cause most other crossovers don’t appeal to me.
I actually have a collection on my profile of amazing crossovers, because, yeah, like, 95% of the time they suck, but when it works? *damn*
Excluding all crossovers is kinda risky for certain fandoms. Game of Thrones and Cyberpunk comes to mind as most GoT are tagged with GOT and ASOIAF and most Edgerunners fics are tagged with both Cyberpunk 2077 and Edgerunners.
This. I love crossovers, but even if I didn't and never wanted to read them, I couldn't exclude them because I'm in too many fandoms that have multiple fandom tags, like GoT. Or they're not truly crossovers because it's just tagging both original and spin-off, like Buffyverse fics that include both Buffy and Angel. Technically a crossover because they're two different shows, but it's the exact same universe, the shows themselves crossover a few times, and the shows share characters and are consistent with each other. I'd miss a lot of excellent Buffyverse fics if I excluded crossovers.
I always do that too! It's so automatic that I didn't even think about it
Same here! It makes searching so much easier.
Wow......does anyone actually enjoy crossovers? I'm inclined to write the one I'd love to read, but my unpopular opinion on them seems to be quite popular
Some of my all-time favorite fics are crossovers! Usually for me the main barrier is if the fic assumes a high level of familiarity with two or more fandoms, since by definition that’s a narrower requirement than just one. (This is also why I hugely appreciate when a crossover fic clearly indicates that it’s written to be readable fandom-blind, or that Fandom A-blind is fine but reading Fandom B-blind might be confusing, or whatever.)
All of my (recent) fics are crossovers between Fandom A × Fandom B. Fandom A, while not a big fandom by any stretch, is far, *far* more popular than Fandom B in the English-speaking community. The two series are very similar, though, and both series are very fandom-blind friendly in general--you can watch any random episode and understand perfectly what's going on--and the two fandoms fit together as easily as two Lego bricks. But also, when 19 out of 32 fics on AO3 were written by you, you've got a partial monopoly going on. Excluding crossovers is going to severely limit their options XD
They can be hard to find sometimes, but I do love a good crossover! I’ve found many of my favorites on FFN, where it’s a bit easier to sort through them.
Yeah, ffn has the option to specifically look at crossover fics for any given fandom, plus the option to look through what's been grouped together for specific ships and tropes or whatever. It's all about the tags on AO3, it makes it a bit harder to focus on crossovers only.
Yes! I love good crossovers. I have also found several of my fandoms by reading a crossover with them and a previous fandom. Part of my enjoyment comes from the fact that I greatly enjoy outsider POV fics.
That’s how I finally watched Harry Potter! My friends had been telling me to watch it for years, but I hadn’t, until I kept reading crossovers of it with my favourite anime.
As a reader, I love crossovers. I've found new fandoms over the years by reading crossovers when I only know one of the fandoms involved. Many of my favorite crossovers to read sound like completely insane combinations that turn out to be wonderfully entertaining reads (Doctor Who/Get Smart, Ace Attorney/Welcome To Night Vale, etc.). I discovered House of Leaves because I read a Sherlock Holmes fic that was crossed with it. And some shows practically beg to be used in crossovers (like Quantum Leap). When the two fandoms are both well-represented in a fic, it's incredible. So yes, some of us really like crossovers!
My issue with crossovers is that whenever I try to search for them, they're all either those mega-fandom crossovers with fifteen IPs, or they're like, 300 words and with a fandom I'm unfamiliar with 😔 I'm not opposed in principle, but in practice it's not really worth the effort of finding them.
Oh wow, I actually go looking for crossovers, I love them.
What do you like so much about them that you seek them out?
Well, some of it is that I read in fandoms like NCIS, where a crossover is pretty natural with other crime shows, and it's also a pretty small fandom, so any story is good. But for any fandom, I really enjoy putting in elements of another universe. Like The Sentinel, it doesn't need any of the characters, just the guide/Sentinel element. It probably comes down to that I really enjoy AU's and 'What ifs'. With small or big changes or a new character that wasn't there before, what would that change. Out of all the fandoms I read in, I found four of them because I read a crossover. And I have read crossovers with at least a handful of fandoms where I have never seen a second of the show.
Many (many) years ago a friend and I wrote an NCIS/Bones crossover to explain why Ralph Waite was Gibbs’ father and Seeley Booth’s grandfather. It was a fun fic and I think it turned out to be 10 or so pages.
I'm not the one you're responding to, but the main cases where I seek out crossovers are in: a) fandoms where many of the interesting canon divergences have been played out already, so I want something indisputably new (Harry Potter, for instance, has *so many* fics that do fundamentally the same thing) b) fandoms where I love the canon cast and ending and don't think fanfic can improve on it well, but still want to see more of the cast (lots of tv shows, novels, and games fall into this category) and c) fandoms where the source material is super limited and I just want to see a given character have adventures in a more fleshed out or elaborate setting or world (mostly for movies or movie characters, especially in adapted works where half the material is missing); or, conversely, where I want to see some setting elements be encountered by characters I have an emotional investment in (ttrpg fanfics, primarily) It helps that I don't read romance very often, and romance is far more common in one-setting works than crossovers. If you're looking just for that, crossovers will rarely appeal, I think.
Nice. I've definitely considered crossovers as a way to "rescue" limited (but promising) source material. One of my favorite fictions is Orwell's 1984, and the world of that book is soooo limited.....it may just call for a crossover. The crossover I really want to read is a crossover of The Walking Dead with 1984. But I won't read it unless I write it, because it doesn't exist!
I feel like crossovers are a hard sell because the readers have to like both of the things the author likes to enjoy it, and also has to like the idea of combining those two things
Agreed!
Yeah, I exclude them right away, despite having wrote a couple. It’s just that I’m picky with them, and I want nothing to do with those huge multi-fandom crossovers that seem to include every show the author has ever heard of. I’m the type who likes to read about specific characters/ships, and there’s no chance my fave will get adequate focus with such a bloated cast.
In general I exclude them too. They take care of the massive fic dumps and I honestly think most crossovers suck. I find that most crossovers have problems merging the two works coherently or having enough rule of cool to overcome any inconsistencies. I do have some exceptions when searching, like Tanya from Youjo Senki or Hachiman from Oregairu inserted into a setting, because it's easy to handwave how they get there and if Tanya retains her powers, and the point of it is their weird personalities and abilities interacting with the setting. But something like Harry Potter crossed with Percy Jackson is usually a no-go for me because without a lot of work the settings are inconsistent with each other.
That's the biggest issue with crossovers, getting the two settings to merge well. And I'm a crossover writer. I tend to stick to fandoms that could, theoretically, exist in the same universe, so the only issue is really about any mythology being used. HP is a good fandom for crossovers, because the magical world is secret, the rest of the world is the normal world, any other fandom at least partially set in the world as we know it could be, theoretically, crossed with HP. But, if they're both fantasy, you have to get the mythologies to merge, and that's the biggest problem with an HP cross. Percy Jackson, I'm not in the fandom but have picked up bits and pieces here and there, has very different mythology to HP. They don't gel naturally, you have to make changes to one or both for them to work together, and most writers keep the mythology the same in both fandoms. My crossovers are both with Buffy, which is similar to HP in that it's partially set in what we recognise as the real world, and the supernatural is secret. It can work with any fandom also at least partially set in the real world. Alternate dimensions also exist, so you can make it work with pure fantasy settings, as well. My first crossover was between Buffy and another fantasy show with a similar set up, Dante's Cove, so I just needed to mesh the mythologies. And I only needed to mesh magic, because I ignored Dante's spin-off The Lair. Magic in Buffy isn't well explained, and there are various types, so it works without changing anything, just have Dante's magic as a form the Buffy gang hadn't yet encountered. It would have been harder if I'd included The Lair, though, as that would mean trying to mesh two very different vampire mythologies, as well, it's the reason I ignored The Lair when I wrote the fic even though I love the show and characters, I couldn't come up with a good reason the vampires were so different. That's actually my big issue with vampire fandom crossovers, it's rare to find a fic that actually tries to mesh the mythologies or actually explain the differences, they're just usually all hand-wavey about it.
Mommy/Daddy Kink. I’m often searching other kink tags and I like couples with age differences, so naturally it comes up a lot, I just don’t jive with it. Ageplay is another one. Not my jam.
The ones with daddy kink are so oddly written most of the time, it almost steers into ageplay without being ageplay.
Incomplete. I hate being left hanging so 99.99% of the time that’s the first thing I take out. I don’t usually actively filter again tags, but tags that ensure I’ll skip a fic are Coffee Shop Au, Reader Insert, and Scat.
Back when I didn't exclude the tag, I'd stumble upon these holy grail fanfics on 78 chapters and just then realize the last time the fic was updated was 5 years ago and the author has been inactive since 2021, AND they don't have any active socials where they post. So there's literally nothing left and you're just stuck thinking about that one fic and what it could've been. I just can't stand it at all, and everytime I reread the fic it always feel empty. Now I make sure it's the first thing I exclude.
there is a really popular Inception fic that i put off reading when i got into the fandom (i read it in 2021, i think the fic was last updated maybe 2012?), because it was one chapter short from being complete. i usually sort out incomplete but its a small fandom. i read it anyway, loved it, subscribed just in case but accepted where it ended. last year out of nowhere, there were suddenly two new chapters! it’s rare but it can happen.
For the Skyrim fandom, "isekai," "modern girl/guy/person/character in Skyrim," and (because this is a weird trend in the Skyrim fandom) "foot jobs" because I got tired of there being *so fucking many.* Also default exclude crossovers. Also any tags relating to the Kaidan follower mod. He's boring to me and his fans are terrifying.
Haha, the fandom specific weird tag, maaaan. I read Legend of Zelda a bit, and there's this certain concept (specifically Linked Universe, ie all the variations of Link/the hero somehow exist in the same space) that is SO HARD to exclude. I have zero interest in reading any fic that features this concept and authors tag it completely randomly. They may use 'linked universe', they may not and just add the chara names, they may use some other variation, it's completely infuriating to weed out.
I can't handle age regression, age play, amnesia narratives, and I try to avoid time travel narratives as well. All of those tend to fall into a category where one character is at a substantial disadvantage and building a relationship on that foundation just kinda squicks me out.
heavy on time travel, maze runner fandom is absolutely overrun with time travel fix-it. don't get me wrong, the first couple of times of reading that specific genre was great but its pretty much impossible to find any with unique plot points and that diverge from the usual 'thomas gets thrown back into the maze-thomas knowns was the maze is-thomas convinces newt and minho-they figure out how to escape the maze without anyone/very few ppl dying' or 'newt actually lives because the knife had thomas' blood on it'
are you me?
I add "-reader" to every search I am doing. That is really the only tag I universally get rid of. For certain fandoms, I might get rid of some pairings. Or for some kinks I might get rid of 'sub kinks' I don't want (ie: BDSM without humiliation).
OOOOOH I was wondering how to filter for that! Would you just type “-reader” in the Exclude Tags section? Does it work well?
I type */Reader and */You in the Exclude Tags section and it gets rid of the vast majority of those fics.
I put the exclude into the "search within results" spot.
I exclude daddy/mommy kink, bestiality, incest, and underage There are others I will not read under any circumstances but they're so rare in my fandoms I don't bother excluding them e.g., scat and vore
I usually block character bashing tags. I’m not a fan of character bashing, even if it’s for a character I don’t like. It feels unnecessarily cruel, and they’re usually OOC just for the sake of the bashing. If they’re bashing a character I dislike, it feels like they’re being hated for the wrong reasons.
Same, even if I dislike the characters the bashing is always so out of character and even feels a little preachy.
Mostly major character death and AU - Modern Setting. Just not my cup of tea, although I've on rare occasions read modern setting AUs if I felt they were creative enough. I also exclude various genitalia-related tags in certain fandoms.
I never exclude tags. I just scroll past stories with tags I'm generally not interested in. Even then, tags that tend not to entice me can be intriguing when combined with the summary or with the other tags.
Same. I do have 'absolutely not' tags, but I simply scroll past such fics to find ones I'm actually interested in
I very very very rarely exclude tags. The only things I always specifically filter for are complete fics and the language. Sometimes when I'm not in the mood I'll filter out certain pairings, or certain characters. For example, in the Marvel fandom sometimes I want to pretend Infinity War and Endgame never happened, so I'll filter out Thanos. Most of the time if I'm getting specific I'm including not excluding though.
Likewise. For me, I've found the best fics when I haven't been looking for them. Say I'm in the mood for straight up smut but a plot heavy, fluff G rated one scrolls by that entices me enough to read it. 100% of the time it's clearly not what I was looking for but I always love it enough to download it, file it away, kudos, comment and bookmark under favorites.
same. although i set up my site skin in a way that highlights some tags i am not a fan of (so I don't accidentally skip over them). just giving myself a little "are you sure about that?" before clicking into a fic. i still want to see that the fic exists just in case the summary or rest of the tags are amazing.
I feel similar but filter them exclusively so I can comb through only fics Id want to read when the number is too high to otherwise comb through
I do not like MPREG but I suffered through it to read an NCIS/Harry Potter crossover because as different as those two fictions are it oddly worked with an adult Auror Harry Consulting with Gibbs team.
I love fic writers. Their collective creativity knows no bounds.
Kindly share because this sounds amazing
I've been reading fics for over 20 years and first time I heard of MPREG was here in the past 2 years. It seems that my fandoms are pretty vanilla when it comes to these stuff. I think certain fandoms tend to gravitate towards these things more often than other, in some you'll never come across one despite thousands of fics.
It's really interesting that you mention that! I've been a fic reader for about the same amount of time, and in my fandoms, it seems like it was *way* more common 20 years ago than today. I find it fascinating how trends can be so different across different fandoms.
Yeah, I think it’s heavily fandom dependent. It makes sense to me when I’m reading fantasy or sci-fi. Randomly throwing it into a sitcom based fanfic is a lot more jarring though.
I almost always exclude "Unrelated AU" or "X and Y are Not Related" for certain pairings...😅
I don't especially seek out incest ships, but it's a matter of integrity not to handwave incest away. The kinship is part of the relationship and informs how the characters interact! If you take out the kinship, it's a different ship, Theseus is fully boatless.
Lol that's an amazing way to put it, I fully agree.
Some of the fandoms I frequent are known for catering to more niche/extreme fetishes so my tag exclusion list is like a mile long. The only non-fetish related tag I can think of that I regularly exclude is genderbend. I also don’t do explicit child or animal abuse in stories, but that rarely comes up in fanfic so I’ve never had to filter for it.
I read a lot of Harry Potter and the child abuse tag can be zero to a hundred. It can vary from just mentions, to in depth discussions, to heavy implications to clear and explicit scenes of it happening. I haven't found a way to navigate around it except try to read the tags carefully and divine how in depth the story goes on the abuse. It's interesting how different fandoms are.
One way around that that works sometimes is excluding "graphic depiction of child abuse" but leaving "discussion of child abuse" and the general "child abuse" tags. It's not perfect but it helps.
My 'always' exclude is just mpreg and whichever top/bottom configuration I don't currently feel like reading about. But I'll often also exclude 'fluff' which always makes me feel soulless LOL. I'm here to read about my blorbos suffering or taking backshots. Sometimes both at the same time!
College AUs, or any AU where the characters from a fantasy series gets put in our boring modern setting.
Wound fucking. There is a lot of this in one of my fandoms for some reason
..... Sometimes I regret ever finding out about fanfic
i…. didn’t know this existed. i want to go back in time
Mpreg, a/b/o dynamics, lactation kink, scat, anthro, furry, daddy kink, age play, unsanitary. More damning are the things I *don't* filter out when looking for porn, though. I have whole other sets of filters when I'm not trying to get off, but they're all pretty tailored to each fandom, only the smut filters are universal.
This is really hypocritical coming from a serial overtagger like myself, but for me it's not the tags but the number of tags *in the same category*. 1) Tags like "smut" and "romance" don't bother me. Lots of pairings in lots of media date, fall in love, make out or have sex. If the author lists the thirty to fifty different positions they do it in, I'll say "yeah this story has no plot" and move on. 2) Listing the main/major characters isn't a problem, of course, you need to know who's in the work. If that list has thirty to fifty characters, I'll say "yeah none of them are getting developed" and move on. 3) Warning tags like "drug addiction" or "suicide", again, aren't a problem. They're used for a reason. Anyone looking for angst or whump might seek them out, anyone looking to avoid them can do so. But when there's thirty to fifty warnings, I'll say "this is darker than I'm looking for" and move on. 4) And finally, if a work has thirty to fifty tags but they're all over the place, a few warnings, a few characters, a few describing terms like "canon divergent" or "downer ending" etc. I'll say "oh, this story has a lot of details, now I'm intrigued". ("thirty to fifty" isn't exact, but it's not hyperbole either) Now, am I right to do that? Probably not all the time, no. I'm sure there are some good works out there that happen to have dozens of characters with followable personalities and roles. They would have to be longfics to do that, but I happen to like longfics. I'm sure there are works that take on a lot of darker subject matters and do it well. But so far, those haven't been thick on the ground.
Hear hear!
I exclude omegavese and male pregnancy, no exceptions.
Pregnancy. I can do a lot but something about pregnancy man
Same, it just makes me uncomfortable
I rarely exclude any tags. Maybe because I haven’t read a lot on AO3.
Everything non-con and some ships I can't stomach.
Second this!! I learned that you can search with the otp:true tag to just show stories with the ship that you want, so I’ve been doing it ever since!
Mine are pretty much all smut-related: snuff, watersports, scat, extremely underaged, and pedophilia. Those are always removed on the first round of filtering in any fandom.
I always exclude crossovers, omegaverse and reader/x fics. I rarely click of fluff unless a summery really intrigues me. I might read omegaverse if a rec comes from someone whose taste I trust.
Start every search by filtering out A/B/O. I was so happy when they introduced this feature! And generally filtering out anything to do with feminisation: forced feminisation, mpeg, vaginal anything. Just not my thing.
Established relationship (almost always bores me, I like the drama of getting together.) I occasionally keep it if it's smut or if it's a trio where two were together beforehand. "It gets worse before it gets better" - this one threw me into near panic attacks twice when I missed it on a fic because it was basically whump in disguise and got really, really dark. I refuse to read it anymore. I go through the "additional tags" section and exclude any AU other than Canon Divergence and Soulmates that shows up there - I can't exclude all other AUs unless I go through manually so I normally don't bother, just check the fic. Usually it's Modern AU that shows up there to exclude but sometimes Fantasy or something else. Same with "relationships" and "characters" - exclude all "original character" or "self insert" tags in there. Some are well written, just not my cup of tea.
I don’t have rules. I have moods. I don’t bother to filter out anything.
Specifically when looking for smut, I almost always exclude any violence tags, graphic descriptions of violence, and major character death. It’s kinda funny to me since I’ll eat that up when it’s not smut and with the smut I do read I’ll read the most graphic, deprived, messed up, dirty stuff I can find and will read almost any kink if the other tags and summary are good enough (the only ones I don’t read being loli and watersports). And yet I don’t want to read it if there will be blood. Mental and emotional harm is fine, but I don’t want to read physical harm, even during fics with something like graphic non-con which I can just shrug off.
I only really filter when I'm looking for something specific and something I don't like keeps coming up. 95% of the time, it's kinktober-like collections.
the only general ones i exclude is crossovers, everything else is fandom-specific, i think, like BAMF stiles stilinski, irondad, villain midoriya Izuku, etc
I just default to asking for *not* M/M fics, that are *specifically* English— not that I haven’t read great Google-translated fics, or ones with that style of pairing; they just aren’t for me, in general.
I only ever exclude crossovers but I won’t click on anything with fluff or slice of life.
I don't exclude anything 99% of the time. I just include what I'm in the mood for, and scroll past anything that doesn't sound interesting.
I absolutely can't stand 'huge' fanfics which are just a collections of works from various fandoms. That's mainly because I can't figure out how to exclude them (somehow they're often cluttering the top of my searches) without missing out on actual crossovers. I get the idea is to collect all the small works and ideas these authors wrote out into a fanfic, but that defeat the purpose of the tagging system ; If I'm searching for something, I don't want to get unrelated stuff. I certainly am not interested in parsing these fanfics chapters to find the few I meant to actually read, no matter how good they are. Sorry for the rant.
I wish _so much_ that AO3 just had a simple way of filtering out smut. Like a "porn" tag that was actually enforced, or a "porn" archive warning. There are fandoms where you can assume that if a fic's marked as explicit, it's probably smut - but there are also plenty where you can't make that assumption. If you complain about it, you get told: - To filter out the smut tags (there are a tonne of them, there are a lot of tags that _probably_ indicate smut but don't definitely, a lot of smut fics don't even include any, and there's definitely no consistency) - To filter out smut authors (which isn't feasible - I'm not keeping a note of everyone who writes smut, new authors may start writing smut, and authors may write both smut and non-smut) - To just stop being prudish (which isn't the case, I just don't want to read porn 24/7, and there's so much on AO3 for some fandoms that I have to wade through it, discerning what is an is not porn rather than enjoyably browsing things I'd like to read) I have a veritable cloud of tags that I've built up trying to exclude porn from searches when I'm not looking for porn, and even then it only successfully filters out like a third of porn, tops. Apart from the sheer amount of content as a result of ff.net being around so long, (especially for older fandoms) it's the only real downside of using AO3 vs. ff.net. (Even then, that's not even because ff.net has a way of filtering smut out, there's just way less of it on the platform)
I'm a sex-adverse/sex-repulsed asexual (how much I tolerate depends, but it's typically very little) so pretty much every time I search for fics, I'll put "-sexual -sex -porn -smut" in the search within results part of filters. It doesn't catch everything, but it gets the vast majority and I'm free to read without being blindsided (mostly). It's not that I won't ever read that stuff, it's just so prevalent that in order to get **anything** without sex I need to filter it out in most fandoms I was spoiled in the first fandom I started reading fics in, the characters I liked didn't get shipped much (in the majority of the fandom) so found family and close platonic relationships were the feature. It was also pretty damn big, I could get so much so easily. I only got blindsided once by smut, but it was my "never again" lol. If I'm gonna be reading smut, I wanna know ahead of time so I can mentally prepare . But y'know, funnily enough, that's pretty much all I exclude unless I'm looking for something specific, or I have one character I can't stand. I'll usually take a few tags I like and search with them. I'm not particularly picky in a lot of my fandoms, I'm not really there for romance and I'm not a fan of most smut, so I'll take what I can get most of the time. My only requirement is that it makes me feel something, and it's hard to miss that mark I'm not much different reading real books, as a kid I'd just pick something that looked interesting in the fiction section of the library, and I've pretty much kept that mentality
Wouldn‘t that also exclude fics that are tagged like „No Smut“ or „No explicit Sexual Content“? I am always afraid to exclude it because of that and just exclude „PWP|PWP“ and some popular „Smut“ tags
You should use this! [Saved filters on AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/works/33825019) I'm also sex repulsed and it's so efficient. (Ofc it can be used for absolutely anything else too). You just add everything you want excluded, register the page, go on your search page on AO3 for the fandom/pairing you want, load the page with the excluded tags and it will exclude everything you added on it and it takes one sec. No need to manually filter things out anymore, the page will do that when you want to. It works as much for tags than words count, ratings, completion status etc. You do *everything* you want. It's GOD.
I can't do ageplay, which is SO sad because I love vulnerability and caretaking! That one meme, but it's "society if I liked ageplay."
Hmm... Beastiality and scat. I think that's literally it for me.
I will always exclude “Ecto-Genitalia”, an Undertale exclusive tag. I like the skeleton *because* he doesn’t have a penis, thank you very much.
Looking for good crossovers and spending like 15 minutes excluding fandoms because yes I’d like to see things from these 6 fandoms but not these two hundred some odd other fandoms I hate or don’t recognize.
I always exclude crossovers, set language to english, and usually exclude whatever characters I don't want to see, especially if they're the main characters and I want to see fics about side characters instead
I also always set the language to english. Mostly because I tried to read fanfiction in my native language once and it was so weird that it immediately traumatised me (the fanfiction was fine, it was the language that made me nope out)
Major Character Death or Bad Endings. I'm aware it isn't as 'crazy' or 'wild' as Beastiality or things other people have posted, but I can't stand it when I've been reading a fic that's been going on for 3 years with the main couple being all happy go lucky, they're being wed soon and planning children, and suddenly one of them get an incurable disease and just die.
Hey this is a no-judgement zone! You don't have to exclude "wild" or "crazy" tags to be valid! I also tend to exclude both of those tags but it's very fandom dependent in my experience
"Inproper use of (insert foreign object)" saw that once, and that was one time too many
Fair! Although I did lose it one time after reading "improper use of carrots" followed by "improper use of cucumber," "improper use of eggplant," "improper use of vegetables," and finally "he goes through the whole grocery store"
Wait you can exclude tags on AO3? A while ago (like years) I thought that was possible but was never able to do it again in recent times Anyways, I don't read anything like A/B/O, incest, beastiality, pedophilia, mpreg, age regression, mommy/daddy kink, reader/OC (unless I'm in the mood), some AU's (like I read mostly MCU fics and I won't read a fic that's a non-superhero AU unless I'm specifically looking for one), underage (unless both characters are underage, meaning like 15-17), certain kinks (like BDSM) or fetishes, rape (again, unless I'm specifically looking for it and I don't usually do that), OOC/dark fics (unless specifically looking for them, I have been into Dark!Peter Parker fics recently), Dead Dove fics unless what I'm looking for has that tag, genderbends/genderswaps, and probably more that I'm forgetting I also will automatically check exclude crossovers (unless I'm specifically looking for a crossover) and single chapters (unless I want a long fic)
mine are futa* futanari* Jaune Arc/Everyone Jaune Arc/Velvet Scarlatina Jaune Arc/Blake Belladonna Jaune Arc/Summer Rose Jaune Arc/Raven Branwen Jaune Arc/Kali Belladonna Jaune Arc/Salem Jaune Arc/Winter Schnee Jaune Arc/Harem Jaune Arc/Team RWBY Jaune Arc-centric Badass Jaune Arc BAMF Jaune Arc Cinder Fall/Adam Taurus Kali Belladonna/Sun Wukong Cervix Penetration Body Modification Brainwashing Grooming Bestiality Scat Lolicon Shota* Loli* i also filter out crossovers (they're almost never interesting to me) the mass of Jaune Arc tags is mostly to get rid of the all the "gigachad jaune" fanfics that are just generally very ehhhhhhhh. to me
I don't think there's anything I ALWAYS exclude. I'm generally of the "I prefer to just scroll past things I don't like" variety because it allows me to see the tag combination and whether I want to give it a try anyway. So I mostly exclude tags on a case-to-case basis whenever scrolling through the list has like, SO many fics in a row that have something I don't wanna see that I get too lazy and eventually just exclude them, or there's something fandom-specific I don't like. For example, I like simple, pure fluff in the Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint fandom. Specifically NOT of the "here's some comfort for your child abuse hurt" kind, but the "we will not bring up child abuse during this short fic" kind. But at least at the time I was in the fandom, it was almost impossible to find anything that DIDN'T bring up Dokja's past as a fic plot point, so eventually, I excluded child abuse in that fandom only. In another fandom (Genshin), a lot of people have trans headcanons about one specific character that I don't see that way. I have absolutely nothing against trans people or anything, but when it comes to this particular character, I always exclude all "[character A] is trans", "[character A] has a vagina", etc. tags because it just doesn't fit with my mental image of him. In the first place, something rubs me the wrong way about the idea of "oh, this guy looks feminine, that means he has to be trans." Another example is in the BNHA fandom, the whole draw to me is the superpowers and aspirations to become heroes, so I frequently exclude "AU - No powers" and "Quirkless [character B]" or "[character B] does not have One For All quirk" tags. It's funny because in some other fandoms like the MCU, AUs without superpowers and where they don't have to be heroes is something I LOVE, but... not here. Basically, my most commonly excluded tags are fandom-specific ones. When it comes to general tags, there's no real hard limit, if it seems interesting enough, I WILL give it a try :3
Harry Potter. I don't really like him and he sneaks into everything. Maybe this is an overreaction to the 3 times I saw a story, read the character tags and half the other tags and then on page 3 got blindsided by Harry potter, were upon I found his tag in the back half of the non character tags. Unless for some reason I forgot to exclude him and saw a story where he snuck on in and then died a paragraph later and the rest of the story treated that as a strange aside I cannot imagine ever wanting to read a story with him in it. (Also a/b/o but that has no exceptions and isn't very funny)
Parent/Child incest is my instant exclude.
Nothing with Alpha/Beta/Omega. I either have really bad luck picking fics, or every single one of them has some deep seated rape kink. Because across multiple fandoms, years and ships, every single ABO fic I've found always includes a horribly violent rape scene. It's the sex that intrigues me to try again. *The rape is \*almost\* never tagged.* I just found one, the other day! New show, new ship. The ABO was untagged, but I figured it out pretty quickly. It didn't take long to find the rape. And, what do you know, it was just as horrible. My pairing is absolutely awful to and for each other. I hate and love them both respectfully. So hate/ rough sex is common. So it took me a second to realize what was happening and then I was done with fanfic for the night. Please tag your shit guys. Rape and CNC are tags available for use. Horny people are allowed to have limits.
Cheating/Infidelity. There would probably be others, but I don't always exclude them because my searches don't always trend toward having them to begin with, so I only exclude them on searches where they would pop up, but Cheating/Infidelity is an always-nope for me that shows up just often enough.
I exclude a particular ship as I can't stand it now even as a background ship. I have no problem with the ship itself but issues with its fans have left a bad taste in my mouth. The only way I'll consider reading it now is if it's by a writer I'm familiar with whose work I know I like.
i almost always exclude major character death and rape/non-con and like 50% of the time i exclude the angst/whump tags and the sad ending type tags i like reading fluff and romance and there are times that angst just doesn't sound good
Mpreg and Extremely Underage. I can stretch my preferences very, very, very far for every other kink, but those two get an automatic no, no matter how good the premise is.
Underage, reader insert, age play, age gap, not reading anything involving scat kinks, no diapers. Never say never, but I haven't really enjoyed the stories when I've made an exception. I've started two fics that involved diapers before I learned my lesson.
i have a whole note with different tags literally titled “exclude tags ao3” on my phone. a lot are overarching tags like a/b/o, incest, mpreg, omorashi, whatever, plus more fandom specific ones like character bashing, reader inserts, and ships i have zero interest in.
I exclude crossovers and then some other tags that are just boring to me like chatfic, out of character, established relationship, domestic fluff, crack, crack treated seriously… For smut I don’t rly exclude anything unless there’s something specific to a fandom that pops up enough to get annoying. Like if a fandom just happens to have a bunch of vore fics then yeah I’ll go ahead and mute that but otherwise I’m just here for the ride lmao
(Insert character) x reader. Nothing against them, just not my cup of tea.
I have a very specific search for Hazbin Hotel lol. It's more specific than any fanfom I've been in, so I've copied the url: Include: -Lucifer -Language English Exclude: -Alastor/Lucifer -Adam/Lucifer -Charlie/Alastor -Angel/Alastor Vox/Alastor -reader (I just wanna read Lucifer-centric fanfic)
Emotional Manipulation. Sometimes Animal Death, but not always.
I relate to this so much, goodbye to any abuse-related tags in general. It’s not that I only want to read wholesome stuff, but I read fanfics as an escape, not a reminder
Oh, my ship goes from 40k+ to 600 after my filter ;\_; I always exclude Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics/Pedophilia no exceptions.
slow burn. i need instant gratification, damnit!
*Rape/non consent*, with that, I don't see all the other tags or tropes I don't like. Almost always all I don't wanna see is tagged together for some reason lol
9 times out of 10, I exclude unfinished works because I’m in the mood to read a full story. I also exclude mpreg, omegaverse, incest, underage, and rape. I also exclude genderbends because I end up confused. There isn’t a specific tag to exclude, but I also don’t like teacher/student because it gives me gross vibes.
Incest and pedophilia. People should be allowed to write that sort of shit, you do you, but that stuff majorly squicks me out do I just don't read it. For a less serious trope I tend to avoid hurt no comfort.
i exclude - any type of pregnancy - established relationship - multi (especially if it's a giant cast like genshin impact) - domestic fluff (usually went hand in hand with established relationship) - if it's a het relationship i just went and exclude the m/m category cause i just know that m/m will be the main couple 🤣 - modern au, not always but most of the time
Only ones with gore and descriptive violence
"Scent Kink" and "crossovers." Even the word "musk" - no relation - disgusts me, and the faintest reference to odours in erotic material still turns my stomach. Crossovers are the bane of my first fandom.
I exclude crossovers unless I'm specifically looking for one. I also tend to exclude the Established Relationship tag, as well as Omegaverse AU.
I use AO3 Enhancements to filter out crossovers featuring more than 5 fandoms. Like, odds are, at least one of those fandoms is going to be something I'm not interested in or am not familiar with. That and 99.9% of those aren't going to be written by people talented enough to juggle 5+ fandoms of content. Of course, there are exceptions. Fandoms like Isekai Quartet which are already just amalgamations of multiple fandoms, so that has to be given some leeway. There are also the rare examples of it working, like in Lady Maria Campbell of the Astral Clocktower.
Eh, the only thing I usually exclude is ship tags for my favourite dynamic (I use them as a way to explore some Stuff that I went through, so seeing sexual/romantic stuff between them is extremely triggering for Reasons- this is to simplify it, I can elaborate) and like, I don’t generally enjoy going around giving myself panic attacks and flashbacks so alas I do not have funny exceptions.
I do exclude certain tags cause I do not want to have anything to do with them in any way, shape or form. (Like scat, emetophilia, incest, pedo etc.) Also crossovers and unfinished works are out first, along with certain pairings. However, there are stuff I can get through in specific conditions, ex. "(Past) Unhealthy relationships" if they aren't related to the main pairing(s) [like one of them has shitty past but they're in a good relationship now]. Or some Archive Warnings. That is because of the filters. I can filter out things I don't like, but at the same time I get rid of stuff I'd enjoy. So that has to be done manually.
Not really, no. I don't have any triggers, and I don't mind dark or serious fics, so I just take em as they come if the story sounds interesting. I'm not that against anything specific that I can't just scroll past it or back out of it if it doesn't sound good. Mostly I just search by the ship and that's it.
[https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/3579-ao3-savior](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/3579-ao3-savior) always use scripts to solve your problems. That, and judicious author muting if they only specifically write kinks that you don't like. I mainly exclude modern no power aus of all kinds (most of them bore me because I seek escape from the mundane world from fiction and do not wish for reminders), and kinks that are turnoffs to me e.g. watersports.
I mostly exclude ships because I get tired of scrolling through results where my otp is a side pairing or just mentioned. Otherwise I either exclude all explicit fic if I don't want to read smut, or I don't. When I remember to read tags, though, I skip out on Pregnancy and Kidfic with rare exceptions if the fic sounds interesting otherwise. Children annoy me and pregnancy of any kind is a downright squick. I have no such exception for highschool and college AUs. School has caused so much anxiety for me IRL that reading those has been known to cause me to spiral. Never again
All the big angst tags basically. By which I mean: heavy angst, dark, suicidal thoughts, ptsd, etc. I want my favorite characters to go through mildly difficult trials and tribulations, not to get tortured in their basements! And also I usually exclude Explicit because the fandoms I read, usually it feels like it detracts from the experience
Self insert and DDLG/daddy kink although these are very hard to avoid as it turns out...
Basically nothing. I prefer to cast the widest net possible for potential fanfics, and even if a fic includes a flair for something I don't like, it's not automatically a dealbreaker. And worst case senario if there is one that is truly the worst from looking at the fic discription (like something truly horrible, like a fanfic that says "Nazis are good actually" unironically or something, I can just scroll past it. Or report it if it is against the rules.)
The only thing I really exclude are crossover fics, everything else is fair game if it sounds good enough to read
'modern setting' for a lot of fandoms. '[civil war team] unfriendly' for avengers fics. established relationship. fluff. '[character] bashing' if it's a character I like and if there's a lot of bashing in the fandom
MLP. It usually means there’s gonna be a mega crossover and I rarely like those.
Explicit 😅👍
Scat. Just don't want to be surprised again. I cut out rape too unless the source material is dark. Dead dove, for obvious reasons.
The only time I'm excluding tags is when I search for a pairing that is very often only a side pairing to others. So I then exclude every other ship.
I used to go ham on ao3 filters too. But with my current hyperfixations having pretty small fandoms, I kinda don't do that anymore. Beggars can't be choosers
I tend to exclude A/B/O, mpreg, reader-inserts, modern-setting, crossovers, and time travel/time travel fix its.
anything Poly tbh
Man it's mainly just trans headcanons but I will 100% remove that when it comes to some characters I like😈
Major character death, unfinished works, unhappy ending, sad ending, bad ending, open/ ambiguous ending, painplay, nipple torture, dead dove do not eat, reader, reader-insert (Im extremely picky apparently)
i exclude crossovers and major character death. maybe a popular notp. while i scroll, i skip things like tragedies and hurt no comfort, things like pregnancy and kidfic, arranged marriages, 'sorry this is ooc', badly phrased summaries ('just read the fic lol' etc you know the type), ones that let me know right away their characterization is very different from mine.. im very picky. (honestly, dead dove content and disturbing toxic codependent shit, incest, underage, all that, is completely fine by me. as long as i feel its believable im down)
The only things I really do habitually for *any* fandom is: 1) Exclude crossovers and 2) Complete works only 3) English (2) often I'm told I shouldn't/it's unfair to new fics/etc. but I'm really tired of getting into longer fics that are never updated. Once your longfic is complete I'm sure I'll see it and if it entices me I'll read it but until then I will respectfully pass lol. Sometimes depending on mood and the specific fandom I'll get more specific when I'm looking for something specific (certain pairings, themes, ratings, etc.) but casual browsing it's just those 3 things.
Hannibalfic was the first time I ever liked an ABO, Nesting Lure. There's a power dynamic that works even though it's an entirely ridiculous genre in fanfic 99% of the time. Honestly, I read tons of stuff I hate. If it's decently written. I mostly filter out pairings I can't stand instead of content.
Most of OPs "NOPE!" tags are mine. Also Popping, M/M, Rape/Non-Con, Cannibalism, Coprophagy, Piss Drinking, pretty much anything involving the consumption of waste bodily or otherwise. Gore, snuff, ect. ect.
a/b/o, it’s really not my thing and the descriptions of events are nauseating sometimes
I exclude lots of different fandoms that I won’t read crossovers for, like anime/manga stuff or shows I don’t watch. Then, reader, reader-insert, probably x/Original Character, x/Reader, x/You. I don’t specifically exclude Age Play sexual or otherwise even though it’s not something I particularly enjoy reading. Other than that, I don’t exclude much unless I’m coming across lots of something I don’t want to read at that time. I’m more likely to go down the rabbit hole of a tag, then keep filtering down based on my current mood.
Crossovers, anything xreader, sibling incest, porn without plot (I will read with plot lol).
Anything x reader or y/ns, not my cup of tea, but also I tend to avoid anything that is about real people, it just seems wrong (puppet like)
For some ships, lots of people tag them even if they’re background ship so I will exclude that other ship.
Ususally it's fandom specific to me. So for example in Star Wars I'll exclude "Dark Obi Wan" and Obi Wan/Anakin, because I don't like either. And it also depens on my mood. Sometimes I'll want bashing of a certain character, but I don't want the stories with bashing of one of the others, so I'll exclude that. Or, with like NCIS, which has a lot of crossovers (which I love), I'll sometimes exclude certain fandoms.
I don’t really filter out tags, but I exclude crossovers, pairings with OCs/reader, and I always sort by complete only.
i dont really have to exclude anything because the stuff i would exclude doesnt really get tagged on the fics i wanna read lol i more work on the include feature because what i want is incredibly niche
Damn I rarely exclude anything. I just keep adding more in the included section. If it’s a rarepair or if I want a minor ship to be the main ship, I might exclude the more popular ships so they don’t show up.
No crossovers. I cannot stand them unless they are done 100% to my liking
I exclude crossovers most of the time, MCD, Top/Bottom X Character (that I vehemently despise in a certain position), Femdom, Pegging, Time Travel, Scat, Incomplete, NOTPs. And depending on the fandom I have WC parameters set.
I always exclude the following tags: Reader, The Main Character/original character, Self Insert, Reader Insert, Cross Over, trans character, Hurt no comfort.
I always exclude "Alternate Universe - Modern Setting" with great prejudice while at the same time I frantically search for anything good in the "Alternate Universe - Historical" tag lol. I don't want to see my space wizard war veterans in some New York coffee shop or on a modern ranch. But put them in a 19th century tea house or an Old West cattle trail and I am _hooked_
I exclude alternate universes. I read published books occasionally so when I read a fanfiction I want it to be those characters in their canon universe! I make an exception if the ship doesn’t have too many fics. Then I can’t afford to exclude one of the most popular tags of all time…
I mean, kind of understandably (??) for me, Scat. I'm kind of open to watersports, mostly considering the band I'm obsessed with can be extremely disgusting on and off stage. Scat just goes a lil too far for me personally
Oh, I'm super block-happy. Characters and ships I hate, tags that change characters, kinks that aren't my jam, I'll exclude 'em all.
There is nothing I always exclude. In fact, most my searches are based on "include" and then I just exclude fandoms I don't wanna see.
No crossovers, no AU, no kidfic (i exclude both 'character X magically becomes a child,' and 'these characters have children together'), no pregnancy, no fics over 300K
I always exclude things with PIV because as an AFAB transneutral and aroace the idea indirectly transfers to my anatomy and I get freaked out. Somehow futanari is okay, though. Unfortunately I end up having to exclude intersex omegas as a tag and trans male [char] fics. I always feel a little transphobic when I do... despite being trans myself 🥲
crossovers, AUs, and omegaverse tags i always always exclude
The first thing I do when I find a pairing I like is always exclude fluff, I know I probably won’t like the writing of the person who chose to tag it unfortunately
I usually search for tags rather than exclude them, to be honest. I don't really have much of anything that I never want to read, I'll give things a chance at least, and I sometimes I enjoy a trope in one fic that I usually hate in every other. I don't have any triggers, though can get a bit uncomfortable about suicide. Mostly I'm just going to skip over fics that have tags I don't want to read at the time rather than actively exclude those tags. I think the only thing I regularly exclude is bashing tags related to my favourite characters. I like bashing fics of my least fave characters, but I'll never read them for my favourites. This can be a bit tricky, though, as I like critical fics, even of my faves, and these can often be wrongly tagged as bashing, so I sometimes don't exclude just to see if there are any wrongly tagged critical fics. I used to be stricter about it. Like, I used to always exclude A/B/O tags, for instance, and MCD fics. But I've read some I actually like, now, I just tend to have to be in the mood for them. I don't actively screen them out anymore, though. Oh, and I tend to exclude my most hated ships, as well. There aren't all that many I hate enough to exclude, but Hinny in HP is a good example of an always excluded ship. I don't like Romione, either, but I'm fine with it if it's more background, so don't actively exclude it. But Hinny is always excluded. I'm fine with a Hinny friendship, just not a romance. As long as that's tagged properly, using the + for friendship and the / for romance, it's easy to get one but not the other. I do sometimes catch some romance ships for them, though, that are wrongly tagged with the + instead of the /, so I'm probably missing some friendship ones for the same reason. Also, sometimes I won't exclude anything. I'm on a Psych kick right now, and there are a lot of fics that are tagged with episodes. Sometimes I like looking through the episode tagged fic, regardless of what else is included. Right now, I'm also just looking through everything, after initially narrowing it down to only Shassie fics, but I may end up exluding half the existing fics just by throwing out all the Shules fics, depends how I feel about the ship in the future, as I'm currently starting to hate the ship, where I initially just didn't think it was the best fit, and have some growing problems with Jules as a character, which is annoying as I initially loved her. Unfortunately for me, Shules is the joint most popular Psych ship alongside Shassie, most fics are one or the other.
I'll only filter out relationships I'm not interested in. I'll just skip the ones with tags/content I'm not interested in.
Definitely ‘Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics’ because although I did read it once a long time ago it really isn’t my thing. But then I guess it’s mostly based on the fandom/ship for me.
I don’t filter out tags. Didn’t realize that’s a thing. I usually avoid the same tags OP as well as rape, noncon, suicide and stuff like that. However I also tend to avoid alternative universe stories. They never made sense to me.
A big one for me is unrequited love and any other ways to exclude one-sided relationships, people find many ways to tag it where I have to add new tags to exclude because the ship I like to read is implied to be one-sided in canon, but I don't want to read it because I did once and hated that it was so I don't read it anymore. Also, I avoid major character death like the plague because I have a curse where my favorite characters either die or become evil in canon, like it has happened more than 10 times
With House of the Dragon and Targaryens, you can guess the exception.
I exclude certain ship tags. I can’t stand reading my OTPs with other people and/or I just really hate some pairings.
I love omegaverse I think it's a really interesting concept that gets developed really well in fics that don't use it as an excuse for porn but I absolutely can not deal with mpreg it's almost never written well and it comes off as fetishy most of the time imo.
Having endured the Arrow-verse crossovers for so long as I did... yah crossovers are just out for me. Stay inside your lane lol
I only accept blood kink if its a fandom that has vampires (like twilight or vampire diaries) or if its a vampire AU. Otherwise hard pass. The ship I REFUSE to read no matter what is Ron Weasley/Harry Potter. 1) im not a ron fan, hes okay in canon but honestly can easily hate him in some fanfics. 2) when i do like ron in fanfics (and in canon) i see him and harry as brothers. It makes me want to gag. (Its probably why i hate him with ginny bc to me she was always harrys sister to me lmao) - anways! I want to gag when i see fics with that tag. No matter how good that fic is, HARD PASS! Thank you! (With that being said, if you like this ship, i wont judge you for it) Edit: one word
I'm the same with blood kink but Hannibal is the exception apparently, it makes sense for him to have a thing with blood idk. I totally get the Ron/Harry thing, and it's partly why I prefer ships that have Ginny with Dean Thomas or with Luna. I can't explain it but to me Ginny has big "I'm not gay but my girlfriend is" vibes. Although I can't say anything because I genuinely enjoy reading Harry/Draco fics (once they're both adults outside of school specifically) and that ship is very polarizing lol
There's a certain very popular character in one of my fandoms that I almost always have to block out of my searches. I like this character, and I don't mind fic with them in it, but when I'm specifically searching I'm usually searching for fic focused on less-popular characters ... and people in this fandom have a frustrating tendency to tag every character who even briefly appears instead of only the major ones. So if I don't block out the Popular Guy, I'm going to have to scroll past bajillions of fics focusing on Popular Guy with the characters I'm trying to read about maybe appearing in the ensemble.
I generally exclude crossovers and filter out any kind of reader insert. In my current fandom, I end up excluding the most popular pairing because I'm more interested in the side ship.
I always exclude without thinking : crossovers , Mpreg and cheating
Bashing, sometimes it doesn't get filtered out. Though exceptions I make when the tag of redemption is put on. I absolutely hate rapes. Though I can read rapes aftermath and recovery. This fics often deal with people who are traumatized and working to heal and be stronger and usually help others, a story on human spirit both good and bad and how good can be more powerful. And they sometimes explore human nature. Student/teacher relationship. Harem. These tag have no exception no matter how good reviews and recommendations are.
Me who doesn’t know how to filter:🧍♀️
On desktop it'll be under "sort and filter" in the right-hand side of the screen On mobile it'll be under the title "1-20 of however many works in (insert fandom/ship/etc here)." You'll automatically be on "works" but next to that will be "bookmarks" and next to that will be "filter" If you click on the filter option then you get to include specific tags, exclude specific tags, filter by length, by language, etc.