Has this ever happened to you? You're looking for fic of your personal favorite pairing, but because of a quirk of the fandom, your ship shows up in the background in a lot of fic about other, more popular ships.

Meaning that the search results are flooded with fics that aren't about your ship at all.

(Sokka/Suki in Avatar: The Last Airbender is a good example of a ship that gets this very hard)

Well, there's now a browser extension for that. It adds a toggle to the search page that will remove all search results that don't have the relationship you're looking for as the first ship tag.

The thought being that generally writers will tag the primary ship of their fic first and then add in whatever other ones are floating around.

Not a perfect heuristic, obviously, but a pretty decent one.

For firefox: AO3 Primary Ship Search – Get this Extension for 🦊 F...

For Chrome: AO3 First Tag Search

A couple notes:

1) THis only works when searching Works using the main search page, if you navigate to your fandom and use the filter sidebar there it won't work.

The reason for this is that I don't actually use AO3 much for reading random fic, so I didn't know it existed.

I'm looking into updating it to be useable through the filter sidebar as well.

2) It's listed as experimental on the Firefox AMO, and would be on Chrome's web store if it had that option. Reason being, I've only tested it myself, and as noted above, I don't actually use AO3 in that way very much!

So if you use it, I'd appreciate feedback on whether it's working for you, and if it DOESN'T work or breaks in some use cases, I'd like to hear that as well!

3) Because of how AO3 is set up, I can only remove fics from the search results page; I can't fetch more from the next page to take their place.

Which means that each page of search results will have fewer entries than normal - sometimes drastically fewer.

I haven't actually witnessed a completely empty search results page in the wild, but there's no reason it couldn't happen.

4) If you're searching with multiple relationship tags, it'll keep in any fics that have any of your tags as the first ship tag. So if I, say, search Sokka/Suki and Aang/Katara, it'll keep in any fic that has either of those as the first ship tag, and remove any fics that have anything else as the first tag.

5) It's occurred to me that it would also be useful to have the same functionality for Character tags, so that you can find fic focused on minor characters without having to wade through a field of fic in which said minor characters were just in the background. That'll probably come with the update that adds sidebar support.

replurking to save lives

as someone who loves minor characters this sounds like a godsend

oh HELL yeah

you’re a saint and a hero

THANK YOU

oh my god this is incredible THANK YOU

as someone who usually cares about less popular characters/ships this happens to me all the time...

OMG THANK YOU

this made my day

music to my ears!

THANK YOU DAVID PUMPKINS

WONDERFUL

That is awesome

Oh, this is amazing, thank you so mcuh!

Nice!!

... I LOVE YOU

Jesus Christ as the person who always ends up with the rare pairs this is a godsend

What an excellent extension! Thank you.

BLESS <3

.....I am proud to call you my friend today, sir, and honored to have played some small part in this breakthrough

if only by choosing to gripe to a genius.

Is this available to RT on Twitter?

I haven’t boosted it on Twitter because I wanted to give it some time to see some use and make sure it generally works before (potentially) exposing to a wider audience

oh wow this is a much better option for me than OTP: true, can't wait to use it.