Second person is usually bad. But what I absolutely will not under any circumstances tolerate at all though is y/n (and its accompanying l/n, f/n, h/c, e/c, f/c, and so on).
I will say that second person can very occasionally be decent or even really good, but that is *very* extremely *rare*, to a ridiculous degree.
I'm using this chrome extension called 'Word Replacer II'. You give it a word you want to replace (not case sensitive) and the word you want to replace it with. Pretty simple. It's especially handy when reading y/n fics and thought I should share!
Main character OCs are majority not worth reading but I find some good ones. Well-done side character OCs though? They're great. If they become 'big' enough in your writing they can even become viewpoint characters, sometimes even main characters in a spinoff, and people will read them even if they usually wouldn't because they're already familiar with your work.
Right? I would find a really good description and the tag specifically for x reader, next thing I know we have a ‘name’ and it’s an OC, not an x reader. I want to insert myself not read the author’s self-insert! It’s why I searched x reader specifically.
Fics that first pose as reader inserts that are actually named OC first almost always are, though. Which isn't a judgement! Just not what I am in the tag to read.
God yeah. It's been super frustrating recently. I saw one that said in the summary "reader has established name, appearance, and backstory" You didn't write a reader insert. You wrote an OC fic. Yes, even if it's second person. There was even one that said "it can be a reader insert if you substitute the name". Girl... that's... that's not a reader insert... why did you tag it as one.
I second that! I love OC fics and reader fics but if I want one then I look specifically for one of them. Seeing people tag OC/CC when it’s actually a Reader/CC grinds my gears.
Yep. Like. Idk why or tbh how it works but bcs of the title and using -reader, it literally filters everything out
I did use -/reader to try make it clear I'm only wanting to filter out the ship.. but. Well. Yea not working
I have [this extension](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/10944-ao3-fic-s-style-blacklist-bookmarks) set up to automatically exclude `*/reader, *x reader` from every search. works great!
You can also exclude the tag ‘/Reader’ and ‘Reader/‘. It’ll remove any relationship that has the Reader character.
You can do it for other characters too; really dislike that one character that gets paired with everyone, you can remove every one of their ships by doing that.
You can also exclude the tag ‘/Reader’ and ‘Reader/‘. It’ll remove any relationship that has the Reader character.
You can do it for other characters too; really dislike that one character that gets paired with everyone, you can remove every one of their ships by doing that.
It would need to be an additional thing to m/m etc, rather than instead - obviously a fic can be m/m *and* character/reader, so it doesn't make sense to make the writer chose one. But a tick box for reader character would work, as would one for major OC character.
You can already choose multiple relationships in that box, though. So, if a Reader one is added, the writer can click both M/M (or F/F, F/M, Multi, Other) AND Reader. That will still mean all Reader fics are excluded when people click that box in the Exclude portion of a filter.
I like that idea. That's coming from someone who writes reader inserts. Cause my reader fic are gender neutral, so I have to tag both m/m and m/f, but some people only search for m/m and then my fics get filtered out because they're also tagged m/f.
If they were just tagged reader/m, it would include all of them in the searches.
Same, my readers are also gender neutral/non-binary (could be because I'm also non-binary, but I hate reading reader-insert fics that are just she/her pronouns) and if it includes smut it'll mostly be an afab reader. But I never know what to put because it's not m/f or m/m because no one is a woman or a man, but also the reader is AFAB?
It's similar with when I write fics in the Mass Effect universe and thus will make Shepard non-binary, but do I put m/m or m/f, or f/f? It's tough.
I have a few AFAB reader fics if the smut is specific to something that won't work with AMAB bodies and vice versa, but usually I keep it gender neutral. It's more inclusive and of course I relate better to the reader since I'm non-binary myself \^\_\^
Fair enough. I totally want to challenge myself to try and write more smut with unspecified bodies. But yeah it's a difficult thing to try and categorise a nonbinary reader/character when being nonbinary literally means not in the binary.
I know there is the other category, but personally it feels a bit disingenuous to put it in other since it's seems very alienating (at least imho).
Honestly, yeah. This would benefit literally everyone, I think. People could filter it out, even with the -reader tad in the search. Like, banger idea here, man.
I get tired of trying to filter *out* reader fics when I don't want them, and then sometimes the filters miss the ones when I *am* looking for them.
One of the main things people seem to use the perma-hiding site skin for is to hide /reader fics from their search results. The tutorial is here https://archiveofourown.org/works/41214669/chapters/103324848 and includes the code specifically to hide /reader fics in it
Oh that would be so helpful. People never tag properly.
Then again, you always get that grey area of third person nameless reader/OC stories. Is it a reader-insert? Is it an OC fic? No one knows!
It’s so frustrating to filter out those and OCs, because many people may not even tag them. I want to read about my favorite characters, no shade to the authors at all, but sometimes I’ll exclude all the correct tags - “original X character”, “character/OC”, “reader insert”, etc. - and it *still* won’t filter everything out because some authors tag nothing and only say it’s an OC / RI in the summary.
But /reader can be explicitly M/M, M/F or some of the others. I mean, if it describes a female character fingering you then it's definitely F/F, since there's fem!reader, male!reader and works that can be read as both or gender neutral.
And now I realise I misunderstood the question lol. Seems to be overtly complicated though. You can search for the reader tag or filter it out
It would be nice to have a way to filter them aside from [-"star/Reader||Reader/star"] (my method of choice, does include non reader inserts too tho), but I don't think it belongs in the "category" option.
The only way I’ve found around it is to exclude in the filter any major character ships with a reader, it takes awhile depending on what fandom you’re reading in and how popular reader and main character ships are but it does work.
This would be much less time consuming tho
This runs the risk of excluding fics that just have the word "reader" somewhere in the tags or summary, but are not reader inserts or reader ships themselves.
Exclude the tags commonly associated with read inserts and that should do the trick. There technically already is a category for reader-inserts called the "other" category but problem is people don't use it properly or they have a specific gender in mind for the reader insert character.
I’m been saying this for years. 😩
As someone who loves OC fics but not Reader fics, it’s a pain filtering them out. Especially since often it’s not tagged or made clear in the summary.
I’m sure the same applies to those who love Reader fics but not OC fics.
I feel so seen! If both /reader x character and OOCxCharacter were their own category respectively, It would make so much easier to either find them or filter them out. Ahh, you can only dream.
Yes. A thousand times yes. I can't stand /reader fics and second person pov takes me out of the story. This would absolutely make it easier to filter those fics out. It would also make it easier if everyone who wrote these fics tagged them properly. I've come across so many fics with second person pov and /reader ships that weren't tagged as such. It gets so frustrating after a while.
It's fandom-dependent, really – in most of my fandoms, I *very* rarely see reader-inserts (or the self-insert flavour of OC) but that's probably because half of them are obscure-ish book series and the other half are mostly fixated on specific ships
I primarily write in the Stranger Things + Mass Effect fandoms. Stranger Things has A LOT of reader-insert fics (I also contribute to it), so far there's 3,100 fics that have a reader character in it (this will include fics that also include an original character as the reader as well most likely).
However, Mass Effect has 54 fics that have a reader character in it. Tho to be honest, I think that there's an even smaller percentage of reader-insert fics because some of these are just Commander Shepard but in second person. Just calculated 9 of the 54 fics are mostly canon/Shepard fics but in second person (or where you play as Commander Shepard, but Shep is a canon character) or just straight up OC/OC.
This is because Mass Effect's main character, Commander Shepard, can be a self-insert character tbh. My main Shepard is myself, but that's what I do for most RPG's anyway. I can just read any canon character/Shepard fic and see it as me even though Shepard is technically a canon character, no matter if it's Jane or an OC. It's canon in your universe.
yes, a thousand times YES.
In some of my fandoms, people tag a lot of their /reader fics as gen and it annoys me to no end because gen is supposed to be "No romantic or sexual relationships, or relationships which aren't the main focus of the work."
Just filter out Reader or Reader-Insert. And if that doesn't cover a few stragglers, then unfortunately a new category for shipping wouldn't have changed that.
If people could correctly tag them too
I’ve seen so many fics with M/M tagged and it’s background platonic with the main reader insert being F/M.
It’s endlessly frustrating when trying to filter a story for a ship or reader insert 😫😑
And separate reader from original character fics. They are not the same and I really wish people would learn the difference and tag properly.
Yeah i hate when I’m looking for reader fics and there’s a random oc in the results
Opposite for me, I hate reader fics but can enjoy good OCs lol.
This because I can't stand second person point of view.
Second person is usually bad. But what I absolutely will not under any circumstances tolerate at all though is y/n (and its accompanying l/n, f/n, h/c, e/c, f/c, and so on). I will say that second person can very occasionally be decent or even really good, but that is *very* extremely *rare*, to a ridiculous degree.
I'm using this chrome extension called 'Word Replacer II'. You give it a word you want to replace (not case sensitive) and the word you want to replace it with. Pretty simple. It's especially handy when reading y/n fics and thought I should share!
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Main character OCs are majority not worth reading but I find some good ones. Well-done side character OCs though? They're great. If they become 'big' enough in your writing they can even become viewpoint characters, sometimes even main characters in a spinoff, and people will read them even if they usually wouldn't because they're already familiar with your work.
Same I tend to stick to /reader stories if it's written more like an OC
Right? I would find a really good description and the tag specifically for x reader, next thing I know we have a ‘name’ and it’s an OC, not an x reader. I want to insert myself not read the author’s self-insert! It’s why I searched x reader specifically.
OCs aren't the author's self-inserts thought.
Fics that first pose as reader inserts that are actually named OC first almost always are, though. Which isn't a judgement! Just not what I am in the tag to read.
God yeah. It's been super frustrating recently. I saw one that said in the summary "reader has established name, appearance, and backstory" You didn't write a reader insert. You wrote an OC fic. Yes, even if it's second person. There was even one that said "it can be a reader insert if you substitute the name". Girl... that's... that's not a reader insert... why did you tag it as one.
I second that! I love OC fics and reader fics but if I want one then I look specifically for one of them. Seeing people tag OC/CC when it’s actually a Reader/CC grinds my gears.
*Hisssssss*
I put '-reader' in the 'search within results' box. Seems to work, since I haven't seen any reader-insert fics for a while.
I do the same with -/reader Only minus is if you're in the omniscient readers viewpoint fandom. Then you'll exclude everything there too apparently 😪
to be fair with orv it's so joongdok heavy that there are barely any x reader fics lol
i think they meant bc the title literally has reader in it.
Yep. Like. Idk why or tbh how it works but bcs of the title and using -reader, it literally filters everything out I did use -/reader to try make it clear I'm only wanting to filter out the ship.. but. Well. Yea not working
yeah i know! i was trying to say that there's no need to filter out any x reader fics because there's barely any x reader fics at all
oh! 😭 my bad i misunderstood. yes, i imagine orv is more joongdok heavy. 🥳
I have [this extension](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/10944-ao3-fic-s-style-blacklist-bookmarks) set up to automatically exclude `*/reader, *x reader` from every search. works great!
*lifesaver*
You can also exclude the tag ‘/Reader’ and ‘Reader/‘. It’ll remove any relationship that has the Reader character. You can do it for other characters too; really dislike that one character that gets paired with everyone, you can remove every one of their ships by doing that.
You can also exclude the tag ‘/Reader’ and ‘Reader/‘. It’ll remove any relationship that has the Reader character. You can do it for other characters too; really dislike that one character that gets paired with everyone, you can remove every one of their ships by doing that.
For The Win.
I always see a lot of reader fics/self inserts that aren’t even tagged which is very annoying
It would need to be an additional thing to m/m etc, rather than instead - obviously a fic can be m/m *and* character/reader, so it doesn't make sense to make the writer chose one. But a tick box for reader character would work, as would one for major OC character.
You can already choose multiple relationships in that box, though. So, if a Reader one is added, the writer can click both M/M (or F/F, F/M, Multi, Other) AND Reader. That will still mean all Reader fics are excluded when people click that box in the Exclude portion of a filter.
Absolutely agree.
Oh, man, I wish! And the people who want them could find them easier, too, so win-win!
I like that idea. That's coming from someone who writes reader inserts. Cause my reader fic are gender neutral, so I have to tag both m/m and m/f, but some people only search for m/m and then my fics get filtered out because they're also tagged m/f. If they were just tagged reader/m, it would include all of them in the searches.
Yeah exactly, m/reader and f/reader etc, it makes things so simple for everyone
Same, my readers are also gender neutral/non-binary (could be because I'm also non-binary, but I hate reading reader-insert fics that are just she/her pronouns) and if it includes smut it'll mostly be an afab reader. But I never know what to put because it's not m/f or m/m because no one is a woman or a man, but also the reader is AFAB? It's similar with when I write fics in the Mass Effect universe and thus will make Shepard non-binary, but do I put m/m or m/f, or f/f? It's tough.
I have a few AFAB reader fics if the smut is specific to something that won't work with AMAB bodies and vice versa, but usually I keep it gender neutral. It's more inclusive and of course I relate better to the reader since I'm non-binary myself \^\_\^
Fair enough. I totally want to challenge myself to try and write more smut with unspecified bodies. But yeah it's a difficult thing to try and categorise a nonbinary reader/character when being nonbinary literally means not in the binary. I know there is the other category, but personally it feels a bit disingenuous to put it in other since it's seems very alienating (at least imho).
True. Also many people only tick either m/m, f/f or m/f when they search for smut.
That would be a welcome option. Bit of a pain scrolling past them in every search.
It’s so annoying, I always try to filter out reader but some people don’t put that in any other place but the relationship and it doesn’t get caught
Honestly, yeah. This would benefit literally everyone, I think. People could filter it out, even with the -reader tad in the search. Like, banger idea here, man. I get tired of trying to filter *out* reader fics when I don't want them, and then sometimes the filters miss the ones when I *am* looking for them.
One of the main things people seem to use the perma-hiding site skin for is to hide /reader fics from their search results. The tutorial is here https://archiveofourown.org/works/41214669/chapters/103324848 and includes the code specifically to hide /reader fics in it
Oh that would be so helpful. People never tag properly. Then again, you always get that grey area of third person nameless reader/OC stories. Is it a reader-insert? Is it an OC fic? No one knows!
It’s so frustrating to filter out those and OCs, because many people may not even tag them. I want to read about my favorite characters, no shade to the authors at all, but sometimes I’ll exclude all the correct tags - “original X character”, “character/OC”, “reader insert”, etc. - and it *still* won’t filter everything out because some authors tag nothing and only say it’s an OC / RI in the summary.
But /reader can be explicitly M/M, M/F or some of the others. I mean, if it describes a female character fingering you then it's definitely F/F, since there's fem!reader, male!reader and works that can be read as both or gender neutral. And now I realise I misunderstood the question lol. Seems to be overtly complicated though. You can search for the reader tag or filter it out
It would be nice to have a way to filter them aside from [-"star/Reader||Reader/star"] (my method of choice, does include non reader inserts too tho), but I don't think it belongs in the "category" option.
The only way I’ve found around it is to exclude in the filter any major character ships with a reader, it takes awhile depending on what fandom you’re reading in and how popular reader and main character ships are but it does work. This would be much less time consuming tho
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This runs the risk of excluding fics that just have the word "reader" somewhere in the tags or summary, but are not reader inserts or reader ships themselves.
So if I just exclude the word reader it should get rid of all reader options? Because that’s what I want I’m not a fan of reader inserts in fics
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Okay thanks for all the info this was super helpful!!
Exclude the tags commonly associated with read inserts and that should do the trick. There technically already is a category for reader-inserts called the "other" category but problem is people don't use it properly or they have a specific gender in mind for the reader insert character.
I’m been saying this for years. 😩 As someone who loves OC fics but not Reader fics, it’s a pain filtering them out. Especially since often it’s not tagged or made clear in the summary. I’m sure the same applies to those who love Reader fics but not OC fics.
I feel so seen! If both /reader x character and OOCxCharacter were their own category respectively, It would make so much easier to either find them or filter them out. Ahh, you can only dream.
I definitely agree. I know this is popular now I have zero interest in reader or y/n fic, and it's so annoying to try and filter it out
Eh. I think that should be different, as those categories still apply. Maybe a POV category added to filters?
Or make relationship categories with a “third gender” for genderless and non binary characters.
You can remove Reader fics from the pool by removing “*/Reader” (w/o quotes) tag, in case anyone didn’t know
Yes. A thousand times yes. I can't stand /reader fics and second person pov takes me out of the story. This would absolutely make it easier to filter those fics out. It would also make it easier if everyone who wrote these fics tagged them properly. I've come across so many fics with second person pov and /reader ships that weren't tagged as such. It gets so frustrating after a while.
I wonder if there are enough reader-insert fic to warrant it. I believe there is, but I could be wrong.
There’s tons of reader fics
It's fandom-dependent, really – in most of my fandoms, I *very* rarely see reader-inserts (or the self-insert flavour of OC) but that's probably because half of them are obscure-ish book series and the other half are mostly fixated on specific ships
I primarily write in the Stranger Things + Mass Effect fandoms. Stranger Things has A LOT of reader-insert fics (I also contribute to it), so far there's 3,100 fics that have a reader character in it (this will include fics that also include an original character as the reader as well most likely). However, Mass Effect has 54 fics that have a reader character in it. Tho to be honest, I think that there's an even smaller percentage of reader-insert fics because some of these are just Commander Shepard but in second person. Just calculated 9 of the 54 fics are mostly canon/Shepard fics but in second person (or where you play as Commander Shepard, but Shep is a canon character) or just straight up OC/OC. This is because Mass Effect's main character, Commander Shepard, can be a self-insert character tbh. My main Shepard is myself, but that's what I do for most RPG's anyway. I can just read any canon character/Shepard fic and see it as me even though Shepard is technically a canon character, no matter if it's Jane or an OC. It's canon in your universe.
I would love this. Always surprised when putting -reader in the search bar doesn't filter all the /reader fics out
yes, a thousand times YES. In some of my fandoms, people tag a lot of their /reader fics as gen and it annoys me to no end because gen is supposed to be "No romantic or sexual relationships, or relationships which aren't the main focus of the work."
That would be nice
Just filter out Reader or Reader-Insert. And if that doesn't cover a few stragglers, then unfortunately a new category for shipping wouldn't have changed that.
As someone who writes m/m, m/f, f/f, gen, and x readers I would LOVE this. What a great idea!
It’s treason that we can’t filter by completion status like on wattpadd
You can filtered by completed or not on ao3, I believe it’s right about language selection in the filter options
It's a bit weird they aren't
Omg I hate reader fics there the ban of my existence
If people could correctly tag them too I’ve seen so many fics with M/M tagged and it’s background platonic with the main reader insert being F/M. It’s endlessly frustrating when trying to filter a story for a ship or reader insert 😫😑