where she is now I can only guess

[musesfool]

I don't understand why the filter_id method of excluding things from searches has suddenly stopped working for me on AO3. It's bad enough I have to re-input it every time I re-open Firefox, even though I have the the script to save it installed. Arrgh. I mean, I'm also irritated because there is so little new fic posted that I want to read! But

Comments

[musesfool]

whenever I try to read a story by clicking on the pairing tag, it would invariably turn out to be that the canon het part of the story is either 1) a cursory nod to the canon before the the F part of the M/F is shoved aside or 2) worse yet, the canon female love interest is villified like whoa. And there is just no way to filter things out based on which one is the main pairing. SO FRUSTRATING.

Believe me, I know that feel. I mean, in the particular case in my current fandom filtering out this one pairing means I solve that problem for three other pairings, only two of which are canon het, so having it not work is really irritating for me right now. But I yearn for the day when it doesn't have to be like that, when it can be split by main and background or main and past or what have you.

(although I raise my eyebrow at labelling something with porn "gen")

As I said, I can see it in certain circumstances with certain characters, but that is when the sex is not relationship focused - if it's a prostitute AU that is actually about a character working as a prostitute and having sex with multiple johns, not just a way for a pairing to have sex, for example, or if a character has a lot of one-night-stand/doesn't know the person's name sex and it's not the relationship that's the focus, but the character's mindset (why are they enacting this behavior?) etc. Nobody actually writes those stories! But I could see why one would label them gen despite the porn.

I can sorta see why an Avengers fic with background established Tony/Pepper is labelled as gen since that's part of the canon

In that kind of case - I usually use the Zoe/Wash-Firefly example - if it's "Tony gets called out to fight aliens while he and Pepper were in the middle of sex and the story is about fighting aliens" I can see it being gen? But it's the focus that matters. People who hate Tony/Pepper would complain that it had to be labeled het, but I would probably note that there is a smidge of het content and label it "background Tony/Pepper" but choose "gen" as the category in the tags.

MORE MILLS SISTERS PLEASE. I wish I could be interested in the flights of Katrina and Katrina and Ichabod's eternal romance, but I'm sad to say those two bore the pants off me. Ah well.

*nod nod*