Telling girls they don’t need to/shouldn’t feel they have to apologise, even in small ways and teaching them to consciously drop manners creates entitlement. It can’t not.

What about living your life to help others feel better? What about selflessness?

Saying “sorry!” isn’t some huge burden in life. It’s manners and I’d hope that if I had a daughter she’d be proud of being as polite as possible, not about being as right as possible. It’s living with poise and dignity. Saying, “sorry!” doesn’t take away from your self confidence if you’re self assured and when you’re truly confident you can apologise for absolutely nothing all day long and still know your worth. 

Saying “sorry!” takes nothing but a breath and if you’re doing it with a positive outward intent to make the other person’s day better, then there’s nothing to complain about but empowering someone, which wait, I don’t have to point that paradox out. 

It’s creating drama out of nothing. Like guys holding doors open was treated like an offence, saying sorry is being treated like it’s beneath females. It’s a common courtesy that ALL people, women AND MEN have gotten into the habit of doing because it’s what you should do. If anyone excessively apologies, it’s men since the rise in feminism. Social pleasantries weren’t created by the patriarchy to oppress women.

The person that bumped into you might have because someone bumped into them or maybe they’re sick or they’re hiding an injury. The waiter at the restaurant might be under unimaginable stress and overworked with that being their second or third job or they might even be a single parent that has kids to go home and wait on for for a few more hours, saying “sorry!” might be the only time they hear it that entire day. Getting excited is great but yes, we need to learn to express ourselves rather than exploding, it’s encouraging control, not controlling. Worrying you’re making someone sad while you’re in distress is being considerate and empathetic....THAT TAKES STRENGTH, it’s NOT shameful. Stop drilling sensitivity out of girls.

Being guilted into apologising for something that wasn’t your fault and being a humble human being are two different things, Barbie. it isn’t always someone else’s fault and that’s gonna create a really messy mentality later in life when these little girls gotta take responsibility for their decisions and say sorry one day for something that wasn’t their fault because sometimes we have to, for our own dignity’s sake we just have to swallow our pride and say, “sorry!” for something we don’t need to say “sorry!” for. Sometimes being the bigger person is better. Women aren’t infallible just because of their gender. 

“strawmanning where there isn’t even an argument” says the person that got #offended enough to reply when you could’ve scrolled past and saved everyone’s time if there is absolutely no argument to be had here but anyway…in all seriousness, there’s an big issue that you genuinely think there is nothing here to even discuss. That there’s no argument to be had here about the treatment of males or is it that males aren’t worth even having a discussion over? so we’ll get rid of it all together, yeah? because having a conversation about the male experience doesn’t immediately gratify the narcissistic feminist need for everything to be about women all the time as some sort of compensation for crimes in history that weren’t even committed against them personally…I get that, I get it. That’s fair. 

“strawmanning where there isn’t even an argument” says the person that got #offended enough to reply when you could’ve scrolled past and saved everyone’s time if there is absolutely no argument to be had here but anyway...in all seriousness, there’s an big issue that you genuinely think there is nothing here to even discuss. That there’s no argument to be had here about the treatment of males or is it that males aren’t worth even having a discussion over? so we’ll get rid of it all together, yeah? because having a conversation about the male experience doesn’t immediately gratify the narcissistic feminist need for everything to be about women all the time as some sort of compensation for crimes in history that weren’t even committed against them personally...I get that, I get it. That’s fair. 

So I started with going to the Sherlock (TV) section of Ao3. On the right we find this lovely section! ((I know I’m going over things you already probably know, but I figure this post may go to new Ao3 users, so bear with me.))

Underneath this, I chose sort by Kudos, because that’s a quick way to find most popular fics, for the sake of this demonstration. 

With those filters on, we end up with this being our first two results: 

As you can see, we have Nature and Nurture by earlgreytea68, and The Internet Is Not Just For Porn by cyerus. So what if I am utterly sick of seeing earlgreytea68 on my list? Let’s pretend I’ve read all their fics, or that I just don’t like her, or whatever. I want this author out. I go to this section on the right: 

In “Search within results” I type earlgreytea68 into the bar, with a minus sign in front. This gives me the following page, upon hitting the sort and filter button:

There goes earlgreytea68! But now I’ve decided that Crack is just not my thing, I’m sick of that, too, for heaven’s sake, I want something reasonable in my gay slash fanfiction about detectives that solve crimes about glowing dogs and irish megalomaniacs. Heaven forbid this get ridiculous.

Well, then I add this to my search:

Which gets rid of everything with that tag. My results are now:

Performance in a Leading Role is now my first result!

You can do this as many times as you want; the biggest problem I have is trying to filter out multi-worded tags. For example, “Secret Relationship” is hard to filter. Better to go with authors you dislike or with words like “DubCon”. 

I hope this helps! Also remember that googling site:archiveofourown.org and then adding search terms will mean google searches Ao3 for you, and sometimes that works far better. 

You can filter out phrases by enclosing them in quotes. For example, if ABO and Hydra Trash Party are not your things, try:

Say, you’re in your random fandom- I went with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, since I’ve been reading Iron Man stuff recently. Tony Stark is awesome.

But anyway, you’re on the page, and you see that there are 174,774 works! That is way too many for a casual afternoon’s browsing.

And you see that the first one is Peter Parker/Tony Stark and that is not your jam. It doesn’t work for you, or it squicks you, whatever. Wouldn’t life be easier if you could browse without seeing that pairing (or whatever pairing you don’t like)? You can!

First, click on that pairing tag(You may want to open this in another tab, actually.):

and it’ll take you to the page for that pairing tag. Click this button:

and then look at the address bar! The actual page is unimportant. Copy the numbers located here:

and go back to the original search page! Down on the side, in the same place you can get rid of other tags, type -relationship_ids:”the number you just copied”

Then hit ‘sort and filter’ annnd… magic!

The fics with that pairing are gone! You can also do multiple pairings, get rid of any tags you don’t like, and sort it by date or length or kudos, or whatever.

That means you can pretty much use all the Lucene Query Syntax in the “Seach within result” field.

I don’t think AO3 indexes the whole fic for searching but definitely it’s meta data. Combined with Lucenes awesome query syntax you can do pretty much every search you heart desires.

Addtional Lucene Query Syntax that has not been mentioned yet and you might find useful:

Wildcard Searches

You can use wildcard searches within single terms. For a single character wildcard search use the “?” symbol. For a multiple character wildcard search use the “*” symbol.

AND/OR

Lucene allows you to combin terms through logic operators. You’re looking for fics that are either “reunion” or “enemies to lovers”?

Just put in >“reunion” OR “enemies to lovers”< into the field

and you end up with all the stories that are either or but not both.

But wait, now you’re looking for fics that are both “reunion” and “enemies to lovers” at the same time? Now worries Lucene got you covered.

Just change it into >“"reunion” AND “enemies to lovers”“<

and you’ll get all the fics that mention both “reunion” and “enemies to lovers” somewhere in their meta data (note: it’s not just tags. It’s also title, summary …)

Boosting

You can also boost specific terms when doing a multi term search.

You can use the “^” Operator followed by a number to boost a specific term.

Say you’re interested in fics that are either “first kiss” or “bed sharing” but you’re much more interested in “bed sharing” fics and feel they are more relevant.

You can use the search >“first kiss” “bed sharing”^5<

to manipulate the order of your results in a matter that the score of every fic that contains beg sharing is multiplied by 5. Therefore all fics containing that term are given priority and shown at the top of the list.

You can also combine all of the above, target specifc fields (that’s what you did with the “relationsship_id:xxx”) and many more things.