Fic Finding Fiend

hi! i’m your local fic-finding fiend — part librarian, part detective, part cryptid that’s spent way too long yelling at ao3’s search filters (seriously, this is purgatory)

send me your lost fics, your half-remembered fever dreams, your “i swear this existed in 2014” cries into the void. i will do my best to drag them out of the archives like some sort of cursed fanfiction archaeologist.

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📝 how to send an ask

please include at least:

• main ship

• fandom

super helpful extras:

• any tags or phrases you remember

• rough word count (“short,” “mid,” “long as hell”)

• completion status (complete / wip / abandoned in despair)

• rating (T, M, E, etc.)

• a vibe, scene, or one line you remember

the more info i get, the faster i can find your fic. otherwise i’m just typing “guy fic maybe feelings” into ao3 and hoping for divine intervention 😭

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🚫 i will not find fics that include:

• underage sex

• rape / non-con as the main focus of the fic

• underage relationships that fandom generally disapproves of

• scat or vore 🤢

• extreme gore or sexualized violence

• incest or “pseudo-incest” ships

• bestiality or anything involving non-sentient beings in sexual contexts

• real-person fiction (rpf) — i read it, i just don’t find it 😌

no shade to anyone’s reading habits — these are just my personal boundaries.

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✅ what i will find:

• angst (light emotional damage to full therapy arcs)

• hurt/comfort (emotional wounds, physical wounds, bonus points if both)

• found family & team chaos

• canon divergence, fix-its, timeline shenanigans

• enemies to lovers, friends to lovers, “oh no there’s only one bed”

• missing scenes, aftermaths, character studies

• fics that made you laugh, cry, or stare at the wall for ten minutes

• longfics that consumed your week

• short fics that lived rent-free in your brain since 2016

bonus clues i love:

• one weirdly specific line

• a unique tag (e.g. “idiots w/ feelings” or “space trauma but sexy”)

• a general vibe like “felt like rain” or “read like a ghost wrote it at 3am”

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🧭 logistics

i only search ao3 right now — no wattpad, no ff.net, no screenshots from tiktok fanfic videos.

deleted/orphaned fics might be gone for good, but i’ll still check every sneaky search trick i know before giving up. i may even end up doing field research and finding a person who downloaded it - it's happened before in my personal fic finds, so don't discount it.

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☕ final notes

• i’m one person armed with caffeine and spite, not omniscient (yet).

• please be patient — some fics like to hide.

• i will always be nice, even if you’re mean.

someone said "they were enemies but also not." no names, no tags, no fandom. just vibes.

1: anon said "they were both wet." no further context. i have narrowed it down to approximately every fic ever written. morale is low.

2: was asked to find a fic about "two enemies who might be friends if they weren't enemies." i stared at the screen for about fifteen minutes before realizing they described the entire genre of fanfiction.

3: someone remembered one line. it was a good a line. like really good. so good it is also apparently in forty-three separate fics and somehow two actual novels. i am now literate in 12 ships i didn't know existed.

4: someone said "i think one of them died". i have not slept.

5: "it was long." so is my suffering

6: accidentally found a fic i read in 2016 that emotionally destroyed me. i am now emotionally destroyed again. making an appointment with my therapist.

okay, this one? this one’s hauntingly familiar. i swear i’ve seen it — the strawberry/blueberry line especially rings a bell. unfortunately, “Beau and the Beast” (or variations of it) pulls up a good few of the Beauty and the Beast M/M retellings on AO3, and none match your description perfectly 😭

a few possibilities:

• it might’ve been tagged as Original Work but later deleted or orphaned

• the author could’ve changed the title or main character’s name

• or it was part of a fic anthology/collection that doesn’t appear under that name anymore

i’ll keep digging for you though — the detail about the grey hair and “fine with the curse staying” is super distinct, so if it exists, i’ll find it.

checked all of the fics under the specific Beauty and the Beast fandoms and nothing matched! checked original works and maybe i just need to change my parameters because nothing stuck out there either.

It's from the hobbit/lotr fandom, i know it has a quite a few chapters.but i haven't read it yet. I wanted to save it and read it later but i guess i just forgot and now I'm lost. I just read thriugh the first chapter a bit, and it started like the 'modern-girl-in...' and i know the the reader is female and her best friend also got transported into the hobbit/lotr universe. I know that this isn't a lot, but i pray to got that you somehow find it😭😭

oh friend… you’ve described about half the Hobbit/LOTR section on AO3 😭 the “modern girl (and her best friend) falls into Middle-earth” trope is a whole thriving ecosystem — i think there are actually more fics about that than there are hobbits.

that said, i’ll absolutely give it a shot! i just need a few more clues to narrow it down a bit:

• do you remember which characters the reader meets first? (Bilbo, Thorin, the Fellowship, etc.)

• any specific tone or details — funny? romantic? survival-focused? lots of pop culture jokes?

• or even a single phrase or line you remember (sometimes those are magic 🔍)

so.

i disappeared for a bit because i accidentally got a full time job, learned an entire trade, became really good at it, and then got fired from said job.

so now i've respawned, slightly unhinged, infinitely more skilled, and i'm back in my natural habitat: crying over fanfics and caffeine.

the fic-finder inbox is currently a crime scene but i'm excavating it! expect some old asks finally getting answers, potentially new rec lists, and maybe a few unhinged meta tangents because i've been feral without tumblr's nonsense.

also, uh.

between the last few years i wrote a whole Star Wars spy thriller.

This Could Be Survivable by me -- it's like Slow Horses but in space, with more burnt coffee, paperwork, and of course women who could probably out-stare God.

no pressure to read it just wanted to let you know i did actually make something of my time away. kind of.

okay. that's all! the blog's officially alive again.

I’m looking for a The Hobbit/LOTR fanfic that is Legolas x reader. It’s a modern girl in middle earth story and is pretty short from what I remember, like a one-shot thing. The beginning is at the end of the battle of the five armies I think, and reader is complaining to Tauriel about Legolas’ staring, not realizing how good the hearing of elves are. It also mentioned that the reader worked an office job in the modern world. At the end, there’s a celebration and Legolas talks to her since he heard what she was complaining about. And that’s pretty much all I remember ☠️ I’m almost 100% certain it was a fanfic here on tumblr.

It was a short fic so this doesn’t feel like a ton of info but it’s most of what I remember. I feel like it might’ve been taken down, so no pressure, but I’m hoping someone can at least identify it and confirm or something. Thank you for looking!

i am going to have to admit that after searching for days i have failed to come up with anything. as i am unfortunately not in the lotr fandom, i feel that i may have missed something that was quite obvious to those actually in the fandom.

i did not restrict my search to tumblr, just in case you accidentally misremembered the location of the fic. i found quite a few fics of a similar nature but none match the details you gave me in the slightest.

if anyone reading this knows the fic, feel free to let me know! i do believe it may have been deleted but i am going to keep looking for a little longer just in case.