Pascy

Because I think it really centers one of the key narrative tensions around the characters' life choices, and the question of the very definition of 'crime.' And how it's a contextualized process, rather than a hardcoded binary of actions that are okay and actions that aren't.

It maybe wasn't good to do that to Wen Xu's corpse, but it was war after all, so it's also not a big deal and the cultivators involved don't carry any lasting culpability, even though it wasn't even useful to the war effort to do that.

There's no need to figure out who it was exactly, and attach a stigma to them for vengeful corpse desecration.

But Jin Guangyao having done the very same thing to Nie Mingjue that Nie Mingjue did and allowed to be done to Wen Xu--well that's bad, right? Because it's not war, now. Because it's politics and personal relationships, and the rules for those are different. It's different.

And Jin Guangyao is like, is it though? No. That's bullshit you all tell yourselves. Lines drawn in water, to make sure you're always in the right and anyone else who resorts to violence is wrong.

The rules aren't ever different. Some of us are always at war.

Which is simultaneously the mindset that makes him a dangerous untrustworthy person who makes everyone around him less safe, and He Has A Point Tho.

All of which juxtaposes really interestingly with Wei Wuxian, who in the two phases of his Terrifying Necromancer era did exactly the same things under what were, to him, about the same circumstances (i.e. people he loved had been killed on a pretext that he'd started it, by people who self-professedly weren't going to stop until they'd taken everything he had left) but when it was war he was a hero (albeit controversial), and when it wasn't war anymore he was a criminal, unforgivable, had to be put down.

For anyone who hasn't seen them before, Hidden Search Operators are handy tricks you can use when you're either searching or filtering AO3.

summary: string is a generic way of explaining that you can search AO3 for a specific word that appears in a summary. You can do this from the search bar in the header, from the Any Field box at the top of the Advanced Search form, or from the Search Within Results box at the bottom of the filter menu.

Examples:

summary: Bruce

summary: "Bruce Banner"

summary: Bruce OR summary: Banner OR summary: Hulk

You need to put quotation marks around your search term if it is more than one word. The quotes make sure that the site searches for those two words together.

The other two operators listed work best in the Search Within Results box.

expected_number_of_chapters: 1 will return results where every fic has only 1 chapter currently posted.

You can use expected_number_of_chapters: -1 if you want results where every fic has more than 1 chapter currently posted.

I saw your tags @jackdaw-sprite and I figured I could offer you some help? You've got a few options to find fics that are actually about your fave who is often sidelined.

My own personal go-to is to use the Search Within Results filter. You can find the filters by clicking/tapping on any tag. If you're on a wide screen like a laptop, they'll be on the right hand side of the screen. If you're on a narrow screen like a phone, you'll need to press the Filters button at the top of the page to open up the menu.

In that menu, scroll down until you're near the bottom. That's where you can find the box labelled Search Within Results. In that box, you can type

summary: Renhardt OR summary: Rendog

When you filter for that result, you'll get 19 fics with that name mentioned in the summary, and if the name is in the summary you've got MUCH higher chances of them being central to the fic.

There's also a way to find fics with a tag in the X position. Fan coders have had this same issue, and so they've created userscripts that you can add to your web browser (like an extension). Here are a few that might be helpful for you to try:

AO3 Actually Relevant Characters - Sorts and highlights works based on how relevant the tagged character seems in the work's tags and summary.

AO3: Prioritise my Faves - Hide work if chosen tags are late in sequence, or if blacklisted tags are early

AO3 Secondary Character & Pairing Filter - Replaces works with placeholder if the tags you want aren't the first few tags, with option to show work.

Editing to add: this version of the post has a syntax error in it. To remove oneshots with a filter, use

Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky

Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*

You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.

You might have noticed that when you include more than one item in your AO3 filters, the number of results drops drastically. When you include more than one item, you're telling the filter to find fics that have tag A as well as tag B, and the more items you include, the more things you're requiring a fic to have in order to show up in your results.

You're telling AO3 that you only want fics that have all of the things. You're not telling AO3 that you want fics that have any of the things.

This is because the filters use something called Boolean operators. The Boolean operators are: AND, OR, and NOT. You need to use caps for these terms in order for them to function as an operator and not just another word in a phrase.

AND (the one used by include filters) means you want both (or all) of the things

OR means you want any of them or any combination of them

NOT (the one used by exclude filters) means that you want none of them, either alone or in combination

So if Include = AND and Exclude = NOT, then how do you use OR? Use the Search Within Results box. It's near the bottom of the filter menu, right above where you can choose which language you want to read and below where you can choose word count range and completion status etc.

In this box, type the name of the first tag you're interested in, then the name of the second tag and put an OR in the middle. Keep adding OR in between them, and you can stack as many tags as you want - until you get to whatever the character limit is (character, in this case, meaning letter, number, or symbol).

If a tag is just one word, then your filter would look like this:

angst OR fluff

If a tag is more than one word, then your filter would look like this:

"no beta we die like men" OR "I wrote this instead of sleeping"

You need the quotation marks around multiple words to let the filter know that those words belong together, in that order

If you want to do an OR search for ships, it gets a bit more complicated because of the symbols used in ship tags. For ships, instead of using the name of the tag, it's better to use the tag ID number.

To find the tag ID, tap/click on the ship tag to go that tag's results page (I'm using Frodo/Sam in this example). On that results page, tap on the button labelled RSS feed. That will either open up a new page full of code or download a text file of code. Near the top of that code, you'll see something that looks like:

The tag ID number is the number that appears after /tags/

In this case, the tag ID number for Frodo/Sam is 13674. When I repeat the same process for Frodo & Sam, I get the tag ID number 716913. Then I just need to set up my OR statement and let it know that the tag number I'm providing is a relationship ID:

relationship_ids: 13674 OR relationship_ids:716913

Put that in the Search Within Results box, and I'll get fics with either one of those ships tagged, and I'll also get results with both ships tagged.

Instead of quotation marks you could also use brackets and instead of NOT you can you a dash. (Boolean Operators have alternative characters/symbols that can be used instead of typing the entire operator but this also depends on where you are typing them. If you type them on a site that doesn't recognize the character/symbol, you might not get the results for what you want.)

For example, if you're searching for Frodo & Sam OR Frodo/Sam but you don't even want a mention of Bilbo, you can write it like this:

(Frodo & Sam) OR (Frodo/Sam) -Bilbo

It will filter out every work that has Bilbo anywhere in the tags (and summary, title, series titles, and if the author's name contains it😅) while giving you the works that you want. It doesn't work for partial words however (I think you would have to use an asterisk (*) which is sometimes called a wildcard, but I haven't tried that yet, I'll update if I do), i.e. poly vs polyamory.

Note that when using the dash there mustn't be a space between it and what you want to filter out, or else you will get a page with zero results (I think it ends up filtering out every work with a space, and that's all works).

Dashes can also be used with brackets, for example: -(character death)

This will filter out Major Character Death, Minor Character Death, Temporary Character Death, Canon Character Death, and so on so forth.