I’m building a fanfic archive and I’ve been thinking a lot about the limitations of AO3’s tagging system lately. For me, the biggest issue is the lack of distinction between “main” and “side” characters/relationships.

If I want to read a fic where Character A is the protagonist, I have to filter for Character A—but then I get hundreds of fics where they’re just a background cameo. Same goes for relationships.

I also wish I could filter out any relationship involving a character without filtering out the character themselves. Sometimes I’m too tired of seeing ships with A/{B, C, D…Z, X, Y}, but I don’t want to exclude Character A altogether.

And sometimes I’d like to search for attributes like “BAMF” that apply to the main character, regardless of who that character is. If I search for “BAMF Character A,” I can get fics where A is just a side character.

prompt: spec out the best possible advanced search as if you were building the site from scratch with most the capabilities of the one we implemented but solving all these issues, as well as common frustrations of other ao3 users