#and freeforms which might be useful to more than just the one fandom asdlkjfskdj

[someidiotwithalaptop]

In today's installment of unnecessarily complicated bullshit coded by your local compsci reject at 5am: literally every* rwby ship tag ID on AO3

If you've ever wanted to be able to search for all fics tagged with an OT3 or all three of its composite pairings, well. uh. here's how to do it

Long post incoming!

Tag IDs are unique numbers associated with each tag, and if you chuck this:

filter_ids: 12345

into the "Search within results" field on AO3 (or "Any field" if you're in the Advanced search), it will filter for all fics that have tag #12345. This is basically useless unless you know what numbers go to which tags (we'll get to that in a sec), but if you do, then you can do fun stuff like this:

filter_ids: 1072769 OR filter_ids: 994409

(Which translates to Bumbleby OR Whiterose)

This lets you search for fics with either tag A or tag B instead of only fics that have both. Afaik not something the nice filtering UI is able to do.

Searching for Bumbleby AND Whiterose just involves tossing two of those "filter_ids" thingies into the search together like this:

filter_ids: 1072769 filter_ids: 994409

You can also combine them like so:

(filter_ids: 1072769 filter_ids: 1325904 filter_ids: 1059208) OR filter_ids: 2397525

((Bumbleby AND Freezerburn AND Monochrome) OR Bees Schnees)

to look for all fics with either both of the first two tags or the second tag. I've been messing around with this a bit and so far it's been letting me make my searches as long and complicated as I want.

(EDIT: okay so trying to put 683 tag filters in at the same time will return an error...)

Anyways, getting back to what the fuck are these numbers even, I put an explanation of how I found them over here (sort of, in practice I used python to do most of the legwork because jESUS FUCK THERE'S OVER 2,000 OF THEM). But for those who don't want to spend ages poking around in html code, I present:

The Fuckoff Giant Text File Of RWBY Relationship Tag IDs

It should be possible to download it if you'd like, but at least for me google docs is willing to show a searchable preview! Just hit ctrl+F and type in the ship you're looking for.

Keep in mind that these are mostly** going to be listed the way the canonical tag appears on AO3, i.e. "Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long" will get a hit, but "Yang Xiao Long/Blake Belladonna" is not in the giant text file at all.

**(I did get rid of parentheticals clarifying the fandom, i.e. "Summer Rose (RWBY)/Reader" is listed as just "Summer Rose/Reader")

Also, these are sorted by tag ID, so this is (I think???) a list of every ship tag in this fandom in chronological order of when they were first tagged, since the tag IDs are assigned sequentially.

*(this file contains every single ship to the best of my knowledge. I probably did miss some and I could only scrape the ones that had already been created at the time but. but.

Amber/Ilia Amitola/Blake Belladonna/Maria Calavera/Elm Ederne/Pyrrha Nikos/Penny Polendina/Ruby Rose/Salem/Weiss Schnee/Ciel Soleil/Emerald Sustrai: 101267707

but I REALLY DID GET A LOT)

so uh. yeah! someone take python away from me askjdflskjdf