#written ao3 relationship tag and then youll just see i guess

[inevitably-johnlocked]

Hello Steph! I’m semi new to the fandom and I love your blog!! I’ve discovered so many wonderful fics through your recs! I was wondering if you have any tips on looking through and finding new fics? I have a hard time navigating AO3 sometimes. Thank you!

Hi Lovely!

Well, welcome to the fandom!! I’m a bit late but it’s the thought that counts!!

Honestly, I’ve found the best way to find fics is through recs, though for YEARS before I joined fandom, I was on FFNet where tags don’t exist beyond “relationship” so, that’s where I started, and I found 500+ fantastic stories pre-tag era just by reading summaries and looking in the John/Sherlock tag (the slash denotes, in old fandom, that it’s a relationship fic… the “&” is a characters but no relationship fic, so you’ll want to search “John / Sherlock” if you go the FFNet route). The joys of sites like Ao3 is that you can filter down fics to specific themes and ratings so long as authors have tagged their fics accordingly. The downside is that you will miss out on some great fics from authors who don’t tag because they don’t want to spoil the stories with tags… that’s where reccers come in! The dedicated few who read stories or trawl through tags to easily sort fics for all of us to read! 

I’ve mentioned several times that one of the best places to go is the @johnlockficclub‘s discord server and even the club itself! I’ve discovered quite a few fics I probably would have never read otherwise through there, so do check them out! 

And as you know, I also rec fics as well and because I 95% only rec fics I have read personally, you can be sure they have my stamp of approval, LOL (not that it means anything, but I’m also a picky SOB so blah). These days, I only trawl tags if I want something to fill a specific need or kink I want to read RIGHT NOW, but seriously, I cannot rec Alexx and Swiss Miss enough because they are primarily where I get all my fic recs as of late, and they are monsters at getting new lists up consistently and more regularly than I. Cupid also has a Johnlock Love Letters Series which I also have found a few gems through, so be sure to go there too!

Outside of reccing a few authors, I can’t really suggest much else. I guess my last bit of advice, if you want to go hunting on your own, is use Ao3′s filter feature, and if you’re looking for a specific thing, use the box that says “search within results” under More Options, rather than the “include tags” box, because that will search the tags, titles AND the summaries, and filter your results down to “Relationship: Sherlock / John” and “Sherlock & John” and search all the Sherlock fandoms, as people sort BBC Sherlock into all of the other ones too. Then just… scroll down until you find a description that sounds interesting, LOL. No magic at all LOL. And if you really like a story from an author, click on their names to see everything they’ve written, if you want more stories similar to what you’ve read. I’ve found a lot of great stories just by reading a lot of the same author’s stories, as well as seeing what they’ve recently bookmarked. 

I hope you find some of your own favourite stories, and I hope that I’ve made the process a bit easier!