It's been ages since I posted on here, and some of you probably don't even remember me, yikes. I was more active in the mid-2000s and thereabouts, wandered off to other fandoms over time (but never lost my love for reading L&C fic). But I've been hanging out in the L&C Discord server for the past few years, and have been working on a project that might be of interest to the parts of the fandom which aren't on Discord, so I figured I should post about it.
The Archive has a spreadsheet that is referred to as a "database", which lists information about fics to make it easier to search for stories that match criteria, but if anyone knows what a database truly is, then you know that doesn't quite count. I started creating an actual database to store information about fanfics I enjoyed, when I realized I was struggling to remember all my favorites (across all my different fandoms). In the past month or two I've finally gotten to adding L&C to the database. (There are 21 other fandoms in there, not counting those added for crossover purposes, and I started with the smaller fandoms first. L&C is the largest one yet.)
The database stores a lot of information about each story:
- title
- author(s)
- fandom(s)
- summary (when available - many fics here on the mbs or the nfic archive do not have one)
- rating
- major characters
- minor characters
- major ships
- ship type(s) (such as M/F vs. F/F)
- minor ships
- time in canon (with L&C, this means basically what episode plot, or if it's somewhere in a particular season, or arc, or something like early years or future)
- tropes, grammar (present tense, first person, etc.), relationship status (beginning, established, etc.), story ending type (positive, sad/unhappy, cliffhanger, etc.), and other story elements (I have some L&C-specific tags for things like green K, red K, whether Lois already knows the Secret or Clark tells her or she figures it out, etc.)
- story link
- special notes where I try to put things like Kerth award status, or if there's a gfic or nfic version available of the same story elsewhere
The benefit of entering all of this information means that it's extremely simple to make recs posts. I do broad ones for each fandom (though it'll be a very long time before I create those for L&C because of how many fics I still need to add to the db!) but I also do custom ones upon request. People can ask me to filter on just about anything - rating, ship (not as big a deal here, though there still
are other ships that could be read in this fandom, such as Jonathan/Martha or Jimmy/Lucy), major character, time (if someone wanted to read a bunch of fics about the New Krypton arc, for instance, or All Shook Up rewrites), and trope (accidental marriage, pregnancy, emotional hurt/comfort, and many more). I can filter on a combination of things, and it's about as easy to
exclude something as it is to find only fics which have a specific thing.
I'm still very early in adding Lois & Clark; I've only got 191 fics in there (written by 11 different authors) totaling a little over 4 million words. I'll be working on adding this fandom for a considerable amount of time, so it won't be "done" any time soon, but you're welcome to ask me to run a query and make a custom post for you (I usually post on my Dreamwidth - a blog site that's easy to browse and doesn't require any kind of account to do so). Obviously, the quality of the results will depend on which authors and how many fics I've got entered at the time you ask. Most of the fandom favorite authors aren't in there yet so you'd get only a smattering of everything if you ask right away. But I keep steadily adding fics, so eventually…
If you do decide to ask for a post like that, send me a PM with the request or comment here, whichever you're comfortable with. (Obviously, the resulting post will be linked wherever you asked.) I've set my settings to email me in either case, so I should hopefully see it shortly. You're also welcome to comment on or ask any further questions about the database here. You can read much more about the fanfic database
at the master recs post pinned to my Dreamwidth if you're at all curious.
