snowgall:

If you’re like me, you use the AO3 Work Search form all the time to help zero in on the fics you want to read. But this form has some weird quirks. Take the “warnings” section for example:

What do I do if I want to search for fics that don’t include Major Character Death? If I just check the MCD tag like so:

Then my search brings up all fics that DO contain MCD!

I can instead choose “No Archive Warnings Apply” of course, but that will also rule out “Violence”, “Non-Con”, and “Underage” and maybe I’m OK with those. All I want to do is to avoid MCD, that’s all.

I can try adding -“major character death” to the search terms, but doing so will also rule out any fics tagged with benign variations like “temporary major character death”.

What I want to do is specifically avoid fics which use the MCD archive warning. So how do I do that?

You need to make use of the specialized search parameter terms that AO3 actually sends to its servers when you use the work search form. For the archive warnings, these are as follows:

• Chose not to use = warning_ids:14
• None Apply = warning_ids:16
• Violence = warning_ids:17
• MCD = warning_ids:18
• Rape = warning_ids:19
• Underage = warning_ids:20

So, if I want to rule out MCD and only MCD, I search for “-warning_ids:18″ (the hyphen before the search term means “not”) by entering that into the “Any Field” search bar:

And voila! All fics except those with MCD warnings!

If you want to avoid violence or non-con or underage instead, simply change the warning_ids number to the one you want to rule out. You can also rule out more than one at a time, like so:

Combine this with your other favorite search terms and happily find the fics you want and avoid those you don’t 🙂

You can use variations on this trick to more accurately search for specific categories and ratings too. If people are interested, I’ll make a separate post about those.