Finding titles is hard enough

[schneefink]

About two weeks ago iirc I was trying to find a WIP again that I'd forgotten to bookmark and because searching for tags wasn't successful at first I decided to instead go through the list of all the works I'm subscribed to on AO3. I removed some I remembered were finished, but there's still 35 pages; plus 25 pages of series subscriptions and 20 pages of user subscriptions. (I get so many notifications... I really should cut down because I already can't keep up, especially when I'm busy like now.)

I was also curious how many titles I could find that belonged to two works I'm subscribed to. I might have missed some because I removed works and then didn't reload the pages, but I ended up finding four: "Birthright," "Eidolon," "The Butterfly Effect," and "Through the Looking Glass." Three of them didn't surprise me at all. I'm not sure if four is more or fewer shared titles than I expected. I was slightly worried that looking for shared titles would make me more anxious to find "not common" titles for my own fic but fortunately not, who cares if two stories have the same title or not. Same as with books I suppose, I wouldn't want my story to share an unusual title of a famous fic but there's so many stories out there that sharing titles is inevitable and as long as it fits the story, eh.

Comments

[vriddy]

I don't even want to see the length of my subscriptions list on AO3 😂 I also don't check what other works already use the title when posting or I would end up with keyboard smashes as titles as the only way to be original, I suspect... 🤣 I find titles very difficult.

[schneefink]

Titles are hard! I had a brief phase where I was worried about my titles being "too generic," which is bs (but there are a few titles I´ll almost certainly never use because the associations with other fics are too strong, like "Written by the Victors" etc.)

[momijizukamori]

Trying to find ANYTHING in the subscriptions list is an absolute nightmare, seriously.

[schneefink]

Yeah. I would love to be able to sort by date of when I subscribed to the thing but I have no idea if that is even under consideration.

[gwyn]

Lol i have a story called Eidolon!

[schneefink]

I got curious: the search function tells me there are 77 works called "Eidolon." As well as 136 for "Birthright," 340 for "The Butterfly Effect," and ~444 for "Through the Looking Glass" (I could not figure out how to search for the exact title so there might be some "Looking Through the Glass" in there and some other inaccuracies.) Now I wonder what the most popular title is!

[wrennette]

i always wonder about the thing with multiple titles as well, for a while there was a vid going around tumblr that had the lyrics of an entire song (i think hallelujah by leonard cohen) as represented in ao3 song titles. i imagine it's not the only song that's happened with!

[schneefink]

Oh yeah, I loved those xD I first saw Some nights I stay up (reading AO3 fic), and this article links a few more.

[wrennette]

o fun!

[dreamersdare]

If your title is shared, then it's probably a good thing for a title, hence why more than one person thought of it. That's how I look at it anyway

[schneefink]

Makes sense!