The Rec Center is the home of my compilation of fanfic recommendation websites. These are excellent resources from finding fics that haven't been posted to Ao3, especially in fandoms that were around before Ao3 was created in 2008.

The sites are filterable by fandom, site focus, and whether the site is still online. For tips on navigating the system, see the help page. You can get started at the big list or the fandoms page (in progress).

The aim of this site is to act as a resource to find older fics, and hopefully diversify reading habits to non-Ao3 resources. Just because a fic wasn't posted to Ao3 doesn't mean it's not good! The focus is on standalone personal websites, so reclists on Tumblr, LiveJournal, or equivalents are not eligible. Also, to serve the diversification purpose, sites that largely link to Ao3 are not eligible either.

Many of these sites include material that you may consider objectionable. These sites are listed for archival purposes, not as an endorsement of any particular content on them.

Overall, the Rec Center is meant to be a useful fandom resource. If you have any suggestions - or even better, rec sites I've missed - please let me know!

In 2024, I was starting to read stories in the Naruto fandom, which is absolutely massive and has a lot of stories that were never posted on Ao3. Finding fic on Ao3 is a great experience, but finding fic off of it can be tough. I eventually came upon a number of old reclists that I used to find old fics that were fandom favorites.

I ended up doing so much research for all of this that I thought I might compile my results for anyone else who was having trouble. So, The Reclist Project was born. I started listing every single fic that I found on a reclist, and found the ones that were recced the most often. Then, I put them on the website with the recommenders' notes and some filtering options. This took... a very long time to do. I got through several hundred fics and a couple fandoms before I was a little burnt out, and stopped focusing on it for awhile.

In early 2025, in the break between school ending and my job starting, I got back into website making. I revamped my site, but I thought it looked a bit empty, so I thought of this project to give my site another purpose.

Now, don't take that as me saying I'm just doing it to fill space. I absolutely love fandom archiving and research. Hopefully soon I'll be able to do archival volunteer work for Ao3; where I'm at now, it's just not possible yet, and I want to focus on this for the time being. I also see this as doing my part for fandom and interacting with it, since I'm not very good at the whole "social media" thing. (Or the "commenting" thing, unfortunately.)

I'll definitely take hiatuses from this from time to time, but hopefully I'll be able to update every so often!

The update log can be found here.

Of course, many updates will be adding new rec sites. The newest additions will be posted at the top.

The most pressing thing that needs to be updated is the Fandoms page. It's a bit of an undertaking, so sorting and adding all those links will take a while.

There are several other filtering options I want to add. The first I'll likely add is filtering on whether the site recs for multiple fandoms or just one, as that's easy to implement. I'd also like to find some way to indicate the site size/number of recs without having to count them myself. Something I think would be valuable would be to rate sites on ease of usage - some of these old web sites are quite difficult to navigate, and recs aren't separated by fandom. I'm also considering whether it might be useful to show if a site recs at all to Ao3, but this is an extreme minority.

I currently have a large site backlog, but if that ever changes, I might start adding Tumblr, LiveJournal, etc. reclists. I have a sweet spot for personal websites, but more niche fandoms can be hard to find on them.

Under the category of "don't count on it" is listing sites that primarily rec to Ao3 or that are massive collectives anyone can rec to. If I start doing that, I've run out of anything else to add.