Ao3 Use - Tumblr Posts

hi, sorry i'm looking for help w an ao3 thing and the subreddit is closed and you seem fairly knowledgeable so hopefully you don't mind me putting this in your askbox haha

is there a way to search for fics with relationships involving a certain character? obviously you can filter for specific relationships, but if you don't particularly care *what* the pairing is as long as it has character x in it, is there a way to do that?

my problem is i'm stuck in ensemble character hell, and so often fics tagged with that character feature them only in the background. whereas (generally) if a character is tagged in a relationship then it's much more likely that they'll be in the main focus.

so is there a search function that will turn up fics tagged x/y AND x&y AND x/y/z and so on?

This Reddit thread may be of some use to you.

Currently there is no surefire way to search specifically for all ship options involving one character at once, but there are several ways you can somewhat navigate the search function in order to achieve something similar. There are some instructions for this on the thread, but there is also the AO3 Hidden Search Operator Cheatsheet.