As fandom slowly trickles into the mainstream, and fanfiction becomes a common conversation topic with your girls instead of a taboo, it’s understandable that many new fans want to jump right into the innermost workings of their fandoms.
Archive of Our Own (AO3) is the modern-day Library of Alexandria for fan-made works, but because it must operate in accordance with copyright laws worldwide, readers and writers must be careful about how they use it, especially amid increasing internet censorship. To prevent any legal issues and keep the servers up, AO3 has to remain absolutely free, and authors can’t link any payment methods in their fan fics.
Fanfiction has been around since even before the dawn of Spirk, and the art form has been perfected over many years, travelling through Fanfiction.net, LiveJournal, Wattpad, Quotev, Tumblr, and even published under other names, like Game Changers, which was originally posted on AO3 as a “Stucky” fanfiction.
However, veterans of fandom culture and discourse will agree that AO3’s archive of transformative fiction is the holy grail of all fanfic sites. Getting started can be difficult, so to make your journey into the archive a little less perilous, I’ve prepared my top tips for new readers.
Starting Out
Other sites may brag about an organization very similar to a library, but as you increase the amount of searchable works, search tools can become very overwhelming. Which is why AO3’s tagging system works so well; it’s, as the name implies, an archive, so you’ll have the most success slowly narrowing down your search categories until you find what you’re looking for.
You should generally start looking through the alphabetized fandom tabs to find the universe you want to read things in. By the way, anything starting with a ‘the’ is alphabetized by the word after.
Once you’re in your selected fandom, all the works there are sorted by date, and since AO3 doesn’t have a way to sort by popularity, you’ll want to choose ‘sort by kudos.’
A kudos is similar to a like on social media in that you must have an account to leave one, and you can only leave a single one. In comparison, another stat you may see attached to fics is ‘hits,’ which is basically the number of clicks a fic has gotten.
Some vets have a hits-to-kudos ratio they look for when surveying potential reads, but sorting by kudos is a great place to start if you aren’t a professional fic-reader. It essentially orders fics under your selected tags based on how many account-havers liked it. So, you’re pretty much getting a curated rec list from seasoned fans for the first couple of pages.
You may also want to use the include and exclude options in the filters tab to sort for specific ratings for fics, where G is similar to a G movie rating, T is PG-13, and M and E are often interchangeable for R ratings.
Also in these filters, you can sort the fics to only be about your OTP (one true pairing) by using the ships tabs, which list the top tagged ships with names separated by a forward slash. Character relationships that aren’t romantic are tagged with their names separated by an ampersand.
If searching for fics is too scary right now, social media is a great source for recommendations. If you find a fic from TikTok or Tumblr you want to read, and it isn’t linked, I recommend entering the username of the author into the search bar instead of the fic title.
Getting an Account
Having an AO3 account is a great way to save and sort your fics if you’re a chronic re-reader or waiting on updates, and you know what you like. You can also follow authors and favorite tags to check up on every so often and block others from showing up in your searches.
AO3 accounts are created through invitations, and you have to wait to receive an invitation email to activate your account, but many years ago, before the mainstreaming of fan culture, you could get your invitation on the same day as your request. However, now the average wait sits around a week, but it’s worth it if you plan to use bookmarks or write some fics.
Tagging
When you’re first starting, the AO3 tag search system can be intimidating, but the strict tagging system that writers and long-time supporters use is perfect for including your favs and eliminating anything that’ll give you the ick. You definitely learn your favorite and least favorite tags from experience, but here are some basic ones to put into the include or exclude categories in your search.
‘Fix-it’ is a good start if you really don’t like a specific plot point in your fandom, like a specific fire captain dying for realism, a favorite character getting sent to Super Hell after confessing his love for his best friend, or your show’s confusing fifth season ending that spawned ‘conformity gate’ theories on TikTok and X. Fics with this tag are generally also tagged with the episode that they are fixing so keep an eye out for those.
Fluff, angst, whump, and smut are pretty good tags to use if you’re looking or not looking for a specific tone. Fluff fics tend to be happier, feel-good, and generally plotless, while angst brings out the sad and often yearning sides of fandom. Whump is going to put your faves through the wringer, and smut is exactly what it is on BookTok, but probably more artful.
AU is an alternate universe, and it’s generally formatted as ‘Alternate Universe – x’ where you would enter in something specific. Say you wanted to read about Superman and Batman as college students, then you would use the tag ‘Alternate Universe – College/University.’
‘Dead Dove Do Not Eat’ is a more confusing common tag. It’s from a scene in Arrested Development where a character finds a bag labeled this and opens it anyway, disgusted to see a dead dove inside the bag. This tag essentially means you should take the other tags seriously and not be surprised when it’s exactly what it says on the label. Fics tagged with this typically include darker or more controversial content that readers may gloss or skim over.
Don’t Like, Don’t Read
Starting on sites like Wattpad, Quotev, and Fanfiction.net before moving to AO3 made sure earlier generations of fans could develop the netiquette necessary to make fan work discourse positive and kind, but there’s been a rising trend in readers who haven’t spent a lot of time in fan circles being overly critical of creators or downright rude.
Writing fanfiction is done by fans out of their own love for the content. If you don’t like a tag in a fic, that doesn’t make it a story not worth telling; it’s just a story that isn’t for you. This is where your executive choice as the reader comes in.
AO3 is an archive where every entry is a piece of the author, so if you don’t like something, you can’t call for the censorship of the entire archive or blast an author in the comments. Leaving respectful, kind feedback is the best way to support authors and help ensure the longevity of this backbone of fandom culture.
Happy reading!
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