Archive of Our Own

"You understand that using the Archive may expose you to material that is offensive, triggering, erroneous, sexually explicit, indecent, blasphemous, objectionable, grammatically incorrect, or badly spelled."

- Clause from the Terms of Service

Archive of Our Own (also known as AO3) is a website for Fanfic and Fan Works, and also hosts other media, such as Fan Vids, Fan Art and podcasts. The site itself has been running since late 2008, but only started to become widespread and popular from 2011 onward. To give an indication of how young it is, AO3 contains over 8,000,000 fan works in total (as of August 2021); Fanfiction.net, its main competition and predecessor, is estimated to host over 20 million stories. The rise in popularity of AO3 was helped along by the rise of Tumblr, as both sites initially shared a similar fandom mentality and outlook; when the late 2010s saw Tumblr becoming more restrictive, AO3 began to serve as a fandom haven.

Part of the reason AO3 has comparatively less fan works than other sites, even taking account for age and traffic, is because the site only accepts new users by invitation. While nowadays they have an easy button to get one and the queue of acceptation moves quite fast, at the beginning the only way to get an invite was by other user inviting you, and the first users were BNFs. That, and the fact that their initial main focus was into backing up fanfic archives in danger, gave the site the reputation of being "elitist" and "full of actually good quality fic".

As a site founded by fandom members who have seen content purges in several other sites (more notoriously the FF.net purge of NC-17 fanfics and LiveJournal's deletion of fandom blogs in 2007), Archive of Our Own has a politics of minimal censorship and maximum inclusiviness, allowing writers to publish any content so long as it is legal - including Lemon fics, Rule 34, and controversial tropes like rape and incest. Needless to say, this is not without its faults or criticisms, nor is it without a certain range of quality.

The main differentiating features of the site are the "kudos" button (similar to "likes" on Facebook, except that you don't need to register to give one); its "collection" system that lets the authors link fics together as part of a "series" and group other fics together based on criteria, such as fandom events or themed challenges; and its tagging system, which is very similar to Tumblr's own, with similar perks and flaws. The site encourages users to use the tag system as a complement of Media Classifications, to add content warnings for controversial contents (like "Death of a major character" or "Rape/Non-Con") and so reinforce the informed version of "Don't Like, Don't Read". AO3 also allow authors to "orphan" their fan works (i.e. dissociate their name/online identity from them) and lock viewing their fics to registered users-only, which serves as an alternative to deleting everything in case the author wants to leave their fandom identity behind. The site has several usability improvements not present in other sites, like providing in-site color schemes designed for easy reading, showing the full fic in a single page instead of chapter by chapter, and downloading the fanfic as an e-book for offline reading.

As of 2021, the most popular fandoms on the site include:


 * My Hero Academia
 * Harry Potter
 * Supernatural
 * Doctor Who and its spinoffs,
 * Marvel and The Avengers (mostly centered on the Marvel Cinematic Universe incarnation of the franchise)
 * DCU
 * Star Wars
 * Real Person Fic (usually centered on K-pop bands (BTS being the most popular), One Direction and Videogame YouTubers)
 * Sherlock Holmes (mostly because of popular adaptations like Sherlock).

There is also a surprising amount of original works.

In April 2019, AO3 received a Hugo Award for "Best Related Work".


 * Alan Smithee: If an author wants to abandon a work but not delete it, it can be orphaned. This is the next step before deletion and allows for the work to remain visible - but the author cannot edit, modify, or delete it any further.
 * Anonymous Author: Unlike many other fanfiction and writing sites, the Archive lets authors publish works anonymously.
 * Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: as seen above, every warning and listing the site provides to advice the readers that the site doesn't make itself responsable for any possibly disturbing and triggering content the reader meets, it usually ends its listing with "grammarly incorrect" or "badly spelled".
 * But You Screw One Goat!: Bestiality is a recognized tag.
 * Censorship Bureau: because the site were founded by victims of this in other platforms, AO3 attempts to avert this, and allows for complete freedom in what people choose to write and release. Depending on the quality of the content, however... This has also caused problems due to giving off an image of moderation being completely absent - see the Archive of Our Own/YMMV subpage for some of the more serious flaws that have arisen from this approach.
 * Content Warnings: There are four required warnings for the Archive - "Major Character Death", "Graphic Depictions of Violence", "Rape/Non-Con", and "Underage". The fifth warning ("Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings") basically means that none of these apply. Additional warnings can be added in the tangs and in the author notes.
 * Fan Translation: the site permits to link to translations of fan works (for the fan authors that allow it) and automatically can link the translation to the original if the former is also hosted in the site.
 * Kink Meme: The site not only host works that began there and has archived a couple of them, it also has a couple of kink memes working within using the same features created for fics fests and fandom Secret Santa exchanges.
 * Lemon: Given the type of site, this should come as an inevitability.
 * Porn with Plot and Porn Without Plot: they are official tags in the site
 * Real Person Fic: unlike other archives, RPF is allowed in the site
 * Recursive Fanfiction: The site allows linking to "related works", which varies from fan art hosted in the site, to derivated fan works.
 * Sturgeon's Law: more or less embraced by the site. Their stated mission is to archive and protect as much fan works as they can, regardless of quality, because in their opinion even mediocre and troll fics are proof of fan interest, and as such worthy of preservation.
 * Start My Own: The whole reason of the site existence.
 * X Meets Y: One simple way of describing the site is "4chan meets Fanfiction.net, as manned by members of late 2000s LiveJournal". It is a very chaotic environment which is only controlled by moderators in cases of extreme chaos and by topic, where preference is given to moderate disruptive user interactions over "inappropriate" content. Otherwise, extreme content like hardcore (written) pedophilia, Gorn and racism roam free.