I’m using ao3 the way god intended: via 36 open semi-abandoned tabs on my phone at 2 AM the night before work

starting a collection of my favourite AO3 author’s notes

honourable mentions

OH OH MY FAVORITE ONE:

I WROTE THIS TO BE GAY NOT ACCURATE

i actually never ever want AO3 to be censored bc nothing is more fun than reading the tags on a fic and going “huh. didn’t know there was a market for that.”

squinting at a tag and trying to decide how badly I want to learn a new word

How am I only just learning this!?

[ID: a cropped screenshot of the AO3 Exclude filter section, reading "Other tags to exclude". "*/reader" and "*/you" have been selected. End ID.]

Wait

[ID: cropped screenshot of the ao3 include filter, reading "Other tags to include:" with "*/James "Bucky" Barnes" selected. /end ID]

IT WORKS

Is this new???? I've been wanting wildcard relationship search for YEARS 😍😍😍

My multishipping ass is about to go ham...

helpful info for those who need it

Explanation of what this does for anyone confused!

the fanfiction in my head is soooo good wish you guys could see this

the fanfiction in my head is soooo good wish I could read it

This.

I don’t know about others but the only reason I put both is so that whichever someone clicks on, they will find my fic. So if there is supposed to be rules, I guarantee you that no writer knows these ones. We can barely get people to comment, you think we’re going to specifically choose & or / ? Hell no.

I’ve been in fandom for twenty years, and “/” means romance and “&” means no romance was literally one of the first things I learned. It dates back to Star Trek fanfiction of the 70s. I’m boggled by the fact that anyone who’s been reading fic on AO3 for more than like five minutes wouldn’t know that, and I’m curious as to what fanfic community you come out of.

I don’t think that tagging with both is actually going to get your fic in front of more readers. People looking for romance often exclude the “&” tag if there are too many gen fics tagged with both. People looking for gen often exclude the “/” tag if there are too many fics with both. So rather than putting your fic in front of twice the people, you are in fact more likely to get your target audience ignoring your fic because it has a tag they don’t want.

Also, by overtagging you are more likely to annoy potential readers away from your fic than entice them. A fic tagged both & and / better have both romance and a ton of platonic interaction between the two characters, like a slow burn romance friends-to-lovers arc. If it isn’t, I’m going to be very unhappy because the author lied to me with the tags to try and trick me into reading a fic with deceptive advertising.

When I’m in a fandom and see tagging where some of the tags don’t really apply and are just there to get it in front of more eyes, I’m going to assume one of two things. Either the author is a newb who doesn’t know anything, or the author is purposefully spamming the tags because they don’t care about lying to their potential audience and think that “spray and pray” is an effective tactic. In the first case, their writing probably will not be very good, so why bother reading their fic. In the second case, the fact that I can’t trust the tags to be accurate means I’m not going to read it to see if it’s interesting even if it has a tag I like. Chances are, that tag isn’t actually in the fic anyway, and even if it is, by spam-tagging the author is making the archive harder to use for everybody. Why would I reward bad behavior with attention? No. Far better to mute the author and move on.

More to the point--and no, I will never stop harping on this, because we have GOT to stop leaving our strongest points in the drawer--it doesn't matter if you heard of this convention before joining AO3 or not, because it's in AO3's tagging FAQ.

[id: the "How do I tag a romantic or platonic relationship?" section of the tagging FAQ here.]

"But Jo," you may argue, because you're wrong. "There's no way to find that without digging through site FAQ menus, and that's really inaccessible!"

sure

except

that when you go to post a new fic, and you go to put in those relationship tags, you see this

[id: the Relationships field]

and that tooltip, the one THERE TO EXPLAIN HOW THE FIELD WORKS, links to the Relationships segment of the tag FAQ, which explicitly lays this shit out.

I don't care if you don't know fandom history. I don't care if you've never heard a goddamn word about the spirk shippers. I don't care if you've never been exposed to fandom culture in your life. It is, frankly, not fair to expect those things of everyone.

What is entirely fair to expect is that you will READ THE INSTRUCTIONS PRINTED NEXT TO THE FUCKING BOX, actually. Forget fandom conventions. It genuinely doesn't matter whether you agree with or respect fandom conventions. This is a site policy. This is explicitly how tagging on AO3, specifically, works.

IS THAT HOW I CAN FIND GOOD PLATONIC STUFF???

man if I gotta write bad fics, it should at least be easy! But it’s not! It is also hard to write this bad fic

Stumbled upon this random ship (in a fandom im not active in myself) that has like 150 works on ao3 which are all from just two people gifting each other fics about this pairing back and forth and theyve been doing it for 3 years... i think thats true love probably

When I came across this post yesterday, I was surprised that op said they don't see people making art/moodboards/crafts/etc. for other people's fics anymore.

That and commenting on fics have been the main way I've interacted with fandom over the past like, 25 years, so I'd be curious to know what other people think in the tags.

For now, though:

I wanted to include podfics and playlists in this, but that would make the poll too broad, I think, so I just wanted to focus on visual art here.

I’ve decided that starting a 50k+ fanfic at 3 in the morning when you have to wake up early is not a rookie mistake but in fact a time honored tradition of ao3 veterans

There are currently ~2300 works in AO3 tagged with "Created Using Generative AI"

I'll be upfront with my opinion, which mirrors my opinion in regards to my field: using AI will only hasten your own obsolescence. The point of fanfiction is not to crank out fics, but rather to enjoy the hobby and communities of writing and fandom.

google siting ao3 as a source is so unhinged