In the library world, we like writers and we like to read! It’s a generalization, and not 100% true; but it’s true often enough that chatting about writers and writing is always a fun topic.
And, that of course includes facfic! We’ve mentioned fanfic on our podcast when we talk about fun books and things to read. And I’ve chatted with several of you who are avid fanfic readers and contributors. There is no need to get a publisher’s permission to write, and all the opportunities to explore and have fun with all sorts of already existing worlds in fiction. If you have not explored, there are some real treasures out there waiting for you!
So we are bringing you an excerpt from a story about one of the biggest fanfic archives out there: Archive of Our Own. It is particularly relevant because it is about a cataloging controversy – something near and dear to the hearts of library people everywhere. How we choose to organize information is rarely as straightforward as we wish it would be, and getting everyone to agree on a system is always a challenge. That challenge blew up on this archive, with a very long, very tagged, story: Sexy Times With Wangxian.
You can read the whole article here, and enjoy an excerpt below.
“The Archive of Our Own — the beloved, Hugo-winning fanfiction platform shorthanded affectionately as AO3 — was famously created by fans, for fans. It’s run by a fandom nonprofit, coded and moderated by volunteers, and reliant on its huge community of users to help it carry out its mission of preserving and protecting fans’ work. Because the history of fandom includes a long lineage of fanfic authors fighting for the right to write and publish fanfiction without facing deletion and/or legal threats, AO3’s rules are incredibly permissive: “Our goal is maximum inclusiveness,” explains the platform’s Terms of Service.
Longstanding calls for AO3 to more closely moderate fics with toxic elements, for example, have generally been met with a polite but firm “no” from AO3 according to that mantra — a variant of the classic free-speech idea that permissiveness and openness, not restriction and censure, will bring the most benefit to the community. Basically, if it’s a fic, it can stay.
Until now, that permissive approach has worked well for most AO3 users. But lately, the site’s approach to moderation, curation, and what even counts as fanfiction have all been thrown into upheaval and caused widespread consternation — all thanks to a single fic.
Over the past few months, this fic has enraged users, become a target of ridicule and harassment, and been the subject of so many abuse reports filed by members of the AO3 community that moderators reportedly stopped accepting complaints about it. On February 21, the moderators reportedly suspended it for a month on a technicality — but this hasn’t fixed the problem, and its author has vowed to return with a vengeance.
What’s wrong with the fic in question, and why is it such a powder keg? As I reported on the situation in search of answers, my perspective shifted: I thought this was a story about website moderation, taxonomy, what performance art looks like on the internet, and an online community’s complicated growing pains.
And it is all of those things. But it’s also a story about ethics, kindness, and connection within a community plagued by toxic abuse, and how a single disruptive user can undermine everything that community purports to stand for — even if the upheaval ultimately leads to something better.
Since it first appeared in October 2019, “Sexy Times With Wangxian,” or STWW, has become notorious across AO3. That in itself is unusual, because most AO3 users stick to their own fandoms and don’t pay much attention to what’s happening in others. STWW belongs to the fandom for the wildly popular Chinese TV series The Untamed, and the “Wangxian” in the title refers to the ship name for the show’s beloved main romantic pairing. It’s a very long fanfic, over a million words, and contains more than 200 chapters of porn featuring The Untamed’s large cast in endless permutations and sexual scenarios.
All that, by itself, isn’t enough to make STWW remarkable — not on a website as wild and unpredictable as AO3. Yet the fic has become impossible for many AO3 users to ignore thanks to a unique quirk: Its author has linked it to more than 1,700 site tags (and counting).
A quick note about AO3’s tagging system: It is designed to let users tag creatively and freely. So you can add useful tags, like pairing labels and character names, but you can also toss in personalized tags for fun and creative expression, from “no beta readers we die like men” to “I wrote this at 4am on three bottles of Monster Energy and zero sleep don’t judge.”
The tagging system is in service of the site’s total permissiveness — you can write anything you want in tags. But for the site to function, tags still need to be useful for navigation. So AO3 has hordes of volunteers known as “tag wranglers” whose sole job is to sort through the massive number of fic tags on the site and decide which ones will actually help users find what they’re looking for.
Those tags are then made “canonical,” which means they’ll become universal tags that every user can sort through. They’ll also appear within a list of suggested tags as you type. If I start to type “hospital” while tagging a fic, AO3 will return canonical tag suggestions like “Alternate Universe — Hospital,” “Hospital Sex,” and “Hogwarts Hospital Wing.” That makes it easy to determine whether your fic fits tags the community is already using.
AO3’s tagging system is so organized and thorough that it has won widespread acclaim from fields like library science and internet infrastructure. But it still has its limits — and with more than 1,700 tags, “Sexy Times With Wangxian” has revealed what some of those limits look like — in some cases quite literally.”
Check out the rest of this story here!
The drama of metadata and cataloging – it’s a lot more exciting that you might imagine!