Also known as AO3, the Archive of Our Own is host to a truly staggering amount of fanworks, mostly fanfiction, but also fanvids, fanzines, podfics, etc. For a concept of the scale, the Marvel Cinematic Universe fandom has over 511,000 visible works! (Though some are only visible if you have an account, so the number you see may be lower.) There are other sizable fanfic platforms, but I like AO3 best, because of how wonderfully navigable it is.
As I suggested before, you can browse works by fandom, but also by tags! Tags are one of the features I like best, because they give you more information about the actual contents of the story. These include the characters, major relationships, content warnings, and whatever else the author wants to add! The content warnings I’d especially like to see spread to the wider publishing industry, as they label heavier topics such as graphic depictions of violence, major character death, and rape, which many audiences would prefer either to avoid or to have advance warning for. Those are Archive Warnings, which means they’re expected to be labelled and appear in bold when they are, but most authors also list other possible triggers in their general tags, or else in the author’s notes for each chapter. I consider it an accessibility feature, and I think my future books may have something similar, so readers who want those warnings have easy access to them.
Because the Archive is well-organized and online, it also has an extensive filtering system. Within whatever tag you’re browsing (including fandoms) you can then choose to only see, or not see, any works with particular ratings, warnings, relationship categories, fandoms, characters, relationships, or particular tags. Furthermore, you can do the same for crossovers and completion status (I like reading stories that are already done, so that I can binge them), and set limits on word count or the date range in which works were last updated. If you want to read Marvel fics, but you don’t want Quantumania spoilers, you can filter to only see works that came out before the movie did! You can also do a more specified search, and sort by language.
The visual layout of the results is likewise convenient. Next to the title of each fic are four color-coded boxes, marking the maturity rating, romantic categories (gay, straight, lesbian, multi, gen, or other; gen is the circle with the dot, meaning any romance present isn’t the focus of the story), whether there are Archive Warnings (the lower left is red with an exclamation point when there are) and whether the work is complete. Like I said before, Archive Warnings are bolded, and relationship tags are highlighted grey, with a slash for romantic and an ampersand for platonic. Other relevant information is under the tags and summary, like the language, word count, and chapter count, all of which are nice and easy to find!
AO3 also has plenty of account features, like subscriptions, but the one I use most is bookmarks. Not only can you bookmark fics and then filter among them, but you can add your own Bookmarker’s Tags when you do! For example, one of my tags is “Spanish practice,” because I’ve found reading fanfic in Spanish is a great balance between education and entertainment. Plus, I learn a lot of really niche words I wouldn’t otherwise have cause to know!
All in all, I’m extremely impressed with this entertainment platform and how easy it is to use! Especially for a volunteer-staffed nonprofit. If you read fanfic, or want to read fanfic, and you haven’t checked out AO3 yet, I highly recommend it! They’ve got something for everyone. And it’s not that hard to find!
