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.
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).
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.
Virtual1979 is an Asia-based writer of Chinese descent; internet sleuths have
alleged that they are a 41-year-old long-time member of fandom. But since virtual1979 started posting chapters of “Sexy Times With Wangxian,” AO3 users have asked them repeatedly to stop — and they’ve not only refused, but continued to expand STWW to add more tags and fandoms. Their defiance has generated sustained furor over the fic. Many users have started referring to it simply as “the wall of tags.” One person on Reddit
literally dreamed about A03’s moderators stepping in to help. Fandom blog site the Geekiary published
an angry rundown of the situation, noting, ”I have not sat down and done the math, but at this time I’ve probably spent 20 or so minutes of my life just trying to scroll past the fic.”
This all leaves me feeling strangely poignant — both frustrated and hopeful for the future of the AO3 community. Because even though the controversy around “Sexy Times With Wangxian” is technically just about tagging, it’s really about the painful, even absurd way that meaningful change happens, with subtext about the ways we reach out to and connect with other people online. In this case, virtual1979 wasn’t intending to subvert and overhaul an entire fanfiction community with thousands of members, but that may be just what they’ve done.
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