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On occasion, the OTW shares posts from a guest, providing an outside perspective on the OTW or specific aspects of fandom. These posts express each individual’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy.
Atticus Yus (she/her) is a postgraduate student at Cambridge Digital Humanities, affiliated with Newnham College. A fanfiction writer herself, she is currently most active in the Identity V and Hannibal fandoms and enjoys baking banana bread in her free time. Today, Atticus talks about her research regarding fan communities with a particular focus on tagging systems and social networks.
How did you first find out about fandom and fanworks?
I owe my big sister everything for introducing me to fandom! Growing up, I remember her and her friends sitting in our family’s living room talking for hours about YuYu Hakusho and My Chemical Romance. She’s got a creative soul, writing her own fanfictions and serving as a beta reader for her friends too. She had fan art all over her childhood bedroom, which I thought was the coolest thing ever.
By the time I reached an age where I was discovering my own favourite media (back then, it was One Direction and The Hunger Games), she was quick to introduce me to fannish lingo, including “fanfiction” and “fan art.” Learning these terms eventually led me to websites like DeviantArt, QuoteV, and AO3. After enjoying other people’s fanwork, I decided to start creating my own stories.
Your research brings together fanfiction, consent, and reading practices. What first led you to think about reading fanfiction through the lens of consent?
I discovered fanfiction at the same age that I was first encountering sexuality. I consider fanfiction to have been my first exposure to content that challenged my understanding of consent as it was taught in school, where I was taught that “no means no,” though, never learned what happened when these rules were not followed. Through fanfiction, I encountered tags such as “dubious consent”, “consensual non-consent”, and “consensual but not safe or sane”. I had been taught such a clear framework of understanding consent that it felt intimidating to encounter content that seemed to challenge it. Later in adulthood, I became aware of fan conflict, such as pro-shipper and anti-shipper, which made it clear to me that fans are invested in conversations on ethics and consent. However, these debates have deep social roots in matters including shame, censorship, and American purity culture (Samantha Aburime’s 2022 article on this exact topic is useful here).
Witnessing pro-shipper and anti-shipper conflict online taught me there is much at stake regarding sexual content in fan spaces, and this led me to consider how consent is signalled in the first place. As an AO3 reader, I pay attention to tags before deciding whether to engage with a work. A tag such as “dubious consent” is not simply a descriptive label, but also a warning, invitation, or signal of how the author interprets consent in their content. I started to wonder whether consent tags operate on multiple levels: not only between fictional characters, but also between authors and readers.
Fanfiction spaces often rely on detailed tagging and content/authors notes. How do these systems shape a reader’s ability to give or withhold consent?
I think of the tagging system, summary, and author’s notes as paratexts: drawing on Gerard Genette, paratexts function as a threshold priming the reader’s interpretation before they have entered the text. In this sense, consent on AO3 is not located solely within the narrative but is negotiated before reading begins. However, paratexts are not universally consistent in usage. On AO3, authors assign tags to their own work, can choose to not provide archive warning, and may create tags too. Through my research, I identified what appears to be an informal gradient of consent, ranging from rape/non-con to enthusiastic consent. Yet I was unable to identify clear boundaries between categories such as “mildly dubious consent” and “extremely dubious consent.”
This ambiguity is not surprising. Understandings of consent are shaped by personal experience and cultural context rather than universal definitions. Thus, an author’s subjective interpretation may not align with a reader’s. Consequently, readers may encounter content they did not agree to. Tagging systems facilitate informed decision-making but cannot guarantee it; they rely on trust that authors have represented their work in ways readers will find meaningful and accurate.
Related to the praxis of consent around AO3’s usage, what are your thoughts on fanfiction (and AO3 in particular) becoming more well known with the mass media/audience? Have you noticed any changes within fandom spaces related to an increase in interest from people who enter fandom spaces without prior experience with fandom culture?
Although fanfiction is becoming more mainstream, I think it is often misunderstood as a textual object rather than a practice. I am thinking about a 2025 TikTok trend where users generate AI ‘fanfiction’ about themselves and their friends. I thought calling the generated text ‘fanfiction’ wasn’t quite right, because these works were not really fan produced. Recently, I was reading through the comments under OTW’s 2023 post “AI and Data Scraping on the Archive”, where it announced that AI generated content is not prohibited under its Terms of Service. I thought the comments caught onto a legitimate concern that resonates with my own research: what happens to fanfiction when we remove the fan?
I have also noticed more fanfiction being shared through screenshots on platforms like Instagram and X. In these cases, work is often circulated outside AO3 without author consent or the surrounding paratexts that shape reading practices. My assumption is that many writers (like myself) expect AO3 to function as a relatively contained space governed by its own norms of tagging and consent, and taking these works out of context disrupts fandom etiquette. I don’t have answers, but I ask myself questions like, how might new forms of automated or decontextualised “fanfiction” reshape consent practices altogether?
How did you hear about the OTW and what do you see its role as?
I first encountered the OTW through AO3. Recently, my research has depended heavily on Transformative Works and Cultures and Fanlore. Across these interactions, I understand the OTW’s role primarily through advocacy; it works to establish fandom culture as legitimate, and as deserving of protection and scholarly attention. Coming from English departments, this feels particularly personal to me, as fan studies was consistently dismissed as not properly literary by peers and faculty members alike.
But I also see the OTW as performing care work within fandom. AO3 emerged in response to the need for a stable, non-commercial space for fans to share their creative works without censorship and monetization by platform owners, as outlined in Astolat’s post, “An Archive of One’s Own.” I am intrigued by the post’s connection to Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” addressed to students at women colleges and touching on the importance of giving women the resources and private space to achieve creative freedom. Like Woolf’s essay, the OTW addressed an infrastructural gap that left fan communities online vulnerable and without a space of their own. Now of course, it isn’t perfect; as a woman of colour, I cannot disregard racism in fandom communities and AO3’s infrastructural failure to address this (refer to Alexis Lothian and Mel Stanfill’s 2021 article). But maintaining fandom infrastructure by providing an archive, preserving at-risk works, and keeping a wiki of community knowledge is essential to continuously improving the conditions of fan culture over time.
What fandom things have inspired you the most?
Squee! I love that so many fans have reclaimed fangirling. Specifically, the idea of passionately loving—or even being obsessed with—a piece of media, but not having to explain why. When I made the decision to pursue fandom during my graduate studies, I was always asked, why? Constantly explaining my decision felt redundant and even patronising. So, I am inspired by all the fangirls who squee unapologetically, proudly and loudly.
We encourage suggestions from fans for future guest posts, so contact us if you have someone in mind! If you enjoyed this post and would like to read more like it, we encourage you to look back at earlier guest posts.
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