Archive of Our Own’s 15-year journey from blog post to fanfiction powerhouse

Naomi Novik wrote a post on LiveJournal. She wrote, "We are sitting quietly by the fire, creating piles and piles of content around us, and other people are going to look at that and see anopportunity."

The community was open to exploitation, she was afraid. A group of men stepped onto the scene to promote a site that would be filled with fan content. It was the subject of intense criticism by many people involved in fandom at the time who felt stung by having a group of perceived outsiders attempt to profit off work they had always provided freely.

The people behind Fanlib are only interested in making money off content created by other people and getting media attention. Novik wrote that they don't have a single woman on their board. She said that they needed a central archive of their own to prevent exploitation by outsiders.

The Organization for Transforming Works was founded a few months later. Archive of Our Own was fully launched in 2009.

Photo by Andrew Matthews/PA Images via Getty Images

She starts the story around 1997. Fanfiction archives were often hosted by individuals and subject to technical difficulties, the worst of which could wipe out hard work for good. When a friend's fanfic archive began to break, Novik bought a suite of Perl script to help out.

She says that the ideas of what things are important in an archive came from that. A lot of this was described in the archives of our own post and made it complete into the AO3 site, like highly searchable pages, a robust tagging system, and an easy-to-use recommendation method.

Yuletide, a holiday season fanfiction exchange program that began in 2003 using the same software, was started by Novik after he became familiar with the script. She gained a kind of reputational credit, which would go on to be crucial in getting volunteers involved in forming the O TW.

There are a lot of people doing this. I don't believe I did any of these projects alone. Fanfiction is a way of life for a lot of people. They are willing to invest some time not just in reading the stories and writing the stories, but also in building the infrastructure.

Rebecca Tushnet, a legal scholar who had worked as a clerk in the Supreme Court, was one of the two people. Both were involved in discussions about the future of fanfiction at the time.

Writers and fans of fanfic are willing to speak openly about their work in TikTok videos. It was a much more covert hobby than the Star Trek fanzines of the 70s and early 80s.

Sexism and homophobia played a part in its denigration. The writers of the stories would sometimes have to have them deleted at the request of their employer. I would get frantic emails from people saying that I was going through a divorce and my husband was going to take my fic and try to take my kids. How quickly can you take me away from the internet?

It was important to keep certain aspects of fandom secret. She was talking about fanfiction when an audience member asked if there were people writing about Kirk and Spock having sex. I took a breath and said, "Yeah, there is, and it's amazing, you should read some" I've never done that before. It was the kind of thing we used to do together. She had nightmares about her fanfic costing her tenure track at the university she worked at, and she would often imagine how to defend herself against a complaint about her having written sex scenes.

She says that's the only way through. She responds differently when people say fanfic writing is weird. She compares "Are you dead inside?" to being a painter, musician, or knitter. "'But isn't it erotic?' I agree. It is indeed. Women have a sexual interest.

Image: Beth Gwinn

Fanfiction was illegal at the time. Many of the people who created and shared it believed that was true. Rebecca was the first person to say stop. Don't say it's illegal,' says Novik. Nobody really knows. There are a lot of good reasons to believe that most fanfiction is legal.

The uproar against Fanlib was a catalyst. Novik, Coppa, and others were worried that newer members of fandom would find these commercial efforts before the community-driven ones that they had built over decades. It's not a fandom where you put toys on a shelf. There was a sense of urgentness that we had to build something before someone else built something shiny that would make new people think.

There was a heightened sense of importance just a few days later. More than 500 accounts were suspended by LiveJournal without warning. Many users were affected by the bans because they had not posted anything against LiveJournal. The ban wave was referred to as Strikethrough by users. Barak Berkowitz apologized and promised to restore unfairly suspended users.

More suspensions took place in August. Fan communities were worried about how they could sustain themselves if they were banned. Fanfiction.net was one of the sites that had similar problems. There have been 30 earthquakes in the last six months in this area. 'Let's build a house on it.

She was too busy to create the archive herself, according to her original post. She changed her mind after the comments flooded with people who didn't know how to organize themselves. She says she should have known.

She knew she had to make a nonprofit because it couldn't be sold when the founders wanted to go somewhere else. Content purges and even shutdowns were often seen as the result of sites changing hands and trying to become more profitable. Fanlib was bought by Disney and closed less than a year later.

Both online and offline, Novik had archives. She was able to coordinate a worldwide team long before the epidemic. She was familiar with people who had skills that could be useful.

Knowledge of the law, coding, server maintenance, design, accessibility, and more were all learned by volunteers. AO3 was built by fans but they were aware of what they were doing. Fans are everything. Fans are journalists, fans are librarians, fans are graphic designers, and fans are accountants. Every job there is done by fangirls.

The archive is often referred to as a triumph of amateurism by founding board members and head of design for AO3. It definitely wasn't. Professionals were given the chance to do it right. Tepper had worked at a design firm for clients such as MTV and the British Broadcasting Corporation.

That doesn't mean that amateur weren't involved The team put together programs that volunteers could learn to code from. Lucy Pearson chaired the accessibility, design, and technology committee after volunteering. It was a test to see if the archive would run on Ruby or Python. The wrong call was made when they chose Ruby on Rails, as Python went on to get more support. Pearson was able to do more training when it became available. She wrote code for AO3 and trained other people.

She says that part of the original plan was to build the community that could support the archive. The aim was to train and support people like me who had never done coding before.

Many features that AO3 users may take for granted were put together by the team thanks to feedback from many other people. The tagging system is a point of pride for a lot of people. The system doesn't balance what Tepper calls taxonomy and folksonomy. If you want to read about Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Buffy and Spike getting together, you don't have to worry about whether the writer calls it "Spike" or "Spuffy" because volunteers are known as "tag wranglers." Writers are free to call it whatever they want without losing searchability.

It also accounts for tags being used editorially, something Tepper didn't anticipate but now loves. She says that she has saved on her phone the tag page for "feels." You can scroll through and see all the different versions of the same thing. I think this is the greatest thing that I have ever done in my career.

A sense of pride was a common theme among people I spoke to. Pearson says coming in on the coding side and doing something that he had never considered doing before was exhilarating. I had to rethink who I was and what I could do.

I think it was formative for me. The testing team was led by Maia Bobrowicz, who was on the ADT committee. The development relied on volunteer enthusiasm and that led to some issues. I became the leader of the testing team because the person who was doing it was too much. It was normal.

Image: 20th Century Fox

The team prepared to launch AO3 into alpha in 2009. Pearson put together a 5,000-word FAQ page in two nights, after Bobrowicz realized they didn't have a way to invite people to join. Pearson remembers answering support tickets on Christmas Day. She said it was intense.

Bobrowicz would coordinate between teams in the UK and the US by having two meetings a day. The problem was a cross-organizational one and she expanded the testing team to try to mitigate it. I'm happy we did it. I'm happy it's there. Bobrowicz said he was sad that we burned out so many people.

The volunteer team had a clear majority of people. The journal is editorially independent and is a product of the people who did it. She says that it was mostly white, middle class, middle aged and American coastal ladies.

AO3 had been criticized for its handling of race from the beginning. The discussion intensified in 2020 as the O TW addressed racism in fandom spaces for the first time but without addressing concerns that fans of color had about AO3's own policies. Two scholars, Rukmini Pande and Stitch, were not acknowledged for their criticisms of the site. Pande, who has also experienced continual harassment since the post two years ago, found this to be quite startling, considering that AO3 itself has never dealt with its own whiteness.

The OTW has done a lot of important things for fandom spaces but at the same time has not been very open to ideas of how to engage with concerns of fans of color. Fandom's perception of being driven by women and LGBTQ-plus people can make it seem inherently progressive, which can obscure the issues that it still faces. Pande says there is a lack of willingness to acknowledge how deep the whiteness is in AO3.

Fans and academics wrote an open letter after AO3 posted. The Board is urged to take immediate steps to make a space where all fans can thrive.

Racist content needs to be dealt with in the same way as other potentially objectionable content in order to get a change in policy. Almost all content is allowed on AO3. Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. In the wake of Strikethrough and similar raids, this was a permissive space. One of the early volunteers said that it would be an "anathema to its whole purpose" to not allow legal content.

AO3 is designed to include a lot of content that users won't want to see. The warnings should be used if the story contains depictions of violence, major character death, rape, or under the age of 18. Readers can exclude stories from their searches by using these. The priorities of those who created them and their perception of the community they were creating them for are reflected in these categories. Fans argue that the exclusion of explicit racism from the categories shows a blind spot that AO3 has never fixed. Busse says it makes them look like they aren't committed to that. I don't think we are committed to it like that.

AO3 is run in a way that makes it hard to change. There is a risk of harassment on the site. Pande saysAO3 has been used to target him. They haven't done anything about it.

Tushnet says that because they are run by volunteers, they are never going to have software that makes it easier to find bullied people. That software works very well. We're artisan. We're going to stay that way. That is a daily challenge.

Photo: OTW

AO3 announced users would be able to block other users, as long as they are logging in, and called it the first part of increased measures against harassment. In response to the open letter in 2020, they made a number of changes, including giving writers the ability to turn off comments on their works, which was implemented in August of the same year.

Pande thinks the blocking feature is a good addition to the site. She says that the changes didn't address the bigger problem. She says that they are not supported by any changes to the terms of service. The last update recorded on the website was in the year 2018? There is a chance that new content warnings could be implemented, which hasn't yet happened.

Fans of color say these issues are not prioritized because they are seen as a predominantly white space. AO3's handling of race is seen as coming from outsiders rather than long-time participants. There has never been a good faith attempt by the organization to try and fix the issues of racist abuse on their platform. I can only accept that this is their policy and most of the fans are okay with that.

According to an article published in 2021, some form of action towards the unmaking of structural racism within AO3 is urgent and necessary. Busse says that TWC is changing its editors to more fully incorporate fan studies by scholars of color.

Simple changes can be difficult to implement. Busse remembers internal discussions about changing AO3's front page. There is nothing ever happening. Four years later, we still don't have a front page. We have pages from 2008 and 2009. It's so bad.

AO3 has been criticized over the course of 15 years. It wasn't guaranteed to be popular at the beginning. It was marked by hostility from some within the fandom space who didn't want it to exist at all. Cupitt said that everyone was low for a couple of days, but he reminded them that fan blowback is always there. She says that even though the Archive was a fan-run site, it looked professional and got some of the same hostility as other websites. "I said, 'Look, within a year, once we've launched, it'll just be taken as a fannish institution and people will forget that there was ever any issues.'"

It is. Early finance committee member Cat Meier spoke on a panel at a 10:30PM slot, which she and the other panelists referred to as "Fanfic: Threat or Menace." Fanfic should be considered a legitimate creative activity according to the description. She got to do a panel about fanfiction at the same convention in the middle of the day a decade later. She says that a lot of people were shocked to hear that they had not always been welcomed.

AO3 was named one of the best websites by Time Magazine. The person says it blew his mind. AO3 won an award. A representative of the team accepted it on stage. Her university put her on the front page because of her fanfics.

The degree to which the O TW contributed to the cultural change is a matter of opinion. People wanted to give the legal team a lot of credit. Tepper says that there was a lot of fear in the fan community. The OTW was willing to deal with amicus briefs, test lawsuits, and reply to cease- and-desist orders.

There are no court cases to be seen. You are happy to threaten a woman who has no money and is going to be freaked out if you threaten her. When you get a letter from the Electronic Frontier Foundation saying that they are ready to go to court with you and that they expect to get their court costs back, you start to doubt it. That made the fan community less afraid of lawsuits.

Tushnet points out that the termtransformative works is useful. We were aware of the attempt to make fans understand the terminology. The commonsense justifications for fandom existed before us. We just wanted to give them a place to stay.

The fact that so many volunteers have been involved over the last 15 years and have been able to share their enthusiasm and understanding online created a snowball effect, according to others. 20 people sail over to explain to the person why AO3 isn't running ads.

Image: Universal Studios

Some people think that the wider shift is more important than the fanworks alone. Romance and erotic fiction aimed at women have become more popular. Cupitt points out that Fifty Shades of Grey began as a fan fiction. There is less fear in admitting to reading or writing fiction because of better attitudes towards women's sexuality.

AO3's numbers have boomed during the Pandemic. They are not the only fanfic sites out there. Fanfiction.net is still the preferred platform for a lot of people. Fanfiction is the third largest category after romance and teen fiction on the platform. Many of the stories cross over between these, where AO3 stories tend to focus on the relationships between characters, and Wattpad has a reputation for reader-insert romance stories written for teens.

While fanfiction might have found a less precarious position, so much of the story of the O TW remains relevant to this day. During the process of reporting this story, Tumblr went through another wave of content bans that could see blogs deleted for mentioning transphobia, racism, or the word "girl" The echo of Strikethrough was felt by another community who were rejecting the idea of a website encroaching on their world. "It's the same story!" She is so confident in the future of the O TW because of the repeated patterns on the internet. She says they will outlive them all.

Lessons can be learned from both the successes and the problems of the last 15 years. AO3 can be used for Facebook. The member of the legal committee is rhetorical. I don't know anything. Facebook does not have a community that is interested in what it does.

The O TW is fueling its longevity and celebrated status in both fandom and wider culture. The organization's origins and slowness to change make it hard for it to be fully inclusive of all fans.

AO3 was successful because of the number of people who love it. Over time, I think there will be more critique, and I think a lot of the critique is founded. It all began with a "hey, what if...".