How Not to Get Lost on AO3, a guide for anyone who wants to read fanfiction and survive all those tags
Sometimes I think about how little it takes for someone to dive, completely willingly, into something they had no idea existed until then. In my case, it was all the fault of Severus Snape, Harry Potter and one fairly innocent question that had been keeping me awake for years. What if their story had gone differently? What if there was something else hiding behind all that mutual hatred? And what if somebody else had thought exactly the same thing and decided to write about it?
I sadly can't remember how exactly I discovered Snarry back then. All I know is that one day I stumbled upon a website dedicated to this pairing, and a whole world opened up in front of me that I hadn't known existed. Suddenly I realised I wasn't the only person who built alternative scenarios in her head, rewrote the characters' decisions and refused to accept that their story had to end exactly where the original author ended it. Someone else had already written down the things I imagined, added their own, and all of it was right there to read.
At first, of course, I looked only for Czech stories. I picked a pairing, found a story that caught my attention, and read. Little by little I discovered new authors, other pairings and all the possibilities fanfiction had to offer. I also started to realise that the pairing alone tells you nothing about the kind of story you're going to get. Some authors wrote the characters so convincingly that I felt as if I were reading a continuation of the original. Others placed them in a completely different world, and somehow it still worked. And then, of course, there were stories that made me wonder whether we had even read the same books.
But the Czech fanfiction world had one rather significant drawback. Sooner or later, I started running out of stories I wanted to read. And if you know that feeling when you finish an amazing story, you're still emotionally recovering from it and you're already desperately looking for the next one, you can probably imagine the state I was in. The idea of accepting the end of my fanfiction adventure just because I had run out of Czech texts felt completely unacceptable.
So I decided to start reading in English, which, considering my English at the time, was a pretty bold idea. I had learned German at school, English had never felt like a natural language to me, and I struggled to express even relatively simple things, let alone read entire stories full of emotions, wordplay and expressions you would have a hard time finding in any ordinary textbook. But my hunger for more stories was clearly stronger than my language skills. At first I chewed my way through the texts slowly, looked up some words again and again, and sometimes I was guessing what the author meant rather than truly understanding it. Over time it got easier, though, and I found out I could enjoy reading in English just as much as in Czech. Somewhere along that road, AO3 jumped out at me, and I very quickly understood that knowing English didn't mean I could find my way around everything the internet had to offer.
My first encounter with AO3 and why I wanted to close the browser
I remember that feeling surprisingly well. I opened Archive of Our Own and had absolutely no idea what I was looking at. There were links everywhere, fandom names, abbreviations, numbers and long lists of English terms that meant nothing to me. All I wanted was to find a nice story, ideally with characters I loved, and instead I felt as if someone expected me to pass a university entrance exam in fanfiction searching.
I didn't understand why one story had thousands of kudos and another lots of hits, what bookmarks were, or why some tags looked like real literary terms while others looked as if the author had been talking to themselves while writing them. What frustrated me most, though, was that I knew what I wanted to read, I just had no idea how to explain it to the website.
Luckily I found the Facebook group Group of Our Own CZ/SK, full of people who knew their way around the archive far better than I did back then. And what was even more important, they had no problem helping someone who asked about things that seemed completely obvious to them. Thanks to them, I slowly began to understand how AO3 works, why some searches end with thousands of results and others with absolutely nothing, and what all those numbers and labels actually mean.
Several years have passed since then, and my role on AO3 has changed quite a bit. Today I don't only read there, I also publish my own fanfiction under the name MimosaConfiante. I started as someone desperately searching for one more story with Severus Snape, and I ended up writing about characters who won't leave me alone long after I close the book or turn off the last episode of a drama.
Thanks to that, I now know AO3 from both sides. As a reader who can spend an absurd amount of time searching for the next story, and as an author who knows how much work can hide behind a few chapters. And because I remember my early frustration very well, I decided to write a guide for anyone who is just trying to find their way around this enormous archive and feels as if everyone else got an instruction manual and somebody simply forgot to give them one.
A quick start for beginners, or how to find your first story
If you've just opened AO3 and mostly want to know how to get to something you can actually read, you don't need to study every available feature first. To begin with, a few basic steps are enough to take you from the front page all the way to a specific story. And if some English term doesn't make sense to you, I'll come back to it in the following sections.
Step | Example on AO3 | What you get |
|---|---|---|
1. Choose a fandom | Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling | You'll see stories from the chosen world. |
2. Choose a relationship | Harry Potter/Severus Snape | You'll find stories tagged with this romantic or sexual relationship. |
3. Sort the results | Sort by → Kudos | Stories will be listed from the highest number of kudos. |
4. Choose completion status | Completion Status → Complete works only | Only works marked as complete will remain. |
5. Set the language | Language → English | You'll see stories marked as English. |
6. Look through the results | Summary + Additional Tags | You'll find out what the story is about and what to expect. |
Once you've set everything, don't forget to press Sort and Filter so the selection actually applies. If you're looking for something very specific, you can of course add more requirements, but for your first meeting with the archive I wouldn't make it unnecessarily complicated.
One more important thing. AO3 isn't built to automatically recommend you more and more stories based on your behaviour. What you find depends above all on how you search, how the authors tagged their stories and which conditions you set. And that's exactly why it's good to know what the individual options mean.
What AO3 actually is and where to start looking
AO3 stands for Archive of Our Own, an archive created by fans for fans. It's a non profit platform run by the Organization for Transformative Works, which allows fans to publish and preserve their fanworks. You'll find fanfiction from all kinds of fandoms here, from Harry Potter and Marvel through anime all the way to Chinese danmei, as well as original stories and other fan creations.
At first glance AO3 can look a little old fashioned, especially if you're used to modern apps full of pictures and recommendations. But the longer I use it, the more I appreciate that it focuses above all on the stories themselves and on finding them.
On the front page you'll find the Fandoms menu, where fandoms are sorted into categories such as Books & Literature, Anime & Manga or TV Shows. If you're looking for Harry Potter, you can start in the literature category, but if you already know what you need, there's no reason to go through the whole list. There's also a direct search.
Once you open a specific fandom, you'll get to the list of stories. Popular fandoms can have hundreds of thousands of them, so I personally wouldn't recommend browsing them only by date and hoping that sooner or later something interesting shows up. This is exactly where the Sort and Filter menu starts to make sense, and on a computer you'll usually find it right next to the search results. Before you start going through the individual options, though, you need to know one more thing about relationships between characters.
Pairing, or why one slash matters
If you read fanfiction mainly because of particular characters, you'll come across the word pairing very often. It refers to two characters whose relationship you're interested in, and in romantic fanfiction it's usually a romantic or sexual relationship.
On AO3, however, it's important to tell apart two labels that look almost the same. If you see Harry Potter/Severus Snape, the slash marks a romantic or sexual relationship between these characters. On the other hand, Harry Potter & Severus Snape marks a non romantic dynamic, for example friendship, family or another important bond.
This distinction can save you a lot of surprises. If you're looking for Snarry and instead open a story in which Snape is standing in as Harry's father, you probably missed exactly this small but important difference.
Of course, there are also stories with several relationships, side pairings or more complicated combinations of characters. That's why it pays to look at the whole list of relationship tags, because the mere presence of your favourite pairing doesn't have to mean it will play the main role in the story.
Sort by, or how the stories should be ordered
When you open the Sort and Filter menu, right at the top you'll find the Sort by option. It decides the order of the results and is, in my opinion, one of the most useful parts of the whole search. You can display the most recently updated stories, the longest ones, or the works that have collected the most kudos.
I myself prefer sorting by Kudos, which means the stories with the highest number of them show up first. For me it's a comfortable starting point, not a guarantee that the first story will automatically be the best. Quality of writing and personal reading preferences really don't fit into one number.
If you're more interested in newer stories, you can use Date Updated, which sorts by the latest update, or Date Posted, which sorts by publication date. You can also sort by word count, comments, bookmarks, hits, title or author. And if you find that one way suits you better than the others, nothing stops you from using it every time.
Kudos, hits and bookmarks. What do those numbers actually mean?
When you look through individual stories on AO3, you'll notice a few figures at the bottom of each entry, usually in the bottom right corner. Next to the language, word count and number of chapters you'll also see Comments, Kudos, Bookmarks and Hits. These very numbers confused me quite a lot the first time, because I had no idea what they meant or what I was supposed to take from them.
Kudos are a simple way to let the author know you liked their work. From one account, or as a logged out visitor, you can leave kudos on a particular work only once, so their number is often used as a rough indicator of popularity. But a story published several years ago has had much more time to collect reactions than one the author finished last week, so comparing the numbers alone can be misleading.
Hits are the recorded views of a work. They're not the number of unique readers, and they don't tell you how many people actually finished the story. So if a story has ten thousand hits, it doesn't mean ten thousand people read it from beginning to end.
Bookmarks are the places where readers save stories. Some people use them as their own little library of favourites, others as a list of texts they want to come back to. Public bookmarks count towards the number shown on the story, while private ones are visible only to their owner.
And finally there are Comments, through which readers can respond to a story and talk to the author. I'd like to come back to those later, because publishing my own work has given me a rather personal relationship with them.
Include, or everything you want to read
Below the sorting you'll find the Include section. It lets you decide what the displayed stories should contain and gradually narrow down the number of results. When I saw this menu for the first time, it looked like an endless list of options, and I wasn't even sure whether I was expected to pick something in every single section.
Luckily, you don't have to. And to make it easier to find your way, let's go through the individual parts in the order in which you'll meet them on AO3.
Ratings
The rating marks the approximate age and content suitability of a story. It isn't a rating of quality or a number of stars given by readers, which is quite an important distinction.
General Audiences marks content generally suitable for all ages, Teen and Up Audiences is meant for teenagers and older readers, Mature for a more adult audience, and Explicit marks explicit adult content. If the author doesn't choose a rating, you'll see Not Rated.
The rating alone won't tell you what the story is about, though. Explicit doesn't necessarily mean romance, and General Audiences certainly doesn't mean the story can't emotionally tear you apart. So if you're looking for a particular kind of storytelling, it's good to treat the rating as just one piece of information.
Warnings
Warnings are content notices that can tell you in advance about things like graphic violence, major character death or sexual violence. If some topics are hard for you, I recommend not skipping this section.
I would especially watch out for the difference between No Archive Warnings Apply and Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings. The first one means that none of the archive warnings apply to the story. The second one means the author decided not to use the archive warnings, which definitely doesn't mean the story can't contain sensitive topics.
I personally don't filter by warnings much in my everyday searching, but it's always good to know what you're getting into. Especially if some kind of content can catch you unpleasantly off guard.
Categories
In Categories you'll find the labels M/M, F/F, F/M, Gen, Multi and Other, which help you tell apart the kinds of relationships in a story.
M/M marks relationships between male characters, F/F between female characters, and F/M between a male and a female character. Gen is used for stories without a significant romantic or sexual relationship, or where such a relationship isn't the main focus. Multi can mean several relationship categories or relationships with more partners, and Other covers the remaining possibilities.
I usually don't need this section, because I tend to pick a specific pairing straight away. For someone who searches by the type of relationship rather than by particular characters, though, it can be very useful.
Fandoms, Characters and Relationships
These three sections let you narrow your search further by fandoms, characters and relationships. If you open Harry Potter, for example, you can display only stories featuring Sirius Black, Remus Lupin or a specific relationship between them.
Here I'd point out one thing that can be quite annoying while reading. The fact that a story has your favourite character or pairing in its tags doesn't mean the story is actually about them. Sometimes they appear for only a few paragraphs, while the main plot focuses on someone completely different.
That's why it's good not to rely only on the ticked relationships and to read the summary of the story too. After all, when I'm looking for a particular pair, I usually want to read about them, not find out a few chapters in that they only flickered somewhere in the background.
Additional Tags
And here we get to the part that, in my opinion, makes AO3 something special. Additional Tags allow authors to describe almost everything their story contains.
You can come across Angst, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Slow Burn, Alternate Universe, Canon Divergence and lots of other terms that hint at what kind of story awaits you. Some describe the emotional tone, others the setting or the way the relationships between the characters develop.
You'll also find author's notes, little jokes and sometimes whole small comments on the story itself. So not every tag is a commonly used term, and you definitely don't need to learn them all by heart. Over time you'll find out which ones you see most often and what you can expect from them.
If a story catches my eye, for example, but I see OOC in the tags, I usually skip it. OOC means Out of Character and is used when the characters behave very differently from how we know them from the original. Characterisation matters a lot to me. I don't mind alternative universes or different circumstances, as long as I can believe that the character would really act this way in that situation.
Because of all those terms, I've also written a separate fanfiction dictionary where the individual terms are explained in more detail. For now, it's enough to know that tags are one of the best ways to tell whether a story might interest you.
Exclude, or when you know what you definitely don't want to read
Below Include you'll find Exclude, which works exactly the other way round. Instead of choosing what a story should contain, you can leave out specific characters, relationships, tags or content warnings.
I personally almost never use this section. I'd rather keep a wider selection and decide based on what the author wrote about their story. If I see something that doesn't interest me, I simply move on. That doesn't mean I consider Exclude useless, of course, because for readers who want to filter out certain topics on purpose, it can be one of the most useful features of all.
I'd only recommend using it a little carefully. If you exclude a certain relationship tag, for example, you'll also lose stories where that relationship appears only on the margins. And that can be a pity if the main story would otherwise have caught your interest.
More Options, or a few inconspicuous but useful settings
Below the main filters you'll also find More Options. It might surprise you that this is exactly where some of the features I consider most important in my own searching are hiding.
Crossovers
A crossover is a story that connects two or more fandoms or fictional worlds. You can come across Harry Potter in the Marvel universe, for example, or combinations that would never cross my mind even in a very creative moment.
I'll admit I really don't like crossovers. When I choose a particular fandom, I usually want to stay in its world, and I'm not interested in what the story would look like if heroes from a completely different universe walked into it. That's why the Exclude crossovers option is useful for me.
Just keep in mind that AO3 recognises crossovers by their fandom tags. Some stories are filed under several related fandoms without being a classic meeting of two different worlds, so even this filter may not always work exactly the way you imagine.
Completion Status
This setting is absolutely essential for me. AO3 lets you display all stories, only finished ones, or only works the author is still writing. I personally choose Complete works only, because I don't like falling into a story, losing myself in it completely and then finding out that the next chapter may never come.
I don't mean to say that unfinished stories don't make sense. Lots of authors post regularly, and following a story while it's being written can be a wonderful experience. I simply like being able to dive into the plot and read the whole thing without waiting several months for the next part.
And this is exactly where it's good to know how AO3 marks the number of chapters. At the bottom of a story's entry you'll find Chapters, which tells you how many chapters the author has already posted and how many they're planning.
Example | What it means |
|---|---|
Chapters: 5/11 | 5 out of 11 planned chapters have been posted. |
Chapters: 5/5 | All 5 chapters have been posted and the work is marked as complete. |
Chapters: 5/? | 5 chapters have been posted, but the final number isn't given. |
Also keep in mind that a finished story can be part of a longer series that isn't finished yet. So if you want a closed story, it's worth checking for any sequel too.
Word Count
Word Count lets you set a minimum or maximum number of words. If you want something short to read before bed, you can search for shorter stories. And if you're tempted by a long story that will keep you busy for several evenings, you can set a higher minimum.
I practically never use this option. If a story catches me, I don't really mind whether it has five thousand or two hundred thousand words. It will of course change how long I'll be reading it, but on its own it's no reason for me to leave a story out.
Date Updated
This option lets you limit the results by the time of the last update. It's handy when you're looking for newer stories, or when you feel you've already gone through everything worth your attention in a fandom and you want to see what's been added since.
Language
Unless you read in every language in the world, I definitely recommend setting the language. AO3 holds stories in many languages, and without this limit you might come across a story whose title and tags catch your eye, but which you can't actually read.
These days I read mostly in English, so I usually pick English. When I remember how I once fought my way through every other paragraph, I find it rather funny that English has become my main language for both reading and writing fanfiction.
Why AO3 sometimes finds nothing at all
This is one of the things I wish I had known right at the beginning. It's very easy to feel that the more options you tick, the more precisely AO3 will find your dream story. And to a certain extent that's true, but only if such a story really matches every condition you chose.
Imagine you're looking for a particular pairing, only finished stories, and you want Slow Burn, Hurt/Comfort, a certain alternate universe and a few more very specific tags. The result can be a beautifully precise list of stories, but AO3 can just as well tell you that it found nothing at all. And if you're a complete beginner, you might think you're doing something wrong.
The problem may be somewhere else entirely, though. Maybe the author didn't use a certain tag even though their story contains that motif. Or you chose such a specific combination of requirements that there simply isn't a matching story in the archive.
It's also good to know that if you select several specific tags in Include, you're looking for works that match all of them. It doesn't mean AO3 will automatically pick stories containing at least one of them.
That's why I recommend starting with fewer conditions and adding more as needed. And if you end up with zero, try removing some. Maybe exactly the story you're looking for exists, and the author just tagged it a little differently.
How I search for fanfiction and why I made it to page 370 of WangXian
Over the years I've built my own system on AO3, and it's actually much simpler than you'd expect after such a long time. I don't use most of the available filters, I don't build complicated combinations of tags, and I don't try to decide in advance every quality of the story I'm about to read.
I usually choose a pairing, sort the results by kudos from the highest, set finished stories and the language. I don't want crossovers, but otherwise I keep the search fairly open. Then I just browse the individual stories, read their summaries and check the tags. And that's how, little by little, I made it all the way to page 370 of the WangXian search results.
How many stories have I read in that time? I have no idea, because it never occurred to me to count them. I simply devoured them. Some were long, others short, some completely wrecked me and others I closed after a few paragraphs. Of course I didn't read everything that came up. Sometimes the summary didn't catch me, other times the tags didn't suit me, or I just wasn't in the mood for what the author was offering. And it also happened that I came back to some of the stories I had skipped, because what doesn't appeal to you today can be exactly what you crave a few months later.
When I'm looking for something really specific, though, my approach changes, of course. If I want a certain trope, an alternate setting or a particular relationship dynamic, I start using more of the search options. That's exactly when the AO3 system can be incredibly useful and help you find even a very specific kind of story.
In my everyday reading, though, I prefer to leave room for surprise. I don't want to know everything that happens in a story beforehand, and sometimes what catches me is exactly something I would never have typed into the search myself.
Summary and tags, or how I recognise what I want to read
For me personally, one of the most important parts of every entry is the Summary, the description of the story. Some authors write a classic blurb, others use a short excerpt from the story, and others are happy with a few sentences meant to catch the reader's interest.
Sometimes one interesting idea is enough, and I immediately want to find out what the author did with it. Other times I read the summary, look at the tags and decide to move on, even though the story has an enormous number of kudos.
What interests me most is how the author works with the characters and their motivations. If I'm reading WangXian, for example, I want to keep recognising in Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian the personalities I fell in love with, even if their story takes place in completely different circumstances. I don't mind alternate universes or new interpretations at all, as long as their actions make sense to me. What usually puts me off, though, is the feeling that the author took two complete strangers and simply gave them familiar names.
Of course, summaries and tags aren't infallible either. Sometimes the author doesn't write the most convincing description, but the story itself is wonderful. And other times a summary catches your interest, only for you to find out a few chapters in that the writing style just doesn't suit you.
That's part of reading and discovering too. There's no obligation to finish every story just because you once opened it.
How to save your favourite stories and not get lost in them a second time
Once you finally find a story that caught you, you might want to come back to it later. And if you read a lot, you'll probably find out sooner or later that relying only on your own memory isn't exactly the most reliable system.
AO3 offers several ways to keep and follow stories. Bookmarks work as saved favourites to which you can add your own notes or tags. If you don't want others to see which stories you've saved, you can mark them as private.
Mark for Later is handy for stories that caught your eye but that you don't want to read right away. You'll find them in your account history, as long as you have it turned on. Subscribe, on the other hand, lets you follow particular stories, series or authors and get notified about new posts.
And finally there's History, which will help you find stories you've already visited while logged in. I just wouldn't rely on it as the only archive of your favourite stories. It's no guarantee that you'll be able to reach everything forever, and if an author removes their work, your history won't bring it back.
A small request from someone who writes on AO3 too
Now that we've explained kudos, bookmarks and comments, let me take a small detour from an author's point of view. As a reader, I know very well how easy it is to finish a story, be thrilled, close the page and immediately open the next one. But ever since I started publishing myself, I've seen the other side as well.
Behind every story there's a person who gave it their time, their energy and often a good piece of themselves. And even though fanfiction is usually written out of love for the characters and the world that captured us, knowing that someone read our work and that it left something in them can be incredibly lovely.
On AO3 I have comments where people tell me my stories made them cry, that they loved the way I captured the relationships between the characters, or that they found something in one of my stories that touched them personally. One reader appreciates a particular scene, another writes a few sentences about how the story made them feel, and someone simply says thank you for a lovely read. And every single one of those reactions makes me happy, because it reminds me that stories born in my head can reach someone who is a complete stranger.
That's why I'd like to ask everyone who reads on AO3 to think about this from time to time. You don't have to write a literary analysis or come up with a perfectly worded English sentence. Sometimes it's enough to tell the author you liked their story. And if you don't feel like writing a comment, you can at least leave kudos. For you it's a small thing, but on the other side of the screen there may be someone you'll make really happy.
And what if you still keep getting lost on AO3?
When I think back to my first encounter with AO3 today, it seems almost unbelievable how much a website I now use completely automatically managed to throw me off. And I didn't need to know every tag or understand every feature. I just needed someone to explain the basics so I could start finding my own way. And that's exactly what I'd like to pass on.
AO3 offers you an enormous number of options, but you definitely don't have to use all of them. Over time you'll build your own way of searching that suits you, and you'll learn to recognise your favourite genres, authors and relationship dynamics. Maybe you'll use dozens of filters, maybe you'll end up like me and get by with a few basic settings.
Once upon a time, all I wanted was to find out what would happen if the relationship between Harry Potter and Severus Snape developed differently. I had no idea that this curiosity would lead me to reading in English, to other fandoms, to Chinese danmei and eventually to writing my own stories. And even though I've worked my way through an unbelievable number of stories over the years, I still feel there's so much left to discover.
So if you're standing at the very beginning right now and feel you'll never find your way around AO3, try giving it a little time. Maybe one inconspicuous story will take you much further than you would ever have imagined.
Yours, Mimosa
Want to find your way around fanfiction even better?
If you came across terms you don't understand while reading, I've also written a separate fanfiction dictionary where you'll find explanations of the most common abbreviations and labels. In the next article, dedicated to fanfiction tropes and dynamics, we'll look at what Slow Burn, Angst, Hurt/Comfort or Enemies to Lovers mean and how to tell what kind of story awaits you.
And if you're interested in Chinese danmei, you can also continue with my danmei glossary, because that world has its own dictionary too, and it's quite easy to get lost in it.
Mimosa Confiante
By day, I work somewhere between marketing, copy and campaigns; by night, I usually end up somewhere between fanfiction, cosplay and yet another “what if” that refuses to leave me alone. I write mainly in the Harry Potter and Mo Dao Zu Shi fandoms, most often Snarry, Snamione, HarryLu and WangXian. My healthcare background means that anatomy, medicine and far too much research occasionally find their way into my stories. Cosplay is another way for me to play with the characters I love, whether I stay close to canon or turn them into my own fanfiction and AU versions. In Diary of a Slytherin Girl with ADHD, I write openly about life with a brain that usually has far too many tabs open at once.
📖 More stories on AO3 and Wattpad · 📸 Instagram · 🎥 TikTok · 👉 More about me
