Fandom's lighthouse in a sea of censorship

How the fanfic site Archive of Our Own protest artistic freedom

Sept. 25, 2021: Cosplay weekend at the Technik Museum in Speyer, Germany, via Shutterstock.com

Debates over free expression often center on government power and the First Amendment. But in fandom communities and other niche online subcultures, the boundaries of speech are shaped by moderators, platform policies, and evolving group norms. Within these intensely participatory spaces, decisions about what is acceptable can determine which voices are amplified and which are pushed aside. In these environments, cultural gatekeeping and platform rules often define who gets heard.

When Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893, fans lost their minds. They wrote angry letters to Doyle and his publisher, they wore black armbands in the streets as if a real person had died, they even began writing and publishing their own unauthorized stories about the beloved detective. The practice of fanfiction is as old as storytelling itself. The Aeneid builds on Homer’s Iliad, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet reimagines a poem by Arthur Brooke, and Dante’s Inferno is sometimes described as “self-insert” fanfiction of the Bible. But like any form of artistic expression, fanfic has long faced creative restraints.

Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. Original caption THE DEATH OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. Illustration by Sidney Paget for The Final Problem by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Strand Magazine, December 1893.

In 1981, for example, Lucasfilm sent letters to Star Wars fanzine publishers saying they were free to continue — so long as they didn’t include pornographic stories. Nor has moving from print to the internet resulted in a landscape free from constraints. Often, fanfic platforms remove content without warning based on input by platform owners, advertisers, or the public. FanFiction.Net purges adult content despite having an “M” rating for mature stories, and has banned entire genres including self-inserts, scripts, songfics, and audiofics (“fic” meaning a work of fanfiction). The platform Wattpad has removed LGBT stories from the Warrior Cats series after parents complained and targeted LGBT content more broadly.

Recognizing the risks to free expression, fans founded Archive of Our Own in 2008 with a clear mission: “Maximum inclusiveness of fanwork content.” Unlike other fanfic platforms, AO3 maintains a strong opposition to creative restrictions. The site imposes only two content requirements: all work must be fan-made and users cannot claim other people’s work as their own. Based in the United States, AO3 now serves more than 10 million users, supports dozens of languages, and hosts over 16.7 million works across more than 76,000 fandoms. Time magazine named AO3 one of the 50 Best Websites of 2013. And in 2025, Forbes listed it as one of the world’s best fanfic sites, alongside FanFiction.Net.

To help users avoid content they don’t want to see, AO3 offers a robust tagging system with ratings and content warnings, allowing readers to filter or mute specific themes while authors can choose to post works without rating them at all.

But sexual content is just one common target. Within fandom communities, calls for censorship are growing louder, with other targets including depictions of racism or other forms of discrimination, abuse, violence, or underage characters dealing with “adult” topics.

Once-common fandom maxims like “don’t like, don’t read” or “ship and let ship” (let bygones be bygones, but applied to character relationships, or “ships”) have given way to claims that depicting harmful behavior in fiction necessarily encourages it in real life. This mirrors a broader cultural trend FIRE has written about — the collapsing distinction between words and violence.

In some cases, fans have even gone so far as to reinvent something akin to the Hays Code, a Hollywood self-censorship rulebook that was in use from the 1930s to 1960s, instructing early moviemakers on how to avoid offending America’s moral watchdogs. Fans have argued, as Hays did in its time, that depictions of morally questionable behaviors are only okay if they are punished within the story. An adulterous character must see the error of their ways. A villain must face consequences. The abuser cannot be portrayed sympathetically, even for a chapter.

Comparison of Betty Boop before the Hay Code era in “Ker-Choo” (1933) and during the Hay Code in “Musical Mountaineers” (1939), via the Internet Archive.

The underlying concerns driving these restrictions aren’t entirely baseless — research on media effects shows that repeated exposure to certain content can normalize attitudes, particularly among younger audiences. And platforms do face real legal and ethical questions about hosting mature material, even if fictional. But AO3 argues that categorical content bans only create more problems than they solve. In its FAQ, it explains, “Biased enforcement of content rules has been shown to occur even when the purpose of the rule is to push back against discrimination. For example, rules intended to reduce racial hate speech on social media often end up being disproportionately enforced against racial minorities speaking out against racism.”

They’re not wrong. In fact, this has played out repeatedly. In 2018, for example, Tumblr’s adult content ban disproportionately flagged art by black creators while missing actual pornography.

Fans also point out that writing about darker themes like child abuse, racial discrimination, or sexual assault can be cathartic for survivors. Psychologists have found that journaling and creative writing can help people process trauma, and such practices are often used in therapy for PTSD and related conditions. When asked why it doesn’t remove extremely offensive content, AO3 offers a blunt defense of creative freedom:

Our mission is to host transformative fanworks without making judgments based on morality or personal preferences. If it’s a fictional fanwork that is legal to post in the United States, then it is welcome on AO3. This approach is intended to reduce the risk that content will be removed as a result of cultural or personal bias against marginalized communities.

We recognize that there are works on AO3 that contain or depict bigotry and objectionable content. However, we are dedicated to safeguarding all fanworks, without consideration of any work’s individual merits or how we personally feel about it. We will not remove works from AO3 simply because someone believes they are offensive or objectionable.

In fandom communities, the forces shaping speech are platform policies and ever-evolving community norms. Unlike the constitutional clashes that define disputes over government power, these conflicts play out in message boards and comment threads. The stakes may appear smaller than heavy-handed government regulation, but for the people involved, they shape who gets to participate and what ideas are allowed to take root.

AO3 has made its website a bulwark in an online landscape increasingly shaped by censorship and moral panic, distinguishing itself as a lighthouse in the storm. As a private platform, it retains the right to set and enforce its own rules, just as users remain free to express themselves. That tension between platform discretion and user expression may not be a constitutional crisis, but it is a reflection of how cultural and platform values shape today’s digital spaces.