I have a genuine question about tagging on ao3; specifically the ‘author chose not to use archive warnings’ So from what I’ve read it’s basically a ‘there could be any of the warning tags here, or none’ but I don’t understand the point of that? You can tag with multiple warning tags, and if you don’t have any of them in your story there’s a tag for that! I’ve even seen some with that tag and some of the other tags from the same category. Is the point to specifically be a gamble? Because there are some warning tags where I’d be fine reading it and some where it’s not for me, and I’m a firm believer in tagging things correctly (as most profiction people are)
The point of “author chose not to warn” is that yes, there could be any number of terrible things in this fic, and the author is not going to tell you, you’re going to have to gamble.
At the time AO3 was created, there was (and still is) a very real conversation that any kind of content warnings constituted “spoilers” for the story.
Not tagging warnings, or giving content warnings at all was the norm when AO3 was created. Just like seeing content warnings in books, content warnings on fanfiction were against the norm.
So people wanted an option to not warn on their fics.
There was especially a discussion about warning for “major character death” being inherently a spoiler, and authors wanted the option to shock and surprise their reader.
Which is why “chose not to warn” exists.
The author doesn’t want to warn you, they want you to find out for yourself. And they don’t mind if that convinces some people not to read their fic.
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