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People need to stop viewing “Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings” as the author not caring about potentially triggering people, and start viewing it instead as one big blanket archive warning. It essentially means that any of the main archive warnings could apply to this story, but the author isn’t directly tagging which ones.
Think of it like this. Imagine, if you will, an author writes a story about a group of friends in high school. It starts off as a relatively happy slice of life story, with hints of a darker story lurking beneath the surface, until finally, the big twist occurs; one of the main characters dies. Perhaps they’re murdered, maybe they commit suicide, but either way, it’s a shocking moment.
If the author tags this fic with the “Major Character Death” archive warning, then this would spoil the twist in advance. The author wants this moment to be shocking, and if people see that archive warning, then potential readers will already know that one of the main characters is going to die, and that would lessen the impact of the twist, even if they don’t know which character it applies to.
And so, “Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings”, naturally being more vague, helps to preserve the surprise of that major character death, while at the same time, notifying potential readers that the story will contain content that would normally require an archive warning.
“Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings” is a “Read At Your Own Risk” label, essentially, and that’s perfectly fine. If you see this particular warning, then you should understand that the content of this story could potentially trigger you. Whether or not you want to take that risk is entirely on you.
Note: “Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings” is a completely different label to “No Archive Warnings Apply”. Please stop confusing them.
If the author tags this fic with the “Major Character Death” archive warning, then this would spoil the twist in advance.
This is the exact purpose and use case that “author chose not to warn” was created for.
At the time that AO3 was being organized and built, there was no generally used tagging system for fanfic. MOST fanfic was completely untagged.
The broad, general view in fandom was that tagging things like character death was consider spoilers for the fic, and nobody wanted that.
AO3’s tagging system is wonderful, and I’m glad we have it. But “Author chose not to warn” is a useful tag that was created for a reason!
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