Entitled Piss Baby Readers and Tagging on Ao3

Special Thanks to friend of the blog Sage for explaining what exactly was happening to make this non-issue into such a wild little jaunt into clusterfuck land.

On October 13th, 2025 Twitter user @luochascoffin tweeted: “reading explicit fics with untagged top/bottom is like playing fucking russion roullette” [sic]. When Sage told me this, my immediate response was: “Dramatic but okay.” This isn’t an uncommon sentiment, after all. Some people are really into a particular butthole getting railed by a particular penis. There’s something they’re going through that makes that part of the character interactions interesting and it makes the ol’ brain go “brrr” the same way that say military uniforms might do for me. Hey, we’re not here to judge (I’m kidding, I’m gonna do a lot of judging here but not about kink). The issue here is mostly that this discourse—actually two intersecting discourses—brought out some of the most intense whack-a-doodle brainrotted individuals in fandom at the current time. Uncertain about that? Just look at the Quote ReTweets (QRTs) on that post, some insisting that the “wrong” top or bottom dynamics in a fic will make the reader “gouge [their] eyes out” and comparing untagged fic to sexual assault or feeding someone a fatal allergen.

Now, unbeknownst to probably 90% of the people who’ve got this bug up their ass, there was a simultaneous related discourse that stemmed from the WangXian BL fandom. How Sage described this to me was that there was an event going on where contributors would post untagged fics that featured a “reverse dynamic” of what I understand is the widely accepted top/bottom standard of the fandom (stoic quiet top and bubbly gregarious bottom). Now, this actually fills me with a strange type of joy because it introduces fandom into the concept of existing within discomfort. We should all be capable of existing within a certain level of discomfort in our lives and not all art is meant to make you happy or feel good, it’s supposed to introduce you to new experiences or feelings that you wouldn’t otherwise have in an environment where you can simply stop looking. That’s the beauty of fiction and art, you can simply stop. This isn’t Rudyard Kipling’s Boots being blasted into your ears for forty-nine hours straight as a part of SERE Training, this is an optional experience that can be ended at any time and writers/artists who implore you, ask you, or make you (yes, MAKE YOU!) look at something and feel what they intend you to feel whether that be positive or negative are doing their jobs as artists or writers. That’s what art is.

Well apparently not enough people have internalized the adage “Art comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.” Despite insisting that there was some kind of nebulous “harm” that somehow occurred due to untagged fiction on Ao3 (oh no…like a book…), it was obvious to the majority of fandom-goers that this was a nothing-burger of an argument and what we were seeing cropping up in these fandom spaces was nothing more than the tantrums of entitled little loser babies who were shitting their pants over art that wasn’t specifically catered to their personal tastes. This is like walking into the Albright Knox Art Gallery and getting upset that they host modern art when you specifically preferred classic and how dare they call themselves an “art” gallery with all this…art. At least one person compared having to see the wrong blorbo take a dick to being subjected to scat porn which just outs them as too young to have been sent emails by your best friend containing an auto-play video of Two Girls, One Cup as a light-hearted and harmless prank.

The entitlement was further cemented when hardliners were told that they could simply filter for what they wanted and ignore the rest, which then led to arguments that this was going to prevent them from consuming the untagged fics that could possibly fit their tastes and how dare those untagged fics remain untagged as it is clearly criminal for authors to remain unconcerned about a stranger’s personal consumption of their fic. They also whined about ongoing fics where the t/b was untagged because the author wasn’t certain of the positions until mid-fic, the readers then complaining that the author was ignoring conventional dynamics and insisting they were getting bait-and-switched by authors who are just trying to write their damn longfic. As someone whose counts go up by anywhere from 2,000 to 9,000 hits after clicking the “complete” tick box, I can say it’s not that difficult to wait until the fic is finished and maybe, god-forbid, read ahead a little to see if it has something you actually want to see in it. The argument that this was “engagement farming” is absolutely ludicrous as there’s no algorithmic or even rhetorical gain to be had from numbers going up on the Archive. It makes no sense to pretend that authors who are just trying to write their stories and post them would have any need for higher hit counts as it has no bearing on the fic’s ultimate success, that success usually driven by word-of-mouth and fandom interaction.

Switch shippers, that is folks who don’t care what the top/bottom or uke/seme “dynamics” are, were either amused, disgusted, or on their high horses about all of this drama and utterly unable to let an opportunity pass to put their fucking feet in their mouths. With the complete inability to simply act with grace and composure, some switch shippers began to express that having a preference for t/b was somehow the actual harm, upholding traditional gender roles and reinforcing things like compulsory heterosexuality (they can’t be heterosexual, they’re gay men, Barbara). Writing a man as effeminate isn’t a crime, being an effeminate man in real life isn’t causing anyone harm, and gay men are gonna gay however they damn well please no matter how you tag on Ao3.

This discourse became so ubiquitous that even long-time big name fandom accounts such as @unhingeda03 weighed in, stating, “Not gonna focus on how insane it is to compare a life threatening food allergy to the off chance that you might read the wrong fake character taking it up the ass😭 but this new culture around tagging as a result of ao3 is so annoying. tags are a courtesy, not a necessity.” [sic] with plenty of folks becoming quite indignant under the incorrect assumption that those who stated this milquetoast and completely correct fact were entirely against tagging as a concept…which is not at all what they said, nor what they meant. Users began demanding that if one wanted to leave fics untagged, they should leave them off of the Archive with @KRaddare claiming, “[…] you forget an Archive is not just a place to dump your untagged shit on it. […] People are there to consume and they are allowed to consume to their tastes.” Whew. Where do I begin with how wrong this is? Someone clearly doesn’t understand what an archive is or what it’s meant to do and I’ll give Kathie here a hint: it’s not for consumption. Consumption is a happy byproduct of the archive, not the purpose. Kathie here was also one of the more vehement posters to accuse folks of fooling people into reading fics to accumulate more hits, claiming (again, stupidly) “Writers HAVE 1 fucking job, regardless of what they write, and it is TAGGING PROPERLY .”[sic] That’s very funny, Kathie, ‘cause I was under the impression that a writer’s one job was to write. Silly me, I guess.

The end result of artistic emotion is not something that we should feel entitled to—that we don’t know what exactly is in a book isn’t the end of the world and it certainly isn’t any reason to gouge your eyes out. These people do not spend time in used bookstores, they know nothing of closing your eyes and putting a finger out in the library stacks and reading whatever you ended up pointing toward. They don’t understand the joy of encountering something utterly fucked up and marveling over just how unbelievable it was that the writer even thought of it in the first place. These are people who don’t appreciate art. They see it as “content” that is meant to be “consumed” rather than a living part of our cultural zeitgeist with its own breath and soul. Let any of these philistines come to me and tell me that O’Keefe, Kahlo, Degas, or Pollock should have warned us what their art would evoke in us. Let any of the unenlightened come to me and tell me that King, Christie, and Child should have told us exactly who dies and who killed them as if it weren’t essential that we find ourselves utterly ruined at the destruction of our preconceived ideals in the thick of the narrative. These people are desperate for comfort and in that, they become bland, lifeless little slugs of human beings who cry like babies with soiled nappies when art refuses to coddle them.

Well art is for adults who know how to comport themselves, so eat shit you little sprogs.