Usage of “No Archive Warnings Apply” and “Choose Not to Use Archive Warnings” on the AO3

[alias_sqbr]

An Archive Of Our Own (AO3) is an archive for fanworks. Any work posted there needs to be given a title, a fandom, a rating (from "General Audiences" to "Explicit", with the option to pick "No Rating"), and warnings. Here's the AO3's guide to using warnings, note that it deals with some possibly triggering subjects.

Note these two cases in particular:

Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Use this if warnings may apply but you don't want to use them.

No Archive Warnings Apply
Use this if AO3 warnings don't apply to your content

These are not the same! But the specific differences can be muddy.

From A Moving Forward PSA for everyone using AO3 by kkglinka:

“No Archive Warnings Apply” means the fic is PG13 at worst, probably fluff, totally safe.

“Choose Not to Use Archive Warnings” is the polar opposite. It’s a glaring Enter at Your Own Risk billboard. It means: a shitload of warnings apply but I ain’t telling because this story requires shock value. It’s very important to read the author’s notes for those fics because they might be using that older format from above.

So I thought this was roughly true, if a bit over-simplistic, then decided to do some rough poking at the AO3, and now I don’t think it’s true at all: as far as I can tell, while works marked "No Archive Warnings Apply" are overall lower rated and "safer" than works marked "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings", the difference is small enough to not be much of a useful guide to the content of any given fic.

For example: using the AO3 search, 14% of fic tagged "No Archive Warnings Apply" are explicit, while 16% of those tagged "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings" are. A difference, but not a hugely significant one. And under the cut I have a bunch of examples of dark topics which are about half as common amongst "No Archive Warnings Apply" works as "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings" ones: a significant difference, but not large enough to make "No Archive Warnings Apply" safe.

My goal isn't to criticise kkglinka, I agreed with them until I ran the numbers (and it is of course possible that I somehow ran the numbers wrong) My goal is to encourage an accurate understanding of how AO3 users use these tags and warnings, and also to have fun playing with numbers because I am a nerd. In the likely event that my own analysis is flawed, I would be interested to hear about it.

And I do agree with kkglinka's final point: if you see something marked "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings" you should check the notes and tags very carefully, especially if there's subjects you find triggering. From broader fandom context I suspect kkglinka is pushing back against the situation where someone posts a worked marked "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings" that contains major character death or whatever, and a reader(*) gets angry because they think "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings" means "No Archive Warnings Apply". And it does not! It means the work could contain literally anything, and if you can't deal with that you shouldn't read it.

So I guess my point is that readers should also check the notes and tags for works marked "No Archive Warnings Apply". If a work marked that way contains major character death etc then yeah, you have a right to be pissed off. But a whole bunch of other stuff is fair game, including porn and other "unsafe" content. Always step carefully.

Content Note: discussion of triggering tags/content


I think there's two important things to remember here:
1) A lot of sexually explicit works don't involve any of the AO3's warnings, eg they involve consensual sex between two adults where no-one dies or gets graphically injured. It doesn't even have to be vanilla sex. "No Archive Warnings Apply" covers a wide range of content, much of it neither PG-13 or "safe": not just porn, but sad break-up fic, psychological horror etc.
2) People use "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings" for a lot of reasons. I have heard of a lot of people who use it for all of their (often G rated, innocuous) works just because they don't want to have to think about whether any warnings apply. And a lot of other people use it the way I do: to indicate that a work doesn't quite need any of the archive warnings, but skirts close to them, or to other common triggers, so readers should be wary and check the notes for extra details. And then there's using it to hide a twist or keep things ambiguous: if a character dies then unexpectedly comes back to life, using "No Archive Warnings Apply" would spoil the surprise.

Note that I and many of these people have been on the AO3 from the beginning, and I think our usage of these tags is reasonable.

Now for some more detailed number crunching. If I, like, remembered what a p-value is, I might do something more complex. But I don't, so. Simple percentages it is!

I am, of course, assuming that tags are an accurate measure of content, which is not always true, and have probably included some unconscious bias. Also, past experience suggests that I will have gotten some of these numbers flat out wrong. Finally, it's important to note that these flat numbers don't capture the complexity of all the different subfandoms and subcultures, who will often have their own approaches to tags and warnings.

Please take all of this with a grain of salt.

So! Even when we consider subjects that don't technically hit the Archive warnings, but will still be upsetting for a lot of readers (eg the kind of content I would personally tag "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings"), the difference is non-negligible but not overwhelming.

Violence:
No Archive Warnings Apply: 3%
Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings: 3%

Incest:
No Archive Warnings Apply: 0.7%
Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings: 0.9%

Abuse:
No Archive Warnings Apply: 1%
Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings: 2%

Suicide:
No Archive Warnings Apply: 0.7%
Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings: 1.5%

Implied/Referenced Character Death:
No Archive Warnings Apply: 0.3%
Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings: 0.5%

Horror:
No Archive Warnings Apply: 0.2%
Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings: 0.4%

Angst:
No Archive Warnings Apply: 12%
Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings: 14%

Which is to say, for example, that 3% of works marked "No Archive Warnings Apply" are also tagged with "Violence". The odds of reading a random work marked "No Archive Warnings Apply" and it being tagged "Violence" is 3%, and this is about the same as the odds of encountering the "Violence" tag if you read something tagged "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings".

It's interesting to note and consider the variations but I don't have any conclusions to draw from them. What I can say is that that "dark" subjects are more likely to be marked "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings", but a fair amount get marked "No Archive Warnings Apply". And while you're twice as safe reading "No Archive Warnings Apply" if you want to avoid suicide or horror, your odds for encountering angst or violence are about the same.

Meanwhile...

Fluff:
No Archive Warnings Apply: 20%
Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings: 17%
Graphic Depictions Of Violence: 10%
Major Character Death: 7%
Underage: 10%
Rape/Non-Con: 7%

I would not have expected 7% of works marked "Rape/Non-Con" to also be tagged "Fluff", but I guess it's further proof that you gotta check this stuff carefully.

Also, a totally irrelevant coincidence I noticed: As of me typing this, there are almost exactly the same number of works tagged "Underage" (107083) as "Rape/Non-Con"(107108). Anyway.

Now let's consider the range of ratings.

If I restrict myself to searching one tag I get a nice sidebar with a variety of useful information. I can't figure out how to get the side bar to show up for all works, so will arbitrarily pick the "Alternate Universe" tag, as something nicely pan-fandom and large.

Alternate universe:
General: 22%
Teen: 36%
Mature: 18%
Explicit: 16%
Not rated: 8%

Alternate universe + No Archive Warnings Apply:
General: 30%
Teen: 39%
Mature: 13%
Explicit: 13%
Not rated: 5%

Alternate universe + Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings:
General: 18%
Teen: 33%
Mature: 19%
Explicit: 15%
Not rated: 14%

For all three, the most common tags that weren't to do with the specific nature of the AU were Fluff, Angst, and Romance.

So. Those tagged "No Archive Warnings Apply" do tend to have lower ratings than the tag as a whole, which tends to have lower ratings than "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings". But the numbers are mostly similar, and the tags are very similar.

Now consider:
Alternate universe + Non-Con:
General: 1%
Teen: 9%
Mature:33%
Explicit: 52%
Not rated: 5%
Most common non-AU tags: Angst, Rape/Non-con Elements, Hurt/Comfort

That is a LOT more higher rated fic, and darker tags.

So yeah. On the whole, works tagged "No Archive Warnings Apply" do tend to be more innocuous than those tagged "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings", but it's by no means a clear line, and readers should always be careful.

EDIT: I added a clarifying intro for more context. Also velithya pointed out that there's probably a correlation between "Creator Chooses Not To Use Warnings" and a relative lack of tags. I think my analysis still holds overall, but it's worth keeping in mind.

(*)As a fanartist I try not to assume everything posted to the AO3 is fanfic, but can't think of a nice replacement for "reader". They say a picture is a thousand words, right? ;)

Comments

[owlmoose]

This is great analysis, thanks! It's an especially good counterpoint to the original claim, which I do not find true in my experience AT ALL. Out of curiosity, I did a quick check of my own fics, and although about 2/3rds of my stories are tagged "No Archive Warnings Apply", most of the rest are "Choose Not To Warn"; about half of those are rated Teen, and over half of the rest are rated General. And my 18 Explicit fics are split almost equally between No Warnings Apply and Choose Not to Warn.

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah, it doesn't apply to my works either, my couple of Choose Not To Warn works are pretty middle of the road ratings/content wise except for whatever specific thing made me use that category.

[torachan]

Yeah, their statement sounded totally wrong to me right off the bat even without checking any numbers. If all fics that have no archive warnings are PG-13 then they're saying that all explicit fic is either underage, death fic, rape, or graphic violence. I'm guessing this person does not read any explicit fic if that's their impression of it.

As for choose not to use warnings, many people do use it to mean "there is something in here that needs a warning but I don't want to spoil" but there are also plenty of people who are anti-warning and use it because they do not want to use any warnings (like myself). I put that on all my fics, regardless of content. So even my fluffy G-rated gen is CNTW (and in fact the vast majority of my fic would not require any archive warnings to begin with).

[alias_sqbr]

Ha, right.

And yeah, I use specific warnings myself but know there's a lot of people like yourself out there who don't. I remember it being one of the major arguments put in favour of CNTW existing way back during the pre-AO3 warnings discussions.

[torachan]

Yeah, I really like CNTW because the whole process of tagging and warning is really stressful for me so I'd rather just opt out of it altogether. (I don't really tag beyond rating/pairing, and maybe whether something is AU or not, simple tags like that.)

[merit]

Interesting perspective; seems to be conflating 'warnings' and 'ratings' which do overlap but are definitely separate in my mind (and from what your analysis has revealed, the case with most users of Ao3). The warnings themselves only cover a limited number of hard content warnings; that's where the tag 'honour system' comes into play e.g. horror, darkfic etc.

I'd be curious to see why explicit media seems absent from their analysis.

[alias_sqbr]

Right! I'd be curious to know how reliable that honour system is but can't think of any easy way to test it.

[pebblerocker]

I have a feeling I shouldn't be trying to respond to this on a bad brain day, but to what extent is this a prescriptivist/descriptivist division, the difference between "how you ought to tag your fic" and "what you can expect to find in fic under these tags"?

For instance, if a fic features major character death and the author doesn't feel like saying so, they ought to tag it "Choose Not to Warn", as I understand it. But some writers might be tagging their deathfic "No Warnings Apply" instead, and so readers should be aware of that?

[izilen]

Apologies for butting in. I think it's a pretty good idea to make readers aware that unlooked-for danger may be lurking in No Warnings Apply, but major character death really shouldn't be one of the things that show up in such a fic. That hypothetical deathfic would genuinely be mistagged and if anyone comes across it it can actually be reported to the AO3 Abuse team so they can ask the author to change the tag (or change it if the author doesn't).

On the other hand, tagging something that has, say, 'abuse' as No Warnings Apply might not be intuitive practice to some, but it is not incorrect (as in, against the Rules).

[alias_sqbr]

It's prescriptivist: if someone marks a work "No Warnings Apply" and an Archive Warning does apply, they can be reported for breaking the terms of service, and the work is in danger of being taken down.

The descriptivism comes in with tags like "Angst".

[(Anonymous)]

It is very good to see the statistics bear out what I thought — that there was no meaningful correlation between those archive warnings and ratings/themes the way the person seemed to think there would be.

I've seen that post going around and personally this take (https://ao3tagtips.tumblr.com/post/183138014853/kkglinka-this-is-a-moving-forward-psa-for) summarises how I feel about the issue.

[izilen]

Whoops, I am the person who sent the anon comment — It was an accident, I forgot I was not logged in.

Further comment:

While I agree with the OP when they say that people should carefully check other tags/notes/etc when it comes to works where the Creator Chose Not To Warn, that also goes for No Archive Warnings Apply. It's the claim that if it's tagged No Archive Warnings Apple it's probably pg-13, generally fluff that I would take with a whole wheelbarrow of salt.

Thank you again for running the numbers.

[alias_sqbr]

Right! You always have to be careful.

That was a good link, thank you.

[wychwood]

“No Archive Warnings Apply” means the fic is PG13 at worst, probably fluff, totally safe.

“Choose Not to Use Archive Warnings” is the polar opposite. It’s a glaring Enter at Your Own Risk billboard. It means: a shitload of warnings apply but I ain’t telling because this story requires shock value. It’s very important to read the author’s notes for those fics because they might be using that older format from above.

Yyyyyyeah, that is 100% not would I would expect, aside from the final sentence! CNTW means it could contain anything, but not that it does; "no warnings apply" means that it does not contain the specific big-ticket items which are covered by the warnings, and nothing else. As you say, it could have all kinds of dark-fic, horror, kink, etc etc.

I'm wondering if this is a person who maybe doesn't read very much on AO3? Just because it's such an implausible interpretation of what those categories are for.

Thanks for the stats, though - it's really interesting to see the numbers on this :)

[alias_sqbr]

They seem like they read a lot from context, they may just be in a fandom/subculture that tends to use the archive a specific way.

[velithya]

My understanding of the different between the two tags is that "No Archive Warnings Apply" refers only to those archive warnings that are REQUIRED to be selected if they exist: Graphic Violence/Major Character Death/Rape-non-con/Underage. If none of these four warnings apply the author is well within their rights to select "no archive warnings apply" and the fic could well still contain other content that doesn't fall under those specific four tags.

In addition I think those numbers aren't necessarily going to be completely accurate - I don't nowadays choose to read a lot of fic tagged "choose not to warn" and in my experience a lot of authors who do use that tag also don't use other tags on there that could indicate what is contained within the fic. Whereas the numbers you are running are dependent on the "choose not to warn" author also using a secondary tag indicative of some of the content. *shrug*

I think the only thing readers can be assured of is that a "choose not to warn" fic could contain anything and that a "no archive warnings apply" fic will not contain only things covered by the four required archive warnings.

[alias_sqbr]

Oh that's a good point about a likely correlation between "choose not to warn" and a lack of tags. HMM.

[velithya]

I was typing on my phone so one of my sentences up there got a bit mangled (sorry!) but I was trying to say that while I don't choose to read CNTW fics now I have read a few in the past and pretty much none of them had additional secondary tags on there indicating any kind of content. But yeah, seeing as you've run the numbers we can see that there are certainly authors who DO use secondary tags; but I'd suspect that a significant proportion of CNTW authors don't.
And honestly I'm not sure how you could go about checking that... you might have to do an exclusion thing where you search for CNTW and then use the "exclude" filter to exclude as many secondary tags as possible.... IDK. It's all a bit tricky.

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah, I'm not sure how you'd check either. One thing you could do is compare the relative popularity of tags of various types, eg the Fluff: Angst ratio for No Warnings is 1.7, versus 1.2 for CNTW.

[velithya]

That would certainly be an interesting analysis but again depends on CNTW authors using secondary tags!

[torachan]

Oh yeah, that's me for sure. The reason I use CNTW is because that sort of tagging and categorization does not come naturally to me and it's not how I choose things as a reader. I do tag pairing and rating (although I find rating stressful, too, and I think at one point I just gave up and decided to rate all fic with sex as M even though a lot of it "should" probably go under E, because I couldn't figure out where the line was) but otherwise very minimal tags + CNTW for all fics regardless of content.

I'm sure I could probably get more readers if I added a bunch of tags and didn't use CNTW, but it's not worth the stress of trying to figure out what merits a tag or warning.

[velithya]

Ah yeah I hear you! I do pretty basic tagging myself and every time I scroll past a fic where the author has basically downloaded their tumblr into the tags my eyebrows go all the way up (even more so when they download every sex act contained in their fic in the tags!! Like... okay we get it)

I think the line between M and E is the line between "could I watch this at 6.30pm on the television?" with "yes" being M and "no" being E :P

At the end of the day everyone should tag as they are comfortable with, abiding by the rules of the archive. If it works for you, keep doing it! A few more readers aren't worth the extra stress.

[ursula]

In practice, I often use "choose not to warn" when I'm not sure how AO3 warnings interact with canon. For example, if I'm referencing a death that happens in canon, does that need a Major Character Death tag?

[alias_sqbr]

Right! Same.

[velithya]

I've seen that example just recently! It was tagged "major character death" and then "canon character death" in the general tags, which I thought was entirely reasonable.

[deborah_judge]

Yeah that is completely not how I use those two terms. I use no archive warnings apply when no archive warnings apply, but that doesn't mean the fic is fluffy or low-rated. I use CNTW for all kinds of things, including:

- I didn't feel like parsing if a particular thing counted as one of the warnings or not, which is sometimes hard to parse
- there's other squicky things that I felt the need to warn for but isn't one of the warnings
-a warning would be a spoiler or misleading about the content of the fic
-I was feeling anxious about warnings wank that day and wanted to cover myself


But yeah, it looks like she's responding to people who think CNTW and No Warnings Apply are the same? Which I had no idea was a thing.

[ember_keelty]

Yeah I came here to explain how I use it, and this is basically it for me too. I think it's that first one that's been the most salient for me, definitely more so than instances of wanting to avoid spoiling shocking content. I really do like that the archive is so specific in its rule about what to warn for, but even so there's a lot of edge cases. Some questions I've run into include:

-Does "major character" death refer only to a character who is major in the source material, or could it also apply to an OC or minor canon character who plays a major role in the fic?
-The "noncon" part of the "noncon/rape" warning suggests that its main purpose is to flag fic that contains graphic onscreen rape presented as pornography, but there are definitely people who would want to see a CW for other rape-related content. So do I need to use that warning for characters non-graphically discussing a rape that happened offscreen? Rape threats that aren't followed through on? Characters thinking about and discussing how they are living in an environment where sexual abuse is a constant threat, but so far they haven't been subject to it? Characters thinking about and discussing such an environment that they know exists elsewhere but in which they thankfully are not currently living? In theory, any of these could merit a warning for rape, but at some point slapping one of those on would be misleading in a way that I'm not really comfortable with.
-What exactly makes violence graphic in a textual medium? If it's full-on written gorn, then sure, that's easy to tag for, but what about briefer descriptions of something that would definitely bump up the rating if it were depicted visually, but that in textual form is going to vary significantly in how disturbing it is depending on how vivid the reader's mental imagery is?
-What about gore that isn't the result of violence, such as a character accidentally injuring themselves? I'd imagine that hits most of the same issues that the violence warning is supposed to protect readers from, and yet that warning doesn't technically apply.

I usually try to think these issues through and tag according to whatever conclusions I draw, but that sometimes results in me looking back over my posting history and realizing that I've been inconsistent about it. So it's often less of a headache all around to go with CNTW.

[alias_sqbr]

Right, there's a lot of reasons to use it.

And yeah, it seems like they're arguing against some very flawed posts themselves.

[naraht]

My reaction to that kkglinka post was HELL NO THAT'S WRONG and I'm glad you've dug up some evidence to back that up. Personally I'm very literal about these flags.

“No Archive Warnings Apply” means that none of the (short) list of archive warnings apply. The fic may be fluffy and innocuous; it may be dark as hell. There may be additional warnings in tags; there may not. There may be no additional warnings provided even if the fic is dark as hell.

“Choose Not to Use Archive Warnings” means the author doesn't choose to use archive warnings. This may be be because they're ideologically opposed to warnings; it might be that they don't have the energy or ability to decide whether warnings apply. The fic may be fluffy and innocuous; it may be dark as hell. There may be additional warnings in tags; there may not. There may be no additional warnings provided even if the fic is dark as hell.

Simple. In a way.

[alias_sqbr]

Right! The fact that you can't assume what authors will tag etc is why there's standardised warnings in the first place.

[sonofgodzilla]

Sorry for replying to such an old thread, but thank you for posting this. I had one of those wrist-slapping emails from AO3 about rating material this morning, and I was hit with the sharp realisation that perhaps what AO3 thinks of as "general" is less generous than what I think. I still feel, after all this, that I know nothing about what the site expects of me, but your post made for some interesting context about how little I know. :p

[alias_sqbr]

Ah well, I'm glad I could help even if only in a small way :)