Talk to me about Archive of Our Own

[pastypirate]

Dd1 is obsessed with it due to the Harry Potter fanfic. I'm considering removing it after I've googled. She's 13. Any experiences?

it's a website of fanfic. You can filter down to non 18+ options (obv there are some 18+ fanfics) but at that age i was hiding mills and boon under my bed so💁

What else do you want to know/discuss?

There's a range of ratings but you can find a lot of very explicit fiction on there. Sex, all sorts of fetishism, violence. Anything goes really - they're an anti censorship platform.

I'm not sure there's a way to filter out the explicit stuff. Presumably you can make an account and add a skin, but she could just remove it...

Honestly I started reading fanfiction from 11-12ish, including a lot of really raunchy stuff, and I don't think it really affected me. I'd say its a lot less damaging than watching porn. But it's your decision as a parent of course.

I use it for fanfic. Adult content should have a warning, but it's added by the content creator rather than moderated, as far as I know.

Adult content that I have seen tends to be 'slash' content more than anything else, and fairly conformist to romantic fiction tropes at heart.

Like a pp, when I was 13 we were passing round the likes of Jilly Cooper and Jackie Collins at school!

I'd say that of all the things a young teenager could access online, Archive of Our Own is at the safer end.

I'll add that I once posted a fanfic effort of my own on there (not adult content!) - well over a decade ago. Every so often I still get very occasional 'Kudos' emails and it makes me feel briefly warm and fuzzy that somewhere out there I have brightened up a total stranger's rainy Sunday afternoon 😃

Thanks folks. Dd1 fanfic of choice seems to be about a spin off gay storyline that's before the books start. She also loves heart stopper it's that kind of thing.

I guess I'm trying to make informed choices

I love Ao3, but I would be checking her choices on there. There really isn't anything prohibited on there, and not everything is properly tagged. I'm not sure I'd like my young teen on there.

That sounds harmless - do you think your DD is likely deliberately to seek adult material out for shock value? The thing about text is that you can stop reading if you come across something you don't want to see. Yes, you'll see a few lines of the material, but it's not like a photographic image that you see and then can't unsee.

There is some seriously explicit and weird stuff on there, not suitable for an 11 or 12 year old IMO. You can filter by rating and those are pretty reliable IME

you can download as PDFs. If you really want to allow it I’d set up the filter, let her browse and choose a few to download and then close the site.

I pretty much got most of my sex education from reading fanfic back in the day! As others have said I don't think it did me much harm - certainly isn't as bad as watching porn. There is some absolutely filthy/not nice stuff out there though - ao3 is good because everything should be tagged but for example there's a lot of non-consent/incest/underage.

I suppose you've got two options, you can try looking into what settings you can put on your home broadband to restrict access but tbh you'd probably have to block the whole website and realistically there are lots of ways teens can easily get around it. Or just keep lines of conversation open, tell her to check the warning tags of everything she reads, stop reading if she finds anything uncomfortable and she can always come to you if she has any other questions.

And definitely remind her that the majority of any sex scenes on there are very unlikely to be accurate - lots of it is gay male sex written by women/young girls so even if it's well written it's not particulalry realistic!

I've been on there. Just be careful. It's not very well moderated, there's some very explicit sex descriptions, including kinks, things like fisting etc and it's easily accessed, you just check a box saying you're over 21.

Just remind her that it's a way for people to express fantasies and that it's not an accurate portrayal of real life sex.

I think I was about 13 when I first discovered fanfiction.net and what was then the NC-17 rating. And clearly my adolescent mind went straight for those. But as someone says above, the written text is harder to keep going if it’s not your thing and certainly is limited by the depths of the imagination in the way that fully visualised porn, abuse and inappropriate storylines can be on tv/film/internet.

I definitely knew it was all made up - mostly because the stories I read were about RPGs that I played and the characters therein so it felt very distant. It also got me into writing stories albeit absolute shockers of 13-16 year old narrative but it was a fun creative outlet!

There is some absolutely filthy/not nice stuff out there though - ao3 is good because everything should be tagged but for example there's a lot of non-consent/incest/underage.

And the unpleasant stuff isn't necessarily all sexual - warnings for violence/torture should be heeded. And writers sometimes address themes such as suicide, self-harm, and so on.

Fic for British fandoms written by (often young) Americans can be good for a laugh, however - 'USS Titanic' for example.