Guide to Literature Review on Ao3

foreword

like gospel, this post comes to you in 3 parts:

1. testimony: a defense of fanfic
2. instruction: the how-to you came for
3. revelation: all the ways fanfic has deeply shaped my perspective on how to write, and what it means to Write Good.

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a defense of fanfic

i recently learnt fanfic has kind of a bad rep. the types of slander i’ve heard: “amateur”, “unserious”, “trashy”, “pure smut”¹, “disservice to the source material”

fanfic is serious

fanfic was the start for a lot of “serious writers”.²,³

• E.L. James: probably the most famous example. Fifty Shades began as Twilight fanfic⁴
• Cassandra Clare: Wrote a bunch of popular HP fanfic before publishing The Mortal Instruments
• Naomi Novik: Founded Ao3, won some awards for Spinning Silver and Temeraire series, including Hugo and Nebula
• Mo Xiang Tong Xiu: A personal favourite — versions of her work started off as fanfic before she went on to become the bestselling novelist she is today, with multiple animated and live-action adaptations⁵

a prototypical story of how someone gets into fic

1. they read a work of fiction
2. something feels missing / they disagree with a part of the writing / they don’t feel “seen” by it: as a concrete example: i’m sure everyone’s had the experience of being recommended / consuming a piece of media they “should like”, only for it to completely miss the mark or go to shit halfway⁶
3. they feel compelled to write to fill that void: they write their own ending, or version of that “missing scene” between 2 characters, or entire separate universe (or “AU”) in a different time or setting⁷
4. they publish that writing / build on others’ writing on the subject

so critiques on the “literary polish” or “mass appeal” of fic are kind of missing the point. fic is not meant to “go viral” or “produce results” or be “good writing”, it’s writing out of necessity from a specific person. if the author was able to scratch their own itch, it’s a success. if it strikes a chord with even one other person, it’s a hit!⁸

and if the field we’re exploring when engaging with fiction is the full breadth of human emotion and experience, i think fanfic (and Ao3, its humble institution) represent the frontier of independent research.

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how to do a lit review on Ao3

so how do we find the good stuff, the writing that really speaks to us? how do we figure out what’s worth writing about ourselves?

step 1: scoping review

the goal of a literature review is to better understand existing work before you embark on original research. every review starts with a continuous loop of defining a topic + audience, searching + researching the literature, taking notes, narrowing scope… but a “scoping review” stops there.

one model for doing a simple scoping review is looking at the ratio of primary to secondary to tertiary research to determine what’s most needed in a field.⁹

some examples of each of these quadrants

• need for identification of research questions / primary articles: there are only 24 crossover fic between Sonic and Supernatural (compared to 190 crossover fic between Supernatural, Doctor Who, Sherlock). And 0 on what I think should be a no-brainer ship between two main characters from the 8th most popular fandom, Nie Huaisang x Shang Qinghua
• need for a literature review: the types of “basic literature reviews” can be broken down on the axises of length (minis ↔️ fulls), and “quality” (qualitative ↔️ quantitative)
  • in the fic world, “analyses” or “meta” refer to mini qualitative reviews, in the form of comments directly on the work or xposts of the work on other social media platforms (see the tumblr, twitter, reddit fandom multiverse)
  • longer-form analyses, published under the tag “meta” / “non-fiction” on Ao3¹⁰ , or issues of the Ao3 journal “Transformative Works and Cultures”, or digital ethnography journals generally fall under the “full/qualitative” category. i’ve mostly only seen quantitative review from computational social science + HCI journals¹¹
• need for a review pointing out the need for more research: some of those longform quantitative reviews, like the annual review of top ships and 2022 review of the top fandoms i think implicitly do this, the journal ones list a couple in their usual academic ways in the conclusion
• need for a review of reviews: i have yet to find a single meta-analysis (the field is young), so perhaps this is it lol
  • this is partly due to the difficulty of data collection. i’ve only seen one mega dataset out there, but it was for fanfiction.net. Ao3 actively discourages programmatic interaction — there’s no API, and web scrapers use some messy hacks to work around rate limiting (see my fork of one such downloader script).¹²

search methodologies

initial search: under advanced search, filter by “fandom” + “completion status” + “crossovers” + “language”, sort by “kudos” (the Ao3 term for upvotes)

• you can sort by other fields also, but i’ve found the most luck with “kudos”
• optionally, also filter by “characters”/“relationships” if you’re looking for character/relationship exploration as opposed to plot or worldbuilding, and word count depending on if you’re looking for long-form vs. one-shot explorations

narrow scope: the key search fields here, in order of precision-recall value (ability to filter the search space without accidentally cutting out relevant work), are “warnings” + “categories” + “keywords” (title or any field) and “additional tags”¹³

some fun anchor stats i’ve found from doing this

• total fic: 13M
• most popular fic: “I Am Groot”, with 160k kudos and 1.2M hits
• the big 5 most popular fandoms: marvel cinematic universe (550k)¹⁴, harry potter (500k), my hero academia (300k), supernatural (250k), star wars (250k). honorable mention for fastest growing fic: genshin (200k since only 2022)
• number of The Sims fic: 1257¹⁵

step 2: critical appraisal

q’s to determine if a work truly addresses open questions in the space + how you can build upon them. let’s use “Salvage” by MuffinLance — the most upvoted fic about “Avatar: The Last Airbender” with a whooping 66734 kudos at this moment, and has been (officially) translated into 5 different languages and 2 podfics — as an example.[^16]

• what is the problem the paper is trying to solve?
  • there is so much to explore re: character parallels and parenting mid season 1, when the characters are in their most adolescent phase and Zuko is just flailing around episode after episode
• key insights? ideas?
  • despite being universally loved, and arguably the most popular character in the series, Iroh’s parenting of Zuko is actually at times questionable. in contrast, Hakoda, who’s also great, is rarely explored due to little airtime
• key mechanisms? implementation?
  • put these characters on a boat in the middle of the ocean and have them Say Words Please
• key results? conclusions?
  • Zuko gets adopted into the water tribe
  • justice for Azula
• strengths (does it solve the problem well? is it well written?) + weaknesses
• can you do (much) better? what did you learn/enjoy/dislike? present your thoughts and ideas (in the comments)

a word on Ao3 etiquette (that’s also the golden rule of fanfic): if you don’t like it, don’t read it!! there is no need to shittalk a writer in the comments. some pieces will speak to you, some won’t — that’s the nature of fanfic, not a slight on the writer. you can share feedback in the form of “i liked that part”, or “this scratched X itch but not Y”. and the highest form of criticism / complement is to fork the work and write your own¹⁶

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what does it mean for writing to be Good?

or “professional”, “quality”, “serious”?

• does it mean “published”? (aka submitting your work to an Institution, and the Institution says “yes people will read this” — influenced by how well you can write a marketable “copy”, whether you have an existing audience)
• does it mean “accredited”? (aka submitting your work to a panel for Judgement, and the Judgement says “yes this made me feel something” — at the discretion of the taste of the panel)
• does it mean “able to make a liveable wage off your work”? or “get moderately rich / famous”?

this may sound like i’m pushing for less elitism, but i do think there’s such a thing as better and worse writing. the point i’m trying to make is i’m finding these standard milestones in the career of a “writer” to be increasingly decorrelated with the writing i enjoy most.

the writing i enjoy most is “fanfic” writing — writing from my friends, writing with abandon, writing that’s just not “good” but i could tell was written with personal purpose. so go forth, and write! and continue honing your crafts, but post to Ao3 ❤️

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afterword

yes, i know: v characteristic of me to write about writing (the same way i will often end up watching playthroughs rather than finish a game, jump to reviews and critiques before finishing a book, read about reading more than just reading)

my beta reader (thank u Kiva 💗) thought the lit review section felt a bit disjoint. that happened cuz i read too many articles of the form “how to write a literature review”, and they all started to blur together, so i needed to purge it from my system¹⁷

TODOs

• less tech jargon
• make the ao3 downloader accessible to actual fic writers

open q’s i’d like feedback on

• which footnotes should i convert to main text, and versa?
• what is your level of exposure to fic / ao3 and how much of this made no sense?

Footnotes

1. in their defense there are [300k] fic tagged “Plot what plot/Porn without plot” compared to only [100k] “Porn with plot”… but that’s not the point here!! ↩

2. i’m taking the commercial success angle here in case the “literary merit” is not “the point” argument falls moot. ↩

3. authors get a lot of feedback on Ao3! one of the top nonfiction works is this guide to beta reading. there’s also this long study from 2017 on distributed mentorship in the greater fic community ↩

4. which you could argue itself began as Catholic-Protestant fanfic that literally came out of a fever dream from Stephanie Meyers ↩

5. if you don’t know her by name, you may know her as “woman whose work caused AO3 to be banned in China” ↩

6. or if you’re truly unfortunate, at the very end ↩

7. or sometimes they have 0 qualms with the source material and just want to play with the characters / setting / something tangentially inspired. that’s probably the more frequent scenario give “original character” (OC) is the top character tag by a 4x margin (closely followed by “reader”). but i don’t read much OC fic so i couldn’t make that an example ↩

8. see: one of my personal favourite models of success as a fic writer — the story of an artist and her only fan who secretly not so secretly created multiple accounts to hype them to keep them going ↩

9. where secondary is “review” and “tertiary” is meta-analysis. i’ve lumped “secondary and tertiary articles” together under “review articles” in this diagram for the sake of simplicity, but you can expand this out to ratio of primary to secondary articles, secondary to tertiary articles, and tertiary to pop-science articles to similar effect ↩

10. examples i found interesting: the tag guide for BBC Merlin fic, or analysis of history and conventions of the WWE fandom ↩

11. more examples i found interesting: quantitative exploration of linguistic complexity in fic, predicting popular fic, framework for developing models of reader reactions to stories ↩

12. the general consensus seems to be “the ethics are questionable”. which i’m admittedly a bit confused about, given one of Ao3’s main features as an “archive” is the “download button that authors cannot opt out of” ↩

13. this can take some trial-and-error. every subsection of a fandom has their own dedicated lingo for adjacent concepts. but through a process of gradual enculturation, you become capable of quickly finding what you’re looking for ↩

14. not counting the separate “avengers” tag, that’s another 200k ↩

15. the inspiration for this search ↩

16. another piece of Ao3 lore: fic writers will go so hard for absolutely no reason. see the pre-chapter notes that go: “so sorry this fic is 12h late guys, i just got out of chemo” (or in Salvage’s case, birthgiving) ↩

17. like every therapy book or every parenting book ↩