Virginia Weaver, Senior Staff Writer  

Microwaved Beef is a column by Virginia Weaver that reflects on flashpoints from the last few years in the culture wars. The rapid pace of contemporary discourse makes it easy to forget critical moments and trends that have defined our social and academic lives. Microwaved Beef brings those moments back into the spotlight. 

Founded in 2009, the website Archive of Our Own (commonly known as AO3) has become the dominant platform for hosting fanfiction. AO3, along with other fanfiction hosting sites, is noteworthy – and sometimes notorious – for the creative liberty their users enjoy, as well as for their central role in fostering fandom subcultures.  

A core feature of AO3 is authors’ ability to add tags to their fanfictions, or “fics.” According to AO3’s official FAQ page: 

A tag is a keyword or phrase that provides information about a work, and can be made by anyone creating content such as works or bookmarks on the Archive of Our Own (AO3). These tags are used to specify which Rating, Warnings, Fandoms, Categories, Characters, and Relationships apply. 

Tags help readers sort their searches on AO3, allowing them to easily find fics that may appeal to them, while avoiding fics that contain content they wish to avoid. For instance, some readers may want to avoid AO3’s ubiquitous pornographic fanfiction, which might be hard to do without being able to see tags. Fanfiction has played a key role in many fandom phenomena widely considered bizarre or disturbing, such as “hivliving,” a fandom centered around imagined storylines in which U.S. founding father Alexander Hamilton is a gay man living with HIV during the 1980s AIDS crisis. Fans of Hamilton (2015) may want to read fics based on their beloved musical without encountering content they find troubling, and tags allow them to do so. 

AO3’s tagging feature was useful and unremarkable until 2021, when one fanfiction accumulated around 4,400 tags and, accordingly, crashed the site for many users. This fic quickly reached pan-fandom notoriety and has since been dubbed “Wangxian the AO3 Killer.” 

Written by pseudonymous author virtual1979 starting in 2019, Sexy Times with Wangxian was a lengthy gay erotica fic based on a popular Chinese media property, described by its author as “Wangxian’s happily ever after in the tune of Fluff and Porn.” Fanfiction featuring gay male romance and eroticism is notably popular, so Sexy Times with Wangxian was hypothetically a good fit for AO3.  

virtual1979 posted Sexy Times with Wangxian a chapter at a time, eventually uploading well over 250 chapters containing over a million words. The fic’s many updates made it appear frequently in unwitting AO3 users’ search results and occupied a significant amount of their “screen real estate,” as virtual1979 added new tags for each chapter. The fic’s legions of tags reportedly made AO3 unusable with screen readers and routinely crashed frustrated users’ browsers.  

In early 2021, AO3’s moderators took heed of fans’ complaints about Sexy Times with Wangxian. virtual1979 received a temporary ban in February 2021, albeit for engaging in threatening behavior, not explicitly for their tagging practices, which violated none of the site’s policies at the time. Then, according to Fanlore.org: 

In May 2021 the fic title and summary were changed multiple times. Some of the title changes included the addition of slurs, and at least one summary update changed the text to include a carriage return after each character, which increased the work’s screen real estate on the works search page. 

While it has legitimate uses, a carriage return had no purpose for AO3 users except to add to the fic’s technical inconveniences.  

Later that month, virtual1979 put an end to their own mayhem by deleting Sexy Times with Wangxian. The author posted to X, then known as Twitter: “It’s been awesomely peaceful and conducive for writing after I’ve disassociated from AO3 and ditched the sinking ship filled with trolls and troublemakers.” Although virtual1979 uploaded Sexy Times with Wangxian to a personal website, they have not made it accessible again to readers. 

In August 2021, likely in response to the Sexy Times with Wangxian incident, AO3 introduced a tag limit of 75. On Reddit, a poll posted in r/FanFiction asked users whether or not they supported the new tag limit. The overwhelming majority of respondents indicated their support for the decision. The poll results seem to reflect a general consensus among AO3 users. 

Fanfiction’s rise to mainstream prominence might seem limited to fics that attained massive success after being reworked for mainstream publication, such as Fifty Shades of Grey or 2025’s smash hit fantasy novel Alchemised. However, beyond the growing number of fics that have attained massive commercial success, critics have argued that fanfiction’s popularity has shifted fiction readers’ tastes in broad and significant ways. In December 2025, for instance, popular conservative BookTuber Hilary Layne uploaded a provocative and instantly controversial video informatively titled “Fanfiction Has Destroyed Writing (And Everything Else).” Layne critiques the way that fanfiction websites’ tagging systems have allowed readers to “hyper-specify” what they want to read, reducing their ability to tolerate the discomfort provoked by weighty literature. AO3’s tagging disaster in 2021 undoubtedly drew extra attention to the seemingly innocuous feature, and the debates it may have kickstarted rage on.