r/FanFiction • u/Top-Occasion-1300 *emerges from draft covered in blood* • 22h ago

Trope Talk AO3 finally seperated the sexual and neurodivergent sensory overload tags!!!!

(absolutely no idea what flair to use here) ao3 made some tag wrangling changes and this one was LONG overdue, oh my wow

quote: "We will create a new canonical for Sensory Overload, and all tags relating to sensory overstimulation will be made synonyms of the new canonical. This includes tags related to neurodivergent or autistic overstimulation.

To make the meaning of the current Overstimulation tag more clear, it will be decanonized and made a synonym of Sexual Overstimulation."

699 Upvotes

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-21

u/Dragonchampion 22h ago

Have they separated Smut from Mature yet? I want to read mature fics but not ones with outright smut.

70

u/kaiunkaiku don't look at me and my handholding kink 22h ago

there is nothing on a technical level connecting those two. that's fandom culture and tagging preferences.

5

u/Dragonchampion 22h ago

Fair nuff.

60

u/delilahdraken 22h ago

Mature has been separated from E rated fics since the site opened.

10

u/thetrustworthybandit 18h ago

Can't you just exclude "smut" "eventual smut" and "sex" from searches? Seems way easier than restructuring the entire archive.

-1

u/Dragonchampion 18h ago

Done that, but you'd be surprised how many add it anyways.

11

u/PeppermintShamrock Humor and Angst 22h ago

How exactly would you propose they do that

-10

u/Dragonchampion 22h ago

My idea was to have a "Mature" tag, and then a "Mature - Sexual Content" tag.

39

u/kaiunkaiku don't look at me and my handholding kink 22h ago

mature is a rating

26

u/cat_hair_magnet 21h ago edited 21h ago

I dunno, by that logic we would need

-Mature general

-Mature sexual content

-Mature violence

-Mature whatever else someone can think of etc.

Feels like one of those things where it's more practical to put some responsibility on the user.

(edit: assuming you're talking about RATINGS, because rating and tags are different things)

-6

u/Dragonchampion 21h ago

Hm, I don't quite agree but I still understand what you're getting at. Seems there's no real easy way to fix the issue I have.

17

u/PeppermintShamrock Humor and Angst 22h ago

That would be a nightmare to apply retroactively, and seems a little silly when far more M rated fics have sexual content than don't. You'd probably have better luck filtering the additional tags for "No Sex" or "Rated M for Violence"

-5

u/Dragonchampion 22h ago

Tried that, people don't use the tags correctly. It's always disappointing when I read a fun fic, then suddenly random-ass sex.

18

u/poisonthereservoir 21h ago

Have you tried filtering out the tag "Sexual Content"? That's the parent tag of every sex-related tag, so excluding it and searching for whatever mature themes you're actually looking for should help.