Content Warnings Tags on AO3

The broadest canonical abuse tag, used when an author wants a single unmistakable warning or when the abuse spans several forms. More specific tags (physical, emotional, child, domestic) usually accompany it.

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A canonical umbrella tag covering dependence of any kind, including substances, gambling, or fantasy-specific compulsions like magical addiction. Authors reach for it when the specific substance matters less than the pattern of compulsion and loss of control.

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A canonical tag for the ordinary presence of drinking: bar scenes, parties, wine with dinner, liquid courage before a confession. It is a neutral disclosure rather than a warning of abuse.

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The canonical tag for alcohol dependence and destructive drinking, as opposed to casual social use. Stories range from active addiction spirals to sobriety journeys, and fandoms with canonically hard-drinking characters use it constantly.

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A warning for limb loss, whether depicted in scene — battlefield, accident, or surgical — or central to a character's history. Conscientious fics handle the aftermath honestly: phantom pain, adaptation, and rebuilt self-image.

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A canonical warning tag for the death of an animal, applied because many readers who tolerate human character death find animal death uniquely unbearable. Authors tag it even for brief or background instances out of respect for that boundary.

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A canonical tag for killings that fail: assassination attempts, ambushes survived, poison administered but not fatal. The attempt typically launches the plot, whether toward investigation, protection arcs, or revenge.

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Secrets weaponized: characters coerced by threat of exposure into silence, service, or worse. Fic uses blackmail as villain leverage, as the engine of secret-identity stakes, and in darker works as the root of profoundly unhealthy dynamics.

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A broad freeform tag noting that blood appears on the page, whether from combat, accidents, medical scenes, or supernatural elements like vampirism. It is one of the most general injury-adjacent tags on the archive and spans every rating.

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The canonical tag for explicitly visceral content: heavy bleeding, exposed wounds, and graphic bodily damage described in detail. It frequently accompanies the Graphic Depictions Of Violence archive warning and horror-leaning works.

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The vampire act itself, tagged as a warning and an attraction: feeding scenes that the genre has always treated as intimacy by other means. Fic explores consensual feeding arrangements, hunger as metaphor, and the trust of offering a vein.

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A canonical tag for characters who struggle with how they see their own bodies, short of or alongside a diagnosable eating disorder. It appears in stories about insecurity, scars, weight, and learning to be seen by a partner.

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A canonical tag for the systematic rewriting of a character's identity, loyalties, or memories, distinct from moment-to-moment mind control. Fandoms with conditioned-assassin or indoctrination storylines made it a cornerstone recovery-fic tag.

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A canonical tag for fractures, specific enough to help readers who find bone injuries uniquely visceral. It ranges from a casted arm played for domestic comedy to compound fractures in darker fare.

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A canonical tag for sustained peer cruelty, most at home in school settings and high school AUs but applicable to workplaces and teams. Stories range from victims finding allies to former bullies seeking redemption.

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A canonical tag for works in which a character has cancer, whether the story follows treatment, remission, or decline. Some authors write it from personal or family experience, lending many of these works documentary weight.

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A canonical warning tag for the consumption of human flesh, whether in survival-horror scenarios, monster narratives, or fandoms where it is canonical subject matter. It is applied strictly so readers are never ambushed by the content.

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A canonical tag indicating the death in the fic is one that actually happens in the source material; the author is depicting or dealing with canon's casualty rather than inventing a new one. Fix-it readers use it as a signpost in both directions.

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A canonical freeform tag for death in a work, used when the Major Character Death archive warning is too strong or the author wants to flag mortality without specifying whose. It covers a broader territory than the official warning.

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A canonical tag warning that abuse of a child is depicted within the work itself, not merely referenced. Authors apply it to give readers a clear, unambiguous heads-up about one of the archive's most sensitive subjects.

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A canonical tag for the absence of care rather than active violence: parents or guardians who fail to feed, supervise, protect, or emotionally support a child. Fandoms with canonically neglected protagonists use it heavily in backstory exploration.

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A canonical tag for long-term illness that is managed rather than cured, increasingly written by chronically ill fans putting their own realities into beloved characters. The focus is usually daily life, accommodation, and relationships rather than crisis.

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A canonical tag for persistent pain as a fact of a character's life, frequently mapped onto canon characters with old injuries or harsh histories. Like Chronic Illness, it is often written from lived experience with notable specificity.

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Head-injury fic's workhorse tag: characters knocked out, dazed, and stubbornly refusing rest while someone keeps them awake and watched. The concussion is whump's most domestic injury — serious enough for vigil, mild enough for soft caretaking.

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One of AO3's warning options, often abbreviated CNTW or 'chose not to warn.' It means the author is declining to confirm or deny whether any of the four major warnings apply, sometimes to avoid spoilers and sometimes because the content is hard to classify.

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High-control groups as setting or backstory: charismatic leaders, isolation tactics, and the slow horror of belief weaponized. Cult fic splits between thriller infiltrations and survivor narratives about deprogramming and rebuilding a self.

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A broad canonical tag for works where death, as event or theme, is central, sometimes literally so in fics that personify it. It is less specific than the character-death family and often marks meditative or philosophical treatments of mortality.

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A canonical tag for characters treated as objects, weapons, or animals rather than people, whether by captors, institutions, or whole societies. It frequently underpins stories about androids, experiments, soldiers, and slaves reclaiming personhood.

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A canonical umbrella tag for works engaging substantively with disability, whether canon-established or introduced by the author. Fandom uses it for everything from realistic adjustment narratives to AUs reimagining able-bodied characters as disabled.

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A canonical tag identifying that one of the work's characters is disabled, useful for readers specifically seeking representation. It is a finding tag as much as a warning, and disabled fans use it to locate stories that reflect their lives.

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A canonical tag for episodes where a character detaches from their body, surroundings, or sense of reality, commonly written as a trauma response. Authors often render it stylistically, with prose that goes distant and unmoored to mirror the experience.

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A canonical tag warning for violence between partners or within a household. Writers use it both for stories set inside an abusive home and for escape-and-recovery arcs where a character leaves one.

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A canonical tag for drowning and near-drowning, depicted from the visceral panic of the drowning character or the desperation of a rescuer. Water-adjacent fandoms and angst writers both keep it in steady use.

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A canonical tag for dependence itself: characters in active addiction, hitting bottom, or fighting their way out. It signals a heavier and more sustained treatment than Drug Use, often structuring the entire plot around the illness.

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A canonical tag disclosing that characters use drugs within the work, without specifying whether the portrayal is casual, medical, or destructive. It is the general-purpose disclosure from which more specific tags branch.

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A canonical tag for scenes where a character is actively drunk, played for comedy, vulnerability, or honesty depending on the work. Drunken confessions and morning-after embarrassment are its classic story beats.

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A warning tag for sexual situations where consent is compromised, unclear, or constrained — intoxication, power imbalance, deception, or fantasy mechanics like sex pollen that remove free choice. It occupies the gray zone between fully consensual content and the Rape/Non-Con archive warning.

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A canonical warning tag for works depicting disordered eating, including restriction, bingeing, and purging. Conscientious authors apply it prominently because such content can be harmful to readers in recovery, and many add chapter-level notes on top.

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A canonical tag narrowing Manipulation to the emotional register: guilt-tripping, weaponized affection, conditional love. It most often describes dynamics inside families and romances rather than villain plots.

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The canonical tag for abuse that leaves no bruises: degradation, isolation, control, and fear sustained over time. Fandom writes it often and seriously, frequently in stories about recognizing such abuse for what it is.

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A canonical tag with a double life: it warns for trauma flashbacks experienced by characters and also labels the narrative device of scenes set in the past. Context and companion tags usually make clear which sense applies.

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A canonical tag for the specific abuse of making someone doubt their own perception and memory, named for the 1944 film. Fandom uses it precisely in abuse narratives and psychological thrillers where a manipulator rewrites a victim's reality.

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One of AO3's four major Archive Warnings, selected during posting when a work contains detailed, on-page violence. Unlike freeform tags, this warning is part of the archive's required warning system and appears prominently on the work's blurb so readers see it before clicking through.

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A canonical tag, common in crime and horror fandoms, warning that dead bodies are described in forensic or gruesome detail. Procedural fandoms whose canons open on corpses made this a standard disclosure.

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A canonical tag for stories where a character's guilt, earned or imagined, is a driving emotional force. It covers everything from atonement arcs to characters quietly corroding under a secret.

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A canonical tag flagging firearm violence specifically, applied with particular care in modern-setting works where shootings carry real-world weight. Crime, cop, and superhero fandoms account for much of its use.

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A warning tag for characters shot in the course of the story, from cop and hunter fandoms' occupational hazards to shocking mid-fic escalations. The wound's aftermath — field medicine, hospital vigils — is usually where the tag's real story lives.

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A warning tag for characters without housing — runaway backstories, post-disaster displacement, and street survival. Fandom applies it to canon histories like runaway teens and to AUs exploring precarity, ideally with more compassion than voyeurism.

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A canonical tag focused on the experience of being admitted: a character as patient, with the loss of autonomy and fear that entails. It is narrower than the Hospitals setting tag and centers the patient's perspective.

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The broader warning for people used as test subjects — government programs, mad science, and powers or mutations installed without consent. It overlaps with medical experimentation but emphasizes scale and dehumanization: subjects as numbers.

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A canonical warning tag for plots involving the buying, selling, or forced movement of people. It appears in crime-procedural fandoms tackling the subject and in dark AUs, and conscientious authors treat it as a serious disclosure rather than set dressing.

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A canonical tag for sickness of the ordinary and serious kinds alike, from flu-season misery to undiagnosed dread. It overlaps with sickfic but reads more as disclosure than as genre promise.

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The canonical off-page variant for alcohol problems that are mentioned, historical, or background rather than depicted. A character's past drinking years, or a parent's alcoholism shaping a backstory, are typical uses.

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A calibrated warning that infidelity exists in the story's orbit — a backstory betrayal, a suspected affair, an ex's crime — without being depicted in scene. It lets readers with hard limits around cheating make informed choices even when the act stays off-page.

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A canonical warning tag indicating that a character's history of childhood abuse is mentioned, remembered, or implied without being shown in scene. It appears constantly in character studies and hurt/comfort works that explore how a difficult upbringing shaped an adult character.

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The canonical tag for drug use that exists in a work's margins: a character's past habit, an offscreen relapse, a mention in dialogue. Nothing is depicted directly, which is precisely the information the tag conveys.

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A calibrated warning that homophobia exists in the story's world — mentioned, remembered, or feared — without being depicted in direct, extended scenes. Authors use it when a character's backstory or environment includes prejudice the narrative acknowledges at a distance.

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The canonical tag for sexual assault that is referenced, implied, or disclosed without being depicted. It allows authors to write about survival and aftermath while assuring readers the assault itself stays off the page.

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The canonical tag for works where self-harm is part of a character's history or is alluded to without direct depiction, such as a partner noticing old scars. The Implied/Referenced framing lets authors warn honestly while signaling the content stays off-page.

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A canonical tag for works where suicide is discussed, remembered, or part of the backstory but not depicted. A character grieving a loss to suicide, or a past attempt mentioned in conversation, are typical uses.

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Part of AO3's 'Implied/Referenced' family of canonical tags, which exists so authors can warn for difficult subject matter that is discussed or remembered without being shown. Here, torture happened or is mentioned, but the work does not depict it directly.

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A canonical tag for confinement with an institutional or judicial cast: dungeons, cells, prison sentences just or unjust. Fantasy fandoms use it for throne-room politics gone wrong; modern ones for incarceration stories.

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Questioning under pressure — police rooms, wartime captures, and captors who want what the protagonist knows. The tag spans procedural tension and outright coercion, shading toward torture warnings at its dark end.

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A canonical tag for blades as weapons or threats, covering knife fights, stabbings, and menace. Its specificity serves readers for whom edged-weapon violence lands differently than other kinds.

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A canonical tag patterned on the Major Character Death warning, telling readers that a central character, not a redshirt, takes the serious damage. It is effectively a promise to whump fans and a warning to everyone else.

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A warning tag for characters subjected to experiments framed as medicine — unethical trials, enhancement programs, and lab captivity. It anchors backstories like the Winter Soldier program and countless whump scenarios about bodies treated as research material.

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A canonical tag warning that medical interventions, from stitches to field surgery, are depicted in some detail. It serves readers with medical squeamishness who can handle the fact of injury but not the clinical mechanics of treating it.

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A canonical tag for trauma arising from medical experiences themselves: emergency interventions, painful treatment, experimentation, or care that crossed into harm. Sci-fi fandoms with lab-experiment backstories apply it constantly.

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A canonical tag for the moment a character's coping collapses entirely, whether through accumulated stress, grief, or trauma. Fandom uses it for cathartic crisis scenes where composure finally and completely fails.

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A canonical warning tag for pregnancy loss, applied with particular care because of how many readers carry this grief personally. Works range from realistic portrayals of loss within a relationship to backstory explaining a character's sorrow.

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A canonical tag closely allied with Grief/Mourning, tending to emphasize the outward observances of loss: funerals, rituals, black clothes, the public performance of grief alongside the private kind. Many authors use the two tags interchangeably.

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A canonical tag for unlawful killing within the work, whether the fic follows the killer, the investigators, or the bereaved. Crime fandoms use it descriptively; others use it to warn that a death is violent and intentional.

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A canonical tag flagging needle use, whether medical injections, IV lines, or more sinister applications. It exists because needle phobia is common enough that authors extend the courtesy even for brief scenes.

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The Archive Warning option stating affirmatively that none of AO3's four major warnings (graphic violence, major character death, rape/non-con, underage) are relevant to the work. It is a positive declaration, distinct from declining to warn.

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Syndicates, families, and empires of crime — the structural backdrop for mafia stories, yakuza dramas, and underworld AUs beyond the dedicated Mob AU tag. It signals criminal hierarchies, codes of loyalty, and violence as business policy.

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A canonical tag for pervasive, irrational distrust, whether as a symptom of mental illness, the residue of betrayal, or a justified response in a spy or horror plot. It colors the narration with suspicion of everyone and everything.

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A canonical tag for abuse located in a character's history rather than the story's present, leaving the form unspecified. It is the general-purpose backstory-abuse tag, refined by more specific companions when authors want precision.

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A canonical tag situating childhood abuse firmly in a character's history rather than the story's present. It differs from Implied/Referenced Child Abuse in emphasis: the past abuse may be explored in flashback or detail, but it predates the events of the fic.

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A canonical tag indicating sexual assault occurred before the story's events and informs the character's present. Works carrying it are typically aftermath narratives; whether the past assault appears in flashback varies by author.

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A canonical tag placing sexual abuse in a character's history, with the story focused on survival's long tail: triggers, intimacy difficulties, disclosure to a partner. Much of this writing is recovery literature in fandom form.

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The umbrella warning for historically accurate prejudice of all kinds — racism, sexism, homophobia, classism — rendered as part of a period setting. Authors use it when an era's worldview pervades the story too broadly for itemized tags.

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A warning for historical settings rendered with their era's racial attitudes intact — 1940s segregation around the Howling Commandos, colonial-era hierarchies, and slurs or structures the period normalized. Authors use it when accuracy demands ugliness the narrative doesn't endorse.

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Historical settings carrying their era's gender politics: Regency marriage markets, mid-century workplaces, and worlds where women's options are legally narrow. The tag warns that the setting's sexism is rendered honestly rather than airbrushed.

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A canonical tag for bodily violence within a relationship of power or trust, distinguishing abuse from combat or stranger violence. Family and partner contexts are its usual territory.

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Economic hardship as lived texture: skipped meals so siblings eat, juggled jobs, and the constant arithmetic of almost-enough. The tag grounds working-class character studies and class-difference romances in material reality.

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A canonical setting tag for works substantially set in prisons, from gritty incarceration drama to prison AUs that relocate an entire cast inside the walls. It signals setting more than specific content, with harsher elements tagged separately.

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A warning that racial prejudice appears in the work — directed at characters, embedded in the setting, or examined as theme. It covers both real-world racism and fantasy-coded analogues when authors tag conscientiously.

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An official Archive Warning disclosing that a work depicts non-consensual sexual activity. AO3's policy allows such content to exist on the archive provided it is warned for, which is why this label exists: it gives readers the information needed to make an informed choice before opening a work.

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A canonical tag clarifying that the drug use depicted is casual and social rather than addictive or plot-catastrophic, most often marijuana at a party or similar. Authors use it to set expectations more precisely than the bare Drug Use tag.

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The specific anguish of believing your desires damn you — queer characters raised in condemning faiths, sinners by doctrine, and the long untangling of shame from belief. The tag is a cornerstone of queer coming-of-age fic and priest-adjacent romance.

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A canonical tag for scars as physical fact and narrative symbol: maps of survived history that other characters discover, touch, or ask about. The scar-reveal scene is one of fandom's most reliable intimacy beats.

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A canonical tag for characters harming themselves indirectly: reckless missions, refusing care, drinking to oblivion, burning every bridge. It is distinct from Self-Harm in method but adjacent in spirit, and fandom applies it to half its favorite martyrs.

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A canonical warning tag for on-page depiction of a character deliberately injuring themselves. Responsible authors pair it with additional tags clarifying tone, since the same warning covers both raw vent fic and carefully handled recovery narratives.

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A canonical tag marking active self-loathing rather than mere low confidence: characters who blame, punish, or despise themselves. It often accompanies guilt-heavy backstories, particularly characters who believe they caused others harm.

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A canonical tag native to crime and thriller fandoms, covering works where a serial murderer is antagonist, subject, or, in darker corners, protagonist. Certain fandoms built around such characters use it as a basic descriptive tag.

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A canonical tag escalating from the base Injury tag: wounds that are life-threatening, permanently altering, or require extended recovery. It tells whump readers the stakes are real and tells sensitive readers to steer away.

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A warning for gender-based prejudice in the work: workplace dismissal, institutional barriers, and characters underestimated or harassed for their gender. Fic frequently deploys it so a heroine can demolish the expectations stacked against her.

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A canonical warning tag for sexual abuse, applied alongside or instead of the Rape/Non-Con archive warning, often when the abuse is part of a pattern within a relationship or family. Authors use it to be explicit about content many readers need to avoid.

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A canonical warning tag for works depicting enslavement, whether historical, fantastical, or dystopian. AO3 hosts both serious examinations of the institution and slave-AU premises, and the tag exists so readers can avoid or evaluate all of them.

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A canonical tag for cigarette (or occasionally other) smoking, applied both as a courtesy disclosure and as an aesthetic note, since the shared-cigarette scene is a minor romance institution. Period pieces and noir-flavored fics use it heavily.

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A canonical tag for characters whose anxiety centers on social situations: parties they dread, conversations they rehearse, gazes they avoid. It often appears in modern AUs and coffee-shop settings where everyday interaction is the story's terrain.

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A specific violence warning for knife wounds — back-alley attacks, battlefield blades, and betrayals made literal. Authors tag it for readers who filter on depicted violence types, and because the intimate range of a knife carries its own narrative charge.

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A canonical tag for severe food deprivation, whether imposed by captors, poverty, survival situations, or self-denial. It is distinct from the Eating Disorders tag, though the two can co-occur, and is common in captivity and post-apocalyptic narratives.

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A warning for choking and strangulation depicted as violence — fight scenes, assassination attempts, and the particular horror of breath taken by another's hands. It is tagged distinctly because many readers filter it specifically.

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A canonical tag disclosing that a character experiences suicidal ideation, whether passive weariness with living or active planning. It warns for the interior experience specifically, distinct from tags covering attempts or completed suicide.

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The canonical tag for works in which a character dies by suicide. It usually appears alongside the Major Character Death archive warning and is applied so the cause of death is never a surprise to the reader.

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A canonical warning tag indicating a character attempts suicide within the work or its immediate backstory. Many fics carrying it are aftermath stories about hospitalization, the reactions of loved ones, and the slow work of getting better.

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A canonical tag for operations depicted in the work, from sterile hospital theaters to desperate battlefield improvisation. Medical-drama fandoms use it descriptively while other fandoms use it as a graphic-content warning.

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A canonical tag for characters tormented by having lived when others did not, common in post-war, post-disaster, and post-canon-tragedy stories. Fandoms with battlefield casualties or destroyed homeworlds generate this tag in volume.

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A simple courtesy warning that the work contains profanity, often the only reason an otherwise-gentle fic carries a Teen rating. It frequently signals faithful rendering of canonically foul-mouthed characters.

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The canonical tag for characters facing a fatal diagnosis, covering both stories that end in death and those granted a miraculous or medical reprieve. It warns readers about one of the heaviest premises in fiction up front.

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A canonical tag for menace without (necessarily) execution: intimidation, ultimatums, the promise of harm hanging over a scene. It lets authors warn for an atmosphere of danger even when no blow lands.

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An official Archive Warning applied when a work depicts sexual activity involving characters under 18; the archive has more recently clarified the warning's wording as referring specifically to underage sex. As with the other major warnings, authors must either apply it where relevant or choose not to warn.

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A canonical tag for abuse conducted in words: insults, humiliation, screaming, and the steady erosion of self-worth by speech. It often marks parental and partner dynamics in backstory-heavy character studies.

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A canonical tag applied as a courtesy to emetophobic readers whenever a character throws up, whether from illness, drink, poison, or horror. Its existence reflects AO3 tagging culture's attentiveness to specific phobias.

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A canonical tag for works set in or shaped by warfare, native to fandoms whose canons are wars and imported into AUs everywhere else. It covers front-line combat, home-front waiting, and the long aftermath together.

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