Content Warning Tags on AO3
The archive warnings and content tags that help you make informed choices — and avoid the content you don't want.
AO3's tagging culture exists largely so readers can protect themselves. Content warning tags and the four Archive Warnings flag the heavy material — Major Character Death, graphic violence, and more — so nothing blindsides you mid-story.
These tags are both safety information and, sometimes, spoilers, which is why understanding them matters. This guide explains how the warning system works and how to use it to filter content in or out with confidence.
The 116 tags in this group
Abuse
The broadest canonical abuse tag, used when an author wants a single unmistakable warning or when the abuse spans several forms.
Addiction
A canonical umbrella tag covering dependence of any kind, including substances, gambling, or fantasy-specific compulsions like magical addiction.
Alcohol
A canonical tag for the ordinary presence of drinking: bar scenes, parties, wine with dinner, liquid courage before a confession.
Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism
The canonical tag for alcohol dependence and destructive drinking, as opposed to casual social use.
Amputation
A warning for limb loss, whether depicted in scene — battlefield, accident, or surgical — or central to a character's history.
Animal Death
A canonical warning tag for the death of an animal, applied because many readers who tolerate human character death find animal death uniquely unbearable.
Attempted Murder
A canonical tag for killings that fail: assassination attempts, ambushes survived, poison administered but not fatal.
Blackmail
Secrets weaponized: characters coerced by threat of exposure into silence, service, or worse.
Blood
A broad freeform tag noting that blood appears on the page, whether from combat, accidents, medical scenes, or supernatural elements like vampirism.
Blood and Gore
The canonical tag for explicitly visceral content: heavy bleeding, exposed wounds, and graphic bodily damage described in detail.
Blood Drinking
The vampire act itself, tagged as a warning and an attraction: feeding scenes that the genre has always treated as intimacy by other means.
Body Image Issues
A canonical tag for characters who struggle with how they see their own bodies, short of or alongside a diagnosable eating disorder.
Brainwashing
A canonical tag for the systematic rewriting of a character's identity, loyalties, or memories, distinct from moment-to-moment mind control.
Broken Bones
A canonical tag for fractures, specific enough to help readers who find bone injuries uniquely visceral.
Bullying
A canonical tag for sustained peer cruelty, most at home in school settings and high school AUs but applicable to workplaces and teams.
Cancer
A canonical tag for works in which a character has cancer, whether the story follows treatment, remission, or decline.
Cannibalism
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.
Canonical Character Death
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.
Character Death
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.
Child Abuse
A canonical tag warning that abuse of a child is depicted within the work itself, not merely referenced.
Child Neglect
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.
Chronic Illness
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.
Chronic Pain
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.
Concussions
Head-injury fic's workhorse tag: characters knocked out, dazed, and stubbornly refusing rest while someone keeps them awake and watched.
Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
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.
Cults
High-control groups as setting or backstory: charismatic leaders, isolation tactics, and the slow horror of belief weaponized.
Death
A broad canonical tag for works where death, as event or theme, is central, sometimes literally so in fics that personify it.
Dehumanization
A canonical tag for characters treated as objects, weapons, or animals rather than people, whether by captors, institutions, or whole societies.
Disability
A canonical umbrella tag for works engaging substantively with disability, whether canon-established or introduced by the author.
Disabled Character
A canonical tag identifying that one of the work's characters is disabled, useful for readers specifically seeking representation.
Dissociation
A canonical tag for episodes where a character detaches from their body, surroundings, or sense of reality, commonly written as a trauma response.
Domestic Violence
A canonical tag warning for violence between partners or within a household.
Drowning
A canonical tag for drowning and near-drowning, depicted from the visceral panic of the drowning character or the desperation of a rescuer.
Drug Addiction
A canonical tag for dependence itself: characters in active addiction, hitting bottom, or fighting their way out.
Drug Use
A canonical tag disclosing that characters use drugs within the work, without specifying whether the portrayal is casual, medical, or destructive.
Drunkenness
A canonical tag for scenes where a character is actively drunk, played for comedy, vulnerability, or honesty depending on the work.
Dubious Consent
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.
Eating Disorders
A canonical warning tag for works depicting disordered eating, including restriction, bingeing, and purging.
Emotional Manipulation
A canonical tag narrowing Manipulation to the emotional register: guilt-tripping, weaponized affection, conditional love.
Emotional/Psychological Abuse
The canonical tag for abuse that leaves no bruises: degradation, isolation, control, and fear sustained over time.
Flashbacks
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.
Gaslighting
A canonical tag for the specific abuse of making someone doubt their own perception and memory, named for the 1944 film.
Graphic Depictions Of Violence
One of AO3's four major Archive Warnings, selected during posting when a work contains detailed, on-page violence.
Graphic Description of Corpses
A canonical tag, common in crime and horror fandoms, warning that dead bodies are described in forensic or gruesome detail.
Guilt
A canonical tag for stories where a character's guilt, earned or imagined, is a driving emotional force.
Gun Violence
A canonical tag flagging firearm violence specifically, applied with particular care in modern-setting works where shootings carry real-world weight.
Gunshot Wounds
A warning tag for characters shot in the course of the story, from cop and hunter fandoms' occupational hazards to shocking mid-fic escalations.
Homelessness
A warning tag for characters without housing — runaway backstories, post-disaster displacement, and street survival.
Hospitalization
A canonical tag focused on the experience of being admitted: a character as patient, with the loss of autonomy and fear that entails.
Human Experimentation
The broader warning for people used as test subjects — government programs, mad science, and powers or mutations installed without consent.
Human Trafficking
A canonical warning tag for plots involving the buying, selling, or forced movement of people.
Illnesses
A canonical tag for sickness of the ordinary and serious kinds alike, from flu-season misery to undiagnosed dread.
Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism
The canonical off-page variant for alcohol problems that are mentioned, historical, or background rather than depicted.
Implied/Referenced Cheating
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.
Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
A canonical warning tag indicating that a character's history of childhood abuse is mentioned, remembered, or implied without being shown in scene.
Implied/Referenced Drug Use
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.
Implied/Referenced Homophobia
A calibrated warning that homophobia exists in the story's world — mentioned, remembered, or feared — without being depicted in direct, extended scenes.
Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con
The canonical tag for sexual assault that is referenced, implied, or disclosed without being depicted.
Implied/Referenced Self-Harm
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.
Implied/Referenced Suicide
A canonical tag for works where suicide is discussed, remembered, or part of the backstory but not depicted.
Implied/Referenced Torture
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.
Imprisonment
A canonical tag for confinement with an institutional or judicial cast: dungeons, cells, prison sentences just or unjust.
Interrogation
Questioning under pressure — police rooms, wartime captures, and captors who want what the protagonist knows.
Knives
A canonical tag for blades as weapons or threats, covering knife fights, stabbings, and menace.
Major Character Injury
A canonical tag patterned on the Major Character Death warning, telling readers that a central character, not a redshirt, takes the serious damage.
Medical Experimentation
A warning tag for characters subjected to experiments framed as medicine — unethical trials, enhancement programs, and lab captivity.
Medical Procedures
A canonical tag warning that medical interventions, from stitches to field surgery, are depicted in some detail.
Medical Trauma
A canonical tag for trauma arising from medical experiences themselves: emergency interventions, painful treatment, experimentation, or care that crossed into harm.
Mental Breakdown
A canonical tag for the moment a character's coping collapses entirely, whether through accumulated stress, grief, or trauma.
Miscarriage
A canonical warning tag for pregnancy loss, applied with particular care because of how many readers carry this grief personally.
Mourning
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.
Murder
A canonical tag for unlawful killing within the work, whether the fic follows the killer, the investigators, or the bereaved.
Needles
A canonical tag flagging needle use, whether medical injections, IV lines, or more sinister applications.
No Archive Warnings Apply
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.
Organized Crime
Syndicates, families, and empires of crime — the structural backdrop for mafia stories, yakuza dramas, and underworld AUs beyond the dedicated Mob AU tag.
Paranoia
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.
Past Abuse
A canonical tag for abuse located in a character's history rather than the story's present, leaving the form unspecified.
Past Child Abuse
A canonical tag situating childhood abuse firmly in a character's history rather than the story's present.
Past Rape/Non-con
A canonical tag indicating sexual assault occurred before the story's events and informs the character's present.
Past Sexual Abuse
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.
Period-Typical Attitudes
The umbrella warning for historically accurate prejudice of all kinds — racism, sexism, homophobia, classism — rendered as part of a period setting.
Period-Typical Racism
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.
Period-Typical Sexism
Historical settings carrying their era's gender politics: Regency marriage markets, mid-century workplaces, and worlds where women's options are legally narrow.
Physical Abuse
A canonical tag for bodily violence within a relationship of power or trust, distinguishing abuse from combat or stranger violence.
Poverty
Economic hardship as lived texture: skipped meals so siblings eat, juggled jobs, and the constant arithmetic of almost-enough.
Prison
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.
Racism
A warning that racial prejudice appears in the work — directed at characters, embedded in the setting, or examined as theme.
Rape/Non-Con
An official Archive Warning disclosing that a work depicts non-consensual sexual activity.
Recreational Drug Use
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.
Religious Guilt
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.
Scars
A canonical tag for scars as physical fact and narrative symbol: maps of survived history that other characters discover, touch, or ask about.
Self-Destructive Behavior
A canonical tag for characters harming themselves indirectly: reckless missions, refusing care, drinking to oblivion, burning every bridge.
Self-Harm
A canonical warning tag for on-page depiction of a character deliberately injuring themselves.
Self-Hatred
A canonical tag marking active self-loathing rather than mere low confidence: characters who blame, punish, or despise themselves.
Serial Killers
A canonical tag native to crime and thriller fandoms, covering works where a serial murderer is antagonist, subject, or, in darker corners, protagonist.
Serious Injuries
A canonical tag escalating from the base Injury tag: wounds that are life-threatening, permanently altering, or require extended recovery.
Sexism
A warning for gender-based prejudice in the work: workplace dismissal, institutional barriers, and characters underestimated or harassed for their gender.
Sexual Abuse
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.
Slavery
A canonical warning tag for works depicting enslavement, whether historical, fantastical, or dystopian.
Smoking
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.
Social Anxiety
A canonical tag for characters whose anxiety centers on social situations: parties they dread, conversations they rehearse, gazes they avoid.
Stabbing
A specific violence warning for knife wounds — back-alley attacks, battlefield blades, and betrayals made literal.
Starvation
A canonical tag for severe food deprivation, whether imposed by captors, poverty, survival situations, or self-denial.
Strangulation
A warning for choking and strangulation depicted as violence — fight scenes, assassination attempts, and the particular horror of breath taken by another's hands.
Suicidal Thoughts
A canonical tag disclosing that a character experiences suicidal ideation, whether passive weariness with living or active planning.
Suicide
The canonical tag for works in which a character dies by suicide.
Suicide Attempt
A canonical warning tag indicating a character attempts suicide within the work or its immediate backstory.
Surgery
A canonical tag for operations depicted in the work, from sterile hospital theaters to desperate battlefield improvisation.
Survivor Guilt
A canonical tag for characters tormented by having lived when others did not, common in post-war, post-disaster, and post-canon-tragedy stories.
Swearing
A simple courtesy warning that the work contains profanity, often the only reason an otherwise-gentle fic carries a Teen rating.
Terminal Illnesses
The canonical tag for characters facing a fatal diagnosis, covering both stories that end in death and those granted a miraculous or medical reprieve.
Threats of Violence
A canonical tag for menace without (necessarily) execution: intimidation, ultimatums, the promise of harm hanging over a scene.
Underage
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.
Verbal Abuse
A canonical tag for abuse conducted in words: insults, humiliation, screaming, and the steady erosion of self-worth by speech.
Vomiting
A canonical tag applied as a courtesy to emetophobic readers whenever a character throws up, whether from illness, drink, poison, or horror.
War
A canonical tag for works set in or shaped by warfare, native to fandoms whose canons are wars and imported into AUs everywhere else.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the four AO3 archive warnings?
Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, and Underage. Authors can also select 'No Archive Warnings Apply' or 'Creator Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings.'
What does 'choose not to warn' mean?
The author has declined to specify which warnings apply, so the work may or may not contain triggering content. Read the freeform tags carefully or proceed with caution.
Related Tag Guides
Hurt/Comfort Tags
The tags that lead to whump, caretaking, and recovery — and how to tell them apart when you want someone to suffer and then be looked after.
Angst & Emotional Pain Tags
Tags that promise emotional heavy lifting — angst, grief, heartbreak, and the all-important question of whether comfort ever arrives.
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