Plot Device & Trope Tags on AO3
The engines of fanfic plots — amnesia, soul bonds, body swaps, fake relationships, and other reliable machinery.
Plot-device tags name the machinery that drives a story: amnesia that resets a relationship, a soul bond that forces intimacy, a body swap that makes characters walk in each other's shoes. Each is a compact promise about what kind of complication you'll get.
These tropes recur across every fandom because they work — they manufacture conflict, forced proximity, or revelation on demand. This guide collects the device tags so you can seek out (or avoid) your favorites.
The 158 tags in this group
Afterlife
Stories set after death — heavens, hells, waiting rooms, and bureaucratic in-betweens where the dead process their lives.
Aged-Up Character(s)
Notes that canonically young characters have been written older — teen casts depicted as adults, often years past their canon timeline.
Alchemy
The science-magic of transmutation — equivalent exchange, philosopher's stones, and knowledge bought at terrible prices, with Fullmetal Alchemist as the tag's gravitational center.
Aliens Made Them Do It
A classic science-fiction fandom scenario in which an outside force — alien captors, observation rituals, cultural requirements — compels two characters into intimacy.
Alpha Derek Hale
Teen Wolf fics rooted in Derek's era as Alpha of the Beacon Hills pack, or AUs that keep him in that role permanently.
Alternate Timelines
Handles branched chronology explicitly: timelines split by time travel, choices, or cosmic accident, often with characters aware of — or haunted by — the other branch.
Androids
Human-shaped machines and the personhood question they carry, from Detroit: Become Human's deviants to Data and original synthetic characters.
Angels
Celestial beings from Supernatural's trench-coated warriors to Good Omens' fussy principalities and wholly original heavenly hosts.
Animagus
Witches and wizards who can transform into a specific animal at will, like Sirius Black's grim or McGonagall's cat.
Animal Transformation
Turns a character into an animal — curse, accident, or enchantment — usually leaving their mind intact and their dignity nowhere to be found.
Aphrodisiacs
Introduces a desire-amplifying substance — potion, drug, enchanted dessert — administered accidentally, maliciously, or experimentally.
Artificial Intelligence
Features created minds as characters — ship computers with loyalties, assistant programs developing preferences, androids litigating their own personhood.
Auror Harry Potter
Post-war fics where Harry follows his canonical career path into the Auror office, the wizarding world's dark-wizard-catching police force.
Bathing/Washing
A care-taking tag where one character bathes another or washes their hair, blood, or battle grime away.
Bets & Wagers
Plots set in motion by a bet: dares to ask someone out, team pools on when the pining idiots will get together, or high-stakes wagers with humiliating forfeits.
Blind Character
Stories featuring a blind or low-vision character, from canonical figures like Matt Murdock or Toph Beifong to AU reinterpretations of sighted characters.
Body Swap
Switches two characters into each other's bodies via magic, technology, or unexplained Tuesday.
Breakfast in Bed
The domestic grand gesture in miniature: one partner sneaking up early to assemble a tray, the other waking to coffee and proof of being loved.
Captivity
Dwells in the state of being held — cells, towers, enemy compounds, gilded cages — at longer duration and closer psychological range than kidnapping's plot mechanics.
Car Accidents
Uses the crash as narrative pivot: the phone call that reorders someone's priorities in a sentence, the intersection moment that creates amnesia plots, comas, and survivor guilt on demand.
Class Differences
Romance and friction across wealth and status lines: heirs and chauffeurs, nobles and servants, scholarship kids among legacy admits.
Clones
Genetic duplicates and everything they detonate: identity crises, replacement horror, and armies of identical men demanding individual personhood — the Star Wars clone troopers being the tag's biggest constituency.
Coma
Suspends a character between presence and absence and studies the people in the chairs beside the bed: one-sided conversations, hands held for weeks, decisions made by proxies who aren't sure of their standing.
Court Politics
The knife-fight conducted in ballgowns: favorites rising and falling, whisper campaigns, and smiles that double as threats in a royal or noble court.
Curses
Afflicts a character with hostile magic and its rules: speak and someone dies, touch and they turn to stone, love and the curse completes.
Cyborgs
Flesh fused with machine — combat augmentations, life-saving implants, and bodies rebuilt after catastrophe.
Dark Harry Potter
A characterization tag for stories where Harry embraces dark magic, ruthlessness, or outright villainy — often after betrayal by Dumbledore or the Ministry.
Deaf Character
A tag for stories featuring a Deaf or deafened character, whether canonical (Clint Barton in the comics) or an AU interpretation.
Demons
Infernal beings in every register fandom can imagine: terrifying adversaries, snarky summoned companions, brooding love interests, and Crowley-style demons who are bad at being bad.
Dimension Travel
Moves characters sideways instead of backward — into parallel worlds where the war was lost, the dead lived, or they themselves turned out unrecognizably different.
Dragons
The general dragon tag: hoards, riders, shapeshifted dragon characters, or one very large lizard complicating everyone's plans.
Dream Sharing
Connects two sleepers in the same dream — by bond, magic, technology, or unexplained phenomenon — creating a private world with negotiable physics and no witnesses.
Dreams and Nightmares
The canonical umbrella for significant dreaming: prophetic dreams, recurring nightmares, dreamscapes traversed, and the bleed between sleeping and waking truth.
Drunk Texting
Characters sending messages they would never send sober — confessions, terrible flirting, or paragraphs of feelings aimed at exactly the wrong recipient.
Elves
The fair folk in their Tolkien-descended form: ageless, graceful, pointy-eared, and prone to melancholy about mortal lifespans.
Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE
A canonical Harry Potter tag declaring that the 'Nineteen Years Later' epilogue of Deathly Hallows never happened.
Fairy Tale Elements
Laces the story with folklore's grammar — rule-of-three structures, enchanted forests, bargains with consequences, true love's kiss played straight or interrogated.
Fairy Tale Retellings
Familiar tales rebuilt with a fandom's cast: Cinderella with a CEO, Beauty and the Beast with the fandom's resident monster, Red Riding Hood with actual werewolves.
Fallen Angels
Angels cast out or stepping willingly from grace — for rebellion, doubt, or love of something Heaven forbade.
Familiars
Pairs magic-users with bonded animal companions — cats with opinions, ravens with errands, creatures whose form says something pointed about their witch.
Fever
Burns through a character's defenses along with their temperature: delirium, honesty without consent, and the fevered murmur of a name that tells the caretaker everything.
Flowers
Blooms doing narrative work: courting bouquets, funeral arrangements, flower shop counters, and petals as recurring imagery.
Folklore
Stories drawing on traditional tales, local legends, and the old rules — salt lines, true names, debts owed to things in the woods.
Forced Proximity
The structural trope underneath half of fandom's favorites: circumstances compel two people to share space they would never have chosen — stuck, snowed in, assigned together, handcuffed, quarantined.
Fuck Or Die
The bluntest of the dubious-consent premise tags: circumstances make intimacy a survival requirement — poison with one antidote, a curse with one exit.
Gardens & Gardening
Cultivation as character work: cottage gardens, allotment rivalries, and broken people putting things in soil and watching them live.
Ghosts
Features the dead lingering — haunting a place, a person, or a narrative.
Gods
Divine beings as characters — mythological pantheons, ascended mortals, and original deities — with all the scale problems godhood brings to plot and romance.
Guardian Angels
Celestial protectors assigned to specific mortals, a premise fandom mines for the obvious complication: the guardian falls in love with their charge.
Hallucinations
Makes a character's senses unreliable — fever, poison, magic, grief, or psychological strain conjuring what isn't there.
Hanahaki Disease
The fanon illness itself, taggable in any setting: unrequited love manifests as flowers blooming in the lungs, progressing from stray petals to choking blooms, curable by requited feelings or by surgery that removes the love entirely.
Hogwarts Houses
A tag for stories built around the sorting system itself — house rivalries, re-sortings, inter-house friendships, or applying Hogwarts houses to characters from other fandoms entirely.
Hostage Situations
Compresses the standoff into a pressure chamber: hostages, demands, negotiators, and clocks.
Human Castiel
Fics where the angel Castiel loses his grace and must live as a human, canonically explored in season nine and endlessly expanded in fandom.
Hypothermia
Drops a character's core temperature to dangerous levels — ice water, blizzards, exposure — and prescribes fandom's favorite treatment: shared body heat, administered with medical justification and emotional consequences.
Identity Porn
Fandom's term — not inherently explicit, despite the name — for plots that luxuriate in identity confusion: a character romancing both halves of someone's double life without knowing they're one person, or two masked figures each oblivious to the other's civilian face.
Identity Reveal
Detonates the secret: the mask comes off, by choice, accident, or catastrophe, and the fic deals in the blast radius.
Immortality
Examines living forever as condition rather than power: immortals loving mortals on borrowed time, pairs of undying watching centuries together, or the newly deathless discovering what the price actually is.
Kings & Queens
Stories centered on rulers themselves — the weight of the crown, marriages as treaties, and power's corrosion or grace.
Knights
Sworn swords and the chivalric package: oaths, quests, armor polished by devotion, and the loaded intimacy of kneeling to a sovereign.
Language of Flowers
Victorian floriography as plot device: every bloom a coded word, every bouquet a paragraph, and confessions conducted entirely in arrangements.
Las Vegas Wedding
The classic accidental-marriage delivery system: characters wake up in Vegas, hungover, ringed, and legally bound to someone they definitely weren't dating yesterday.
Love Potion/Spell
Introduces artificial affection by magic — slipped potions, miscast charms, cupid mishaps — and the genre's defining dilemma: enchanted feelings can't be trusted, even when they look exactly like the real ones somebody was already hiding.
Magic
The broadest arcane tag on the Archive, covering any story where magic features meaningfully — canon magic explored more deeply, new magic introduced, or magic as the texture of an AU.
Magic Reveal
The identity reveal's arcane sibling, with Merlin fandom as its great cathedral: a character's hidden magic exposed to the person it was hidden from longest.
Magic-Users
A broad tag for characters who wield magic — witches, sorcerers, mages of any tradition — frequently used when an AU grants powers to canonically mundane characters.
Magical Accidents
The whoops of the arcane world: potions splashed, wands misfired, rituals interrupted at the worst syllable.
Master of Death Harry Potter
Fics that take the Deathly Hallows title literally: Harry, having united the three Hallows, becomes an immortal entity tied to Death itself.
Mates
A bond mechanic from werewolf, omegaverse, and creature fandoms where two characters are matched partners — by instinct, biology, or supernatural design.
Mating Cycles/In Heat
The canonical tag for biological heat and rut cycles — omegaverse heats, werewolf mating seasons, alien estrus.
Memory Alteration
Goes beyond erasure into editing: memories implanted, rewritten, or selectively trimmed by magic, technology, or institutional malice.
Memory Loss
The broader memory tag, covering everything from trauma-suppressed years to magically stolen moments to degenerative forgetting.
Mind Control
Subjects a character's will to someone else's — hypnosis, brainwashing, magical compulsion, parasitic influence — and reckons with the violation.
Mind Meld
Star Trek's gift to fandom vocabulary: a deliberate joining of minds, deeper and more consensual than ambient telepathy — memories shared wholesale, selves temporarily overlapping.
Mistaken Identity
Runs on wrong assumptions about who someone is: cases of swapped names, lookalikes, wrong-person blind dates, and characters courteously failing to correct an error until it's far too embarrassing to fix.
Monsters
Creatures outside the standard vampire-werewolf taxonomy — eldritch things, beasts, and beings whose monstrousness is the point.
Multiverse
Many worlds, one premise: infinite variant universes whose versions of the cast can meet, swap, or compare notes.
Music
A tag for stories where music is structural — musician characters, songs as memory triggers, shared playlists as courtship, and sound carrying what dialogue can't.
Muteness
A tag for characters who cannot speak, whether congenitally, through injury, curse, or trauma.
Mythical Beings & Creatures
The canonical umbrella for legendary nonhumans — sirens, selkies, kitsune, gorgons, phoenixes, and the rest of folklore's bestiary — appearing as characters, love interests, or transformations.
Mythology References
A tag for works threaded with myth — Orpheus parallels, Persephone retellings, Norse cosmology jokes, or characters explicitly compared to legendary figures.
Necromancy
Death magic: raising the dead, speaking with ghosts, and the forbidden science of souls.
Nesting
An omegaverse behavior where a character — typically an omega — instinctively builds a nest of blankets, pillows, and loved ones' clothing for comfort, heat, or pregnancy.
On the Run
Keeps characters moving — fugitives from law, empire, or their own pasts, living out of stolen cars and assumed names.
Parallel Universes
Establishes that multiple versions of reality run alongside each other, whether characters cross between them or merely glimpse the alternatives.
Parseltongue
The serpent language from Harry Potter, used in fic for snake familiars, Slytherin heritage reveals, and dark!Harry aesthetics.
Piercings
A tag for pierced characters and the aesthetic register they signal — punk AU styling, rebellion arcs, and the charged moment of noticing new metal.
Pirates
Sails, plunder, and freedom outside the law — canon crews like the Straw Hats and Our Flag Means Death's misfits, plus the high-seas adventures fandom writes for everyone else.
Poisoning
Introduces toxin as plot: assassination attempts, slow doses discovered late, antidote races, and the particular horror of harm that arrives in a teacup.
Political Alliances
Marriages, treaties, and partnerships forged for strategy rather than sentiment — the standard scaffolding for arranged-marriage fic in fantasy and historical settings.
Politics
A tag for fics where governance, elections, factional maneuvering, or institutional power plays drive the plot.
Portals
Doorways that shouldn't exist — wardrobes, rifts, glowing circles in lab basements — connecting worlds, times, or universes.
Possession
Puts a foreign consciousness inside a character's body — demons, ghosts, gods, symbiotes — ranging from hostile takeover to uneasy cohabitation.
Potions
Brewed magic in bottles: healing draughts, poisons, love potions, and the simmering cauldron-craft behind them.
Pre-Serum Steve Rogers
Stories featuring Steve Rogers before the super-soldier serum — the small, sickly, stubborn Brooklyn artist who picked fights he couldn't win.
Pro Hero Bakugou Katsuki
Future-set My Hero Academia fics where Bakugou has achieved his goal of becoming a professional hero, usually as the explosive top-ranker Dynamight.
Prophecy
Foretold futures as narrative engines: chosen ones, dooms pronounced at birth, and oracles whose words mean something other than everyone assumed.
Prosthesis
Stories featuring prosthetic limbs, from Bucky's vibranium arm and Ed Elric's automail to realistic modern prosthetics.
Psychic Abilities
Minds that do more than think: telekinesis, precognition, empathic sensing, and powers that blur the line between gift and affliction.
Quirkless Midoriya Izuku
My Hero Academia AUs where Izuku never receives One For All and remains Quirkless.
Rebellion
Uprisings against empires, regimes, and orders that deserve it — cell meetings, sabotage, propaganda wars, and the cost of resistance counted in named characters.
Regulus Black Lives
Fics where Sirius's younger brother survives the cave and the Inferi, a premise that exploded alongside Marauders-era fandom's growth.
Reincarnation
Carries souls across deaths into new lives, with memory as the variable that defines each fic: full recall, fragments surfacing through dreams, or recognition without understanding.
Rescue Missions
Structures the fic as retrieval: someone is taken, lost, or trapped, and the people who love them dismantle whatever stands between.
Resurrection
Brings the dead back — through magic, science, bargains, or sheer authorial refusal — and then deals honestly with the aftermath canon usually skips: bodies that remember dying, mourners who already finished grieving, and the suspicion that what came back isn't quite what left.
Rituals
Formal magical or cultural ceremonies — summonings, bonding rites, seasonal observances — whose rules and stakes structure the plot.
Robots
Mechanical beings of every chassis — clunky helpers, war machines, and beloved droids — without the android requirement of looking human.
Royalty
Crowns, courts, and the machinery of monarchy — used for canon royals, historical settings, and fantasy kingdoms outside the dedicated Royalty AU.
Scent Marking
An omegaverse and werewolf mechanic where characters mark partners, pack, or territory with their scent through touch, worn clothing, or proximity.
Scenting
Centers smell as social and romantic language — werewolves and A/B/O characters reading mood, ownership, and attraction by scent, marking territory on people via proximity and borrowed clothing.
Secret Identity
Splits a character between public face and hidden truth — masked heroes, undercover royalty, spies in suburbia — and builds the story on maintenance of the wall.
Selective Mutism
An anxiety-related condition where a character can speak but cannot in certain contexts or with certain people, used in fic with varying degrees of clinical accuracy.
Sex Pollen
A long-standing fandom trope in which exposure to a substance — alien flora, magical contamination — induces overwhelming arousal that must be addressed, typically endangering the affected character otherwise.
Shapeshifting
Covers voluntary or innate form-changing — shifters who choose their skin, characters with a beast form, tricksters who wear faces.
Sharing Clothes
Trades garments and meaning in the same gesture: the borrowed hoodie never returned, the jacket draped over cold shoulders, the morning-after shirt worn like a flag.
Sign Language
Fics where signed language features meaningfully — a Deaf character's primary language, a couple's private channel, or a skill learned as an act of love.
Singing
Voices raised on purpose or by accident: shower performances overheard, lullabies for nightmares, karaoke courage, and the vulnerability of singing for someone you love.
Sirius Black Lives
A fix-it premise where Sirius survives the Department of Mysteries — or never falls through the Veil at all.
Sleep Deprivation
Runs a character past empty — work crunches, vigils, missions, or refusal to face what sleep brings — and harvests the consequences: filter loss, micro-collapses, and truths said in the punch-drunk hours that sober exhaustion can't retract.
Sleepwalking
Sends a character wandering while unconscious — into hallways, danger, or most fatefully, into someone else's bed with zero waking memory.
Slytherin Harry Potter
An AU premise where the Sorting Hat gets its way and Harry joins Slytherin house.
Soul Bond
Forges a metaphysical link between two characters — formed by ritual, accident, destiny, or one catastrophic act of magic — that typically carries shared emotions, pain transfer, or awareness of each other across distance.
Sparring
Practice combat as plot and pretext: training mats, dojo sessions, and friendly bouts that are never entirely friendly.
Spells & Enchantments
Focuses on cast magic specifically: incantations, wards, charms on objects, and enchantments laid on people deliberately or otherwise.
Spies & Secret Agents
Espionage as lifestyle: handlers and assets, cover identities, dead drops, and the occupational hazard of falling for the person you're surveilling.
Stockholm Syndrome
Names the captive's attachment to their captor and tags fics that explore that bond deliberately — as tragedy, as psychological study, or as the foundation of an intentionally uncomfortable romance.
Stranded
Characters cut off far from help — desert islands, broken-down cars in nowhere, derelict spaceships, or storm-isolated cabins.
Superheroes
Caped crusaders as genre furniture — canon hero universes and original hero societies alike, with masks, patrols, and the double-life problem at the center.
Supernatural Elements
Flags the uncanny at any dosage: a single ghost in an otherwise mundane story, low-key psychic intuition, a house that's wrong in ways nobody discusses.
Superpowers
Grants extraordinary abilities inside or outside superhero frameworks — one office worker who can stop time, a whole society of the gifted, canon characters with one new impossible trick.
Supervillains
The other half of the capes equation: schemers, doomsday-device owners, and theatrical menaces — increasingly written as protagonists with points.
Survival
Strips the story to necessity: wilderness crashes, disasters, sieges, and apocalypses where staying alive is the plot.
Tattoos
Ink as story: memorial pieces, matching sets, soulmate marks, and the trust exercise of letting someone read your skin.
Telepathy
Opens minds to each other — innate gifts, accidental links, technology, or magic — and immediately weaponizes the privacy problem: thoughts overheard that were never meant for sharing, especially the ones about the person doing the hearing.
Temporary Amnesia
The reassurance variant: memory loss with a return ticket.
Tickling
Playful tickle fights and the discovery of ticklish spots, usually deployed as lighthearted physical affection between partners, friends, or family.
Time Loop
Traps a character in a repeating stretch of time — usually one day — that resets until they figure out how to break it.
Time Travel
Moves a character through time by any mechanism canon or author provides — accidents, artifacts, dying and waking up in the past.
Time Travel Fix-It
The combination engine of two beloved tags: someone goes back in time specifically to repair canon's tragedies.
Training
Montage made narrative: characters drilling skills, mastering powers, or being forged by demanding mentors.
Transformation
Bodies changed — by curse, magic, science, or bite — into something else: animals, monsters, different ages or forms.
Trapped
Characters physically stuck — in elevators, collapsed buildings, locked rooms, or magical prisons — with no exit until rescue or ingenuity arrives.
True Mates
The destiny-grade tier of the mates trope: one fated partner, recognizable by scent or instinct, written into a character's biology.
Truth Serum
Doses a character with compelled honesty — veritaserum, sodium pentothal, an alien flower, a witch with opinions — and aims them at everyone they've been lying to, especially themselves.
Undercover
Sends a character into hostile territory wearing a fabricated self — infiltrating gangs, cults, companies, or courts.
Urban Fantasy
Magic threaded through the modern city: vampire-run nightclubs, fae courts above bodegas, and wizards who take the subway.
Vampires
The general vampire tag for fics featuring the undead in any capacity — canon vampires explored further, original bloodsuckers introduced, or vampire mythology imported wholesale.
Veela
The magically alluring beings from Harry Potter canon, expanded by fandom into a whole creature-inheritance genre.
Video Game Mechanics
Reality running on game logic: visible HP bars, level-ups, skill trees, and respawn points applied to a world that takes them literally.
Villain Midoriya Izuku
A major My Hero Academia AU genre where Izuku turns to villainy, typically after society or All Might fails him at his lowest moment.
Virtual Reality
Simulated worlds characters enter, inhabit, or get trapped inside — full-dive games, training constructs, and digital afterlives.
Wandless Magic
A power mechanic where a witch or wizard casts without a wand, usually signalling exceptional raw ability.
Werewolves
Covers lycanthropes wherever they appear — canon wolves, fresh bites, or full werewolf societies layered onto mundane settings.
Wingfic
Gives a character wings — suddenly, secretly, or as reimagined anatomy they've always had.
Witchcraft
Practices magic in its herb-and-hearth register: spell jars, moon phases, kitchen witchery, covens, and craft passed down grandmother to grandchild.
Witches
Practitioners of witchcraft in all fandom's flavors: cottage herbalists, coven politics, hereditary craft, and modern witches with Etsy shops.
Wizards
The scholarly arm of the magical professions — staff-and-tower types, academy-trained spellcasters, and Gandalf-flavored wanderers.
Zombies
Deploys the hungry dead at any scale — full outbreak narratives, single shambling complications, or comedic necromantic accidents.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a trope in fanfiction?
A recurring narrative device or premise — like fake dating, amnesia, or soulmates — that readers recognize and actively search for. Tropes are a shared shorthand for the kind of story you want.
Why do the same tropes appear in every fandom?
Because they reliably generate the emotional beats readers love. A good trope is fandom-agnostic machinery: drop any characters into a 'fake relationship' and you get tension, denial, and eventual payoff.
Related Tag Guides
Fake Relationship & Forced Proximity Tags
Fake dating, marriage of convenience, undercover-as-a-couple, and the eternal 'there was only one bed' — the setups that force feelings into the open.
Soulmate AU Tags
Soulmarks, red strings, and bonds — the alternate-universe tags that make destiny part of the romance.
Time Travel & Fix-It Tags
Time loops, second chances, and the fics that go back to fix what canon broke.
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