Friendship — Tag Meaning
The foundational gen tag: friendship as the story's subject, not its backdrop. It covers the forging of new friendships, the maintenance of old ones, and fics that give a canon friendship the focused attention shipping usually monopolizes.
What to Expect From "Friendship" Fics
A friendship explored with full narrative seriousness — its history, its tests, its particular language — and no romantic agenda required.
How to find Friendship fics on AO3
On AO3, click any tag to see every work that uses it, then refine with the "Filters" sidebar — combine it with your fandom or ship, set a rating, or exclude tags you don't want. See our AO3 filtering guide for the full walkthrough.
Browse "Friendship" works on AO3Popular Fics Tagged "Friendship"
Real examples from AO3's most-kudosed works:
Running on Air
by eleventy7
Stilinski's Home for Wayward Wolves
by owlpostagain
journey to the past
by aloneintherain
the beginning of a new and brighter birth
by aloneintherain
Mountains and Badgermolehills
by Glass_Onion
glow in grey
by helloearthlings
Related Tags
Best Friends
Tags the superlative friendship: the designated person, the first call, the one who knows where the bodies are buried because they helped dig. Fics under this tag explore what best-friendship costs and gives — and in shipping contexts, it often marks the friendship that everyone else assumes is more.
Tag guide →
Friendship/Love
The canonical tag for the blurred territory where deep friendship and love overlap or transition — bonds that resist clean labels, or friendships in the slow process of becoming something more. Authors use it when the relationship's exact nature is the question the fic is asking.
Tag guide →
Male-Female Friendship
The canonical tag asserting that a man and a woman are friends — just friends, fully friends. It exists partly as counter-programming against the assumption that any M/F pairing must be romantic, and it flags fics celebrating cross-gender friendship canon often underwrites or ship-teases.
Tag guide →
Platonic Relationships
The canonical declaration that the central bonds are non-romantic — and emphatically not lesser for it. In an archive oriented around shipping, this tag stakes out space for fics arguing that friendship, partnership, and platonic devotion deserve the same narrative weight as romance.
Tag guide →
More Family & Friendship Tags
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