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AO3 shutdown unites fan fiction community
First, it would be a few hours. Then, it would be a few days. Then, a message popped up: “We estimate that service restoration for AO3 will take around 2 weeks, but it could be up to 4 weeks.”
AO3, also known as Archive of Our Own, is an online archive site where people from all over the world can publish fan fiction and original works for viewers to read and interact with freely.
News of its prolonged shutdown wrecked many dedicated AO3 readers and writers, took social media by force and even made national headlines. At MSU, the shutdown made students realize that more people on campus care about AO3 than they thought.
Harry Foster, a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in English with a background of studying pop culture, is a self-proclaimed fan fiction expert. Outside of his studies in pop culture, Foster has been reading fan fiction since 2009 and has been authoring it since 2011.
Foster said there is deeper importance in the role of fan fiction and fandom in our society. He believes it can be a way of protest, a place to explore sexual freedom and kink with little consequence.
Foster referenced specifically the “Harry Potter” fandom and its separation from the author of the series, J.K. Rowling, whose political views do not align with those of the fandom’s majority.
“It’s not just, ‘Oh I feel tension between these two characters in the original series,’ we get to say, we don’t agree with that, here’s Draco making out with Harry Potter,” Foster said.
When it comes to the current AO3 shutdown, Foster notices a beautiful community of people who speak to pop culture and have pop culture speak back to them coming together.
“We all love telling weird, crazy, funny, silly, deep, psychologically complex stories to each other,” Foster said, “and I don’t know a thing about you other than the fact that you love this story as much as I do.”
Marketing sophomore Daisy Hernandez-Macias also feels this sense of community through AO3, remembering when more people hopped on the site when “Heated Rivalry” released earlier in 2026.
“(AO3) allows (users) to find a community they might not be able to find back at home,” Hernandez-Macias said. “It’s hard to not be in that community for such a long amount of time.”
Political science pre-law sophomore Kene Wachuku said that she had recently been taking AO3 for granted, not reading it as often as she normally would. The shutdown has made her notice how much she misses it.
“When I was just getting into fan fiction, it was still like no one really wanted to talk about it and I felt like I was kind of alone,” Wachuku said. “But it’s kind of eye-opening and really cool to see so many people that I never would have expected have this in common with me.”
The attention the site is drawing in its cessation seems to be a double-edged sword of sorts. Foster and some students agree that it could invite more people into the AO3 community, but Hernandez-Macias worries that it could change the dynamic of such a tight-knit environment.
