I swear this happens every couple of months (either on Ao3 or here) where people shout about how Ao3 endorses child porn because of the underage tag
you know what, there are actually some really grizzly fics out there that I would never touch, I think they’re so gross and I wish they’d never been written… but there’s a handy dandy filter we have now that excludes the underage tag (so you don’t have to see that - it was made just for you!) or you can also, you know, just scroll past and not click on the fic!!!
and on that note, not everything under the underage tag is child porn… there are thousands of fics marked underage because a 19 year old and a 16 year old have sex/engage in sexual activites… is that child porn now?
NO
I’ve also read numerous, so well-written they should be novels, fics where rape/non-con of adults or minors is used as a plot point… the character(s) get to work through it, heal and sometimes maybe find love…
it’s not all bad - you want to start a purge/banning of Ao3 over tags that encompass a whole bunch more than just child porn and violent sexual fantasies
it’s one of the few quality sites for fics we have left
Don’t worry; AO3 is not going to start banning/purging the underage fics. AO3 was founded so that fics that got thrown out of other archives would have a place to stay.
There were discussions, when AO3 was set up, about what needed the “underage” tag; they eventually settled on “human under the age of 18 having sex” - this was mostly for the benefit of Australian fans, who could get in legal trouble just by reading such fics.
Nonhumans? No standards. Nobody knows what underage is for elves. Nor dragons. Nor clones that were decanted yesterday with a hundred years’ of mental training.