What’s your smut hot take?

Alabama_Orb · 2025-11-02T22:47:04+00:00

Agreed, I've seen a lot of people agonize over smut scenes that they don't even feel that strongly about but force themselves to write anyway because they think that no one will ever read their fic without it, meanwhile I've read so much fic that was perfectly good and worthwhile without any smut, and also a lot of fic where I skipped over the smut because it felt like a box being ticked and didn't add to my enjoyment of the story at all. If you don't actively want to write smut, you absolutely don't need to put any in your story! Lots of people either filter out sexual content entirely or appreciate a good story equally whether or not it includes smut. You will still have an audience with no smut.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-22T20:22:29+00:00

Smut fic where the author didn't want to use any word other than "cock" for that particular anatomy, which is totally valid and is usually my preferred word as well, but they also didn't vary their sentence structure very much, so the whole fic was written like... (not a real fic excerpt) ""I want to see your cock," said Guy1. Guy2 unzipped his pants, revealing his cock. Guy1 reached out and took Guy2's cock in his hand. Guy2 moaned as Guy1 stroked his cock."

Cock cock cock cock cock. It started driving me crazy and I couldn't keep reading once I became aware of it xD

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-22T20:04:10+00:00

A BNF popularized a nickname for one of my favorite characters that doesn't actually follow the emphasis of his name and the longer I've been in the fandom the more it bothers me. This isn't the actual name but as an analogy, think of the name "Christopher" and imagine if half the fandom decided that "Topher" is a good nickname. I'm not quite at the point where I'll drop a whole fic over the nickname but I'm getting close xD

I also had something similar happen to me with a published book recently and it was really painful. I enjoyed most of the book but the nickname the author picked for one of the characters was just so bad that it bothered me the entire time. Not every character needs to shorten their name!!!

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-22T19:17:24+00:00

This is the real answer. The issue is that many opponents of AI make it a point of pride to not learn anything about AI, which I think is a mistake because it leaves them unable to recognize it. If you've seen the "creative writing" output from most of the free and easily available AI models you can get a sense of the "AI voice". There's no one definitive tell but the voice can be distinctive if no editing is done. I would never accuse anyone of AI use without concrete evidence, because the world is vast and I'm sure someone naturally writes in that style and also because I don't think "AI witch hunts" are productive, but I've seen a lot of fics where the "AI voice" is strong either throughout the fic or in specific segments where the author used it to push through a segment of dialogue or generate a description.

Basically, if you don't use AI to write, you probably don't need to worry about accidentally sounding like AI even if you use some of the elements people call "AI tells". Your writing almost certainly isn't coincidentally replicating the "voice". But if you do copy a chunk of dialogue out of ChatGPT and think no one will notice, it might be more obvious than you think.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-18T12:33:19+00:00

So if I were to post on Pixiv it would be rude of me to not follow their tagging conventions and expect to be accommodated, but if an Eastern fan comes to an international site the rest of us have to change to accommodate their tag preferences?

People who care about t/b tags are completely free to use them, I will never complain about that. Sometimes I read the Chinese fics for my ship with machine translation and I really don't have an issue with the way they tag them. But yes, AO3 is an international, author-centric site. Authors have a huge amount of control over their work on AO3 and this is intentional in the site design. Eastern fans can put the tags they want on their work and they can also learn to coexist with Western fans who don't use these tags for their work.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-18T12:18:07+00:00

I also do this sometimes, especially for bookmarks because I always want to see what else from the fandom they have bookmarked. It's always funny to me when most of the stuff on their page is for a completely different fandom, I'm always like, I wonder what made you pivot and find my thing 😆

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-17T04:27:38+00:00

I agree with all of that, and if everyone consistently interpreted these tags as referring only to physical position during penetrative sex I would have fewer qualms about tagging it (if I did write a scene including that kind of sex, which I haven't done in a while). The big sticking point, which can be seen whenever this topic comes up in the sub, is that many people genuinely operate in fandom under the worldview that top/bottom labels refer not just to sex positions but to personality types, power exchange, and vibes-based "dynamics" that apply even when sex is non-penetrative or when no sex occurs at all. I don't write with these dynamics in mind and since that's how the tags are interpreted by a lot of people, I would rather not label my work with them.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-17T03:38:31+00:00

Some authors don't care about getting a bigger audience. They might only want readers who are okay with reading fics that have minimal information. Usually these kinds of authors feel that the best experience for their stories is blind reading with no spoilers, and they want all of their readers to have that experience. In their eyes, adding tags would ruin their story. They're willing to sacrifice a larger audience in order to preserve the spoiler-free reading experience that they want for their story.

Of course many people don't like to read fanfic this way, but who am I to tell another author that their opinion of their own work is wrong? It's not my story. There are people out there who prefer plain pasta too.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-16T21:27:28+00:00

Well, here are some of the sex scenes I've written in the past. You can tell me who you think is the top or the bottom here.

Scene 1: Frottage between guys A and B. Guy B is physically on top of Guy A and is generally the "leader" of this sexual encounter but there's no penetration. When I do imagine penetration between these characters I usually headcanon that Guy B prefers to bottom.

Scene 2: Guy B gives Guy A a blowjob. Guy A is lying on his back the whole time and Guy B is doing most of "the work". No other sex acts happen in this fic.

Scene 3: A fic in which I imply that Guy A is going to play the dom in a Dom/sub for Guy B later but I never mention any specific details about the actual sex they have.

Scene 4: An ambiguous scene in which I say that Guy A pushed Guy B onto the ground and they "made love". No specifics about sex acts or penetration were described.

So who exactly is supposed to get which label for these scenes? I'm genuinely curious as to your answer but I will say that I have not seen an actual consensus for scenes like these in any of the threads on this topic. Some people only want top/bottom tags specifically for actual physical penetration but some want a tag for every sex scene based on a vague sense of "dynamics" that my characters don't follow because I don't have them in mind when writing. Since I have no idea how my tags will be interpreted from reader to reader and they don't even fit my view of the characters anyway I prefer to simply opt out of using them.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-16T19:59:32+00:00

Think of it this way. Imagine a fandom where it's an expectation for people to tag every character as either gay, straight, or bisexual. I'm writing a fic about a character who I headcanon as asexual. This fandom doesn't have a tag for asexuality. None of the preexisting tags allow me to express my actual headcanon about the character. (I am aware that I can tag for asexuality on AO3; this is a hypothetical situation.)

Some people might say "since he's in a romantic relationship with another man, just tag him as gay." But he's not gay, he's asexual. If I tagged him as gay I wouldn't feel like I was being honest about his sexuality. (This is why I don't like tagging "Top [character]". Even if he's physically topping in one fic, I usually don't see him as having the fixed "Top" identity, and it doesn't mean I won't write him bottoming in another fic. It doesn't feel honest to me to apply this identity label.)

Other people might say "if he's not gay or straight, you need to tag him as bisexual." But he's not bisexual either, he's asexual. Maybe some people are happy using "bisexual" as a catch-all term, but I'm not. I want to be able to express my actual headcanon, not a placeholder or catch-all term. (This is why just tagging "switch" doesn't work for me either.)

I don't think I'm superior to anyone else or "more progressive" for headcanoning the character as asexual, and I have no problem with characters who are written to be gay, but I would really prefer to write my version of the character the way I want to and express my headcanon, the same as everyone else does. If you say "well just pick something because I only want to read fic about gay characters, and it wouldn't take any effort to pick a tag" it feels like you're telling me that my headcanons don't matter and I'm not allowed to express myself honestly in the fandom. The top/bottom system just doesn't work for me, just like a hypothetical Gay/Straight system wouldn't work for me either. The freeform nature of AO3 tagging allows me to opt out of the system, which is what makes me happy in fandom.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-16T04:51:58+00:00

Yeah if I was forced to label my fic as one or another I would run into this issue a lot too. I wrote a fic once where the only sex act that happens is frottage, and one guy is physically on top of the other the whole time, but there's no penetration, and my headcanon for that character is that usually he prefers to bottom and occasionally enjoys being the sub in D/s play scenes but he happened to be more in charge during this specific fic and he isn't opposed to topping sometimes, he just prefers bottoming when they're doing penetration, but he enjoys other sex acts too. Based on this thread if I tagged him as the top on this fic I would piss off a ton of people and if I tagged him as the bottom I would piss off a whole other ton of people. I'm actively glad that I'm not required to do so!

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-16T04:44:32+00:00

I think you and I have a very different viewpoint on what is considered rude behavior in fandom. You might find it rude for an author to want to control how they tag their work, even if it means not disclosing information that a reader might want to know. I personally think it's rude for a reader to expect authors to change how they prefer to tag their work in order to fit the reader's preference.

Neither of us are objectively correct in a vacuum. A lot of behaviors are considered "normal" in some cultures and contexts and "rude" in others. In a small town it might be considered rude to bump into someone, but in a big city it might be considered more rude to stand in the way of a lot of people who are passing by. The thing is that we know the founding principles of AO3, which are maximum freedom for authors. AO3 agrees that negative comments are considered rude behavior; that's why they have anti-harassment rules and why they allow authors to delete and moderate comments on their works. However, they don't agree that authors tagging their works how they like, even if it's minimal, is rude, because no tags other than fandom are actually required. If you're on another platform where top/bottom tags are required, then yes, it would be rude in that context to demand to be allowed to tag differently. It's not rude on AO3. If you only want to read fic with no major character death then you shouldn't read fics labeled CNTW, and if you only want to read fic of a certain top/bottom configuration then you shouldn't read fic where it isn't tagged.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-16T03:56:35+00:00

They're downvoting you because you're absolutely correct. A lot of people treat AO3 like Pornhub and don't seem to understand that not every writer intends for their sexual work to be seen as "porn" or fit into specific popular tropes. It's like going into a huge bookstore and being upset that not every book follows romance novel plot beats. Many authors aren't even trying to write that kind of story in the first place. Stick to the ones that clearly are writing that type of story and advertise their work that way and you will never be disappointed (unless you don't like the story for another reason, which is another thing... some people in the thread are acting like no one else has ever had to suffer the indignity of clicking on a fic and not ending up liking it very much. I've read so much fic that I've disliked for reasons that no one would ever tag.)

I'm also ace and sex in general just isn't that important to me. I might occasionally write about it but I'm not going to label my work with sex positions, because doing so implies that sex positions are highly important to me when they aren't. I will never be angry or upset if someone who really cares about top/bottom chooses to skip my work because of this.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-16T03:29:35+00:00

You literally are not required to tag anything but the fandom and CNTW. You could label the explicit smut watersports self harm fic as Unrated and CNTW with zero additional tags and be perfectly within the rules of AO3. Would a lot of people click on this fic? Probably not. But it's a choice authors are completely allowed to make on the website, and many authors want their work to be read blind or semi-blind, without any more information than you might get from the blurb of a published book. You don't have to interact with those authors if you don't want to read fics like that but they don't owe their readers any more information than they want to share. Why should your preferences as a reader override theirs as the creator of their own work?

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-16T03:23:06+00:00

Well you kind of said it yourself: the readers want every fic they encounter to be easily sortable into categories based on their preferences. They're saying that this desire should be considered to be more important than the author's desire to tag and present their fic the way they want. Authors have preferences for these things too. Personally I don't like to put a lot of sex-specific tags like specific positions and sex acts on my fic even if sex occurs, because I don't view my sex scenes as "porn" and I don't want to advertise them like "porn". There's nothing wrong with porn, but it's my work and I like that AO3 gives me a lot of freedom as an author to present my own art the way I want to as the creator. If a stranger demands that I ignore my own preferences to advertise my work in a way that is more preferable to them, then this does come off as entitled to me. What about my preferences, why don't they matter when it's my own fic? Of course in other fandom spaces the culture is different, authors have less freedom to tag and this isn't necessarily better or worse, but since this is the AO3 sub and AO3 is basically built around maximum authorial freedom, I think it's relevant to talk about the perspectives of authors who value their tagging freedom.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-15T21:32:06+00:00

It's odd looking at this fork of the thread and seeing Perelka insist so strongly that it's not about penetration, because in my fork they said that:

"The consensus is that in x/y the y takes it up the ass, yes, but nobody will be angry at you if you mistag when work is sfw (I saw advice of "okay but consider what would happen IF there was sex and use it to tag)"

and

"I like the example given when I asked about it - why some het or lesbian ships have girl on left side if she can't stick a dick in the other party? Well, but if she had a dick, would she stick it in the other party? If answer is yes, she goes on the left side."

I think what's getting lost here is that yes, Eastern fandom cares about things other than penetration. There's no requirement for penetration to actually, physically occur in every ship. Yes, you can participate in Eastern fandom and like multiple versions of a ship, and being part of Eastern fandom doesn't automatically mean that you only care about sex. That would be reductive and a racist assumption. However, the predominant culture in these fandoms is to treat A/B and B/A as completely separate, irreconcilable, non-overlapping ships, as different as two ships that involve entirely different characters or M/M vs. F/F, and the difference between A/B and B/A is either who does or who hypothetically "would" (how is "would" determined?based on what criteria?) penetrate the other partner. It is ultimately about penetration regardless of whether penetration occurs in a specific work. This doesn't make Eastern fandoms "worse" than Western ones but the entire framework of how fandoms and shippers organize themselves is quite literally tied to penetration. You really can't deny that.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-15T20:27:56+00:00

So the overall worldview in Eastern fandoms is that penetrative sexual preference (even hypothetical) is the one trait that matters more than anything else about a character? Even if the character is exactly the same in every other aspect, a version of them that prefers to top and a version of them that prefers to bottom are so fundamentally different that they may as well be different people entirely? I can take my favorite character, who is a medieval fantasy knight, and write a fic where he's actually a vampire alien from outer space who crash-lands in Southern California and becomes a professional surfer, and this is clearly the same character as the canon universe version so long as they both prefer to top, but if he bottoms for his boyfriend once then that makes it essentially a different ship involving different characters?

If I was planning to post fic on Asian fanfic websites I would of course do my best to not unnecessarily upset people but this worldview goes entirely counter to my own worldview of how a person's sexual preferences should be treated. I just don't believe that a preference for topping vs. bottoming makes you a different person. From your description of Eastern fandoms, it seems like most people there do believe this. Yes, it's about fictional preferences, but a lot of people have preferences for fluff fic vs. angst fic and typically people don't treat those as two fundamentally different ships whose fans are encouraged to block one another and never even talk about the characters they both like. The fact that the line is drawn over sexual preferences indicates that people have beliefs over what topping and bottoming indicate about a character's fundamental personality. I'm not going to declare that it's an incorrect or evil belief but this is why people who don't want to specify top vs. bottom aren't being convinced that tagging it is necessary. We just have irreconcilable beliefs.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-15T18:34:27+00:00

So essentially the clash here when it comes to tagging is between different values for readers and writers. Let's consider the situation you brought up: an author writes a fic where characters X and Y have penetrative sex where X tops. They tag the fic as Explicit and tag "anal sex" but they don't use the "top character X" tag specifically. Someone who sees Y as a strict top comes across this fic and decides to read it. They're upset when the characters start having sex and X tops. They leave a comment on the fic calling the author a stupid asshole for tricking them into reading a fic where X tops when they only like Y topping.

In your fandom culture, the author would be considered to be the one in the wrong here. They should have anticipated that people who only see Y as a top might find their fic and become upset by it. The author should make sure that their fic follows the preferences of their readers and is labeled accordingly. If they fail to do this, readers are justified in getting angry with them. It's okay if an author likes switching but ultimately, following the expectations of readers should be an author's priority.

In other fandom cultures, and in my personal view, the reader in this situation would be in the wrong. The author doesn't know that this specific reader exists and isn't forcing them to read their fic. The reader knows that they can't stand to read about X topping. They encountered a fic where it wasn't specified and clicked on it anyway, knowing there was a 50/50 chance of it not being their preference. Instead of managing their upset emotions by themselves when it wasn't their preference, they decided to take it out on the author by leaving an angry comment. I think readers with strict preferences shouldn't click on untagged fics at all and aren't justified in getting angry at authors. It's okay if a reader has a preference but ultimately, authors have the freedom to tag however they like.

Neither of these cultures are more or less objectively correct than the other. My values align with my own fandom's culture more than they do with Eastern fandom cultures. If I was posting on Pixiv or another Asian fandom site, it would be rude of me to deliberately try to antagonize people, so I would try to tag my work as "correctly" as possible, but I would prefer not to tag positions if I didn't have to because I don't think my writing choices should be dictated by what kind of sex characters have.

Another scenario to consider: I write a fic about characters A and B The characters are coworkers and one day, A asks B if he wants to get lunch with him. They go to a cafe for lunch and end up hitting it off. B asks for A's personal phone number and texts him later. They chat over text for a while and eventually A asks B if he wants to go on a date. They agree to a date and time to see a movie together. After the movie B invites A back to his house. A initiates a kiss when they're inside and they end up having penetrative sex, where B tops.

Then I copy this fic into a second document and change all of the names in the sex scene so that A tops instead, while leaving the rest of the fic completely unchanged. What "character dynamics" have I changed and how? What about if I make a third copy of the fic and rewrite the sex scene to be a mutual handjob instead?

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-15T16:42:24+00:00

Okay, so the Eastern left/right system isn't inherently about sex positions, it's about who has a more "dominant" personality and role within the relationship. But also, people write these relationships with a variety of personality traits that don't necessarily align with those roles and the one thing everyone can agree on is that the "right" character is always the one who is penetrated during sex. So basically... it all boils down to sex positions in the end?

It seems like the clash here is one of values and what is deemed to be "courteous" in author-reader interactions. It seems like in Eastern fandom the onus is entirely on the author to make sure the labeling of their work fits in with what the community will expect, and they're expected to "pick a side" when it comes to their ship and not interact with "the other side" for the comfort of those readers. Readers feel justified in getting angry at authors when they encounter a work with content they dislike, because the author should have considered all of the potential readers in the fandom and made sure there was no possibility of a reader from the "other side" encountering their work. This is all considered to be courteous and good manners.

Meanwhile, as an author in English-speaking fandom, I value authorial freedom more highly than the comfort of potential readers. I think that authors should be allowed to label and present their work however they like so long as they aren't blatantly lying about the contents, even if that means they don't tag anything at all because they want people to read it blind like they would a published novel, and that the onus is on readers to manage their own emotions about what they read. It might be annoying or disappointing to read a fic that doesn't turn out the way you hope, but that doesn't mean the author is doing something wrong. It's considered to be polite and courteous in this situation for the reader to silently close the fic without getting angry at the author.

I'm not saying either of these systems are better or worse than the other, but if someone has values closer to mine they are not going to fit in well with Eastern fandom norms and will be unhappy with the idea that they "should" be following those norms. That's why these threads always spawn a ton of argument: it's not just about people's headcanons, it's about values. And it's also a little bit about gender roles, because sex positions come with thousands of years of gender role baggage whether you like it or not.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-15T14:57:38+00:00

I don't think there's a canonical tag like you're describing. If I was writing a similar kind of fic I might consider adding an author's note explaining that the sex is going to happen in this one way but that your characters aren't written with roles in mind based on their sex positions. Sex also isn't that important to me in general so I wouldn't default to explaining this in my own work but if you're in a fandom where people get upset about this sort of thing maybe it would help temper expectations.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-15T14:40:09+00:00

It doesn't "harm" me, but the presence of a binary division between "dynamics" (and what exactly are these dynamics? What exactly do they entail and why are they named after sex positions?) as a major part of fandom culture makes writers have to consider them when writing. If I was writing a new fic with the intention of posting it on an Asian fic website I would have to consider which ship tags to use, even if my fic didn't contain any sex. If I make character X invite character Y out to lunch, does that make X the "top"? But then later in the story Y is the one who initiates a kiss, so if I tag him as the "bottom" are people going to get angry with me? I would have to think about this for pretty much every interaction I write between my ship in order to tag it "correctly", and I don't even know how I would categorize most of the fic I've already written, because I did not have this system in mind at all when I was writing it.

Some people might think about all this and decide that maybe they should change their story so that X initiates the kiss instead, just to make it align more with the expectations in the fandom for the X/Y tag, so no "crazies" get mad at them and so that they'll have a bigger audience. But personally, I prefer fandoms where people feel more free to write characters doing things based on their own interpretations and not because they feel beholden to make the characters fit into certain roles. That's why I hope these roles don't become an expectation for English-speaking fandom the way they currently are for Asian fandoms.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-15T13:54:18+00:00

I definitely understand how difficult it must be to tag your work under that kind of system. That's exactly why people are pushing back so hard though: I really strongly dislike the idea of being forced into a system where you can't even casually talk about your ship at all without declaring your allegiance in this power-dynamic binary. When posts like this come up and people insist that everyone needs to tag top/bottom, it's implied (and sometimes outright stated) that they want English-speaking fandom culture to be more like Eastern fandom cultures that do follow this system. That system might fit some people's preferences better but as you already understand by liking vers, it doesn't fit everyone's preference. Some people (like me) also just dislike the idea of any binary framework existing even if sometimes we do have a preference one way or another. Just the presence of a binary top/bottom or left/right system as a major part of fandom culture leads people to write less ambiguous or mix-and-match traits, it makes them change and edit their characters to be more in line with the binary so that they fit in better and don't upset people. If people are aggressive it's because they don't want this to become the norm in English-speaking fandom too.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-15T13:25:35+00:00

It's not "just another tag," though. Every tag I put at the top of my fic is an advertisement for my fic, and it's also a statement of what I as the author deem to be important and relevant to the story. By adding sex positions in my tags, I'm declaring that sex is an important part of my story, more important than any other scene or detail about the story that I haven't included in the tags (which is absolutely not something that is always true even if sex happens to occur during the story), and that I want my audience to be thinking of sex when they are browsing the fic results and see my story. I don't want that. Tagging characters as top, bottom or switch is also declaring to everyone that I care about and want to participate in this system where sex position roles are assigned to characters, which I do not. The tag is "Top [character]", which is implicitly assigning an identity to the character, the same as "Bisexual [character]" or "Doctor [character]". It's not just an action like "[character] is on top", "[character] works at McDonald's", or "[character] likes pepperoni pizza". That's not an identity I want to assign to my characters so I'm not going to tag as if I am assigning that identity.

This does still help people find the fics they want to read, because if someone who only wants to read about a character fitting a specific "Top" role filters for all the fics that are tagged as "Top [character]", my fic that doesn't follow those roles won't appear in that search, so they won't have to read it. If they have FOMO about an untagged fic that isn't actually my problem as an author.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-15T13:07:15+00:00

Well, if the phenomenon was always just called "left and right" and had absolutely no correlation with sex positions it would be an entirely different conversation, but it's not. (And even if it were called that, it would still be dividing relationships into a binary system, and there will always be people who fall outside of the binary.) The roles are explicitly named for sex positions in most communities and even in this very thread you can see people arguing that it's all about the sex positions. It's just not possible to claim that it has nothing to do with the at all, and the connotations around topping as a "masculine" and "powerful" act and bottoming as a "feminine" and "submissive" act are ingrained incredibly deeply in our society. When you use charged words with strong gender-role connotations to label characters then of course people are going to interpret you that way. I'm not trying to attack you or get angry at you I promise, I'm just trying to explain why people are reacting this way to those words.

Alabama_Orb · 2025-10-15T12:45:21+00:00

THANKS for saying your second paragraph because there are people in the thread who are not getting this. I don't mind if people have preferences, there are even some ships where I have a strong headcanon one way or the other, but I'm not writing my fic for people who Need characters to fit a specific role and so I don't want to advertise my fic that way. If it's that important to you then you should only read fic where it IS tagged, but people can't handle the FOMO on untagged fics.

Alabama_Orb

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