Nearly Half of Popular Explicit Fanfiction Stories Carry Tags for Aggression, Study Finds

A sweeping new analysis of sexually explicit fanfiction has found that aggressive content is remarkably common in one of the internet’s largest repositories of user-written erotica, with nearly half of sampled stories carrying tags that signal aggression and almost one in five depicting non-consensual acts or rape. The study, published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, offers one of the first systematic looks at an enormous and fast-growing body of written pornography that has largely escaped the scrutiny devoted to visual mainstream pornography. Because the audience for fanfiction skews heavily toward women, the researchers argue that the findings provide a rare and revealing window into women’s sexual preferences, a domain that has historically been understudied in sexuality research.

Fanfiction, broadly defined as literature written by admirers of existing works of fiction that borrows characters, settings, or universes from those stories, has surged in popularity over recent decades. While many fanworks incorporate romantic or sexual elements drawn from their source material, a substantial subset is written partially or exclusively for pornographic purposes. Archive of Our Own, commonly known as AO3, is the leading host for this content, holding millions of stories and attracting traffic that rivals major commercial websites. According to traffic analytics cited by the authors, English-language stories make up roughly 87 percent of the site’s approximately three million explicit works, which is why the research team chose to restrict its sampling to English-language fiction.

The study was conducted by Ezelbahar Metin and Eran Shor of the Department of Sociology at McGill University in Montreal. Despite fanfiction’s popularity as an alternative form of pornography, the authors note that it has garnered far less research attention than visual mainstream pornography or commercial erotic fiction. Content analyses of pornographic videos have repeatedly documented high rates of aggression, including spanking, hitting, choking, and verbal abuse, and have sparked decades of debate about whether such content shapes attitudes toward violence against women. Written erotica produced largely by and for women has rarely been subjected to the same quantitative measurement, leaving a substantial gap in the evidence base.

To fill that gap, the researchers assembled two samples from AO3. The first consisted of the 525 most popular sexually explicit fanfiction stories on the platform, capturing the content most widely read and endorsed by users through the site’s kudos and bookmarking systems. The second was a random sample of 360 explicit stories, designed to represent the broader universe of explicit fanfiction rather than only its most celebrated works. Sampling was drawn across fandoms spanning multiple media categories, including films, television series, books, and video games, with well-known franchises such as Marvel and Star Wars strongly represented. The authors acknowledge a slight oversampling of the Marvel and Star Wars fandoms due to a collection error, which they chose to retain in the analyses, and they excluded the Minecraft fandom because most of its fanfiction involves real people rather than fictional characters.

The core analytical strategy relied on AO3’s distinctive tagging system, a crowdsourced classification infrastructure in which authors voluntarily label their stories with descriptive tags covering pairings, themes, and warnings. This system allowed the researchers to conduct a large-scale textual analysis of aggression-related tags across nearly 900 stories. The results were striking: approximately half of the stories in the overall sample carried at least one tag conveying aggression. Even more notably, acts of non-consensual aggression or rape were present in almost 20 percent of the sample. In the most popular stories, aggression tags appeared at similarly high rates, suggesting that aggressive themes are not a fringe interest but a mainstream feature of the genre’s most-read content.

Because tags depend entirely on voluntary author self-classification, the researchers took the additional step of verifying what the tags actually captured. They conducted a verification content analysis, reading the full text of 60 stories from the sample to determine whether aggression coded in the tags corresponded to aggression depicted in the narratives themselves. This deeper examination suggested that the true prevalence of aggression may in fact be substantially higher than the tag-based estimates indicate. Some authors, the analysis implies, may under-tag aggressive content, either because they do not consider certain depictions aggressive or because they wish to avoid warning labels that might deter readers. The verification step therefore functions as a methodological caution for any researcher hoping to use platform tags as a proxy for content in user-generated corpora.

The findings sit within a rich and contested literature on aggression in sexual media. Prior content analyses of best-selling pornography videos, including work by Bridges and colleagues and by Fritz and colleagues, have documented that a majority of mainstream scenes contain physical aggression, most often directed at women. Studies of online pornography by Shor and Seida and by Klaassen and Peter have similarly found aggression woven into popular content, while meta-analyses by Wright, Tokunaga, and Kraus and by Ferguson and Hartley continue to debate whether consumption of such material is linked to real-world sexual aggression. Written erotica has its own smaller research tradition, with analyses of romance novels, slash fiction, and transgressive themes in commercial erotica documenting long-standing representations of force and domination in fiction marketed to women.

What makes the fanfiction case especially provocative is its audience demographics. Survey evidence and platform research indicate that cisgender women form the largest single category of AO3 users, with nonbinary people forming a substantial second group. The authors frame their analysis as an important step toward illuminating women’s sexual preferences precisely because fanfiction is mostly read and written by women, in contrast to mainstream pornography, whose production and consumption have historically been male-dominated. The high prevalence of aggression tags raises challenging questions for theories that attribute aggressive content in pornography solely to male demand or male-controlled production. When women are the primary authors and readers, the presence of force fantasies in erotica complicates simple supply-side explanations and aligns instead with a broader body of research documenting that sexual fantasies involving force or submission are reported by a nontrivial share of women in general-population studies.

The authors are careful to situate these findings within their limits. Fanfiction is fiction, produced within communities that maintain elaborate norms about consent, warning, and reader choice, and AO3’s tagging architecture is explicitly designed to let readers curate their own exposure. Depicting rape in a story is not equivalent to endorsing it, and a long scholarly tradition in fandom studies reads transgressive fanworks as explorations of power, trauma, and desire rather than straightforward expressions of preference. The researchers also caution that some sampled stories may no longer be available on the platform and that some tags may have been updated since sampling, introducing a degree of temporal uncertainty into the estimates. Still, the scale of the corpus, the combination of a popularity-based and a random sample, and the verification of tags against full texts give the study an unusual degree of robustness for research on user-generated erotica.

The broader significance of the work lies in what it reveals about an enormous and largely invisible pornographic ecosystem. Millions of readers consume explicit fanfiction daily, often on the same devices and under the same roof as mainstream video pornography, yet the genre remains absent from most policy debates, content analyses, and public discussions of sexual media. By quantifying aggression in this space with standard social-scientific methods, Metin and Shor have opened a new empirical front in the study of sexual media, one that centers the preferences of the women who write and read it. Whether the aggressive themes documented here reflect fantasy, aesthetics, narrative convention, or genuine desire is a question the study does not resolve, but it firmly establishes that any complete account of sexual media and aggression must now include the written worlds of fandom alongside the visual industries that have dominated the conversation for half a century.

Subject of Research: Textual analysis of aggressive and non-consensual content in sexually explicit fanfiction on Archive of Our Own

Article Title: The Prevalence of Aggressive Content in Online Sexually Explicit Fanfiction

Article References: The Prevalence of Aggressive Content in Online Sexually Explicit Fanfiction. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-026-03523-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10508-026-03523-0

Keywords: fanfiction, Archive of Our Own, pornography, erotica, aggression, non-consensual content, sexual aggression, content analysis, women's sexual preferences, fandom, sexual media, textual analysis