Archive of Our Own / AO3

Overview

Archive of Our Own / AO3 is the fan-work archive whose loss of access in China is the central institutional consequence discussed in EP113.

Current Profile

The episode presents AO3 as a shared creative resource affected by conflict around a fan work involving 肖战. Because the archive served users beyond the original dispute, its reported inaccessibility transformed a narrow offense claim into a conflict over community infrastructure, speech, reporting, and collective punishment. The source does not independently prove the technical or legal chain from fan reports to the access change.

Key Characteristics

• Archive and community infrastructure for transformative and fan-created work.
• Shared resource whose disruption affected people outside the originating fandom conflict.
• Case in which platform access, content rules, and organized reporting became entangled.
• Symbol around which counter-mobilization expanded toward an idol, fans, and commercial brands.

Evidence

• Community-infrastructure role: EP113-充满偏见的互联网时代，我们更接近真相了嘛？ says the archive’s reported loss of access mobilized creators and readers beyond the disputed work.
• Causal boundary: EP113-充满偏见的互联网时代，我们更接近真相了嘛？ associates fan reporting with the access change but supplies no independent platform, regulatory, or network evidence establishing the full chain.

Qualifications

This profile is based on one retrospective conversational source. It does not establish AO3’s complete governance, ownership, legal status, China-access history, user composition, or the precise cause of inaccessibility.

What Changed

• Created a bounded platform profile centered on shared-infrastructure harm and causal uncertainty.

Relationships

• 肖战 - entertainer whose fandom controversy supplied the episode’s immediate context.
• Weaponized Reporting / 举报武器化 - mechanism through which a dispute may impose costs on an entire community resource.
• Platform Community Governance - broader question of how content rules and platform access affect communities.
• LOFTER - adjacent fan-creation platform mentioned elsewhere in the wiki’s account of the same 2020 controversy.