"squick free" someone writes on their wholesome family fic about married characters expecting a baby.

I read it and am extremely squicked.

You do not know what squicks other people. "Squick" is not a category of elements, it is a description of a reaction.

Squick is literally a personal thing, you literally cannot know what squicks another person.

Same goes for triggers, by the way. You can't guarantee something is trigger-free because literally anything can be a trigger because the human brain can be weird like that sometimes.

No no, actually there's a perfect way to write an absolutely squick free fanfic! Plenty of writers do it successfully every day!

Here.

Blank documents squick me out because they remind me of all my unstarted writing projects. :/

guys. c'mon.

oh my goddd

Okay, for anyone ACTUALLY unsure and wanting to learn: "squick" is an old fandom term. It means something that grosses you out or makes you deeply uncomfortable, but doesn't give you as intense negative reactions as a trigger. They are incredibly personal, though often times, just like with triggers, you can tag relatively common squicks.

For me, mpreg is a squick. It makes me deeply uncomfortable, but it doesn't send me into a panic spiral, a deep depression, or make me angry like reading about eye trauma does.

My cousins in Lannister, ‘squick’ didn’t even originate in fandom.

Also useful to note that ‘squick’ is specifically used to mean “this isn’t for me, personally” without adding a moral judgement to it. A simple easy way to say ‘no, thank you but you do you’. Unlike ‘cringe’ which has negative connotations. Squicks are also more than just uncomfortable.

Daddy kink makes me uncomfortable

Degradation squicks me out

Hand trauma is a trigger

First known usage of "squick" was in 1991. It's not some new term that was made up for this post.

It's a portmanteau of Squeamish and Ick.

Modern parlance would translate it as "A thing that gives me the ick"

Hope this helps, kids ignorant of and derisive towards fandom history.

AO3 was specifically made for the stuff likely to be purged from other sites.

It was built around "we need to own the servers" so we wouldn't have to deal with anyone else's judgment calls about what was acceptable in fanfic: Not corporate sponsors, not evangelical religious groups, not "save the children" activists... and not other fans who think that The Gross Stuff should be banned from public view, only shared via private email after you've sent in a request heavily laden with special keywords.

Some of the founders remembered when slash fanfic was kept under the table at the dealer's room, distributed with brown paper wrappers only to people who knew to ask for it specifically.

And they said: Fuck that. Our art is not a crime and we're not going to be ashamed of it. If you are ashamed to have your art next to it - there's a whole wide internet that's ready to host your G-rated genfic.

AO3 was built for the stuff that was unwelcome elsewhere.

Don't make me tap the sign but this is the sign:

I don’t know about others but the only reason I put both is so that whichever someone clicks on, they will find my fic. So if there is supposed to be rules, I guarantee you that no writer knows these ones. We can barely get people to comment, you think we’re going to specifically choose & or / ? Hell no.

I’ve been in fandom for twenty years, and “/” means romance and “&” means no romance was literally one of the first things I learned. It dates back to Star Trek fanfiction of the 70s. I’m boggled by the fact that anyone who’s been reading fic on AO3 for more than like five minutes wouldn’t know that, and I’m curious as to what fanfic community you come out of.

I don’t think that tagging with both is actually going to get your fic in front of more readers. People looking for romance often exclude the “&” tag if there are too many gen fics tagged with both. People looking for gen often exclude the “/” tag if there are too many fics with both. So rather than putting your fic in front of twice the people, you are in fact more likely to get your target audience ignoring your fic because it has a tag they don’t want.

Also, by overtagging you are more likely to annoy potential readers away from your fic than entice them. A fic tagged both & and / better have both romance and a ton of platonic interaction between the two characters, like a slow burn romance friends-to-lovers arc. If it isn’t, I’m going to be very unhappy because the author lied to me with the tags to try and trick me into reading a fic with deceptive advertising.

When I’m in a fandom and see tagging where some of the tags don’t really apply and are just there to get it in front of more eyes, I’m going to assume one of two things. Either the author is a newb who doesn’t know anything, or the author is purposefully spamming the tags because they don’t care about lying to their potential audience and think that “spray and pray” is an effective tactic. In the first case, their writing probably will not be very good, so why bother reading their fic. In the second case, the fact that I can’t trust the tags to be accurate means I’m not going to read it to see if it’s interesting even if it has a tag I like. Chances are, that tag isn’t actually in the fic anyway, and even if it is, by spam-tagging the author is making the archive harder to use for everybody. Why would I reward bad behavior with attention? No. Far better to mute the author and move on.

More to the point--and no, I will never stop harping on this, because we have GOT to stop leaving our strongest points in the drawer--it doesn't matter if you heard of this convention before joining AO3 or not, because it's in AO3's tagging FAQ.

[id: the "How do I tag a romantic or platonic relationship?" section of the tagging FAQ here.]

"But Jo," you may argue, because you're wrong. "There's no way to find that without digging through site FAQ menus, and that's really inaccessible!"

sure

except

that when you go to post a new fic, and you go to put in those relationship tags, you see this

[id: the Relationships field]

and that tooltip, the one THERE TO EXPLAIN HOW THE FIELD WORKS, links to the Relationships segment of the tag FAQ, which explicitly lays this shit out.

I don't care if you don't know fandom history. I don't care if you've never heard a goddamn word about the spirk shippers. I don't care if you've never been exposed to fandom culture in your life. It is, frankly, not fair to expect those things of everyone.

What is entirely fair to expect is that you will READ THE INSTRUCTIONS PRINTED NEXT TO THE FUCKING BOX, actually. Forget fandom conventions. It genuinely doesn't matter whether you agree with or respect fandom conventions. This is a site policy. This is explicitly how tagging on AO3, specifically, works.