Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a website where people share their works with others. It is basically a repository hosting more than 7 million works that comes with a well-designed filter/search system. There are different types of work on AO3, including stories, drawings, and audiobooks.
AO3 was first created to provide a place where fans could put their fanworks. People that are fans of a particular book, movie, group, or videogame form their own circle known as a fandom. The fictions and stories created by these fans are called fanfics (aka fics), the arts are fanart, and the audiobooks based on a fanfic are called podfics. Most of the works on AO3 are fanworks, but there are also original works up there.
The works on AO3 not only cover more than 40,000 fandoms, but also have characters and stories featuring all kinds of sexuality, gender identity, and relationships. In fact, among the numerous works on AO3, M/M (male/male) are the most popular type of pairing and relationship.
If you already know the title of a work or the name of an author you are looking for, the fastest way to find it is to feed the information to google and add the keyword “ao3”. However, when searching for new works in AO3, I highly recommend using the built-in search system. AO3 has an amazing tagging system that comes with a powerful sort and filter function. There are tags for everything: name of the fandom a work belongs to, the rating of the work, warnings, characters that appear in it, the relationship of those characters, the worldview of the work, and anything the artist wants to include.
I recommend checking “warnings” and excluding anything you do not like, this could decrease the chance of encountering works that contain contents you wish to avoid. Altering the setting of “fandoms”, “categories”, and “additional tags” will also help narrow down your search. The “M” and “F” in “categories” represent male and female respectively. Categories let users choose what kinds of romantic and/or sexual relationships they wish to look for in a work.
just to make space and make sure the layout is neat
AO3 supports text-based content the best, you could download any fanfic just by clicking. The work could be downloaded in many formats. For example: PDF, EPUB, AZW3, and HTML.
If you are looking for a way to sharpen your English skills, AO3 also has many resources. Reading the fanfics posted there, you could pick up all kinds of slangs on your way and learn new words. Although there are many brilliant works on AO3, there are also works that contain a lot of typos and grammar errors. Since there is no editor to edit the text before a work gets published, most authors have to do the editing by themselves. Betas are like editors, they help the author revise his or her work. A fic that has a beta or is beta-ed normally has much less spelling and grammar errors.
Aside from fictions, there are also numerous podfics (the audiobook version of a fanfic) that are suitable for practicing English listening on AO3. The advantage of podfics is that they are based on fanfics, which means you could find the full text version of the work. This makes it easy to look up and check words you did not understand when listening to the podfic. Also, the podfics and their text versions are all free to download/stream. In addition, listening to a podfic provides you the chance to get used to different speeds of speech and accents. Because popular works have a higher chance of getting a podfic version, if a fanfic got a podfic, it mostly indicates higher quality with less misspelling and sloppy grammar.
