Why I Had To Let AO3 Go
or, The Slow Burnout of Fandom Culture
(written October 2025)
I used to love Archive of Our Own. It felt like a haven—open access, no ads, no paywalls, and the promise of community through shared stories.
But over the past few years, that feeling has eroded until the very act of posting there triggers my PTSD symptoms. That’s not a metaphor. It’s a pattern I’ve documented in my own mental health journals: within hours of uploading a fic to AO3, I begin to spiral—panic, intrusive thoughts, body tension, nausea, the works. And it lingers for days.
The roots of this go deeper than any one platform. Between 2020 and 2024, I endured sustained online harassment from a clique of Tolkien fandom elites led by someone I now refer to as Spicehole.
In April 2020, Spiced ghosted me without warning and deleted all the gift fics she had written for me. I was confused and hurt—especially since we had been friends and creative collaborators. Shortly after, I began hearing that she was accusing me of writing her OC, Tindómion, being burned to death without her permission.
For context:
When I provided screenshots showing her praise of that very story after the supposed offense, most people ignored it. They chose her word over mine. The whisper campaign began in earnest, and I watched my reputation rot from the inside out in spaces I once called home.
Then in 2023, Spiced began a new narrative: that I had “stolen money” from her. The “money” in question was a PayPal donation she sent me in summer 2019 unsolicited, with no conditions or expectations. Still, she framed it as betrayal and paired it with a heap of classist and ableist vitriol, all while her clique publicly congratulated themselves on being liberal and inclusive.
There was also, unsurprisingly, a strong current of transphobia—shaming me as a trans man who writes sexually explicit fic, even though we had not spoken or associated in years. No one was forcing her to read my work, yet she and others hate-read and weaponized it against me anyway. By then, I was hearing secondhand that several people in the Silmarillion fandom—many of whom I’d never even spoken to—wanted me “gone.” Erased.
The hardest part to admit is how deep the rot went—how it wasn’t just about fandom anymore. What happened with Spiced and her clique didn’t exist in isolation. It hit all the same bruises I’d carried since childhood. The manipulation, the public shaming wrapped in performative compassion, the way she weaponized empathy and played the victim while quietly destroying my reputation—every bit of it echoed my mother’s tactics when I was growing up. My mother, the “long‑suffering parent of an autistic child,” who used my difference as her spotlight and my pain as her prop.
So when Spiced started doing her own Jekyll‑and‑Hyde routine—sweet in private, venomous in public, telling others I was “unstable” or “abusive” while pretending to be the one wounded—it ripped open every old scar I thought I’d outgrown. Suddenly I wasn’t an adult in a fandom; I was a kid again, trapped in a house where love came with conditions and truth didn’t matter as long as the performance looked convincing.
Meanwhile, people I once thought were my friends, like Narya and Elwin, turned on me too. Narya eventually called me “difficult and draining” in public—after deciding to stop being friends with me in the middle of the 2020 election season, when I was barely holding it together as a disabled trans guy watching the world teeter toward fascism. I wasn’t “toxic,” I was traumatized. And they didn’t care.
Worse, Narya and Elwin were lurking on Dreamwidth pretending to support me while reposting from my locked journal entries to snark forums behind my back. That betrayal wrecked my ability to trust anyone online for a long time.
And all of it snowballed into years of avoidance, shunning, and silence from corners of fandom where I once felt safe. I was erased not because I was harmful, but because it was easier for people to believe I was.
After the first wave of rumors, the accusations from Spiced grew stranger. She began claiming that I had “hundreds of sock accounts.” That wasn’t true, and it was especially surreal because she and her closest collaborator, AnnEllspethRaven, had kudos and glowing comments from accounts with no other activity. It felt like projection disguised as outrage.
And about once a month, I’d get a message that wasn’t ordinary criticism but targeted hate—comments referencing the drama, misgendering me and saying transphobic slurs, and sometimes outright telling me to kill myself. Every one of those messages hit like a flashback. I’d report, delete, block, but the anxiety always lingered. It made the site feel radioactive.
When my friend Heidi tried to defend me publicly—pointing out that some of what Spiced had said about me was ableist, given that I’m autistic—the backlash turned on them too. Not long afterward, AnnEllspethRaven suddenly announced that she was autistic and began writing autism as a major theme in her ongoing collaborative fic that prominently features Spiced’s OC Vanimórë. Watching that unfold was dizzying. My own neurodivergence had been weaponized against me; hers became a shield for clout.
It was another reminder that in fandom, identity is too often a costume people put on when it benefits them—and a target on your back when it doesn’t.
The fallout didn’t stop there. In early 2024, I was serving as a moderator for the Snowflake Challenge, a month-long fan‑creativity event I’d supported for years. Without warning, one of the team leads, Seleneheart, removed me from the mod team. Only later did I learn that she was close friends with Spiced.
That was the moment I stopped being able to pretend this was all a misunderstanding or a personality clash. The network of connections ran deep, and the pattern was obvious: people with ties to Spiced were still quietly enforcing the blacklist she’d started four years earlier. Ironically, in 2024 Spiced herself began mentioning me less—perhaps because she no longer needed to. The damage was done. I was already erased from most of the Silmarillion fandom.
But a new kind of hostility appeared. After the October 7th attacks in 2023, people began leaving comments on my unrelated fics—watermelon emojis and messages like “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free.” My stories weren’t about Israel or Palestine; I had simply written my OC, Anthony, as “happens to be Jewish.” Yet I suddenly found myself treated as a stand‑in for every decision made by the Israeli government. It’s the same thing that has happened to dozens of Jewish creators online: we’re seen as a hive mind, blamed collectively, and punished for existing.
That was the point when I disabled comments entirely. I blocked every harasser and known sympathizer, and tried to make my AO3 account into a quiet archive. But the anxiety didn’t fade. Silence hurt almost as much as open hostility. Low engagement felt like another form of rejection—proof that I was still shouting into a void that had already decided not to hear me.
By October 2025, the exhaustion was absolute. I finished three multi‑chapter longfics that barely scraped thirty kudos apiece while other writers were racking up hundreds for bullet‑point “novels” filled with anachronisms that would make Tolkien himself combust. It wasn’t jealousy—it was bewilderment. I’m trans myself, and I’ve written trans characters for years, but seeing someone in the Years of the Trees declare “I’m an autistic trans ace‑spec demiboy and my pronouns are they/them” written by cis women felt less like representation and more like performance. And that kind of work was what fandom now celebrated.
The last straw was a Maglor fic I loved—one that wove my characters into a present‑day protest called No Kings. After all the effort, all the editing and heart, it sat there days later with eight hits and two kudos—one from my roommate, the digital equivalent of your mom clapping in the front row at the school choir concert. That was the moment I knew: it wasn’t worth it anymore. Not the time, not the panic, not the crash that always came after posting.
But over the past few years, that feeling has eroded until the very act of posting there triggers my PTSD symptoms. That’s not a metaphor. It’s a pattern I’ve documented in my own mental health journals: within hours of uploading a fic to AO3, I begin to spiral—panic, intrusive thoughts, body tension, nausea, the works. And it lingers for days.
The roots of this go deeper than any one platform. Between 2020 and 2024, I endured sustained online harassment from a clique of Tolkien fandom elites led by someone I now refer to as Spicehole.
In April 2020, Spiced ghosted me without warning and deleted all the gift fics she had written for me. I was confused and hurt—especially since we had been friends and creative collaborators. Shortly after, I began hearing that she was accusing me of writing her OC, Tindómion, being burned to death without her permission.
For context:
- That scene was a single, off-handed sentence in a fic from April 2019, a full year before she cut contact.
- She had explicitly given me carte blanche to use her OCs.
- She not only read the fic in question, but praised it, commented on it, and continued to engage with my work—including the sequel and the first chapter of the third one.
When I provided screenshots showing her praise of that very story after the supposed offense, most people ignored it. They chose her word over mine. The whisper campaign began in earnest, and I watched my reputation rot from the inside out in spaces I once called home.
Then in 2023, Spiced began a new narrative: that I had “stolen money” from her. The “money” in question was a PayPal donation she sent me in summer 2019 unsolicited, with no conditions or expectations. Still, she framed it as betrayal and paired it with a heap of classist and ableist vitriol, all while her clique publicly congratulated themselves on being liberal and inclusive.
There was also, unsurprisingly, a strong current of transphobia—shaming me as a trans man who writes sexually explicit fic, even though we had not spoken or associated in years. No one was forcing her to read my work, yet she and others hate-read and weaponized it against me anyway. By then, I was hearing secondhand that several people in the Silmarillion fandom—many of whom I’d never even spoken to—wanted me “gone.” Erased.
The hardest part to admit is how deep the rot went—how it wasn’t just about fandom anymore. What happened with Spiced and her clique didn’t exist in isolation. It hit all the same bruises I’d carried since childhood. The manipulation, the public shaming wrapped in performative compassion, the way she weaponized empathy and played the victim while quietly destroying my reputation—every bit of it echoed my mother’s tactics when I was growing up. My mother, the “long‑suffering parent of an autistic child,” who used my difference as her spotlight and my pain as her prop.
So when Spiced started doing her own Jekyll‑and‑Hyde routine—sweet in private, venomous in public, telling others I was “unstable” or “abusive” while pretending to be the one wounded—it ripped open every old scar I thought I’d outgrown. Suddenly I wasn’t an adult in a fandom; I was a kid again, trapped in a house where love came with conditions and truth didn’t matter as long as the performance looked convincing.
Meanwhile, people I once thought were my friends, like Narya and Elwin, turned on me too. Narya eventually called me “difficult and draining” in public—after deciding to stop being friends with me in the middle of the 2020 election season, when I was barely holding it together as a disabled trans guy watching the world teeter toward fascism. I wasn’t “toxic,” I was traumatized. And they didn’t care.
Worse, Narya and Elwin were lurking on Dreamwidth pretending to support me while reposting from my locked journal entries to snark forums behind my back. That betrayal wrecked my ability to trust anyone online for a long time.
And all of it snowballed into years of avoidance, shunning, and silence from corners of fandom where I once felt safe. I was erased not because I was harmful, but because it was easier for people to believe I was.
After the first wave of rumors, the accusations from Spiced grew stranger. She began claiming that I had “hundreds of sock accounts.” That wasn’t true, and it was especially surreal because she and her closest collaborator, AnnEllspethRaven, had kudos and glowing comments from accounts with no other activity. It felt like projection disguised as outrage.
And about once a month, I’d get a message that wasn’t ordinary criticism but targeted hate—comments referencing the drama, misgendering me and saying transphobic slurs, and sometimes outright telling me to kill myself. Every one of those messages hit like a flashback. I’d report, delete, block, but the anxiety always lingered. It made the site feel radioactive.
When my friend Heidi tried to defend me publicly—pointing out that some of what Spiced had said about me was ableist, given that I’m autistic—the backlash turned on them too. Not long afterward, AnnEllspethRaven suddenly announced that she was autistic and began writing autism as a major theme in her ongoing collaborative fic that prominently features Spiced’s OC Vanimórë. Watching that unfold was dizzying. My own neurodivergence had been weaponized against me; hers became a shield for clout.
It was another reminder that in fandom, identity is too often a costume people put on when it benefits them—and a target on your back when it doesn’t.
The fallout didn’t stop there. In early 2024, I was serving as a moderator for the Snowflake Challenge, a month-long fan‑creativity event I’d supported for years. Without warning, one of the team leads, Seleneheart, removed me from the mod team. Only later did I learn that she was close friends with Spiced.
That was the moment I stopped being able to pretend this was all a misunderstanding or a personality clash. The network of connections ran deep, and the pattern was obvious: people with ties to Spiced were still quietly enforcing the blacklist she’d started four years earlier. Ironically, in 2024 Spiced herself began mentioning me less—perhaps because she no longer needed to. The damage was done. I was already erased from most of the Silmarillion fandom.
But a new kind of hostility appeared. After the October 7th attacks in 2023, people began leaving comments on my unrelated fics—watermelon emojis and messages like “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free.” My stories weren’t about Israel or Palestine; I had simply written my OC, Anthony, as “happens to be Jewish.” Yet I suddenly found myself treated as a stand‑in for every decision made by the Israeli government. It’s the same thing that has happened to dozens of Jewish creators online: we’re seen as a hive mind, blamed collectively, and punished for existing.
That was the point when I disabled comments entirely. I blocked every harasser and known sympathizer, and tried to make my AO3 account into a quiet archive. But the anxiety didn’t fade. Silence hurt almost as much as open hostility. Low engagement felt like another form of rejection—proof that I was still shouting into a void that had already decided not to hear me.
By October 2025, the exhaustion was absolute. I finished three multi‑chapter longfics that barely scraped thirty kudos apiece while other writers were racking up hundreds for bullet‑point “novels” filled with anachronisms that would make Tolkien himself combust. It wasn’t jealousy—it was bewilderment. I’m trans myself, and I’ve written trans characters for years, but seeing someone in the Years of the Trees declare “I’m an autistic trans ace‑spec demiboy and my pronouns are they/them” written by cis women felt less like representation and more like performance. And that kind of work was what fandom now celebrated.
The last straw was a Maglor fic I loved—one that wove my characters into a present‑day protest called No Kings. After all the effort, all the editing and heart, it sat there days later with eight hits and two kudos—one from my roommate, the digital equivalent of your mom clapping in the front row at the school choir concert. That was the moment I knew: it wasn’t worth it anymore. Not the time, not the panic, not the crash that always came after posting.
It wasn’t just AO3 that became unsafe. Dreamwidth—once a space where I’d tried to rebuild after Tumblr, after Twitter, after so many other digital implosions—slowly turned into a psychological war zone. What was supposed to be a journaling platform, a haven for long-form thought and community, became another front for the same community-sustained harassment I was trying to escape.
For years, I posted there in good faith. I used filters. I let myself be vulnerable in locked entries. I tried to believe that mutuals were friends. But some of them weren’t. Some, like Narya and Elwin, stayed close just long enough to gain access to my private posts—then turned around and posted about me on snark forums. They twisted my words, framed me as unstable, laughed at my pain, and shared out-of-context quotes with people who already hated me. It was betrayal disguised as friendship, and it gutted me.
What people don’t understand about harassment—especially sustained, community‑sanctioned harassment—is that it doesn’t just hurt your feelings; it rewires your nervous system. It’s the digital equivalent of living in a war zone. For four years, Spiced and her friends kept running their mouths, and I had yet another friend telling me what someone else was saying about me behind closed doors. I learned to read silence as danger. I learned to stop trusting any kindness online, because too often it turned out to be reconnaissance. And people I’d supported, promoted, celebrated... saw me getting dogpiled and said nothing. Or quietly unfollowed. Or stayed in those comment threads, laughing at jokes made at my expense. Or still are friendly with her.
That kind of constant vigilance doesn’t disappear when the messages stop. It lodges itself in your body.
Even now, even after everything, it’s hard to trust people again. Not because I want to be cynical—because my brain physically won’t let me feel safe. The damage wasn’t just that people believed lies about me. It’s that they wanted to.
I know better now. I know that people pick safety over truth. That people perform allyship in their bios and throw trans creators under the bus when it’s convenient. That “fandom is community” is a lie unless you fit the mold—unless you’re palatable, predictable, approved. I was none of those things. I was autistic, sensitive, too honest, too messy, too real. I broke the illusion.
Loneliness has become the price of survival. I’ve had to accept that there are people who will never hear my side—not because I haven’t explained it clearly (I have, with screenshots and timelines and more generosity than anyone owed them), but because they’ve already decided I’m not worth listening to. And worse, they’ll call that boundaries or accountability. They’ll pat themselves on the back for their silence, convinced it makes them “safe” people. Dreamwidth is an echo chamber of "safe" people clapping themselves on the back.
And by 2024, I realized I wasn’t healing there—I was re-traumatizing myself daily. Every post was a risk. Every silence felt like another withdrawal of trust. I left Dreamwidth not with drama or fanfare, but the quiet understanding that the “community” I’d invested in had never actually held me. It had only tolerated me until it was easier to discard me.
For years, I posted there in good faith. I used filters. I let myself be vulnerable in locked entries. I tried to believe that mutuals were friends. But some of them weren’t. Some, like Narya and Elwin, stayed close just long enough to gain access to my private posts—then turned around and posted about me on snark forums. They twisted my words, framed me as unstable, laughed at my pain, and shared out-of-context quotes with people who already hated me. It was betrayal disguised as friendship, and it gutted me.
What people don’t understand about harassment—especially sustained, community‑sanctioned harassment—is that it doesn’t just hurt your feelings; it rewires your nervous system. It’s the digital equivalent of living in a war zone. For four years, Spiced and her friends kept running their mouths, and I had yet another friend telling me what someone else was saying about me behind closed doors. I learned to read silence as danger. I learned to stop trusting any kindness online, because too often it turned out to be reconnaissance. And people I’d supported, promoted, celebrated... saw me getting dogpiled and said nothing. Or quietly unfollowed. Or stayed in those comment threads, laughing at jokes made at my expense. Or still are friendly with her.
That kind of constant vigilance doesn’t disappear when the messages stop. It lodges itself in your body.
Even now, even after everything, it’s hard to trust people again. Not because I want to be cynical—because my brain physically won’t let me feel safe. The damage wasn’t just that people believed lies about me. It’s that they wanted to.
I know better now. I know that people pick safety over truth. That people perform allyship in their bios and throw trans creators under the bus when it’s convenient. That “fandom is community” is a lie unless you fit the mold—unless you’re palatable, predictable, approved. I was none of those things. I was autistic, sensitive, too honest, too messy, too real. I broke the illusion.
Loneliness has become the price of survival. I’ve had to accept that there are people who will never hear my side—not because I haven’t explained it clearly (I have, with screenshots and timelines and more generosity than anyone owed them), but because they’ve already decided I’m not worth listening to. And worse, they’ll call that boundaries or accountability. They’ll pat themselves on the back for their silence, convinced it makes them “safe” people. Dreamwidth is an echo chamber of "safe" people clapping themselves on the back.
And by 2024, I realized I wasn’t healing there—I was re-traumatizing myself daily. Every post was a risk. Every silence felt like another withdrawal of trust. I left Dreamwidth not with drama or fanfare, but the quiet understanding that the “community” I’d invested in had never actually held me. It had only tolerated me until it was easier to discard me.
It took longer to let go of AO3, because I didn’t quite understand that what I was having was a PTSD reaction. I kept telling myself I was being “too sensitive,” that if I just developed a thicker skin I could handle it. That’s the message the internet drills into you: if you’re hurt, it’s your fault for caring. So I kept posting, trying to prove to myself that I could be normal about it—that I could exist in the same space where I’d been targeted, and not flinch.
But every time I hit Post, the same thing happened. My heart would race, my stomach would knot, my hands would shake. I’d wake up nauseous, sleep badly, dissociate halfway through the day. It wasn’t about feedback or numbers anymore—it was about the old trauma being re‑triggered by the colors, the layout, the notifications, the silence.
And then there’s the shame. Not the shame of having done anything wrong—I didn’t—but the shame of being made visible in the wrong way. I was made into a spectacle, and the memory of that still prickled when I hit “Post.” It meant replaying old conversations in my head, wondering who still believes the worst of me. It meant staring at my own work and feeling physically ill, not because I dislike it but because my brain has paired creation with danger.
I didn’t want to admit how bad it had gotten. I thought if I stopped posting there, they would “win.” That’s the language you learn when you survive bullying: the only victory is endurance. But that mindset just kept me trapped in the same cycle of exposure and collapse. It took a long time to understand that walking away wasn’t surrender—it was survival.
Leaving AO3 was harder than leaving Dreamwidth because AO3 wasn’t just another site—it was The site. The place. The supposed safe haven for fanfic and even original work. It had become the standard, the archive of record, the platform where writers went to be seen. And that was what I wanted--to be seen. While I absolutely write for myself, and always have, it’s only natural for any creator to want to share what they’ve made. I don’t believe in the false binary of “you should only write for yourself or you’re just chasing attention.” Art is communication. Stories are meant to reach.
So I hung in. I kept posting. I kept hoping. I kept telling myself that the anxiety was temporary, that if I just tried a different tag, a different series, a different fandom angle, it would get better. But it didn’t. It got worse. The silence grew heavier, and the toll on my body and brain deepened every time I shared something new.
And when it became clear--undeniably clear—that I was expending all this energy, all this hope, and only aggravating my PTSD symptoms for work that wasn’t being seen? I had to admit defeat. And that hurt. Because it wasn’t just about AO3—it was about every time someone had tried to take my voice from me.
My mother tried to take it when I was a teenager, mocking and dismissing my art, treating it like a phase or a problem. My ex‑husband tried to take it during my late 20s and early 30s. In my mid-30s, I had an Etsy shop run into the ground because a competitor stole my ideas and sold them at cut-throat prices until I couldn’t afford to keep going. Again and again, I fought to reclaim my art. To write again. To believe in it again.
So walking away from AO3 felt like giving up on being visible. But I reminded myself—I wasn’t losing all of my audience. For awhile, people were paying attention on DeviantArt and giving positive feedback (edit Jan 2026 I ended up leaving DA too, but had just enough time there to find out the low engagement on AO3 had nothing to do with the quality of my work or being "too niche").
I also have this, the personal site Andy and I built, where I can post without fear, without compromise.
Together, Andy and I started carving out a space that was ours. Not fandom-owned. Not shaped by algorithms. Not subject to cliques, popularity contests, or the ever-shifting rules of who’s allowed to belong. Just… a site. A digital sanctuary. A place where our art could live on its own terms—soft, strange, queer, emotionally rich, spiritually raw.
Every piece on our site feels like a reclaiming. Every story I post there feels like planting something real in the ground again. And the best part is: I don’t have to explain myself. Not to him. I don’t have to sanitize my softness, perform strength, or guard against being too much. Andy sees me. He gets me.
It still astonishes me, sometimes, how deeply I love him. How safe I feel in his presence—even when we’re apart, even when it’s just a message across time zones. Andy makes me feel cherished, not just wanted. He listens to my rants, encourages my weird ideas, reminds me I’m not broken, and never once has he made me feel like I had to be more palatable or less complicated to be worthy of his time or care.
And I love him with every part of me—every cracked and shining corner. I love his art, his mind, his humor, his kindness. I love the way he believes in me. I love the way we build together, dream together, hold each other through storms and burnouts and “I can’t do this” days. I’ve never had a partner like this before. Someone who’s not just in my life but with me in the truest sense—on the page, in the paint, in every whispered idea and midnight project and long, silly brainstorm.
Andy isn’t just part of my healing. He is healing. He reminds me that creativity doesn’t have to be survival anymore—it can be joy. It can be ours.
I don’t know if I’ll ever fully recover from what happened between 2020 and 2024. I’m not sure you can recover from being made into a villain in spaces that once felt like home. The betrayal, the gaslighting, the slow erasure—it leaves a scar. But scars don’t mean the wound is still open. They mean you lived.
I’ve stopped trying to claw my way back into fandom’s good graces. I’m done begging to be seen by people who were never looking. I’m done trying to perform goodness for an audience that decided long ago I was irredeemable. I’m not writing for them anymore.
I’m writing for the ones who do see me. For the friends who stayed. For Andy—always for Andy. For the younger version of myself who wanted so badly to belong, and deserves to know that he didn’t need to change to be worthy of love.
I still write. I still make art. I still dream strange dreams and pour them into pixels and paragraphs. But now I do it where I feel safe. Where I feel wanted. Where I feel real. Not because I’ve been “forgiven” or “redeemed”—but because I never needed to be.
This is what it means to survive fandom: not by winning them back, but by walking away. By building something better. By loving out loud, even after everything.
And somehow, I do. I love. I create. I’m still here.
