Today I saw an article on Vox from around two weeks ago talking about a recent controversial fic on AO3 (for more information on Ao3 you can refer to this prior post) titled “Sexy Times With Wangxian” (STWW) about the popular pairing from the Chinese drama called “The Untamed” or in Chinese 魔道祖师 or 陈情令. This article caught my eye for more than one reason, a notable one is that my sister has watched the live action drama and the animated version of this show and told me quite a bit about it, another reason is that this very fandom has caused AO3 to become banned in China so of course I’m curious what this show has stirred up this time.

The article claims that STWW is a 200 chapter very explicit fic about the show’s main characters, which on its own isn’t actually that out of the ordinary. What is irritating users all across the platform is what they call “the wall of tags” longer than the list of Jin Ling’s uncles, consisting of 1700+ tags (labels to filter fanfictions) last they counted. I brought it on myself to see if this whole ordeal was real.

First I went to look for the actual fic written by the user Virtual1979, sadly the fic isn’t there as the article said it was suspended but you can see their other works that are stated to be related to STWW.

Next I took a look at the tweets linked and showed in the article. There seems to be nothing out of the ordinary and the picture and video seemed to be taken from the tweeter user themselves. A quick search for the title of the fic on Twitter yielded no helpful results so I moved elsewhere.

I decided to google the fic to see what else has been said on this topic. The underlined link is of the original fic that I checked earlier which would tell you that you have no access to the fic.

I switched over to the “news” tab for some filtered results.I found that there’s only two sites that cover this story, Vox themselves and a blog called Geekiary which they referenced/mentioned. Geekiary has no Wikipedia page and seems to be a just a casual blog so I didn’t look much further there.

Vox does have a page on Wikipedia though! It was created for only a little over 6 years ago and has a YouTube channel created around the same time.

There has been some controversy around this site however but none seem too closely tied in to this particular article.

All in all, I’ve concluded this story to be true. Though I must admit this might not have been the best article to have done this exercise with as it isn’t all facts and more about the author’s opinion as well as commentary, but then again nothing really about fan fiction is that factual.

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click on the photos to read the text 🙂
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Link to article from Vox