Fanfics and Other Writings

Welcome to the 2026 edition of May the Fourth Be With You!

The schedule may be found in this year's schedule sticky and also on the AO3 Community Profile. Nominations are now open for this year's round. Sign ups open February 22nd.

Please read this post before you nominate. Incorrectly submitted nominations will take more time to approve and may be rejected. Do NOT disambiguate your nominations. Many AO3-based exchanges will ask you to add an extra tag at the end. This is NOT the case for this exchange.

May the 4th 2026 Tag Set

We will be accepting nominations from now until 23:59 UTC (7PM EDT) on February 20th. (Note this is one day before signups close to allow us to close the tag set.) As always, any character in any permutation of Star Wars is in, with Wookieepedia and Starwars.com as final arbiters. Do not nominate groups as groups (Ex: "Kanjiklub" "Stormtroopers" "Banthas" "Force Ghosts") and do nominate them as individual characters in & or / relationships. Do not nominate objects such as lightsabers, trees, helmets, or holocrons; "Bor Gullet" is a character, "tentacles" is not.

Use the Fandom dropdown field to select "Star Wars - All Media Types" for each individual nomination to help expedite nomination approvals. If you nominate twenty things, you must select "Star Wars - All Media Types" individually as the fandom for all twenty. If you do not add this step, your nominations will not be associated with the correct fandom and they may take longer to be approved.

You may nominate up to twenty relationships. This is the maximum number of nominations allowed by the Archive's software. The Relationships field may also be used to nominate individual characters. To nominate a platonic relationship, use the "&" symbol. To nominate a romantic relationship, use the "/" symbol. (Ex: The nomination "Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker" is very different from the nomination "Leia Organa/Luke Skywalker") You should NOT automatically select the suggested canonical tag that drops down.

To nominate individual characters, you must use the format "Character: Name (SW)" or the submission form may not accept your nomination. For relationships, please remove the (SW) or (Star Wars) from the suggested field. (Ex: "Finn/Rey" NOT "Finn/Rey (Star Wars)")

You may mix and match relationship types in a single nomination. (Ex: "Ben Solo | Kylo Ren/Rey & Grogu")

Use the following formats for all nominations:

Luke Skywalker/Han Solo
Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker & Han Solo
Leia Organa/Luke Skywalker/Han Solo
Leia Organa/Han Solo & Luke Skywalker
Character: Luke Skywalker (SW)

Conversely, "Luke Skywalker/Han Solo (Star Wars)" will not be accepted and may delay approval of your nominations.

We are not providing differentiation between character versions in Legends, the canon EU, the films, the TV series, the comics, the cereal boxes, or Robot Chicken. Go into as much detail as you want in your signup or letter.
( Guidelines, please read )
Any questions or problems getting the Archive to accept your nomination can be emailed to us at maythe4thmod@gmail.com or left as a reply to this post.

The fine print: AO3 sees "Finn/Rey" "Finn(SW)/Rey" "Finn/Rey(SW)" and "Finn/Rey (Star Wars)" as separate relationships, and our spreadsheet sees them as different characters. If you request the "Finn/Rey" tag and Random Participant Ben Solo offers the "Finn/Rey (Star Wars)" tag, he won't be matched to your request. Many Star Wars characters have multiple piped canonical names, some of which have all the pipes included in their canonical ship tags and some which have random (Star Wars) stuck in the middle or at the end. Stripping the extra information out as you nominate, and adding "Star Wars - All Media Types" as the fandom for each nominated tag, makes the rest of the process easier on the back end to expedite approvals and eliminate duplicates. We can and will be cleaning up errant nominations to adhere to the formatting; this may lead to a delay in accepting your nominations.


A special note for those of you into customizing your own AO3 experience: you can add a piece of code to your site skin to list all approved nominations on separate lines:

body,
#main
.tagset .fandom.listbox .tags.index.group li {
display: block;
margin-top: 0.4em;
line-height: 1;
}

.tagset .fandom.listbox .tags.index.group li::after {
content: none;
}