What Does This Mean?
A content-warning tag in fan fiction, especially on Archive of Our Own, telling readers that the work contains exactly the disturbing material named in its other tags, presented without softening or authorial condemnation. It is often shortened to "DDDNE" or "dead dove", and "a dead dove fic" can also mean a work whose subject matter is very dark.
REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
"The author added "Dead Dove: Do Not Eat" to the tags so nobody could say the dark ending was a surprise."
LORE & ORIGIN
The phrase comes from a gag in the television comedy Arrested Development, in which a character opens a bag labelled "Dead Dove: Do Not Eat" and finds a dead bird, then remarks that he does not know what he expected. As a fandom tag it is documented from 14 April 2015, when a Tumblr user proposed using it to warn readers that the other tags in a work should be taken literally. More than 63,000 works on Archive of Our Own carried the tag as of December 2023, and many older works were retagged after it spread. The tag is meant to be read together with the other tags, not as a description on its own. The episode in which the joke appears is not given.
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