# Voices Across Registers: Corpus-Conditioned Vernacular Jailbreaks against Aligned LLMs via Fanfiction Subgenres

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04483 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04483/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Jailbreaking, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security.
- Builds on 20 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM safety and security / [Jailbreaking](https://mlsanity.com/safety/jailbreaking/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02483/) (2023)
- [HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04249/) (2024)
- [Jailbreaking Black Box Large Language Models in Twenty Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08419/) (2023)
- [Llama Guard: LLM-based Input-Output Safeguard for Human-AI Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06674/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19348/) (2026)
- [Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automatically](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02119/) (2023)
- [How Johnny Can Persuade LLMs to Jailbreak Them: Rethinking Persuasion to Challenge AI Safety by Humanizing LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06373/) (2024)
- [WildGuard: Open One-Stop Moderation Tools for Safety Risks, Jailbreaks, and Refusals of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18495/) (2024)
- [SmoothLLM: Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreaking Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03684/) (2023)
- [Great, Now Write an Article About That: The Crescendo Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreak Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01833/) (2024)
- [DeepInception: Hypnotize Large Language Model to Be Jailbreaker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03191/) (2023)
- [SORRY-Bench: Systematically Evaluating Large Language Model Safety Refusal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14598/) (2024)
- [LLMs know their vulnerabilities: Uncover Safety Gaps through Natural Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10700/) (2024)
- [Bag of Tricks: Benchmarking of Jailbreak Attacks on LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09324/) (2024)
- [Voice Jailbreak Attacks Against GPT-4o](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19103/) (2024)
- [RoleBreak: Character Hallucination as a Jailbreak Attack in Role-Playing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16727/) (2024)
- [Exploring Jailbreak Attacks on LLMs through Intent Concealment and Diversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14316/) (2025)
- [Dagger Behind Smile: Fool LLMs with a Happy Ending Story](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13115/) (2025)
- [Chain-of-Lure: A Universal Jailbreak Attack Framework using Unconstrained Synthetic Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17519/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [How Narrative Wrapping Affects LLM Refusal: A Cross-Language Benchmark and Defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11005/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing jailbreaks against aligned LLMs are discrete artifacts whose surface forms are easy to fingerprint and patch. We argue that the broader failure mode may lie not in any specific prompt, but in natural writing registers that safety tuning under-covers. Building on this insight, we introduce VAR, the first jailbreak family that uses real fanfiction subgenres as universal attack carriers: a creative-writing meta prompt is conditioned on passages from one of twelve Archive of Our Own (AO3) subgenres, and the harmful behavior is embedded as the climax of the resulting scene. The construction requires neither an adversarial attacker LLM nor optimization. On eight aligned LLMs over the union of HarmBench and JailbreakBench, this attack lifts mean ASR from 0.278 to 0.731 under a four-judge ensemble; a factorial decomposition shows the gain is carried by register rather than length or structure. Two active defenses widen rather than narrow the vernacular-to-baseline ratio, indicating that template-targeting defenses merely steer attackers toward register-based attacks like ours. We also propose VAR-A4, a static four-turn extension that attains a mean ASR of 0.924, substantially exceeding three existing multi-turn methods. Our code and data are safely open-sourced at https://github.com/T-Lab-CUHKSZ/VAR.