Fanfiction! Some people read and write it, some people loathe it as an entire concept, and some people just don’t get why you do it. We nerds and geeks have come to expect throughout our time on this earth that everyone who has a negative opinion (or just “doesn’t get it) will tell us so.
But fanfiction has been surging in popularity recently, as evidenced by the growth of fanfiction websites and the mainstream attention certain fanfiction stories have received on places like #Booktok, so let’s revisit it.
What is Fanfiction?
Fanfiction is written by fans of a piece of media (or a celebrity). This media can be movies, television shows, and books. Most people cite Star Trek fanfiction, published in Zines in the 1970s, as the first example of fanfiction, but fanfiction has existed as long as fandom (the term was actually coined in 1939!), and other people argue that fanfiction in some form or other has been around since Homer. Additionally, many writers write Real Person Fiction, when writers decide to create narratives around favorite celebrities or artists. Fans write these fics as love letters to other fans; writing them is an exercise in building a community with your readers and other authors.
To be honest, if people have started writing fanfiction about your work, you’ve really inspired them. In fact, many scholars are now looking to fanfiction as a legitimate literary genre, with its own rules and expectations like any other published genre of work. While people will always claim pejoratively that it’s “derivative”, fans (haha!) and scholars of the fanfiction genre call it “transformative” is an attempt to drive the conversation in a more positive and productive direction.
Why do we write and read it?
There are many reasons a fan might read and write fanfiction, but there are a few key motivations:
We want more stories:
Often, an author must stop writing a story. I don’t blame them. Some stories must end. Otherwise, they end up with something bloated, superfluous, and possibly entirely divorced from the original themes, plot, or even characters with which they started. But just because the story has come to its natural conclusion doesn’t mean that audiences will feel finished with the characters or the setting. We often still feel like we just want more time with these characters, so we read and write with them.
We need to “fix” something:
Sometimes, authorized creators force beloved characters and settings into a story that doesn’t quite fit them. For example, many Star Wars fans disliked Episode 7, 8, and 9 (especially 8 and 9) because of how they treated existing and new characters, so they rewrote parts of them as fanfiction. The point is not to disrespect the hard work that went into the films, but rather to provide other fans with an alternative way it could have happened. Think “How It Should Have Ended” if each episode of HISHE were over 10,000 words long.
We want to see ourselves:
Many people who write and read fanfiction want to see themselves represented. Again, this isn’t necessarily to insult the original work or author (with certain important exceptions), but rather to expand upon the original so that the world is more inclusive of them. If one searches through tags on Archive of Our Own, we can often find evidence of every kind of representation: groups that create their own representation in these works include women (in literature that can’t pass a Bechdel test), queer folx, People of Color, and people with disabilities, to name a few.
We just want smut:
Ah, literally the most stereotypical genre of fanfiction, the smut! The smut is why in the early 2000s you didn’t admit you wrote fanfiction; everyone just assumed you were horny and uncreative. But much fanfiction found on the three most popular fanfiction websites today are not romantic. About a fifth of all fanfiction on Archive of our Own (Ao3) is not romantic, and of the fics that are romantic, less than half are Mature or Explicit. But I won’t stop you from believing that much of fanfiction is smut; it is.
The Corruption of Fanfiction
Fanfiction as a genre is changing with outside influences. What started out as a way for fans to share their common love of these stories with other fans has become fraught with many different pressures.
In 2024, Elizabeth Minkel wrote a brilliant review of how fanfiction has changed in recent years. Not only are studios and agents trawling fanfiction websites for the next big thing, but AI is scraping fanfiction and charlatans are publishing it for profit. To me, all those things violate the spirit of what fanfiction is: sharing of love of an original work with the fandom.
Don’t mistake me: I wish the best for authors are now successful that got their start from publishing their fanfiction. Back when “Fifty Shades of Gray” debuted, and even further back to when Clare published “City of Bones”, the fandom looked down on this as cheap, as selling out, as nearly violating your own copyright. But it has become such an accepted trend that when Ali Hazelwood’s “The Love Hypothesis” debuted, fans celebrated its success, and even the fact that it began as a ReyLo fanfic added to the enjoyment of the book. The more works that have gotten published, the more writers might want to make their start by writing fanfiction. I don’t think this cheapens the genre, even as it may make the stories a little less authentic to the fans and a little more generic to appeal to a studio.
Minkel also describes how fanfiction has become so popular, starting with the 2020 lockdown, that people have been reading it without consuming or even being fans themselves of the original. This changes the nature and motivation of fanfiction so that it is simply fiction, completely divorced from fandom. Back before this new era of published fanfiction, when we all started writing on Livejournal, Fanfiction.net, and Ao3 (and, in my case, Quizilla), many of us wrote specifically for fans of the original story. In fact, many writers would argue that reading our fanfiction divorced from its context ruins the experience we want to create for fellow fans.
The fact that so many fanfiction works are now being polished up and published, that studios and even grifters are profiting from it, justifies the longstanding dislike some authors have of fanfiction, even when they wrote it themselves. And we, the fandom who writes and reads it, completely agree! Fanfiction is unauthorized, but its writers historically have not sought to profit from it. We are aware that our writing is based on someone’s original work, and many of us never had thoughts that our fanfiction would exist outside of websites for fans.
The Legacy of Fanfiction
Given its rise in prominence and accessibility on the internet, and given the published works it has inspired, fanfiction obviously has and continues to leave a legacy of storytelling that inspires legitimately published and authorized artworks.
Changing how we read
Fanfiction blurs the lines between readers and writers. Fic writers write for other fans who feel similarly about a work as they themselves feel. As I’ve explained, fanfiction is a social genre which seeks to include other fans in the conversation of “what if it had been written like this?” Fanfiction could go viral or stay read by a limited few based on its popularity with other fans of the same original work. Therefore, those of us who write fic generally read work more critically so that we can transform the original story. In this way, we are reading every fictional work like writers seeking the next story we wish to tell.
Changing publishing
I would argue that several aspects of fanfiction are beginning to creep into published fiction. First, the growth of explicit romance fiction, that originally would only have been relegated to the internet, now exists on store shelves. I have already established that much fanfiction is written to illustrate romance and intimacy between characters, and this continues to grow in popularity for reasons outlined earlier in this article. In fact, many aspects of fandom have influenced how studios and makers attempt to engage customers. Therefore, I assert that the explosion in popularity of fanfiction (especially slash) has contributed to the explosion of traditional publishing houses publishing and advertising these works that are only a stone’s throw away from the raunchiest writing on the major fanfiction repositories, in an effort to become relevant to younger audiences again.
Teaching us to write
All over the internet, we can find evidence and testimonials that fanfiction, in fact, can help writers become better writers. Many people start writing fanfiction when they are very young, and as they get older begin writing original works that they could then publish. It’s important that I distinguish this point from the practice of changing fic details so it can then be published. I’m referring, rather, to published work that was never in fic form in the first place. Now, fanfiction is not always well-written or engaging, but often the best fanfiction is what becomes viral in the first place, and feedback on one’s fanfiction can help us continue to do what works or improve what doesn’t.
I am a former English teacher, and as such I taught writing for a few years. So, I can attest that a common writing practice exercise is to take a novel and write an alternative ending, create another story for the character, or write an imagined dialogue between two characters. This isn’t necessarily fanfiction in its purest sense, but the spirit of writing improvement is similar.
Conclusion
Whether you love or hate it, fanfiction is here to stay. If you are still skeptical of whether it’s to your taste, or whether you would be endlessly reading bad writing, there are many reddit threads that can point you to well-written fanfiction based on any work (or celebrity) you choose. I personally suggest that writing and consuming fanfiction be embraced by popular culture as the loving act of fans that it is. But please consume responsibly: don’t purchase it and don’t consume it divorced from the original work.
Happy reading!
