In tenth grade, I clicked “publish” on a One Direction fan fiction and waited for judgment. Somewhere between volleyball, student council, AP classes, and dates with an objectively terrible boyfriend, I’d found the time to write a Harry Styles–centered short story, in which Styles saved me from Texas and took me to the big city. (Naturally, we kissed in an airplane bathroom.) When I decided to drop the piece on Wattpad, a popular online platform for these stories, it was thrilling but also terrifying, and more than a little vulnerable. For a moment, that fanfic made me, a lustful 15-year-old who wanted nothing more than to be a writer, feel legitimate.
I look back on that time with an equal mix of affection and cringe. I would have never willingly admitted to writing steamy fan fiction when I was actively doing it; you’d have had to blackmail the information out of me. But recently, a fascinating phenomenon has taken over: I have found myself discussing fanfic with my friends over dirty martinis, the same way I’d dish about my dating life or family drama. None of them shamed or teased me. In fact, they weren’t surprised — a few even recounted their own experiences writing similar stories.
There’s perhaps an obvious explanation for my newfound spirit of openness. Fan fiction is as mainstream as it’s ever been. Popular works of fan fiction are now a boon for traditional publishers, who’ve found that “filing off the serial numbers” or “reskinning” these stories — removing copyrighted details from a fan work, then repackaging and publishing it as original fiction — can be a lucrative practice. Recent best-selling books such as Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis and SenLinYu’s Alchemised both originated as fics, and they’re far from the only examples. If you’ve read (or watched a film adaptation of) Fifty Shades of Grey, After, The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy,Rose in Chains,or The Hurricane Wars, then you’ve engaged with a story that had its roots in fan fiction.
Particularly “when fan fictions become movies, it starts the conversation of, ‘Oh, I read that fan fiction!’” says Ava, a 21-year-old model and fan-fiction reader. “And then it’s like, ‘You read fan fiction? Wait, me too!’ Everyone does. It’s not as taboo.”
Noelle — a 37-year-old actor and former fic writer who, like many of the sources interviewed for this story, spoke under the condition of anonymity — says even “celebrities talk about it more.” She continues, “Brittany Broski has made this incredible career for herself as a self-proclaimed fangirl. The director of Eternals and Hamnet, Chloé Zhao, has talked about how she’s written fan fiction before and read it.” Other examples? Kaia Gerber, who recently shared on Jake Shane’s Therapuss podcast that she writes fan fiction. (About what or whom? “Not a human,” Gerber says.) Billie Eilish has even admitted to reading fanfic about herself. Noelle adds, “The more public figures talk about it, the more stigma is taken away from it.”
While it’s true that fan fiction — including steamy and sexually explicit fan fiction — might have shed some of its stigma, far from every fanfic reader or writer is eager to now go public with their hobby. (As one source, a 36-year-old mortician, told me, “I do talk about fan fiction with my family, but not every family member. I talk about it with friends, but not every friend.”) Case in point: Most of the 12 sources I interviewed for this story requested anonymity, citing fears of judgement, doxxing, or even job loss. One woman would only speak with me if we met in person and outdoors.
As fan fiction becomes more popular (and more monetizable), some fans worry their communities are losing the dynamics that once made them safe spaces for curiosity and experimentation — spaces where members could explore their thoughts and desires anonymously, without any fear of reprisal. Earlier this summer, Wattpad made headlines for revising the language in its content guidelines around sexually explicit material. The site’s news and updates team arguedthat content moderation on the platform would not change, but users of the site were immediately wary of how a shift in guidelines might censor stories.
BecauseWattpad hosts ads — and some writers on the site make money from their published works — users are aware that “if advertisers didn’t like something or if they were afraid to be associated with sexual content, then the platform could just ban it,” says Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of First Amendment Law at Harvard and a co-founder of the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the interests of fans. That presents an inherent risk to users: Mainstream scrutiny invites opportunities for outside entities, like advertisers or even publishers, to manipulate the communities they love. In response, OTW created Archive of Our Own (AO3) in 2007, which Tushnet says is committed to staying “noncommercial.” “We don’t restrict anyone from visiting, and we host all the fan fiction we can,” Tushnet says.
The content guidelines at AO3 remain sparse. The only thing explicitly banned on the site is using the material published to make money. “The thing that has been healthiest for creative freedom and for bringing up really important, uncomfortable topics has been letting people write what they want,” Tushnet says. “And we believe that the only way to hurt someone by writing fan fiction is to actually stab them with a pen. That isn’t to say that writing can’t have important effects, good and bad. It absolutely can. Our view is that the best system is one in which we trust people to decide for themselves what they want to write and what they want to read.”
Full Steam Ahead
A week of spicy stories.
Many fanfic writers and readers are happy with this policy — and they want to see it continue. Particularly when it comes to sexual content, users encourage a “don’t like, don’t read” philosophy, in which they opt not to police the work of another writer. Lots of readers identify as “pro-shippers,” meaning they believe that even dynamics they’d consider objectionable, abusive, or outright illegal IRL have a right to be written about in fan fiction. (This content ranges widely and can encompass incest, sexual assault, human trafficking, violence, and more.) An “anti-shipper” believes dynamics that are morally objectionable in real life don’t have a place online.
Everyone’s line might be different, but one area where it gets extremely blurry is in Real Person Fanfiction, or RPF. A good litmus test for you, dear reader: How do you feel about shipping Heated Rivalry protagonists Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander compared to shipping their actors, Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams? That’s a question that every avid fanfic fan seems to have a take on, particularly as Heated Rivalrycast and crew members have spoken out againstinvasionsof their privacy IRL. As fan-fiction and fan communities enter the mainstream, so too does it become harder for those communities to protect themselves, maintain fandom etiquette, and avoid clashes with the “real world.”
Below, five readers and writers of fan fiction share their feelings about fanfic’s modern moment — and how they’re considering their own relationships with the online space.
When I was on Wattpad, there was a weird dynamic around the people that would get their books published off of Wattpad: the people that ended up being able to successfully monetize. The point and joy of fanfic was that they’re these rich, deep, imaginative, illustrative stories that were completely free to anybody who knew where to look for them. That felt special. It goes against what the internet has become now: all these models of clickbait and ad revenue. Now, the fact that you can monetize fan fiction — the fact that it can become a major motion picture — feels like it changes the nature of fanfic. It changes how people write it and why they write it. That’s weirdly aggravating.
The idea and concept of fan fiction is mainstream now, but I don’t think fan fiction itself — and the community of it — will ever truly be mainstream because I feel like society can’t get over the womanness of it. I want to support the right of horny preteen girls to express themselves. Fanfic was a way for me to discover and explore my own sexuality.
Writing fanfic set me up professionally extremely well, too. That foundation of storytelling is a skill that can translate in so many different places. Underneath storytelling is that desire to understand people, understand yourself. I feel like fan fic is an amazing muscle for doing that. It helped me in my life, honestly.
I wrote fan fiction covertly because I grew up very, very Christian in the Deep South. I wanted to reach out to people, but I was a bit alone in my IRL communities, so I quickly found my way into fan spaces.
I distinctly remember the first time I ever made money off something I’d written: A friend of mine paid me to write fan fiction about her self-insert character in the world of Divergent. I published it anonymously, and people really liked it, so I started publishing more. On my personal social-media profiles, I have occasionally advertised fan-fiction commissions, and they are probably the most profitable thing I’ve written. Generally, I go by ten to 15 cents a word. Sometimes five cents a word if they’re for a friend. The most I’ve ever made on an individual commission was probably $700.
Not to denigrate my own hobby, but I do think a lot of fan fiction is smut, and I don’t think it’s wrong to characterize it as a pretty smutty hobby. I also think there’s no shame in it. Generally, my take is that, while I might find some of the works hosted on Archive of Our Own morally objectionable, I think it is critical that there is a largely uncensored fan-fiction website on the internet. In the case with Wattpad, at any point your company can be acquired by a group that wants to be more marketable or wants to be in line with a conservative-media landscape, and they’ll just decide you’re not allowed to, say, write smut anymore. There are more nuanced discussions to be had about the accessibility of these topics to younger readers. But at the same time, as a rule, even if I personally strongly dislike or even morally condemn a fan fiction, I think it does have a right to be on the internet.
My big foray into online fandom was right after 9/11. I found great solace in coming home from work and watching two hours of Buffy the Vampire Slayer every weekday night. At the time, I was a freelance copywriter, and I had a long-term gig where I was alone in an office with a computer, and they were not giving me very much to do. That’s when I wrote my first piece of Buffy fanfic.
One thing I’ve enjoyed in the last decade is seeing the awareness of fan fiction rise and the mockery die down. But I’ve still encountered, in some fan-fiction spaces, that very young fans think that older women writing fan fiction is weird and gross and reprehensible. They need to be schooled because fan fiction was started by middle-aged women. It belongs to us, no matter what age we are.
Older fans often feel like the younger fans need to be educated about fandom etiquette, because there is an etiquette. I don’t understand — the youngs have turned back into puritans. Suddenly, they’ll be like, “You shouldn’t write that, or it’s inappropriate to write an age-gap relationship.” And sometimes the kind of age gap that they are upset about is, like, eight years. And you’re like, “Hold on.” The thing with young people being grossed out that people in their 60s or 50s or 80s write filthy stories? Get over that. You’ll find out when you’re that age. You’ll realize how wrong you were.
In school, I actually hated writing. I think a big part of that was being told what to write. In 2013, I started writing fan fiction on FanFiction.net, and then I had a friend who found something that they liked on AO3 and was like, “Hey, you should check this out.” I was in late high school, maybe 16 or 17.
Now, at 30, I don’t even talk to my wife about my fanfic. Really, I don’t talk to a single soul in real life about this. It is for me and me alone. I don’t share my accounts. I don’t share anything that I have written because it’s … I don’t know. I would be mortified. I write within ship-specific groups: My biggest one is 30 or 40 people and my smallest is six. But we chat constantly, typically
I think fan-fiction enjoyers are excited for more people, in general, to be interested in fan fiction. We really enjoy interaction on our works. There’s nothing that makes a writer happier than hearing that somebody enjoys what they wrote. And there is a culture on AO3 that is that very sex-positive. Don’t be an asshole. Don’t yuck other people’s yum. Don’t like, don’t read. But I think a lot of the people who are new and coming into the community don’t have any idea of those cultural norms. So, for instance, in the Heated Rivalry fandom, you see vast numbers of new people coming in that start posting, like, hate comments, demanding things of authors — forgetting that we do this totally for free.
Wattpad essentially started my writing career. I want to emphasize how pivotal my fanfic experience was, which I know might sound like an exaggeration to some, but that is where I started to learn how to write. That translated into what I do now.
Fan fiction — and even fandom in general — is often seen as shameful because it’s often a woman-dominated space. I can only speak to my personal experience, but I’ve only known my friends who are women to actively participate in fan-fiction culture. A lot of it is reduced to “smut” — which, don’t get me wrong, I love a good smut piece — but at the same time, I think there’s something important there: women exploring sexuality through the written word and feeling comfortable in being able to express that through their favorite celebrity or their favorite TV show or book series. It allows us to do that in a safe environment. Yet we’re still, somehow, ridiculed.
Recently, I’ve seen a lot more people talking about fan fiction online. My friends have opened up about it more as well, which I think has helped me feel like, Oh, we can talk about this again. I think people are feeling less shameful about the things that they enjoy.
- The Woman Trying Something New With Her Boyfriend
- The Pleasure of Reading About Sex When You Aren’t Having Any
- The Woman in Love With Her Divorce Mediator
‘I Don’t Talk to a Single Soul in Real Life About This’
