When we left off in Fanfiction, Part 1: A Brief History, we’d just discovered the wonders of a centralized fanfiction hub: FanFiction.Net. While a great boon to the fanfiction internet landscape, it invited many more eyes– and more scrutiny. Copyright holders only had to type in a single web address or search their property’s name in a search engine, and they could find themselves in the midst of fan-written works of their properties. And many of them? Didn’t like what they saw. 

Until now, I’ve avoided the giant pink elephant in the room. I can’t avoid it forever. We have to talk about what fanfiction is. Not the definition, we already did that. The content. Everyone hold their breath and take the plunge. 

Fanfiction Has a Lot of Sex

Before the fanfiction authors pull out the pitchforks, let me clarify: a sizeable amount of fanfiction has nothing to do with sex. But, due to the sheer volume of sexual content in fanfiction, we need to discuss it and why it exists. 

All fanfiction comes from a place of deep love for a piece of media. Media, though, is often fixed; there’s only so much of it. When the movie ends, a show is canceled, or a videogame is beaten, a fan has seen everything there is to see. For fans looking to spend more time in the world of their favorite media, they’ll look at the gaps in that information: What did the crew of the Enterprise get up to between missions? How did Luke Skywalker acclimate to his new robot hand between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi? How in the world did Sakura and Sasuke end up married during the time skip at the end of Naruto? To answer these questions, a fan might try to ask the creator or daydream about it in the shower when no answer is forthcoming. Other fans write it down.

Fanfiction, at its core, is often used to fill holes (heh) the creators left open. Whether they’re literal gaps in time a piece of media glosses over or character development that a fan thinks was a missed opportunity, a lot of fanfiction dedicates itself to giving these gaps the time the fan thinks they deserve. And, with media restrictions, ratings, and genres to adhere to, y’know what gets skipped over in most media?

Sex. 

For being one of the most common heightened emotional activities a human can take part in, sex is left out of a lot of media. With all the attractive people in movies, the sexual tension in long-running TV shows, and idealized characters in books, it’s no surprise that people end up wondering what those characters look like naked. It’s human nature. So fanfiction authors, whether they’re looking to explore the complicated emotions that sex can bring up or to just supply the fandom a fun way to get off, write a lot of sex. 

The internet made it easier to find fiction that mashed together copyrighted characters like Barbie dolls with actual bits, and copyright holders were peeking through the door like concerned parents. There were two kinds of reactions exemplified by two famous copyright holders: Joss Whedon and Anne Rice.

Whedon & Rice: Two Takes on Fandom

The premiere of Buffy the Vampire Slayer coincided with the growing popularity of internet forums. To take advantage of this, the show’s network set up a forum for Buffy fans called The Bronze. On The Bronze, fans could talk to each other about the latest episodes, their favorite characters, and their theories for the future of the series. Posting and chatting alongside them were the creators of the show themselves. 

Joss Whedon, head writer and creator of Buffy, regularly frequented the board to give hints about future episodes, defend his decisions, and offer tips about writing in general. He was even known to give teasers by saying, “I suspect [this episode] will generate MUCH fanfic (both adult and otherwise).” Fans celebrated this kind of interaction as it gave all their fandom activities– while not explicitly posted on the site for copyright reasons– a kind of legitimacy.

Not all creators were as open and excited about fandom engagement as Joss Whedon, though. While Whedon likely saw fan engagement as free marketing and a hell of an ego boost, other creators saw fanfiction as an infringement. One of the most notorious authors in fanfiction circles for this unabashed hatred was Anne Rice, author of The Vampire Chronicles. 

Rice stumbled upon FanFiction.Net, along with a few other Vampire Chronicles fan sites, and promptly had a meltdown. She posted a warning on her official website, stating: 

“I do not allow fanfiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.” 

The next day, fan-run websites and FanFiction.Net received cease and desist notices, threatening to sue if all Vampire Chronicles fanfiction was not purged. Not wanting to get into protracted legal battles, all fan sites were taken down and FanFiction.Net deleted their archives, erasing authors’ works without warning. In one fell swoop, Rice had killed her own fandom. 

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, about how fandoms tended to end up. Either copyright holders reacted like Joss Whedon, with encouragement and explicit support, or like Anne Rice, with legal threats and dramatic monologues about virtuoso performances. Joss Whedon-like fandoms flourished. Anne Rice-like fandoms died. To this day, the Buffy tag on fanfiction sites continues to be updated. The Vampire Chronicles only recently emerged from the shadows after 20 years– notably, the very day after Anne Rice died. 

Mega-Fandoms & The Start of the Split

The exponential spread of the internet led to increased globalization and access to information. As the number of homes with personal computers continued to rise, new original properties had the perfect chance to take hold of the collective imagination. Once a book or piece of media caught on, it spread across the internet like wildfire, reaching more people at once than ever before. Two pieces of media got caught in the perfect storm of marketing and social media, attracting international attention: Harry Potter and Twilight. 

Harry Potter and Twilight straddled just the right line to become popular. They were written for teens and young adults, all of whom had grown up with easy access to the internet. The books managed to capture adults’ attention as well, especially the romance of the Twilight novels. With constant marketing and a wide age range of fans, both fandoms grew with each release of a book or movie. They became what many consider the first “mega-fandoms”.

The problem was, Harry Potter was a fantasy series, a type of fandom that had a long history of fan culture. Twilight, on the other hand, was set in the modern day and focused on romance– albeit, with vampires– and attracted more fans who had never interacted with fan works before. 

Fanfiction communities have always had shifting cultures and unwritten rules. For much of the fanfiction world, it was an unspoken rule that fanfiction was for fun, and to find like-minded fans you could gush over the latest piece of original media with. Harry Potter, with a massive amount of fans who came from previous fantasy-related fandoms, kept to these cultures and rules to keep their work safe from the Anne Rice-copyright holders of the world. New Twilight fans who had no history with fan works? Not so much. To say that “traditional” fandom and the Twilight fandom didn’t get along would be an understatement.

This split in fanfiction culture seems petty but ultimately became the baseline for the current fanfiction landscape. See, it’s hard to write Harry Potter fanfiction that is so completely divorced from the original media to make it unrecognizable. Conversely, Twilight had a modern setting, flat characters, and little coherent worldbuilding, making it very easy to write Twilight fanfiction that read as completely original work. And these new fans who didn’t care to follow the pre-established “rules” of fandom noticed it.

Capitalism– And Vampires– Strike Again

Twilight fans had long been putting sparkly-vampire-stalker Edward and normal-but-smells-good Bella in new settings and worlds. Popular fanfiction reimagined the power differentials between the two characters in settings as disparate as white-collar offices, medieval times, or in unique fantasy worlds that left Stephenie Meyer’s worldbuilding in the dust. While these kinds of divergences in fanfiction are relatively normal, the characters remain recognizable as part of the original media. But, with Twilight written for teens and having a lot more lust (blood and otherwise) than character development, many of the fanfiction Edwards and Bellas had little to no resemblance to their original forms. So, being enterprising people in the 21st century working under capitalism, Twilight fans came together to create small book imprints and publishing houses for repurposed Twilight fanfiction. 

There was no copyright infringement happening. All books published by these imprints had switched out names and filtered out any Twilight-specific information from their works. Whether it was because Stephenie Meyer didn’t care or because there was no legal case against it, the imprints did moderately well. Then, a big break happened: one repurposed fanfiction sold a few too many copies. Penguin Random House noticed, bought it, and started marketing it. With big-publisher backing, it flew to the top of bestseller lists. 

You’ll recognize it today as Fifty Shades of Grey. 

The success of Twilight BDSM fanfiction on the traditional market stunned publishers and fanfiction authors alike. It didn’t take them long to recover, though– soon enough, publishers began trawling the internet for fanfiction and fanfiction authors they thought would sell (with all the serial numbers filed off, of course). Entrepreneurs saw dollar signs when looking at the massive amount of fanfiction content online. Capitalism, copyright be damned, had set its sights on fan communities.

Websites popped up that promised fanfiction authors money off of ad revenue. E-reading platforms allowed fanfiction for certain licensed media to be sold for profit. But, hiding in all of these contracts and disclaimers, fanfiction authors realized that if the copyright holder sued for infringement, they’d be on their own. All these websites and entrepreneurs were looking to make a quick buck on people’s passion projects.

This rattled the community, especially those who had experienced the Anne Rice purges of the early aughts. A group of frustrated fans, looking to create a way to protect themselves and other authors, came up with an idea: a strictly non-monetized archive for fanfiction whose terms would create a solid legal standing for all the work on the site. It would run as a non-profit, fueled by fans, and retain copyright lawyers in case any Anne Rices came to call. 

With the combined power of fandom, this archive came into existence just as the publishing vultures began circling. Archive of Our Own, often abbreviated to AO3, was founded in 2008. To this day, there are over 5,651,000 users with accounts on the site and more than 10,930,000 pieces of fanfiction, all protected from monetization and lawsuits in a fan-made space. 

Publishing & Fanfiction Today: Where Are We Now & Where Do We Go From Here?

A lot has happened since the emergence of rewritten fanfiction on the publishing scene a la Fifty Shades, both in terms of culture and the internet. More mega-fandoms have been born from companies looking to play on nostalgia, like Marvel and Star Wars. Social media and the advent of smartphone apps and Google SEO have curtailed the “old internet” experience. Now, many users are funneled into the big social media names– Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok– instead of small websites run by individual creators. As a result, different ways of communicating have arisen, and advertising has shifted to influencer marketing and short, bite-sized content for easy sharing. All the while, publishing is still pulling fanfiction into traditional markets, especially fanfiction from the mega-fandoms. 

This combination of forces (along with many more that I don’t have time to dive into) has changed book marketing and publishing. Now, instead of an author having a carefully prepared elevator speech about what their book is about, they have to name other media their work is like to get attention. When marketing, influencers on BookTok might say a book is “Enemies to Lovers” or “Found Family”- in other words, fanfiction tropes that have served fandoms for generations. The fandom-ification of the book market is hurting both readers and authors, reducing authors’ work to an unsellable paperweight due to a “lack of market interest”, and killing a reader’s ability to find books with meaningful themes and cultural relevance. I cannot name the number of times I’ve been told to read The Love Hypothesis, a not-even-trying-to-hide-it repurposed Star Wars fanfiction about a renamed Kylo Ren/Rey Skywalker, and, when I ask what it’s about, no one can give me an answer that doesn’t sound like fanfiction. 

Don’t get me wrong– this is not me ragging on fanfiction quality. This is me looking at the publishing industry and watching it appropriate a community’s language poorly to sell books. Fanfiction tropes exist for a reason. When you love reading about Dana Scully and Fox Mulder from The X-Files, you don’t need to be told who the characters are or their motivations. All you need to know is where the author plans on taking them. If it’s tagged “Enemies to Lovers”, you know they’ll start antagonistic and the fanfiction will be a journey toward love. If it’s tagged “Found Family”, the author might be interested in a non-romantic interpretation of the relationships between Scully, Mulder, and A.D. Skinner. Those tags and tropes have meaning in fanfiction. Applied to an unknown “original” book? They mean nothing. I don’t know these characters or whether I care about them. All that marketing tells me is that this book will have no cultural relevance, no inherent thematic value. 

Which is the problem. Publishing only takes the fanfiction it considers “market-friendly”. The easy beach read romance or YA adventure novel, mostly. But fanfiction, at its core, has always been decidedly non-market-friendly. As we established at the beginning, there’s always been sex. There’s also a lot of handling of grief, trauma, racism, homophobia, and transphobia. There are also a lot of characters that have been reimagined as queer or as people of color, commenting on the original work’s take on gender, sexuality, or race. From the first fan author who wrote Sherlock Holmes and John Watson making passionate love to today, there has always been cultural critique and weighty thematic elements to fanfiction. Those just aren’t the ones getting published. 

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It’s hard to know where the continued blurring of lines between traditional publishing and fanfiction will take us. There are plenty of other factors to consider like the entertainment industry’s risk-aversion leading to very few original stories being produced, or the ongoing sanitization of the internet to make every website “safe” for advertisers and credit card companies. Some of these issues are already bleeding into non-published fanfiction and small publishing imprints willing to take risks. There’s no way to predict the future but, frankly, I don’t like where we’re heading. 

Still, if there’s one thing we can count on, it’s this: Fanfiction will always exist. From the first time someone altered a story to make their friend laugh to the current-day author of The Subspace Emissary’s Worlds Conquest, a Super Smash Brothers fanfiction that is six times longer than War and Peace, people will always want to tell their version of their favorite story. How that community continues to exist, and for whom, can only be told with time. I hope you enjoyed this very brief (yes, this is brief) look into fanfiction. If you’re new to the concept and are interested in learning more, I cannot recommend Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World by Anne Jamison enough. It’s funny, it’s impassioned, and it’s academic– my favorite nonfiction combo. If you’re a fan yourself, well, I’ll see you all over on AO3. Happy reading and happy sipping!