Fan fiction

The hothouse in which we collectively cultivate our fictions. A whole participatory universe of transformative works about pop culture properties.

AO3’s 15-year journey from blog post to fanfiction powerhouse is a core sample through the movement as it transformed in my early adulthood:

Primarily written by women, and often featuring erotica and/or queer relationships, sexism and homophobia both played a part in its denigration. Coppa, who hosted archives at the time, would sometimes have to delete stories at the request of its writers, who feared retribution in their jobs or relationships. “I would get frantic emails from people saying, ‘I’m going through a divorce and my husband is going to take my fic and tell the judge I’m an unfit mother and try to take my children. How fast can you make me disappear from the internet?’”

Coppa herself felt pressure to keep certain aspects of fandom secret. At a talk she was giving about fanfiction, an audience member pressed her: weren’t there people writing about Kirk and Spock having sex? “I remember taking a breath and saying quite consciously, ‘Yeah, there is, and it’s amazing, you should read some.’ And it was the first time I had ever done that. It was the kind of thing we all skated around.” She had nightmares about her fanfic costing her tenure track at the college she worked at and would frequently imagine how to defend herself against a hypothetical complaint about her having written sex scenes.

“But the only way through that is to lean into it,” she says. Though she still sometimes has people imply fanfic writing is a strange hobby, she responds differently. “‘Are you dead inside?’ is sort of my answer,” she laughs, comparing it to hobbyist painting, music, or knitting. “‘But isn’t some of it erotic?’ Yes. Yes, it is. It turns out women have a sexuality.”

Fanfiction is of course thirsty, as is much of fandom, and there is interesting crossover to pornography. Mind you, what part of human life does not have occasional crossover with porn?