How fan fiction went mainstream

Archive of Our Own, or AO3, is one of the most popular websites in the world, with over 10 million registered users. Its users spend their time both reading and writing many, many words about their favorite fictional characters. It’s a place that allows normie readers to try out their characters in different scenarios and with different outcomes. In the last couple of years, sites like AO3 became fertile ground for publishers to find new authors who might provide them with their next big hit. 

Last summer, reporter Rachel Kurzius wrote about how fan fiction is going mainstream for the Washington Post.  “Fanfic,” as it’s known to its friends, is the underpinning of smash hits from Heated Rivalry to Fifty Shades of Grey. Kurzius anticipates that as more fanfic adherents grow up and get jobs in various roles in the mainstream, we’ll see more and more of this genre creeping into the mainstream. 

Kurzius spoke Today, Explained host Noel King about why fan fiction is everywhere. An excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. For the whole interview, listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What is fan fiction?

This is such a fun question because there are a couple of different strains of thought here. So let’s start with the big tent philosophy, which is fan fiction is anything that is really derived from or inspired by preexisting works. But if we think about this broadly, basically everything that we know, including many of the classics are fan fiction, right? We could think recently about Percival Everett’s James, that’s Huckleberry Finn fanfic, right?

Does that really count?

In speaking with a lot of fandom experts, one person that I spoke with told me she used to want to define fanfic really broadly because it gave it a kind of legitimacy. Like, these are books that are considered part of the literary canon that are winning awards. And so fanfic is that too. But she came around to the idea that if you define everything that way, then that’s such a broad category that it kind of loses meaning and so a more narrow version of understanding fanfic would be these transformative works that are based on preexisting property that exist in the gift economy. And this is key. The idea that this is something that people are doing not to make money and in fact ought not make money doing this, that it’s just they’re doing it because it is fun or exciting or community building to do.

Where did this start?

Last century, there were people who were writing zines, for example, very popularly, Star Trek among them. But those were very specific as to one fandom. People were writing fan fiction about particular characters in one world, and that tradition passed forward to various websites and online newsletters that again, were balkanized into a particular fandom. 

It was only later when we saw broader websites like, for example, fanfiction.net, that were bringing all of these different fandoms together and saying, if you like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you might like Supernatural. Let’s see what these characters could do, or what happens if we put these beloved characters from different worlds together and have them meet with one another. 

That brings us to the modern day with Archive of Our Own, which I would say is kind of the big powerhouse archival player these days. And certainly where I look for fanfic when I read it. 

Explain what Archive of Our Own is.

Archive of Our Own is a website where people can post and read fan-created transformative works, and it is organized in such a way that it’s clear it was created by librarians, right? You can certainly search by fandom, by character. You could also search by the kind of story you want to hear, or a trope that you’re interested in. You would be amazed at just how extensive the archives are on Archive of Our Own.

You would say, even if you don’t know what any of this is, it is being mainstreamed. It has been mainstreamed into culture, now. You are actually consuming things that started out as fan fiction. What are they?

The big one, the Kahuna that became the juggernaut, would be 50 Shades of Grey, which was actually Twilight fan fiction. 50 Shades of Grey completely changed the game. It was a bestseller as a book. It became an absolute bestseller as a movie series. And it got publishers thinking. I spoke with romance duo Christina Lauren [the pen name for co-author duo Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings], who actually met writing Twilight fanfic, and they said that when they first spoke to people about going into the traditional publishing world, and this is more than a decade ago, they were told, “Don’t say a thing about fan fiction. That’s a scarlet letter.” Well, that is not true anymore. 

These days, particularly last summer, you saw three works in particular that either had been Draco/Hermione fan fiction, or at least a prominent Draco/Hermione writer wrote a series that wasn’t exactly the fanfic, but certainly the fanfic roots were actually being advertised by the publisher as a selling point. One very famous one is The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, which was originally a Rey/Kylo Ren fan fiction from Star Wars. And what is so kind of funny and meta about that is that that is now being adapted into a movie. And the male lead is actually married to the actress who played Rey in Star Wars.

If you look at genre fiction these days, publishing houses, when advertising those works, are using very similar tags to the ones that you would see on Archive of Our Own. So they are broadcasting those same tropes as saying, if you like that, you’ll find that in this book. Because they’ve realized, thanks to fan fiction, that’s how a lot of readers like to find what they’re going to read next.

Another thing that I found incredibly fascinating is a decade, a decade and a half ago, fan fiction writers were writing in the first-person present tense, and it created this kind of urgency and immediate connection, but you weren’t seeing that a lot in traditional publishing. Now that has been subsumed by traditional publishing. So a lot of really popular trends, even in terms of writing, began in fan fiction. You might also see joyous queer romance was a huge part of fan fiction before traditional publishing got on board.

So it seems clear to me, based on what you’re saying, that writers of fan fiction and the work itself are being taken more seriously than they were, I don’t know, 20 years ago. Why do you think that is? Is it just because, hey, some of this writing is pretty darn good, let’s take it seriously?

I think part of it is just a broader mainstreaming of fanfic, and that people are kind of waving that fanfic flag proudly in a way that they hadn’t a decade or so ago. And if we’re understanding the structures of traditional publishing, whether it is the editors who are acquiring works or literary agents, a lot of these people are people who grew up on fan fiction, right? So they might not have the same hangups or ideas about fan fiction that previous generations had. They’re interested in it, and they see it as a legitimate form of writing. 

Part of it, I think, is because traditional publishing is in, some may say, dire straits, and there’s a broader hunger for IP, intellectual property, things that have already been proven successes. And if you look at some of these fanfics on Archive of Our Own, they have millions of views. I think traditional publishing looks at this and says, “This is basically as safe a deal as we are going to get in terms of thinking that that might be able to translate into book sales.” 

What I find really interesting about it is, if one of our elemental definitions of fanfic is that it exists in the gift economy, what happens when fanfic becomes a legitimate path to traditional publishing? What does that mean for fanfic as an art or as a community? And I think that that’s something that a lot of fanfic writers and readers are wrestling with right now.