Today, Explained - Why fan fiction is everywhere

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

Publishing houses and entertainment studios have come for fan fiction, but writers and readers want to make sure it stays weird. This episode was produced by Danielle Hewitt, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King. Photo by Michael Reichel/picture alliance via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fanfiction is having a moment. The fans are shipping Buccanetti and Draco and Hermione, and the other man and the other man. They're getting Shane Holland are pregnant. When I learned that about the fan fiction, I was like, whatever floats your boat. I don't know. As soon as I began to read fan fiction,

I realized how much it is in the ether of so much of pop culture and the book industry and film and television. And I think that we've seen fan fiction, fiction really reach, I don't want to say it's reached the zenith, because who knows, it could keep going higher, but there is a kind of mass understanding of an interest in fan fiction that I don't think was there before. And I think that because of that, people just want to talk about it more and more. Fan fiction breaks containment. If you know you know, if you don't, well, this is

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I just don't understand why we're on it. It's our first catchback on the X-Files. This isn't an X-File. Sure it is. And today explained? What do you want? Aliens? Tractor beams. Wow. Rachel Cursey, as freelance reporter covers books, writes about fan fiction. 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? Like, we could think recently about Percival Everett's James. Those white boys, Huck and Tom watched me. They were always playing some kind of pretending game where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy. That's Huckleberry Finn fanfic, right? Huh, does that really count as... Well, so let's talk about it.

Because, you know, 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, right? Like, these are books that are considered part of the literary canon that are winning awards. And so fanfic is that too, don't you see? 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. What is the history of this? Where did this start? I would say 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 kind of balkanized into a particular fandom. It was only later when we saw broader websites, like, for example, fanfiction.net,

that we're 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. And so 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 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.

Okay, so Noel King, 26, I have no idea, even a few weeks ago that any of this exists, But you would say, Noel, 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, like the Kahuna that became the juggernaut would be 50 Shades of Grey. I don't do romance.

Which was actually Twilight fan fiction. You better hold on tight Spider Monkey. Fifty Shades of Gray 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, 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. I think publishing for a long time had seen fan fiction as kind of like, for lack of a better, like idiom, like the red-headed stepchild a little bit of writing. I think, you know, it was seen as reductive and derivative. And, you know, if you were writing fan fiction, it was because you couldn't come up with your own characters or your own stories.

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 Ray Kylo Ren fan fiction from Star Wars. You have that look in your eyes from the forest and you called me a monster. You are a monster. 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 Ray in Star Wars.

I wasn't aware of it. Neither was days of this connection. I was told it after I was offered the job that said, by the way, this is loosely where the inspiration came from. And I thought that meant that was what inspired Ali Hazelwood to start writing. 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. So here are some books with the one-bed trope. That makes me go a little bit peril. I asked booktop for enemies to lovers recommendations where there are actually enemies. Here are eight of my favorite grumpy sunshine romance books with the perfect tension and banter. Another thing that I found incredibly fascinating is, you know, 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. might also see, you know, 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, right? Why? 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, more. 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 like the 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. But 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 fanfix 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. Rachel Curzias is a freelance reporter. Coming up, what does all this mean for fanfic as an art and as a community?

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growing popularity is great for fanfiction, right? Well, maybe. Clubby fanfic sites like AO3 have found themselves attracting a flood of writers and readers. It's kind of an iceberg, you know, like the internet thing says, if you know, you know, I mean, we have, you know, more than 10 million registered users and many, many more unregistered users. Whoa. Francesca Kappa is a professor of English and film studies at Mulemberg College. She co-founded the nonprofit organization for transformative works that created A.03. Why did you start it? So fan fiction as a kind of organized subcultural activity, right, had really been going on very strongly since the 60s. Fan fiction writers and fans were some of the first people to come on to the Internet.

It's really not overstating it to say that we built a lot of the Internet. And this is in the 1990s. And what happened is in the aughts. Venture capitalists came. And in fact, the venture capitalists saw fandom and its potential and fanfic and its, global reach. And a lot of them clearly thought, great, let's commodify and sell this. And the community that I'm a part of, we believe in a gift economy, we have a lot of community norms that are not capitalist norms. And so when the venture capitalists came, there was a real sense of like,

wow, they're literally trying to commodify our hobby and our relationship to each other as a community. And we don't want that to happen. So we founded a nonprofit specifically to create an archive of our own, which, if you're a literary person, might echo to you Virginia Woolf's famous essay, a room of one's own, in which she says, among other things, that a woman needs 500 pounds a year and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. And so the idea was to create a space, a non-profit, non-commercial space for the community that would preserve our fiction and our hobby without it turning into some tech bros commodified dream. Who is writing fan fiction for A.O.3?

So the demographic of A.O.3 is so broad, you would not believe me. I mean, it is 12 years old. And I say that because you're supposed to be 13 and older to be on the site. And then at some point, they click the button and they lie. But there are 12-year-olds. And, you know, there are 85-year-olds. I mean, the first generation of women who wrote Kirk Spock, I mean, many of them are passing. their grandmothers, Kirk Spock stories were kind of stories that posited a romance between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. And women in the 60s started writing Kirk Spock slash sort of in the late, late 60s, early 70s and collecting them in zines. Not with my ship, you don't.

In fact, one of the projects that I worked on in the early days of the OTW Organization for Transformative Works was that we were being contacted by women in their 70s and 80s who were like having to move in with their kids or going into a nurse. homes and they had like 3,000 fan fiction zines. And what do you do when your kids are finding your entire giant zine collection or what do you do with them? You know, grandma was writing fan fiction with a typewriter. And like now grandma's online. In fact, one of the delightful things is people assuming that they know the age of the person they're talking to and then having them talk about like their grandchildren or that they have a high school exam. And those two people are

communicating. Like, they might be having a great time on the same story, and one of them is 16, and one of them is, you know, 60. It is overwhelmingly women. There is a lot of non-binary, a lot of queerness, you know, a whole series of identities. Fan fiction meets needs that the market has up until now not really been very interested in supplying, right? And you see it with the heated rivalry thing. You know, Rachel Reed and many others, you know, kind of learned their craft in a certain way by hanging out at the AO3. And she made a really fanfiction-y kind of a book. And now watching the heated rivalry thing is like watching all sorts of people being like,

I didn't know I could have these big feelings. And we're like, oh, we knew. And then they're like, wow, you mean there's a whole website full of stories that will give me enormous feelings? And the answer is yes. It's very clear you wanted this to be a safe space for people who write and enjoy fan fiction. And there's been this influx of people relatively recently, and that has supercharged some debates over who is allowed to be here, how you should conduct yourself once you are here. Today we're talking about fandom etiquette because the heated rivalry fanfic writers unionized. Fandom etiquette has been out the window in this fandom.

This is literally like fandom 100, not even one of. one, brother. You need to go back and retake last class. Tell me a little bit of the downside of this thing that felt very like private, going very public. I mean, certainly, look, in any subculture and any group, right, people come in and there's a kind of norming process. I will say, I think A-O-3-ish fans are very good at schooling, so to speak, new people who show up about like what we believe and what we don't believe. It is very funny when people come into the space and, you know, they really misunderstand, for instance, our gift culture. Just to say this, the AO3 makes no money and nobody involved with it gets paid. And if they, look, if you don't want to do what we do,

there are lots of other places that you can go. We, you know, we don't, we're not trying to make money, so it sounds weird to say, like, we don't need you, but you can go be someplace else. And we are, like, much bigger than Wikipedia. And in fact, every time somebody adds a story to the archive, it costs us more money. We really. believe when we talk about amateur. Amateur, the root of amateur is Amade. It's love. We do this for love. In the first half of the show, we talked about how publishers, with the popularity of fan fiction, the understanding that like a good or like a popular fan fiction can have like a million eyeballs on it. Actually, maybe called it. A million eyeballs. Like a million people, right? So, but, but okay, but if you

work in publishing, you look at that and you say, well, that's two million eyeballs that. might buy my book at Barnes & Noble or Waterstones or whatever. So this is the tension we have talked about a lot where you have a culture that is trying to keep itself pure, if I can use that word, versus a kind of capitalist imperative that says let's make money off of this. And that leads, as we've all learned to inshittification, you know, a sort of dynamic we're all familiar with. The thing starts out great and now it's crap. How do you, knowing how popular this stuff has become, knowing that there are people with money looking at the people who write on AO3, how do you keep it from getting crappy? Right. So just to say, I am not at all worried about

the inshittification of the AO3. Tell me why not. Well, hold on, because it's structurally uninshittifiable. We don't have customers and we aren't a business. I mean, inshittification is when a business relationship that was once really good for the business and the customers becomes bad, right, where you essentially lock in your audience and then you give them garbage. And we just don't have a structure where that will happen. We don't allow commercial activity on our site or anything like that. And so sometimes we have a little bit of kind of kerfuffling over that when people come in with very different expectations of what a website is, what an internet community is. They expect to have their data mind. We don't collect data. We don't sell data. I mean,

We do none of these things that we could do or that a site our size might do in order to make a lot of money. And is there tension there when somebody discovers this and doesn't sort of know the etiquette or the history or the how long we've been around of it all? Sure. I mean, but again, you know, give people time. They'll learn. I mean, this isn't like a, you know, I don't know, a mean girls club where it's like, don't come and play. Like, come and play. like every fan wants more people to come and, you know, and play. Yeah, you kind of have to play a little bit by our rules, but they're nice rules. They're rules that prize human connection and giving and, you know, on participation and not like the commodification of your friends. Like these are not bad rules to learn. All right. So you've created this thing that has managed to avoid many of the traps of capitalism meets culture. What's the future of fan fiction?

You know, that's a, you know, a lot of it depends on what happens with the law. I mean, if they change the laws on intellectual property, I don't see them doing that anytime soon. In fact, if anything, they seem to be wanting to tighten the laws around intellectual property in what I think of are bad ways. I think they're bad for culture, right? The longer things stay in copyright, the less imaginatively engaged other people can be with them. And I think that's bad for culture, not just about fan fiction, but broadly speaking. Like, it would be awfully, it would have been terrible if Shakespeare had to like negotiate with. Netflix for the right to Hamlet and then didn't get it? Like, that's the world we live in. Right? We're like, Netflix owns Hamlet. It has a five-year option. Shakespeare really has a great idea for it. But, like, no, I'm really sorry because JJ Abrams is going to do Hamlet. Like, that sucks, right? Like, that sucks. That's a terrible culture. And it's one of the reasons that, like, things are bad. The way that a thing stays alive is by being remade, right? You know, Jane Austen stays alive. Yes, because she's amazing. But also because we keep making, like great movies about her, right? And you can tell your own

Jean-Auston story right now. There's nothing to stop you, you know, from writing clueless. Ah, as if. Right? And that's great. And it drives people back to Jane Austen. The tendency is to want to hold on to more rights and let other people play less. You know, I think they are beginning to see that you would not have some of the kind of great publishing juggernauts if they, you know, sued those people out of existence. I don't know how the future goes. Sorry, I'm not a better, you know, projector of the future, but, but libraries are kind of inherently conservative, you know, like we're a library. We want to protect the thing, and we want it to last. That's our main goal for the A.O3 is that we preserve these stories and that

they last for, you know, your grandchildren can go and read the fick you wrote when you were in high school. I know, a bunch of people are shuddering right now. Like, oh, no, but like, that's what we want. Francesca Kappa, she's a professor at Mulemberg College and one of the of the founders of the Organization for Transformative Works, which created A-O-3. Danielle Hewitt produced today's show, Amina El-Sadi, edited, Patrick Boyd and David Tadish, or engineered, and Gabriel Dunatub, check the facts. The rest of us, the best of us, Abashai Artsy, Miles, Brian, Ariana, Spudu, Peter Balin-Rosen, Hottie Mawaddy, Kelly Wessinger, Dustin DeSoto, Miranda, Jolly Myers, and Sean Ramos firm. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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