Fanfiction picks up the slack where mainstream media lacks
By Hailey Ford
The most popular tags on Archive of Our Own. (Hailey Ford/CanCulture)
Ah, fanfiction. If you’ve ever logged on to Tumblr.com, you’ve likely come across a piece of fan-written content in your days—particularly if Superwholock was your vibe. Fanfiction often gets a bad rap, typically associated with amateurish content that displays the weirdest parts of the internet in all of its unholy glory. Viewed by outsiders as either content written by losers with no grammatical skills or the strangest smut that has ever been viewed by human eyes, it’s been difficult for fanfiction to wrestle its way into the limelight of mainstream literature.
While weird smut and bad grammar are entirely present, fanfiction has become much more than that. It’s a place for writers and readers to come together and explore themes and ideas in new and exciting ways. Fanfiction is where writers of any level can explore their favourite characters and worlds while adding their unique touch. It may be based on existing media, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t add new depth to those beloved stories.
Many popular books from recent years, such as The Love Hypothesis or The Mortal Instruments, started as fanfiction. Widespread headcanons have been widely adopted by fandom communities at large. It allows people to better see themselves in characters they love. And yet, it still gets a bad reputation, reduced by outsiders to only the worst parts of itself. To do so is like judging fine arts as a whole by the finger-painting of a kindergartener.
The importance of fanfiction in creating a sense of community, aiding creative development, and allowing for absentee representation shouldn’t be overlooked.
Julian Winters, author of novels Running With Lions, The Summer of Everything, and more, is one of many who found his start in fanfiction. As a young reader, he struggled to find good books with well-written, queer characters. Characters like him.
A 2013 survey found that around 43 per cent of fanfiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3) was explicitly tagged as featuring a relationship between two men, with only around 15 per cent tagged as having romance between a man and a woman.
In contrast, in 2016, only 79 LGBTQ+ Young Adult Novels were released by mainstream publishers - and those publishers put out a lot of books. A 2022 report indicated that only 12 per cent of regular characters on television in the United States are LGBTQ+.
These numbers are the highest they’ve ever been.
Winters recalls that most books or pieces of media that featured queer characters had them living out terrible, traumatic, and depressing lives, up until the point in the story where they inevitably died. For him, fanfiction provided a remedy to that.
“I wanted to tell those stories where I actually get to make it to the end,” Winters said. “We deserve better than just to be killed off halfway through a book.”
Winters also believes there are advantages that fanfiction writing has over traditional publishing - and some lessons he hopes can be learned from the successes of fanfiction.
“You get to just go wherever you want with [fanfiction] and the reader will follow you because you're telling such a great story,” Winters said. “We have this formula we follow [in novels] to get from point A to point B. Sometimes I would just like to spend a lot more time in worlds getting to know characters.”
He specifically points to simple stories, where characters just go about their day-to-day lives.
“Especially for me, as a person of colour, as a queer person. It'd be nice just to see people that identify like me or that look like me just living normal lives,” he said. “One of the great things about fanfiction writing is so much about it is kind of scratching that itch.”
Winters is not alone in his views, either on representation in mainstream literature (or a lack thereof) or on what’s missing from traditional media.
“[Fanfiction] fills in the gaps where canon doesn't go,” said Jaye Roy, a linguistics student at the University of Toronto, who's also a fanfiction reader and writer. “I think that's very valuable, especially when it comes to issues or representation that people might not see in mainstream media.”
Roy added that representation in fanfiction is not always done perfectly. Sometimes, despite their best intentions, amateur writers lean too far into stereotypes. Despite that, Roy feels that representation is one of the foundations of fanfiction.
“A bunch of people seeing the potential for gay and adding in the gay themselves,” Roy said. “Adding queer representation where there is none.”
Research indicates that positive and present representation of queer individuals can help reduce stigma and prejudice against the LGBTQ+ community.
While traditional media is still lacking here, fanfiction allows people to better find that representation in the characters they love. For many, fanfiction isn’t just about filling in holes left empty by mainstream media. It’s also about the people you meet and the shared love of a particular piece of media.
“For me, the importance of fanfiction was very intertwined with community,” Roy said. “It's essentially another way of the fandom coming together and congregating over something they love, or love to hate.”
For the president of the University of Toronto Fanfiction Club, Zain Butt, that sense of community is one of the driving forces of his love for fanfiction and one of his motivators in starting the club. “We're focused on this whole idea of coming together to just give our thoughts,” Butt said. “It's about exploring these scenarios and relationships that are hinted at.”
He added that before recently, it was often incredibly difficult to find direct queer representation. He believes fanfiction allows people to explore implied relationships or ones that viewers, readers, or watchers were drawn to. After all, even back in 1968, fans were writing Kirk/Spock fanfiction.
Butt said he appreciates the openness of fanfiction is, and how accessible it can be to new writers.
“[Writing] is one of those arts that's harder to get into when you're younger,” he said, stating he finds the main option available to new writers is either poetry or short stories. “If you want to do longer narrative fiction, then fanfiction is the preeminent form nowadays.”
For those with a passion for writing, courses can be expensive. For many, fanfiction is an opportunity to learn by doing and sharpen their storytelling skills. It also comes with a built-in fanbase bursting with people who are happy to jump in and give their thoughts.
Plus, it’s free. AO3, Wattpad, Fanfic.net, Tumblr, whatever your site of choice - posting costs nothing but your time, energy, and occasionally your sanity. In sharp contrast, self-publishing through traditional methods could take a sizable chunk out of your bank account. If you’re a broke college student, that’s likely not in the cards for you.
So if you’re just looking to get your work out into the world, put down your pen, pick up your laptop, and log onto AO3. Fanfiction might just be what’s right for you.