At 10, and in the beginning years of being a fangirl, this writer had just finished the “Harry Potter” and “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” series. Both fictional worlds provided a sense of freedom not yet experienced personally in life at that time.
The characters seemed to jump right off the page and come to life. Percy and Annabeth’s happiness and Harry Potter saving the world meant everything. When reading the books in both series (for the time being) were completed, a deep need arose to find a way of continued engagement with those beloved characters. There was also the desire to see them go through scenarios not explored in the main plot.
Stumbling across a blogging platform called Tumblr — which has been an instrumental part of many teenage lives — led to the discovery of other people who shared the same feelings. They wanted to explore their favorite fictional universes beyond what was in the original source material.
That led to the ultimate discovery: fanfiction. These fan-created written works will often use alternate universes or scenarios to explore the relationship between fictional characters outside of their original source material.
Fanfiction not only allows folks to continue to live vicariously through their favorite characters, but it also can provide newbies and seasoned readers the chance to discover more about themselves and their sexuality.
A brief history on fanfiction
Fanfiction has grown rapidly in popularity since the 2010s, but its roots can be traced back to the original 1960s Star Trek television series. Starting in the mid 1970s, fans of the sci-fi franchise published “fanzines” with content centering around the show’s two male protagonists: Spock and Kirk. On some occasions there were even romantic interludes between the two male characters.
In more recent years, however, fanfiction has turned into a business – one that can be lucrative if your fanfiction is popular enough. An example of a successful fanfiction was E.L. James’s, “Master of the Universe,” a “Twilight” fanfiction picked up by a traditional publisher and turned into the still popular “Fifty Shades of Grey” series.
Most authors aren’t paid to publish these stories — in fact, for the majority, it’s a way to practice their writing skills and engage with the media they feel passionate about. For most on platforms like Wattpad and Archive of Our Own (AO3), fan fiction is about community.
Who reads fanfiction?
According to data collected by AO3, over 80% of AO3 users are female, with a significant percentage identifying as LGBTQ+. Over 100 million people read and publish fanfiction, and on the platform fanfiction.net, there are over 700,000 published works just about Harry Potter characters.
AO3 releases the top “ships” — character pairings or groupings fans like to imagine in romantic relationships — every year based on the amount of works published, times certain categories (in fanfiction it’s called tags) were searched and how many times people sought out content with those specific characters. And before you ask, yes, there are also fanfictions for celebrities, musicians and bands. It’s actually a highly debated issue in online spaces on if it truly counts as fan created fiction since it involves real people.
AO3 just released its data for 2024, and the top 10 ships were all same-sex pairings. In addition, all of the top 20 ships but one were male/male pairings. The top 10 were:
- Dean Winchester/Castiel of Supernatural
- Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski of Teen Wolf
- Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
- Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter from Harry Potter
- Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers from Marvel
- Aziraphale/Crowley from Good Omens
- Sirius Black/Remus Lupin from Harry Potter
- Steve Rogers/Tony Stark from Marvel
- Bakugou Katsuki/Midoriya Izuku from My Hero Academia
- Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson of One Direction
The LGBTQ+ community and fanfiction
It’s very clear there is a queer aspect to fanfiction — the data proves that in itself. Because of the nature of each of these pairings, it allows for the readers to experience LGBTQ+ representation in a way often neglected in mainstream forms of media.
That can allow readers to see love through other perspectives and help affirm your own identity by providing a story with characters who experience the same inner dialogue select personas already loved and connected to.
Many fanfiction aficionados feel this way.
A VICE contributor Satviki wrote about their experiences with coming to terms with their sexuality, saying fanfiction provided them a place to navigate their inner conflict.
“If I was choosing the ones, which solely had queer couples, it wasn’t anybody’s business,” they wrote in a 2020 article. “Before I knew it, I had started subconsciously associating myself with the characters … So as the discovery of my own sexuality crept in, relationships in fanfictions kept showing me the light and letting me know the things that went through my mind also went through the minds of my favorite characters in some other dimension. And that it was okay.”
In the article, the author spoke to another person named Khushi, a second-year philosophy student and fanfiction devotee. They shared how they had felt for their entire life: they thought they disliked the romance genre all together. It wasn’t until they read their first queer fanfiction when they realized that wasn’t the case.
“Like all teens, I wanted the joy of the sweeter moments, but as a young queer person, I could either read tragic homosexual stories or go through unnecessary heterosexual drama to get that one interaction between queer characters, which honestly wasn’t worth it,” Khushi explained. “And that’s where fanfiction saved me. Since I enjoyed reading fanfic, I looked up lesbian stories. With so many options out there, I could find the exact romantic story I was looking for, and between two women.
“And to be honest, the giddiness I felt reading them assured me that I did like romance.”
A lot of fanfiction, especially on AO3, contains sexual content. It can range in regards to tropes seen, including but not limited to first-time sex or hardcore ones like bondage and submission, and even harder and niche tropes like Alpha/Beta/Omega dynamics.
“While it’s perfectly okay for people to just seek out fanfics to titillate themselves, to me, these smutty fics were for more than just getting off,” Satviki wrote. “As someone who was new to sex, especially queer sex, they essentially gave me an idea of what sex would look like. And unlike porn, they emphasized on the importance of condoms, lubes and STD testing.”
Fanfiction provided a place for Satviki, and many like them, to truly learn and understand what queer experiences can look like. And because of that, they believe they’re better off in sexual encounters partially because of fanfiction.
“As much as I believe fanfics shouldn’t be the only source of sex education,” Satviki explained, “I stand by the fact that they genuinely did a better job than my parents, society, sex education at school and porn combined,” they explained.