How fan fiction became 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 reading and writing a lot, a lot words about their favorite fictional characters. It is a place that allows normal readers to test their characters in different scenarios and with different results. Over the past couple of years, sites like AO3 have become fertile ground for publishers to find new authors who could deliver their next big hit.

Last summer, reporter Rachel Kurzius he wrote about how fan fiction became mainstream for the Washington Post. “Fanfic”, as it is known by its friends, is the basis of the smash hits from Hot rivalry to Fifty Shades of Grey. Kurzius anticipates that as more fans of fanfic grow and gain employment in various roles in the mainstream, we will see more and more of this genre creeping into the mainstream.

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

This is such a funny question because there are a couple of different strains of thought here. So let’s start with the philosophy of the big tent, which is fan fiction is something that is really derived or inspired by pre-existing works. But if we think about it in general, basically everything we know, including many of the classics is fan fiction, right? We can think recently of Percival Everett Jamesis it Huckleberry Finn fanfic, right?

Talking to a lot of fandom experts, one person I talked to told me that she wanted to define fanfic really broadly because it gave it some sort of legitimacy. Like, these are books that are considered part of the literary canon that win awards. And so fanfic is this too. But she came to the idea that if you define everything like this, then it is such a broad category that it loses its meaning and so a narrower version of understanding fanfic would be these transformative works that are based on pre-existing properties that exist in the gift economy. And this is key. The idea that this is something that people don’t do to make money and, in fact, shouldn’t make money doing this, that it’s just that they do it because it’s fun or exciting or to build community.

In the last century, there were people who wrote zines, for example, very popular, Star Trek between them. But those were very specific in terms of a fandom. People wrote fan fiction about particular characters in a world, and that tradition carried forward to various websites and online newsletters which again, were balkanized into a particular fandom.

It was only later when we saw wider websites like, for example, fanfiction.net, which gather all these different fandoms and say, if you like it. Buffy the Vampire Slayeryou may like it Supernatural. Let’s see what these characters could do, or what would happen if we put these beloved characters from different worlds together and make them meet.

Which brings us to the modern day with Archive of Our Own, which I would say is kind of the big archive power 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 transformative works created by fans, and it’s organized in such a way that it’s clear it was created by librarians, right? You can certainly search by fandom, by character. You can also search for the type of story you want to hear, or a trope that interests you. You’d be amazed at how extensive the archives are in Archive of Our Own.

You can say, even if you don’t know what any of this is, it is being mainstreamed. It has been integrated into the culture, now. You’re 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 greywhich was actually twilight fan fiction. 50 shades of grey it completely changed the game. It was a bestseller as a book. It became an absolute bestseller as a series of films. And it got the editors thinking. I spoke with the romantic duo Christina Lauren (the pseudonym for the duo of co-authors Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings), who actually met to write. twilight fanfic, and they said that when they first talked to people about going into the traditional publishing world, and this is over a decade ago, they said, “Don’t say anything about fan fiction. It’s a scarlet letter.” Well, this is no longer true.

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

If you look at genre fiction these days, publishing houses, when they advertise those works, use tags very similar to what you see in Archive of Our Own. So they convey those same tropes saying, if you like it that way, you’ll find it in this book. Because they have realized, thanks to fan fiction, that this is how many readers like to find what they are 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, and it created this kind of urgency and immediate connection, but you didn’t see much in traditional publishing. Now that has been subsumed by traditional publishing. So a lot of really popular trends, even in terms of writing, started in fan fiction. You can also see that the joyful queer romance was a huge part of fan fiction before traditional publishing.

So it seems clear to me, based on what you’re saying, that fan fiction writers 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? It’s just because, hey, some of this writing is pretty good, let’s take it seriously?

I think part of it is just a wider mainstreaming of fanfic, and people flying the fanfic flag proudly in a way they didn’t a decade ago. And if you understand the structures of traditional publishing, whether it’s publishers who acquire 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 are interested in it, and see it as a legitimate form of writing.

Part of it, I think, is that traditional publishing is in, some might say, terribly tight, and there’s a wider hunger for IP, intellectual property, things that are already proven successes. And if you look at some of these fanfics in Archive of Our Own, they have millions of views. I think traditional publishing looks at it and says, “This is basically as sure a deal as we’re going to get in terms of thinking it could translate into book sales.”

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