Come here, huddle close, come on. Now hush. I’m going to say a few words, and if you know them, well… Ready? Wattpad. AO3. Fanfiction.net. Tumblr. For many teenage girls, queers, and young adults, fandom and fan-fiction are big parts of their lives. I, too, am no stranger to fandoms, finding myself reading story after story on Archive of Our Own (AO3), losing hours on end to a haze of fan fiction - often about dead, gay wizards. Why? Well, many reasons. Firstly, escapism from the monotony of daily life. These bright stories are so much more appealing. Then there’s the rich plots, a lot of the time convoluted and confusing, yet still entertaining enough to sit through 100k or more words. The rare beautiful writing, hundreds of thousands of words, gems tucked away into the depths of the internet (looking at you, bizzarestars and MsKingBean89). But oftentimes, it’s wanting more of the story, your favorite characters and ships. They’re silly fantasies created so that people can come together as a community, connecting over smashing their favorite character together like Barbies.
And that’s perfectly fine. I always have multiple tabs of AO3 and Tumblr open at a time. I love reading AUs, happy endings, angst, and fluff. I love watching edits and looking at fan art. But when fan fiction is picked up to be published as books, turned into movie franchises… Where is the line drawn?
Most famously, Fifty Shades of Grey, which started out as Twilight fan-fiction is now an internationally bestselling trilogy, has a multimedia movie franchise that has made billions, and features music by famous singers including Zayn and Taylor Swift. The Idea of You, a rom com starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galatzine is based on the book of the same name which allegedly started out as fan fiction of Harry Styles. After, a series of fan fiction - also about One Direction - on Wattpad that got picked up and made into a book series complete with a series of movie adaptations.
Not only do most of these have terrible or unrealistic writing, they overuse cringy tropes and feature way too many sex scenes to be realistic (50 Shades of Grey) in order to appeal to a new adult audience. In fact, most of the screen time revolves around how to make the characters have sex again. And again. This results in them having terrible plots and not enough of anything else. Character development often has to take a backseat for the characters to enjoy each other’s company. Honestly, Fifty Shades of Grey is just another over glorified Wattpad smut story.
Too much naked screen time aside, there’s also the moral implications. Many aspiring authors spend years slaving away at their books, screenwriters pour their blood, sweat, and tears into their scripts only for their manuscripts to be brutally rejected by publishing house after publishing house, studio after studio. But at the same time, fan fiction after fan fiction are scooped up from the corners of the Internet with some names and places changed to avoid copyrights, and then they’re published, given budgets of million dollars, made into huge motion pictures that dominate Instagram and TikTok, and sometimes even Hollywood (again, Fifty Shades of Grey). How is that fair?
It’s not fair to the people who work day and night to make it through university to become an author or screenwriter or director, who take odd jobs to scrape by as they squeeze in the time to work on their projects as much as possible and then get rejected in favor for yet another fan fiction to book/screen adaptation. It’s not fair to the creators of the original works, who should at least deserve a credit at the end, if not royalties, as it is their intellectual property in the first place.
Yet, these fan fiction adaptations often attract large audiences, and gain a lot of publicity, though often notorious. Despite many critics giving harsh reviews, they face mixed reactions from the general public, bringing enjoyment to many people, though also headaches to others.
In general, fan fiction can be great for lighthearted escapism, to pretend our favorite characters aren’t actually dead and even for a good cry. Whether it deserves to be printed, bound, published, brought to the silver screen, or it should stay in its corner of the Internet is a different question.
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