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27. What is Fanficton? (Fanfiction #1)

 

April 15, 2026

 

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What is Fanficton? (Fanfiction #1)


Trigger Warning: Mentions of Assault, Rape, Incest, and Harassment, listener discretion is advised

In this episode Myda, Peyton, and Sarah talk about the culture of Fanfiction as transformative literature of existing media. They discuss sites such as AO3 and Tumblr through the lens of digital anthropology and define fanfiction-specific terminology.

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Transcript:

Myda:

Hello Friends and welcome back to Anthro MP3. We’re students from UMass who love anthropology. AnthroHub is a website we’ve helped run that’s full of all things anthro.

Make sure to check it out to look at some of the incredible blog posts and creative works made by students from our school and others. My name is Myda, and I’ll be one of your brand new hosts for today’s episode. I’m currently interested in biological and cultural anthropology.

I’m also joined by…

 

Sarah:

Sarah, one of your other hosts from another episode.

 

Peyton:

And I’m Peyton. I’ll be your other brand new host today, and I’m currently interested in bioarchaeology. So today we’ll be exploring a very unique culture of fan fiction. Myda, if you want to give us a rundown.

 

Myda:

Yeah, but first I’m going to give a trigger warning here for mentions, but not like a deep dive into topics of assault, rape, and harassment. So take care as you listen. People tell stories. It’s our way of keeping track of history and continuing the tradition and imagining a future. Fan fiction is transformative literature of existing media for the personal pleasure and intellectual exploration of the writer and the fellow fans reading it. Along with the written text, there’s fan art, fan crafts, shared messaging boards, beta readers, cosplayers, and websites used to foster the interactive environment fandom thrives in.

 

Sarah:

However, transformative literature and artistic interpretation of existing media isn’t new. Dante’s Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, King Arthur, Shakespeare, and Robin Hood are all works that take existing media and offer a different look or view of them for more modern times.

 

Peyton:

Incredible. I never thought of fan fiction in such depth. I kind of assume you just like something, make a fandom out of it, and then boom, fan fiction. Personally, I’ve read all of those mentions at some point in my life, but I am curious where they all draw their inspiration from.

 

Myda:

Often, modern iterations of historical literature are pulled from the classics. Greek, Roman, Chinese, and Egyptian mythology have captured the hearts of readers from centuries ago to the modern day. They’re also retellings of historical events, usually to contextualize and process the social upheaval of that generation or era. Shakespeare didn’t write what he did just for entertainment. He was voicing the politics of the people. Robin Hood could never exist without the discontent of the poor. The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost only work because of the interrogation of the Bible.

 

Sarah:

It may be notable, actually, to point out that these fandoms can be found basically anywhere. Fandom, in the modern sense, is rooted in sports fans and celebrity fans. And when you look at fandom broadly, it would be easy to say that most people are engaged in it to an extent.

 

Peyton:

I’m not sure how much fan fiction we can find on the Patriots, but I can confidently say that my dad would probably love that. I guess I never really considered fandoms in more mainstream spaces, even though the consumers are technically called fans. However, I’m curious how that connects to what we consider fandoms. How do you even define a fandom?

 

Myda:

Funny you ask. A lot of people have football players they love, all-stars they adore, celebrities they would pay thousands to see. And a fandom is defined as the fans of a particular person, team, fictional series, regarded collectively as a community or subculture. But the only collective we’re focusing on today is a continuation of geek culture, not necessarily the sports fan of the 1930s.

 

Peyton:

Oh, I see, geeks. I’m wondering, what is the difference between geek, nerd, dork? What even is a geek?

 

Myda:

So a geek is somebody obsessively fascinated with particular subjects, and as a collective, often gravitate towards less mainstream content. A nerd is defined similarly, but a dork is considered to be a contemptible, socially inept person, which seems a little harsh to me. But in the 1970s and 80s, D&D and Star Wars were extremely popular with geeks. And before this, there was Pulp Fiction, not just the movie.

 

Peyton:

I hate that movie, by the way.

 

Myda:

But a genre of literature popularized from the late 1800s to the mid 1950s.

 

Sarah:

So you’re telling me Pulp Fiction isn’t just one of Quentin Tarantino’s questionable, I guess is how I’d put it, films?

 

Myda:

Right, Pulp Fiction, or Pulps, were short novellas on wood pulp paper. They were easy to make, with fresh ideas, and were accessible to the public during times of duress. World War I, II, and the Great Depression created a more liberal society with an urge to see the realities of daily life reflected in the media they were consuming. Just like the older examples of reimagined literature, exploration of science fiction, crime noirs, queer stories, and fantasies were an escape with a hopeful ending.

 

Sarah:

But as the Second World War came to the end and traditionalism began to rise, stay tuned for the next episode in the series focusing on gender and sexuality and fandom, the same topics that titillated Pulp Fiction readers for all those decades started to turn noses.

 

Myda:

That’s right, and as cheap novels became kitsch and television started to rise, what was previously an expensive form of entertainment became accessible to most Americans. And with it rose network TV. With network TV came weekly episode drops, and with that, thousands started to follow popular TV shows as a nightly ritual.

 

Peyton:

And I think it’s really important to acknowledge how reading, television, and all of that became so accessible for the everyday American.

 

Myda:

Exactly, and this is how Star Trek broke ground.

 

Peyton:

Oh, that one was my grampy’s favorite. He had piles upon piles of action figures and posters. It was a space western, one based out of reality, and allowed for the viewer to imagine themselves on the USS Enterprise. It captured the hearts of the viewers by imagining a universe without war, without poverty, and with racial integration. Mind you, this show started airing in the 1960s and hearkening back to Pulp Fiction, the geek origins of the sci-fi genre. However, because of ratings dropping, the show got canceled off NBC in 1969. It was a sad, sad day.

 

Myda:

Yeah, but the fans, a mix of sci-fi connoisseurs and a new generation of experimental fiction enjoyers, started a campaign. Say Star Trek involved fans writing letters after letters to NBC to bring the show back, and to the collective surprise of the world, it worked. This historic event cemented Star Trek fandom, the members of which are called Trekkies, as the first big fandom. Because of the campaign and the many that followed, the showrunners and actors could keep producing more works within the Star Trek world, giving the fans continuous material to play with. Here started what we know as fandom today, from slash, relationships and ship pairings, often the same sex, to fan fiction, fan art and fan conventions.

 

Peyton:

Yeah, we’re gonna get really sick of hearing the word fan by the end of this.

 

Sarah:

Continuing off the accessibility factor noted earlier, with the internet came a new way of engaging with fandom. No longer did you have to be in direct contact with fellow fans. You could join websites, forums, share your fics on MySpace, LiveJournal, and later fanfiction.net and AO3. Technology expanded the world of the geek to include thousands, and today millions of like-minded people.

 

Myda:

And through this international intercultural communication, an online culture of behaviors, social spaces, and language started to form. Especially in the late 90s, there was a shift from sci-fi to supernatural fiction. Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling and Twilight by Stephenie Meyer became the millennials’ introduction to fandom. From much early in the century, our interview with a vampire by Anne Rice also got wildly popular online. Star Trek was the blueprint for online spaces and cons, but this new wave of fandom showed the shift in how fans engaged in more mainstream spaces.

 

Peyton:

So there is not enough time in the world to talk about the size of Harry Potter fandom. It was the series that got children reading again. It captured the hearts of kids and adults alike, and it was hard to find someone who didn’t like it. I myself remember reading the series in the third grade, but kept rereading until I was in middle school, where J.K. Rowling’s personal beliefs made me review the story in more critical detail. Regardless, the fandom is still huge. This is a story going on 30 years of popularity. And its early days reshaped how fans engaged in person.

 

Sarah:

Star Trek had its conventions in private. Maybe an actor would come in to sit on the panel, but most fan engagement was secretive and online.

 

Myda:

Similarly, there was pushback still with Supernatural’s fandom, and Anne Rice was so scared of fan works holding her back that she threatened to sue multiple authors. But Harry Potter and its audience of all demographics made it accessible to most people. Being a Potterhead wasn’t embarrassing or job-threatening, and showing up at fan events and dressing up as a witch or wizard was childish, but not completely shamed. Less mainstream interests were secretive, but this shift in attitude with Harry Potter is what allows the modern day fandom to be so widespread.

 

Sarah:

Are we even allowed to mention that on here?

 

Peyton:

I’m not sure,  but that leads to the conversation of copyright. Anne Rice led to the interrogation of copyright, the outcomes of which affected all of online spaces. If Harry Potter became a framework for fandom engagement and Twilight saw tropes established, which will be talked about more in part two, then Interview with a Vampire is why more authors are so confident in posting their fics publicly. Because before this copyright exception was established, fictions had to be shared through emailing lists and on private forums, lest a boss find out about it and fire the writer or the showrunners, send a lawsuit their way.

 

Myda:

Interview with a Vampire was the debut novel of Anne Rice, who unfortunately passed away in 2021. It was based on a short story she wrote in 1968 with the novel published in 1976. Rice infamously requested that fanfiction.net, one of the more popular websites for sharing and creating fan fiction in the late 2000s to 2010s, remove fan works using her characters. This request led to the extreme purging of fan works from a site built off of fan material, which was incredibly insulting to the people who built the site up.

 

Sarah:

Yeah, and before fan sites like fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own, which is also called AO3, a fan fiction sharing site. In the earliest days of the internet, most people made their own websites with their friends or an intentional community in mind. There were websites for family-friendly Harry/Draco Fics, websites for explicit Bella/Edward fics. Messaging and imaging sharing sites were used to share fan art and lower effort engagement.

 

Peyton:

Okay, pause. What are fics? Like, what are we talking about? What do you mean family-friendly? What do you mean explicit?

 

Myda:

So fic is just a shortening of the word fan fiction and slash is a way to denote romantic relationship pairings or in some cases, just sexual relationship pairings. Family-friendly versus explicit is, I mean, pretty similar to the rating system for movies where family-friendly, pretty much anybody can read, it’s safe content. As you go higher, it becomes more typically sexually explicit, though for certain fics, maybe more violent. You also, with the moderation coming from Anne Rice’s lawsuits on things like fanfiction.net, had alternate ways to rate fan fiction and one of those was the citrus scale. And so starting at like lime, lemon, grapefruit is how it went and limes were like, maybe there was some kissing, but in all likelihood, your mom would be fine taking you to the movie to go see that. Lemons were typically more sexually explicit. You might not want family around while you read that one. And then grapefruits were honestly kind of hard to find, but they were the more extreme version. So from there, fanfiction.net.

 

Sarah:

That’s really interesting and it was fanfiction.net that first started to centralize fan content.

However, all of these sites were censored. Even by fans, there was hoops to jump through to share works. The fanfiction.net purge of sexually explicit works to avoid a possible lawsuit was the catalyst for a new website. One that worked to protect fan works, no matter the content.

 

Peyton:

And that’s part of how fandom isn’t just a hobby, but a community.

Myda:

And I mean, like, I love crocheting, but I could stop crocheting and be fine.

 

Peyton:

Right, but the people engaged in fandoms for decades, literally from the 1970s until the 2010s, worked under duress of legal action taken against them. The linguistic and textual signs of this stressful period includes the citrus scale, as well as warnings at the top of pages, letting readers know that the fic author had no legal claim to the world or the characters, thereof the fandom that they were writing for. This was a desperate and objectively useless plea to avoid being sued, but it became kind of a time marker of when a fic was written.

 

Myda:

Under the principle that fanfiction is not copyright because of the Title 17 of the U.S. Code, fanfiction will not be held liable for copyright infringement if it falls under the fair use defense. In determining the applicability of fair use defense to a secondary use, such as fanfiction courts, consider the four following factors. One, the purpose of the character and of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for a nonprofit educational purposes. Two, the nature of the copyrighted work. Three, the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole. And four, in the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

 

Sarah:

And that does not condone the buying or selling of fan works. It is extremely important to highlight that fan spaces and fan works should not be profited off of. The second we give in to capitalism, not only are lawsuits viable options again, but the clean free websites fandom thrives on will be gone. Some fans, especially in bigger fandoms, will see a fic become extremely popular and want to do something like make a physical copy and then sell it. This cannot happen unless we want the entire system to go down.

 

Peyton:

Capitalism killing everything. What’s new? Archive of Our Own or AO3 was born in 2009 and quickly became possibly the most popular and most used fan site in the world. It’s completely free, censorless with a team of lawyers to defend the free speech of the fans engaging with it and volunteer programmers keeping it running. It is used like any other archival site with tags, keywords, word count and other social counters used to filter fics for the reader’s taste.

 

Myda:

Some other popular and semi-popular fan fiction sites include Tumblr, which suffered an NSFW, which means not safe for work, purge of its own in 2017 that shuttered the engagement on the site. Wattpad created book series After and many other fic to publish series, but is typically considered to be harder to use and more oriented to younger fans than AO3. And Quora and Quotev, which are not intended to be fan spaces, but due to parental restrictions often became safe havens.

 

Sarah:

Sorry, I just have to say, I did not know Quora was like a fan site.

P

Yeah, Yeah.

 

Myda:

Oh no, you can find it on there.

 

Sarah:

That is crazy, love that, love that.

 

Myda:

Not primarily, but you could find some communities on there that had found it and started to use it as like a safe space for their like fan content.

 

Sarah:

No, that’s really, really interesting.

 

Peyton:

Yeah.

 

Sarah:

And remember when I said that you should not profit off of fan works, well, After, Fifty Shades of Grey and Alchemize are all books that used to be fan works. Even the recent mass success, Heated Rivalry, has its roots in fandom. The trick here is to change names and story features that directly link the story to the original text. But there are often some signs of the story’s origins in fan fiction.

 

Peyton:

I imagine language has major impacts in fan fiction and fandom, but Sarah, I don’t know if you know more about it.

 

Sarah:

I might know a thing or two. Linguistic anthropology is a subfield of anthropology that looks at the evolution, history, and cultural impacts of language. We can use methods and ideas used in linguistic anthropology to better understand the language used in fan fiction. For example, one of the terms used in linguistics and linguistic anthropology is community of practice. A community of practice is a group of people with a shared interest or goal that in turn has a shared set of words, phrases, and grammar. A community of practice could be a sports team you’re on or even the people you work with. Put simply, a community of practice is where you get your words from.

 

Myda:

Right! Like dead dove do not eat and no beta we die like men.

 

Sarah:

Right, right.

 

Peyton:

What is that?

 

Myda:

Okay, so on fan fictions, especially using sites like AO3, you have tags that let you know what’s going to be inside of that work. It’s really important, especially if you’re just browsing freely to make sure you read through those because they will let you know if there’s gonna be sensitive content. Dead dove do not eat is a specific reference to this one meme from Community, the TV show, where one of the characters opened the fridge, pulled out a bag, and on the bag it said, dead dove do not eat. He opens the bag and well, there’s a dead dove in there. And he looks at the camera and says, I don’t know what I expected. And so it’s a phrase to use to say, hey, what’s on the tags is not an over-exaggeration. It’s not anybody just adding things superfluously. What you see here is what’s inside of it. Do not read it if you are going to get upset. And no beta, we die like men is a much gentler term. It’s just saying that a beta reader, which is somebody who will skim or read and like grammar check somebody else’s fan fiction before it being posted, was not used. So somebody decided to write everything in two hours and post it, was not checked over. You might find grammatical errors. Once again, you see this, you know to expect some level of like fallacy in it.

 

Peyton:

I see, that makes a lot more sense. Thank you.

 

Sarah:

I have to say, dead dove do not eat is actually from Arrested Development and it’s one of my favorite shows. So I just have to point that out. I just have to point that out.

 

Myda:

Sorry.

 

Sarah:

You’re so good, you’re so good.

 

Myda:

All right, social media and fan spaces are an important community of practice for many youth. Fan spaces have created their own words and sayings, like the ones that I defined above, that community members use to communicate with each other and within that space and even beyond. You can see it now being, like trigger warnings was a phrase that was used a lot for fan fictions. It’s now being used in like actual published books. Understanding online fan spaces as a community of practice is important because it shows how the groups people choose to surround themselves with can affect how language is made and changes over time. The community around fan fiction has created different words and slang to better and more efficiently communicate with one another, but it also shows how fan fiction and fan culture has truly created its own subculture and even cultural norms.

 

Peyton:

You know, it’s interesting. I was actually just scrolling reels this morning per usual and what are the chances the first one I had said how the adult novels feel after I just read the most gut-wrenching fan fiction written by a 13-year-old with a bunch of bland foods in the background, basically saying that the adult one was boring. And so it’s really interesting to see the age dispersion in these spaces, especially since they’re all online and you typically wouldn’t find 13-year-olds online, you would think, but that may not be the case.

 

Sarah:

No, it actually is really interesting and the idea of slang and its creation is central to linguistic anthropology. If you look at slang from a linguistic anthropology perspective, slang is used to unite peers and establish connection, especially among youth in contrast to adults or smaller children. When looking at it this way, you can definitely see how the creation of slang used in fan fiction creates a sense of community among those writing and reading fan fiction. Some people may even be able to guess that you read fan fiction if you use certain slang without knowing anything else about you. This shows the power of language in creating a shared sense of identity, even in fan fiction and fandom.

 

Myda:

There is a large chance that you, the viewer, know something about fandom though. There have been countless examples of fans acting extremely inappropriate or normally being confused by typical fandom behavior.

 

Peyton:

And how exactly do you even go about preventing things like that?

 

Myda:

So there are fandom rules, lingo, and behavior that those who engage act with. During 2015 and the release of Star Wars, The Force Awakens, Tumblr user OzHawkAuthor outlined the three laws of fandom. One, don’t like, don’t read. Two, my kink is not your kink. And three, ship and let ship.

 

Peyton:

Okay, wait, I’m sorry. What exactly is a ship?

 

Myda:

So a ship is just a shortening of the word relationship. It relates back to slash and the communities and cultures that would surround around specific pairings. Lots of these are non-canon. Actually, sometimes the most popular of which are non-canon. And the discourse.

 

Peyton:

Canon, canon, canon.

 

Sarah:

What is canon?

 

Myda:

So canon is the actual media produced. So in the case of a movie, it’s the actual film. In a book, it is the actual book. Fanon is what fans, often popular, theories on what happened in a certain scene or what certain characters were doing in the past, often called headcanons, are agreed upon and become fanon, which means that most fans agreed upon that one thing. And yeah, so ships are typically non-canon, which means that they do not happen in the actual text or media. And that non-canon pairing is sometimes more popular because people think that those dynamics are more interesting than the often tired dynamics that we see in popular media.  Personally, I think that all three of those laws relate back to the first, but under the conditions in which they were written with ship wars and hates on fics and online discourse, I understand why all three needed to be written.

 

Sarah:

Then the COVID pandemic.

 

Myda:

Oh God.

 

Sarah:

Dun, dun, dun!  Like TikTok, which was already a popular platform, was thrust astronomically high in popularity and with it, fandom. Suddenly the niche little communities online  became increasingly mainstream. And with it, what many fans feared is the end of the current era of fandom culture.

 

Myda:

Because new fans are seeing fan spaces as a hobby and not a community, something to commodify and not to collaborate in, censorship is being somewhat promoted online.

 

Peyton:

This shift from free speech to wanting to limit the topics discussed like cannibalism, incest, rape, and other such taboo concepts was extremely controversial.

 

Myda:

Yeah, so with the rise of TikTok and people being new to fandom and not really being able to understand the fandom culture that already exists, certain fans will go on sites like AO3 and then get jump-scared because they didn’t read the tags by something they don’t wanna read, such as like cannibalism or incest, which… it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but that’s why the tags are there. And then they’ll get upset. They’ll go online and go, oh my God, I can’t believe somebody wrote about this. But like there were safeguards in place. You just either didn’t know how to use them because you didn’t take the time to learn or it was your choice to ignore them in the first place.

 

Sarah:

Yeah, and the beauty of fandom is that there are safeguards everywhere. You just need to know how to use them. So fics have tags, trigger warnings, spoilers in the author’s notes, things like that. And unfortunately we can’t fully get into that here, but on our next episode, you can learn more.

 

Myda:

And with that, the importance of fandom cannot be understated. Geeks are often people that are placed to be seen in real life. There is a reason why during the COVID pandemic, fandom blew up in popularity. It is a semi-anonymous place of free expression with decades of safeguards to protect users from engaging in material that you don’t want to. To censor that expression would be a violation of our rights as people to free speech.

 

Sarah:

Beautiful closing statement.

 

Peyton:

Thank you all for tuning in to our show today. Another thanks to our team members and our collaborators with AnthroHub, especially our tech crew. And shout out to Emily who’s here right now, whose birthday was just yesterday.

 

Sarah:

Happy birthday.

 

Myda:

Happy birthday.

 

Peyton:

To stay connected, you can find us on Instagram at @anthro.mp3, the number three.

You can also find our sources, transcripts of each episode and more in our AnthroHub show notes. I was one of your hosts today, Peyton, joined by our other hosts, Myda, Sarah, and our tech crew.

 

Sarah:

If you enjoyed this episode, you’ll love our follow-up episode where we chat even more about fan fiction, focusing on the cultural lens. Keep an eye out on our Instagram for future updates on shows, specials, and events. Catch us next time and have a great day, friends.

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