Literary Renaissance: the art of fanfiction 

It’s 2014. The sun is finally creeping against the window, but I haven’t slept yet. Instead, I am tucked in bed, scrolling on my iPad through the final paragraph of a 150-chapter long fanfiction, probably written by another girl who, just like me, obsessively followed the lives of One Direction members. 

That is a confession I once swore to take to the grave, due to the social shame of it. 

This association of fanfiction with immaturity, and thus femininity, is linked to the humiliation associated with “fangirl” culture—a culture of dedicated fans, often women, of fictional characters or celebrities. This humiliation is rooted in a habit of condemning girlhood, reducing it to hysteria, excessiveness, and hypersexuality. So, when that manifests in literature, it is undoubtedly ridiculed. 

This ridicule of fanfiction as immature has only intensified with the interaction of the fanfiction world with recent media. In many instances, terms often reserved for fanfiction writing have been borrowed to serve larger patriarchal narratives of girlhood on social media platforms like TikTok. 

For example, “Y/N”, an acronym for “your name”, is commonly used in fanfiction work written in the second perspective, to allow readers to self-insert as characters of fictional worlds or realities. Recently, however, the term has become synonymous with the “pick-me” subculture, where girls referred to as “Y/N” are seen as seeking male validation—infantilizing women as incapable of operating in the world without male domination. 

All this means that, when adult women interact with fanfiction, the childishness of girlhood is attributed to them, and they are seen as incapable of performing to the expectations of womanhood. 

Yet, despite this infantilization, the fanfiction is sexualised. Again, there are foundations to this convention, like smutfic, an erotic subgenre of fanfiction, which began as a safe space for sexual freedom among women but spiralled into a cycle of literary pornography within the younger generation. In fact, the increase in demand for the dark romance genre on BookTok may have grown out of the explicitly sexual material in fanfiction. 

But the sexualization of fanfiction is more than that. It rests in the fact that patriarchal systems will always, regardless of context, hypersexualize younger women in an effort to shame girlhood. 

This is all set within a context of a general distaste for fiction—where a mind of facts and rationality is honoured above empathy and the human experience. Third-year student Mashiyat Ahmed says that her experience with fiction has been overshadowed by the subconscious pull towards non-fiction by the gravity of academia, where fiction works are regarded as intellectually futile.

Ahmed shared:  “I thought I was cooler than everyone else because my mind was full of specific facts… but over the years, reading the lived experiences of people through stories has given me a metaphorical language to understand my own experiences as a complex human.” 

The administered absurdity of fanfiction has served a greater purpose: fanfiction has revitalised English literature itself. 

In 2022, Rebecca W. Black, an Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine, published an article called “Online Fan Fiction and Critical Media Literacy,” on the contribution of fanfiction to media literacy among the younger generation.

In an era of extreme media consumption and instant gratification, critical skills and media literacy have declined. Black describes that youth are particularly driven to “critically engaging with copious amounts of information” leading to an underdevelopment of analytical skills. But a certain demographic is exempt: fanfiction readers. 

Good fanfiction writing is entirely dependent on thoroughly grasping media narratives, understanding complex characters and dynamics, reinterpreting ideas into different contexts, and reading in-between the lines. 

When these writers engage in fanfiction, they are not merely reusing the works of published authors and movie producers, but reinventing the scope of them. Simultaneously, these writers are consistently honing their skills without the pressure of publication or classicist scrutiny of scholarship. 

Look at the Fifty Shades of Grey series as an example. Born out of a Twilight fanfic story on the reclaimed fanfiction.net archive, E. L. James found a network of publications, authors and film producers to successfully produce a multi-billion dollar franchise without the constraints imposed on first-time published writers. 

From the reader’s perspective, fanfiction has also become a source of representation. For instance, J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, has been under scrutiny in recent years for her problematic representations of people of colour in her works. These have ranged from racist naming of characters, like “Cho Chang”, a Chinese character referred to by two common Chinese surnames, to her blatant anti-LGTBQ+ sentiments on her social platforms. 

In response, fanfic writers have created alternate universes of stories with proper representation, most notably within the Marauders fandom’s All The Young Dudes on Archive Of Our Own, where many beloved characters were rewritten as members of the LGBTQ+ community, largely in retaliation.

More generally, fanfiction has become a space in which young women have reconstructed media texts, as Black argues, “with genderbending plotlines and heroines” that combat the limited roles assigned to female characters within literature. For many, fanfiction is the only space to discover woman-centered discourse surrounding power, sexuality, corruption, and loyalty. 

Narratives present in fanfiction are also spaces to criticize the colonial, classist, and capitalist nature of English literature. Jacob C. Quinn describes in his thesis, Looking Through the Looking Glass, that while English professors continue to assign the same outdated, inaccessible novels, they ponder on the absence within their lecture halls. I am not arguing for the erasure of “the classics” (although I do have my thoughts on them), but the accessibility and variety of literature that fanfiction offers cannot be undermined in English departments. 

As Ahmed recalls, “we forget facts, and there comes a time where rationality doesn’t fill us up anymore, but we never forget stories.” So, when eleven-year-old Yasmine hid under her covers to refresh pages of updating fanfiction works, she was a partial contribution of the great literary renaissance among the youth.