Beyond the canon: How fanfiction became an LGBTQ+ sanctuary

Indian Express

17-07-2025

What if Harry Potter fell for Draco Malfoy? What if Sherlock chose Watson over solving cases? What if Elizabeth Bennet married Darcy, but her heart always belonged to Charlotte?
These are not just wishful rewrites, they're part of a sprawling literary movement. Fanfiction, long dismissed as juvenile, has become one of the most emotionally honest and radical spaces on the internet. For many LGBTQ+ readers and writers, it is not a hobby. It is survival.
Written by fans using characters and worlds from existing books, films or shows, fanfiction reimagines the official versions, often centring voices left out of it. For many LGBTQ+ readers and writers, it is a radical act. A way to exist on the page when the canon never lets them in.
Even Daniel Radcliffe has confessed to reading Drarry fanfics- yes, Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy as star-crossed lovers. If that seems subversive, you are only scratching the surface.
'I don't think it's a good way to train to be a professional writer when you're borrowing everybody else's world and characters.' That is the take of George RR Martin, author of bestselling fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, on fanfictions. One of many traditional writers who've dismissed them as unoriginal or even unethical. But fanfiction writers see it differently. For them, it is a way of expression.
For decades, fanfiction has been rejected as childish, as derivative, as not real writing. But ask anyone who's cried over a 100k words slow burn between two characters who never kissed on screen, it feels more real than most things. These stories live and breathe on platforms like Wattpad, AO3, Tumblr and FanFiction.net, vast online archives where millions of users rewrite the rules of storytelling.
At its core, it is a radical act. It flips authorship on its head. Instead of revering the official version, it challenges it. These questions are not just playful hypotheticals, they're creative uprisings. It gives readers the pen. Especially those readers who are traditionally excluded from mainstream narratives- LGBTQ+ writers, women, people of colour, the neurodivergent. For them, fanfiction is a way of reclamation, a way to become the main character.
While mainstream literature has now expanded its LGBTQ+ offerings- Call Me By Your Name, Red, White & Royal Blue, They Both Die at the End– fanfiction was already there, years ahead, giving readers what they weren't finding in bookstores.
Even as mainstream publishing treaded cautiously, offering one LGBTQ+ story for every dozen straight romances, fanfiction platforms were overflowing with these narratives in every shape and form. It wasn't about market trends or visibility, it was about survival, expression and imagining love without societal norms.
Though it has had a quieter presence, fanfiction is gaining steady ground among Indian youth particularly closeted and questioning teens and twenty somethings. A growing community of desi writers imagining worlds far more inclusive than the one they live in.
Even though Section 377 was struck down in 2018, LGBTQ+ in India still hides in shadows. But online, through fanfictions and forums, it can exist in usernames, in tags, in alternate endings. Even as court deny the right to marry, these stories dare to imagine queer futures not bound by law, but by love.
Fanfiction in India remains personal. Often anonymous. But it's where youth are telling their truth. Unfiltered and uncensored. In heteronormative Indian media that still clings to heterosexual couples, fanfiction lets LGBTQ+ voices write their own stories.
Fanfiction is about being honest, in ways mainstream spaces still struggle to allow. It is emotional. Vulnerable. Utterly sincere. And for LGBTQ+ writers and readers, that sincerity can be radical.
As author of Eleanor & Park, Rainbow Rowell said, 'The whole point of fanfiction is that you get to play inside somebody else's universe. Rewrite the rules. Or bend them. The story doesn't have to end. You can stay in this world, this world you love, as long as you want, as long as you keep thinking of new stories.'
Fanfiction dares to imagine what love could look like. What identity might feel like if it weren't policed. It does not ask to be taken seriously. It just asks to be felt. To some, it might seem cheesy, full of tropes and happy endings. But that's the point. And for a generation of LGBTQ+ youth raised in a world that told them they were too much or not enough, fanfiction's more than literature. It's home.
(The writer is an intern with indianexpress.com)