Latest news with #fanfiction
Washington Post
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Fan fiction is everywhere, if you know how to look
When Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings began pitching literary agents 15 years ago, they kept their interest in fan fiction a secret. Known by their combined pen name, Christina Lauren, the best-selling romance duo met through their shared love of Twilight fan fiction. At the time, Billings says, coming from fandom 'was much more of a black mark on you' if you wanted to break into mainstream publishing. This was just before 'Fifty Shades of Grey' — a novel that began as a rewriting of 'Twilight' — became a global publishing phenomenon. Now, Hobbs and Billings work in a publishing industry with a vastly different attitude: one far more receptive to authors who got their start writing unauthorized works online for other fans, based on previously existing characters and worlds. Fan fiction's ascendance comes as entertainment and media companies are turning to established intellectual property to shore up the eroding economics of their industries. It also helps that many of the decision-makers grew up online, with active accounts on Wattpad, Tumblr and other fan-fiction-friendly platforms. Agents directly solicit writers of popular fan-made works, and new books proudly advertise their 'fic' roots. Fan fiction didn't invent tropes like 'only one bed' or 'friends to lovers,' but fic websites popularized tagging and searching through them, and these categories have become a mainstay of promoting genre fiction of all kinds. The interest of many readers, meanwhile, has caught up with what fic writers, often women and queer people, have been up to all along: Joyful same-sex romances and stories told with the immediacy of first-person present tense, for example, now fill bookstore shelves. If you know how to look, fan fiction is everywhere, often climbing the bestseller lists and sometimes collecting awards. Percival Everett's novel 'James,' which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for fiction, is basically 'Huckleberry Finn' fan fiction. (The Pulitzers seem to be especially fond of this approach: Barbara Kingsolver's 'Demon Copperhead' reimagines 'David Copperfield,' and Geraldine Brooks's 'March' finds its story in the hollows and silences of 'Little Women.') Madeline Miller's 'The Song of Achilles' reworks 'The Iliad' with more explicit gay sex, a familiar approach for fan fic writers, who have long loved to pair up male characters with chemistry either implied or imagined. 'Rodham,' Curtis Sittenfeld's novel about an alternate history where Hillary Rodham never married Bill Clinton, is basically Real Person Fiction, popularly known as RPF. To say nothing of the many modernized versions of 'Pride and Prejudice': 'Pride and Protest' (Nikki Payne), 'Ayesha at Last' (Uzma Jalaluddin) and 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' (Seth Grahame-Smith), among others. Traditionalists may bristle at some of these comparisons, but it's hard to say what distinguishes any of these books from those that populate fan fic sites such as Archive of Our Own unless we start from the assumption that fan fic is Bad and mainstream publication is Good. (Plenty of fan fic is crummy, of course, but it's not like the gatekeepers in traditional publishing aren't whiffing it some of the time, too.) Once we begin down this path, though, where does it end? Think about classics like 'Paradise Lost' and 'East of Eden' — are they not Bible fan fiction? Isn't all Roman mythology simply Greek mythology fan fic? Isn't 'Romeo and Juliet' just Shakespeare's take on 'Pyramus and Thisbe'? There are some characters, worlds and stories that we just like coming back to, and it's hardly surprising that other writers — some blessed by the muses (and hefty book deals), others merely enthusiastic — want to take them for a literary spin. This may be where the usefulness of the category starts to break down. If everything is fan fiction, that 'means that there's not anything really distinctive about fan fiction as we mostly encounter it now,' says Anne Jamison, the author of 'Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World' and a professor of English at University of Utah. Elizabeth Minkel, a fan culture expert and co-host of the podcast 'Fansplaining,' used to want to claim the monoliths of classical literature as fan fiction. A big part of that impulse, she thinks now, was a hunger to legitimize fan fic by expanding people's notions of what it is. But she's telling a new story these days. It started when she got involved in the fandom of the BBC show 'Sherlock,' a contemporary depiction of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. People would often describe the show itself as a work of fan fiction for the way it modernized the characters and setting from Arthur Conan Doyle. Minkel disagreed. 'They're making a lot of money to write the sanctioned big-budget thing on the BBC. And they have a different set of priorities. They have a different set of monetary rewards, different relationship with the source material, with the rights holders,' she says. By contrast, 'fan fiction is all about the gift economy.' Jamison has also come to a narrower understanding of fan fiction, one that has more to do with writing for its own sake, without an eye to profit or reward. It's about 'the personal satisfaction of [writing] and then the personal satisfaction of reading something by somebody else who loves or has strong feelings about the same thing that you do,' she says. 'In many ways, fan fiction is so much more free because you don't have to worry about the market or the demographic.' And it's that freedom that makes fan fiction so delightful. Even as publishers are glomming onto its potential, most of the people writing it are still doing so for themselves — and for one another. They're puzzling through their feelings about desire or power. They're in conversation with the source material, and they're crossing swords with other people in their fandoms about their interpretation of the canon. In exploring this character's heart, might they better understand their own? Or maybe they just really think that Captain Picard should hook up with Lt. Commander Worf. And they're making it so, at least for the thousands — sometimes hundreds of thousands — of words they conjure. For Minkel, the urge to write about preexisting characters was instinctual. As an elder millennial, she didn't have internet in her home as a 10-year-old, so she wasn't inspired by other fics when she wanted to scrawl stories based on the characters from Sweet Valley High in her notebook. That's an experience that she finds many people in her age cohort and older share. 'They just had an instinct when they really enjoyed a story or when it really frustrated them and they wanted to fix something or felt like something wasn't done well,' she says. These days, teens living online are saturated with fan works. They find what they're looking for on sites such as Archive of Our Own, which has basically centralized any fandom you could imagine and some you probably couldn't, all with robust tagging and search. Many of the stories are straightforward. What if these two characters had sex? (Fan fiction tends to be most associated with smut — and you can absolutely find many of your favorite characters getting it on in a cornucopia of ways — but it's not all salacious.) What if this person who died in the show actually lived? What if we got to linger with these people, or in these worlds, in the mundane moments between all the action? Unbound by the constraints of the market (or even of good taste) and often buoyed by anonymity, fan fiction ultimately represents the primordial soup of storytelling, pushing forward the bounds of the stories we can or would like to tell. Jamison sees fan fiction authors sipping from the same wellspring as bards and troubadours. 'It connects with a storytelling culture where there would be wandering storytellers and stuff like that,' she says. 'They would tell stories about the same characters that everybody knew because that's what people wanted to hear about.' While many of those characters come from other works, there's also Real Person Fiction: stories about actors, athletes, politicians and other people in the news. After the arrest of Luigi Mangione in the murder of a health insurance executive, writers produced hundreds of fics about him, in genres such as legal drama and vampire romance — using conceptually familiar frameworks to explore a fascination with an alluring outlaw, itself a well-trodden archetype of storytelling. And there's a delicious strain of fan fiction in which writers set formal or narrative challenges for themselves just to see if they can pull it off. Can you write an entire fic through social media posts? Could you take the characters of ABC's first-responder procedural '9-1-1' and plop them into the world and plot of the NBC sitcom 'Parks and Recreation'? Sure, why not. (The '9-1-1'/'Parks and Rec' mash-up works shockingly well.) Hobbs remembers reading a fic about the boy band One Direction, only 'each of them were an apple and they were, like, living in this fruit bowl. And it was so weirdly emotional,' she says, because the apples observed one another as they rotted and were cut. 'It was just like the craziest thing that at the end of this fic you were like, wow, that was really deep.' There's a kind of puckish absurdism at play in such works that's not so far removed from postmodern literary fiction, but it's underpinned by very real, relatable feelings. And a built-in audience, too. Drawn by their investment in familiar characters, readers who wouldn't necessarily seek out experimental literature will eagerly dive into a story in which, say, the Harry Potter protagonists argue about the principles of philosophical rationalism, or Bucky Barnes's and Steve Rogers's love story is revealed through court transcripts. While some fic is achingly earnest, it's a mistake to think all of it is: A lot of writers are in on the joke. Cecilia R. Aragon, a professor at the University of Washington, conducted a deep ethnographic survey of different fan fiction communities of teens and young adults: 'These young people, who everybody was saying, 'Oh they can't write, they don't like to write, teachers can't get them to write,'' she says. But that's not what Aragon found. They were writing what they wanted to write and had 'a large crowd of peers that were giving them little tiny bits of mentoring,' she says. 'We showed that, as people got more feedback, it was correlated with an improvement in writing ability.' For Hobbs, who 'stumbled into fan fiction … it was a place to not only learn how to write, but also I didn't know that I had anything to say until I had this kind of community and platform to say it.' Hobbs lives in Utah and sees herself as more liberal than many of the other people in her town. Fan fiction 'really did surround me, in a way that I didn't have in my real life, with like-minded people — people who saw the world I did, who saw it the same way I did, who loved the things that I love.' It's possible that the egalitarian openness of fan fiction — the way that it invites anyone to try anything — explains something about its ubiquity. The likes of Percival Everett and Madeline Miller may be writing in a different key than the online fan fic masses, if only because they're getting paid for their work, and so are the people who edit and publicize it. But when their stories sell, and sell to a lot of people, it's partly because readers can feel the joy they take in playing freely with the stories and characters that we love, too. There's a pleasure to witnessing other people's passion, whether it overlaps with our own or merely entices our curiosity. Fan fiction is brewed with passion. And sure, some of the results are profoundly mediocre, riddled with typos, confusing, even offensive. Feel free to close those tabs. But there is also incredible fan fiction. Stunningly written, deeply moving, keep-you-up-all-night gripping, creative in ways that shock and linger. And what makes the form feel especially lovely is that each of these stories is a gift. Someone, somewhere has toiled, and perhaps giggled, over their keyboard. The only glory in it for them is the hope that their words might intrigue, arouse or amuse you. They're stirring the old storytelling soup because it's nourishing but also, even more important, because it's delicious.
Gizmodo
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
Daisy Ridley's Husband Cast in Adaptation of Former Reylo ‘Star Wars' Fan Fiction
The behind-the-scenes story of an upcoming romantic comedy could, on its own, be a pretty fascinating movie. Here's the pitch. A young Star Wars fan writes a piece of Reylo (that's Rey and Kylo Ren for the non-shippers out there) alternative universe fanfiction. The fan is approached about turning the story into a novel, only, it can't be specific to Star Wars anymore. So the names change, but the intention and romance stay the same. That book becomes a smash hit bestseller, Hollywood comes calling, and when the movie version finally comes to fruition, the filmmakers cast the real-life husband of one of the actors who played the character who originally inspired the story. Roll credits. It's a little wild, a little convoluted, but exactly what has happened to author Ali Hazelwood with her debut novel, The Love Hypothesis. The story was originally published online as Head Over Feet, a an alternate universe collage romance between Daisy Ridley's Rey and Adam Driver's Ben Solo/Kylo Ren. Once it got picked up by an actual publisher, though, the romance stayed the same, but everything Star Wars was removed… save for the male lead being named Adam, after Adam Driver. And now, for the movie adaptation, Adam will be played by Tom Bateman, the British actor married to his Murder on the Orient Express co-star, Daisy Ridley. Yes, the same Daisy Ridley who played Rey in Star Wars. The other lead, named Olive, will be played by Lili Reinhart of Riverdale fame. So was the casting intentional? We don't know, but the wonderful harmony of it is impossible to ignore. And, frankly, it's pretty damn delightful too. Sure, most people who read The Love Hypothesis during its 10-month run on the New York Times bestseller list didn't know its Star Wars roots. And people who eventually see the movie, directed by Claire Scanlon and adapted by Sarah Rothschild, will never realize that either. But the people who do can certainly enjoy it on a whole other level. The Love Hypothesis joins a growing list of stories that started as fan fiction and eventually made their way into the book market, and then beyond to the movie and TV adaptation. The most famous is probably Fifty Shades of Grey, which was inspired by Twilight, though Dakota Johnson isn't married to Robert Pattinson in real life. At least not yet. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Geek Girl Authority
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Girl Authority
How to Turn Your Favorite Geeky Obsession Into a Creative Painting Hobby
Obsessing over a book or TV series? Can't stop thinking about your favorite movie? When your home is full of merch, you've exhausted all podcasts and commentary videos, and your motivation to write fanfiction has run out, you might be wondering how you can continue to immerse yourself in your favorite world. One fun, unique option to consider is painting. And no, you don't have to be skilled with a paintbrush in any way for this, all thanks to the invention of diamond painting kits. These make it easy to get creative and produce something worthy of hanging on your wall, regardless of your artistic abilities. What Are Diamond Painting Kits? Diamond painting kits are a form of DIY art that involves carefully sticking hundreds of tiny multi-colored diamonds onto a canvas to create an image. You place the diamonds according to the colors and symbols on the canvas underneath, so there's no guesswork involved—you follow the template to eventually produce a highly detailed image. There are dozens of kits you can choose from online, but some sites also allow you to choose your own custom image to recreate. That means if you have a favorite character or location from your geeky obsession, or maybe even a photo of yourself at a convention or live performance, you can turn it into a diamond painting masterpiece. Why You Should Try Diamond Painting There's a reason why diamond painting is trending right now: it's relaxing and looks really effective, making it possible for anyone, regardless of skill, to create something they're proud of. Diamond painting isn't something you can get done in a couple of hours. Most people spend several weeks or even months completing their painting, which means the value for money is excellent. Plus, you get professional art once you finish, so you're not just paying for hours of enjoyment—you also have artwork that you can hang on your wall. Art, particularly painting, is well known for its depression- and anxiety-alleviating properties , so much so that art therapy is effectively used as a therapeutic treatment for these mental health disorders. It's easy to see why diamond painting is so beneficial to mental health: sitting down with a cup of tea and your favorite podcast or playlist while sticking diamonds, watching your image come to life, is deeply relaxing and satisfying. What to Know When Buying a Diamond Painting Kit When you're buying a diamond painting kit, you'll usually be able to choose from various canvas sizes as well as two types of diamonds (round or square). You'll get to pick any image you like for your painting. Our advice is to go with a colorful image with lots of detail, so you don't end up with a load of browns, whites, or blacks dominating your canvas (unless you don't mind a slightly more boring application process!). Make sure to go with a company that uses superior quality materials, so your image looks as professional as it can be once it's finished. 6 Slice-Of-Life Webtoons That Will Help You Chill RELATED: 5 Tyrants That WEBTOON Made Me Fall in Love With
The Verge
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Even AO3 could not withstand the awesome power of horny.
Posted Jul 8, 2025 at 2:22 PM UTC Even AO3 could not withstand the awesome power of horny. Archive of our Own went down for a few days over the 4th of July weekend, upsetting the holiday fanfiction reading plans of the site's millions of users before service was restored. AO3 goes down occasionally for all sorts of issues, but the reason for this outage was special and hilarious. When Horniness Becomes A Storage Issue [
The Verge
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Fanfiction writers battle AI, one scrape at a time
In the online world of fanfiction writers, who pen stories inspired by their favorite movies, books, and games, and share them for free, there are unspoken codes of conduct. Among the most important: never charge money for your fanfic, and never steal other people's work. It makes sense then that fanfic writers were among the first creators to raise the alarm about their work being fed into learning language models powering generative AI without their knowledge or permission. But their efforts to stop the encroachment of AI into fan spaces is an uphill battle. The latest salvo came in early April, when user nyuuzyou scraped 12.6 million fanfics from the online repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) and uploaded the dataset to Hugging Face, a company that hosts open-source AI models and software. Nyuuzyou's upload was quickly discovered by the Reddit community r/AO3, where hundreds of users posted furious reactions. A Tumblr account, ao3scrapesearch, built a search engine that allowed authors to search their usernames and see if their work had been scraped by Nyuuzyou. 'This is something that takes time and effort and your heart and your soul, and you do this in a community.' Fanfic writers flooded the comment section of the dataset on Hugging Face, getting into arguments with AI defenders. Dckchili defended nyuuzyou's scrape, claiming that it didn't matter because Big Tech crawler bots have already scraped the archive numerous times. RaraeAves argued that 'the creeps' are depending on fanfic writers to not fight back when their labor and creativity are being exploited. When Nikki, a Star Wars fanfic writer who goes by infinitegalaxies online, typed her name in the search engine, she saw that more than 70 of her fics had been scraped. But one jumped out. It was a collective essay she'd co-authored with 11 other writers to raise awareness about the threat of AI to fandom and uploaded to AO3. The irony did not escape her. Nikki mostly writes fanfiction about Reylo, the romantic pairing (or 'ship') of the characters Rey and Kylo Ren from the Star Wars sequel trilogy. The Reylo fandom is close-knit and prolific, with more than 30,000 Reylo stories posted to AO3. About half are set in the canon Star Wars universe of light sabers and space adventures, but the other half take place in alternative universes and explore everything from coffee-shop romances and workplace dramas to medieval knights and fairy kingdoms. One particularly beloved fic in the fandom is set in 1994 and recasts Kylo Ren as Kyril, a mafia boss in newly post-Soviet Russia. The fandom has produced writers like Ali Hazelwood and Thea Guazon, who have made the leap from fanfic to become highly successful, published romance authors. For Nikki, the Reylo fandom offered a new sense of belonging. She found a home in the supportive community of writers and readers and relished the freedom to write whatever she wanted. 'Fandom is largely a gift economy. We're just here to have fun and do things out of the goodness of our heart. And to give things to each other and make work in community,' Nikki says. This sentiment is echoed by many others in the Reylo community, including Em, who writes under the pen name okapijones. Em fell in love with the characters of Rey and Kylo Ren because they represented the enemies-to-lovers light / dark archetypes that reminded her of Beauty and the Beast and Pride and Prejudice. But she hated the way their story ended in the Star Wars sequel trilogy and went looking for other fans who wanted a different ending. 'Fic changed my life. I have met some of the best friends that I have ever had through fic and through the fanfiction community,' Em says. 'There's no rules, there's no editors. It's a pure creative playground, and that is going to breed innovation. Some of the most creative stories I've ever read, some of the wildest storytelling, is fanfic. And that excites me as a creator, because you can just do whatever you want.' 'This is something that takes time and effort and your heart and your soul, and you do this in a community,' Nikki says. 'And then you're telling me you're just going to poop it out two seconds on a screen. And I was just like, who asked for this? This is gross.' In 2023 came Sudowrite's Story Engine, powered in part by OpenAI's ChatGPT. Nikki remembers watching a video about the new 'writing assistant' AI software that allows users to enter details about characters and plot points and generate an entire novel. She was so appalled that it made her cry. Nikki, who works for a software company, had already seen her workplace shift toward integrating AI. But she hadn't imagined her hobby would be impacted by it too. 'Trying to knock this stuff down, that's probably the best thing that one can be doing now.' Later that year, the prevalence of highly specific sexual terms related to the wolf-biology fanfiction trope of Omegaverse appeared in Sudowrite, revealing that ChatGPT had likely been trained on fanfic without the authors' knowledge. Since then, Nikki and many others have been advocating against AI in all its forms in fandom, including using AI to generate fanfic or fanart. 'It's theft at its core. There's no ethical use of something that's built on stolen labor,' Nikki says. Although she's against genAI in principle because of its reliance on data taken without consent, she also says it breaks with fandom norms of free exchange. 'I did it because I love those characters, because I wanted to play in that sandbox, because I wanted people who also love them to read it. It is a gift.' Em says. 'They stole it without my permission.' But over the last few years, fanfic writers say there have been numerous examples of genAI entrepreneurs trying to cash in on their work — such as people like Cliff Weitzman, the CEO of text-to-voice app Speechify, who was found to have scraped thousands of fics from AO3 and uploaded them to WordStream, a website linked to his app, without the authors' permission. (He swiftly removed that after fans pushed back on social media.) Then there was a text-to-speech app from Wishroll Inc, which marketed itself on TikTok as 'Audible for AO3.' The app was announced in May 2024 but was withdrawn later that month after fan pushback. 'It's like a whack-a-mole thing. Every time you turn around, there's, like, another grifter trying to steal your shit,' Nikki says. It may seem odd to hear such a strong sentiment from a writer who, like most fanfic creators, uses copyrighted intellectual property as a 'sandbox' to make up their own stories. But advocates for fanworks say they are 'transformative,' meaning a 'fanwork creator holds the rights to their own content, just the same as any professional author, artist, or other creator,' according to AO3. This is very different from what a LLM does when, for example, it generates a novel based on prompts. AI can't replicate the creative human process of 'transformation,' which involves inventing and integrating new ideas. LLMs can only reshuffle and regurgitate content that already exists. And, unlike the AI-generated books flooding Amazon, one of the principles of fanfiction is that writers do not make any profit from their work. That hasn't stopped AI infiltrating fandom in other controversial ways. Some readers, eager to get new updates of their favorite fics, have taken to uploading them into ChatGPT to generate new chapters, much to the consternation of some authors. Some have taken to locking their stories, requiring readers to have an AO3 account to access them or deleting them from the internet altogether. In the case of nyuuzou's scrape, fans coordinated online to file take-down notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the nonprofit that administers AO3, also filed a takedown. On April 9, Hugging Face disabled the dataset. OTW responded to user concerns about fanfics being scraped in a board meeting on April 26, saying, 'We have added a CloudFlare tool to prevent AI scraping and other bots. This helps a lot but is not perfect. However, more robust solutions would have a significant negative impact on some of our users, especially those using older devices.' Nyuuzou remained unrepentant, filing a counternotice and reuploading the dataset to sites hosted in Russia and China, which are far less responsive to DMCA complaints. Contacted by The Verge via a Telegram account linked on his Hugging Face profile, nyuuzou said he was an 18-year-old student and IT worker in Russia who is 'not interested in fanfiction' and uploaded the dataset for 'legitimate research purposes.' 'My goal was to support community research in areas like content moderation, anti-plagiarism tools, recommendation systems, and archival preservation,' nyuuzou wrote via Telegram. 'I think a lot of the disagreement comes from misunderstandings about why these datasets exist. This was never about creating chatbots or large language models for commercial use.' Founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs, Hugging Face started out building chatbots for teenagers. Since then, the company has expanded to hosting open-source models with the stated aim of 'democratizing AI' by making machine-learning development accessible to the public. 'Our goal is to enable every company in the world to build their own AI,' Jeff Boudier, Hugging Face's head of product, told Amazon Web Services (AWS) in February. But Hugging Face is deeply connected to large companies. In addition to its ongoing collaboration with AWS, IBM invested $235 million in Hugging Face in 2023 and announced it was collaborating with the company on watsonx, IBM's generative AI platform. Nyuuzou said he was surprised by OTW's aggressive reaction to the dataset, writing, 'I had hoped for dialogue about how research datasets might align with preservation goals.' 'That's really disingenuous,' says Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and author of The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want. She's skeptical of the idea that any dataset uploaded to Hugging Face wouldn't ultimately be used to train LLMs. 'Why would you have a large tranche of unstructured data available on the web if not to train a language model?' Although individual scrapers like nyuuzou are small fry in the wider economy of genAI, which is dominated by billion-dollar companies like OpenAI, Hanna says it's still up to sites like AO3 to aggressively protect their users' work. As for fanfic writers themselves, she thinks Nikki's strategy of whack-a-mole is the way to go. 'Trying to knock this stuff down, that's probably the best thing that one can be doing now,' Hanna says. Nikki and Em, the fanfic writers, had a more heated response to nyuuzou's explanation for the scrape. 'Fuck you, dude,' Em says. 'We do free labor for the love of the game and are not profiting off of it — other than creating a community, gaining practice for our craft and creating content for characters and stories that we love. And that is being stolen to fuel things that have such larger implications.' Nikki says she's determined to keep pushing back against AI's encroachment into fandom spaces. 'I don't go looking for a fight,' she says. 'But when people come to us with a fight, I will fight.'
