The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction
In 2024, everyone wanted a piece of fic, from AI grifters to traditional publishers to ravenous audiences. Where did that leave the people who write it?
by Elizabeth Minkel
An illustration of a supermassive black hole found in galaxy M60-UCD1, or AI entrepreneurs when they log onto the AO3. Image courtesy NASA via Wikimedia Commons.
Around this time in December, we usually wrap up Fansplaining with “The Year in Fandom”: a look back at five trends from the prior year followed by five trends from the year coming to a close. With Flourish’s departure this summer, the podcast is now on hiatus—but I had a lot of thoughts about 2024, particularly when it came to fanfiction. Many thanks to Flourish for looking this over; in a way, it’s a “Year in Fandom” segment in spirit.
There were two fanfiction news stories in 2024 that serve as bookends of sorts: both about fic being pulled out of its original context; both about other people profiting off fic writers’ work; and both illustrating the broader trouble when fic is viewed as a large body of mineable “content,” to choose a very intentional word. If 2012 was the year fic was thrust into the mainstream spotlight via Fifty Shades of Grey, 2024 was the year it truly broke containment—everyone seemed to want a piece of the fanfiction pie, leaving fic authors themselves besieged on all sides.
The first story emerged in the early weeks of the year, when SenLinYu—author of the wildly popular Dramione fic Manacled, currently the second-most read work in the entire Archive of Our Own—announced that the story would be pulled to publish in 2025. This announcement was partly notable because it was so straightforward: anyone who spent time in earlier eras of fandom likely remembers the furtiveness (and the wank) around P2P. But it was mostly notable because of the reason SenLinYu was taking Manacled down. Long popular among amateur fanbinders, bound copies of the fic were also being sold for profit on sites like Etsy—and despite the efforts to get them to stop, sellers continued popping up unabated.
While I was reporting on this for WIRED in late February, a wave of concern was spreading through broader transformative fandom—but especially among Dramione writers, a number of whom had also been victims of these for-profit sellers. By the time my story was published, some of them had wiped their works from the internet entirely. Meanwhile, fanbinders—who often don’t just adhere to, but celebrate the non-monetized gift economy—were getting swept up in accusations meant for the for-profit sellers, many of whom weren’t even hand-binding the fic, as they claimed, but making cheap print-on-demand books and jacking up the price.
This debacle set a particular sort of tone for 2024, which is why it seemed fitting that two days before Christmas, my feeds filled with posts about WordStream, a site framing itself as the “Netflix of audiobooks” that was yanking popular fics from the AO3 and reposting them with AI-generated audio, covers, and summaries. The full blow-by-blow was documented by fic writer and artist Easter Kingston, whose stories were among the stolen works; the site is a project of tech entrepreneur Cliff Weitzman, who cited his dyslexia as an excuse for wholesale copying fic authors’ work onto his for-profit site. The fandom outcry was vast and swift, and within hours, the entire fic category had vanished. (Though, as Kingston notes, the works are likely just hidden, not deleted, and are still accessible through other routes in the app.)
Scummy fic-stealing websites aren’t new, but there was something about this one that felt more in line with the for-profit binders than the nameless, faceless plagiarism sites of years past. These actors weren’t collecting pennies via banner ads: they were seeing real potential markets and capitalizing on them. WordStream could fill its digital shelves with beloved works about modern pop-culture characters; for-profit fic binders could literally see customer demand, because as quickly as they listed their materials, people would buy them. To both of these groups, fanfiction is merely a vast repository of works people love that somehow magically wound up on the internet, freely available and replete with a handy download button.
These bookends weren’t the only stories of this type in 2024. The most high-profile among them was Lore.fm, which cropped up in May. “The Audible for AO3” (another stellar tagline!), the site promised to let a user paste in a fic link to AI-generate an audiobook version. Documented by Tumblr user millermenapologist, what was initially framed, like WordStream, as a pet accessibility project, was revealed to be backed by a team of tech entrepreneurs who were trying to AI-generate stories. Within a few days of fandom pushback, the project was seemingly scrapped.
Your fanfiction and mine is probably already part of many large language models: in 2023, Rose Eveleth reported on the unusual prevalence of omegaverse terms in AI outputs, suggesting the AO3 (and, presumably, other open sites like Fanfiction.net) had been scraped to train LLMs. AO3’s developers have since put blockers on future scraping, but there are technical limits to what they can do—and besides, our scraped content is already fueling the AI functionality that’s making so much of our software worse. But pulling specific stories to repurpose on for-profit sites feels a bit different: this isn’t some undifferentiated mass of millions of texts. AI entrepreneurs want libraries of stories to feed their consumer-facing products—and they want them without obtaining copyright permission or compensating writers for original material.
These incidents could simply be a broader story about tech advances and capitalism, from WordStream’s ability to generate a relatively credible website via AI (I mean, “credible” is harder to argue if you saw those abysmal covers, but still) to the ease with which Etsy sellers can print and distribute bound fic. They’re also about the unintended knock-on effects of the design of the AO3 in particular: literally a repository of free works about popular subjects that people love, with a handy download button. They’re stories of ostensible “fandom outsiders” swooping in like vultures, taking advantage of a largely pseudonymous body of writers who are perceived to be legally ignorant—and who are in practice often legally powerless, armed only with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (because yes, you do own the copyright to your fic) and often given no real pathways to implement it.
But as I watched these and related stories throughout the year, I found myself putting them side by side with a broader discussion within transformative fandom. Commentary about the fracturing of online communities and the shortening of fandom life cycles has been churning for years; in past “Year in Fandom” episodes, Flourish and I often found ourselves noting that these trends had only continued from one year to the next, and we wondered if there would someday be an inflection point. In 2024, it feels like we may have arrived there—because as the for-profit appetite for fic exploded, so, too, did the appetite of readers, whose numbers seem to be skyrocketing.
On the surface, this feels like it should be a good thing: More fic readers means more people in fandom, right? Instead, I read post after post talking about how distant writers felt from these newer readers—how impersonal and lonely the act of fannish creation has become. Anecdotes where readers gush about a fic on Discord, but make zero attempts to connect with the author. Screenshots of fic titles or passages with no URLs—and captions like, “I wish I could tell the person who wrote this how incredible it is.” TikToks highlighting fics garnering hundreds of effusive comments, while the authors of the stories themselves never hear a peep. Readers complaining about “small” fandoms with thousands of works, or asserting they wouldn’t even bother clicking on a fic under 100K words—they want more, more, more.
By no means do I want to paint the predatory profit-seekers with the swaths of enthusiastic readers who are engaging with the body of fanfiction in good faith. But I do see in both these trends a framing of fic as just that: fanfiction as a vast and ever-growing body, one that’s largely disconnected from authors and their fanwork communities. Fic has long been notable for its relatively high ratio of producers to consumers—compared to your average pro-fiction genre, a large portion of readers are also writers, too. But as the audience for fic soars, these close ties between reading and writing seem to be deteriorating at a rapid pace.
A decade and a half after decoupling where the fanfiction lives from where the people live, we’re seeing what happens when fanfiction scales—but participatory fan communities do not. And as the appetite for fic seems to be increasing exponentially on all sides, where does that leave the writers who create it?
Sometimes I think about the fanfiction world I entered a quarter-century ago, and I struggle to wrap my head around the sheer size of it now. To be exceedingly clear, this isn’t headed towards some Make Fandom Great Again screed about the old days. I’m moved when I think about how widely accessible fic is today—how the people who will connect with it are far more likely to find it than even a few years ago, let alone a few decades. I wrote fic before my family had the internet, and when I eventually got online, finding out it was a practice others did, too, was revelatory; I’ve heard plenty of similar anecdotes from people my age and older, or from those who only learned about it as adults and wished that they’d heard of it sooner.
I’m also the first to push back at the suggestion that online fandom was ever just the people you could see talking. Prior to the 2010s, I was a lurker, which meant I never left a comment, or reached out to an author, or even remotely considered joining in the conversation. But I still felt like I was lurking within the communities I was watching—understanding roughly, even if not from a first-hand perspective, how fic was created and shared. Back then, it was much easier to see the connections, because the groups of talkers were small and tight-knit; especially in the LiveJournal era, you could trace an idea from fandom to fanfiction, like a spiraling kink meme prompt, or a comment exchange on a meta that blossomed into a full story elsewhere.
The modern web doesn’t often allow for this kind of closeness: there are too many platforms, some so unmanageably large that users cede control to algorithms, some so closed that only a limited number of fans would ever see a given conversation. Fans talk in some places, and fic is hosted in wholly separate places: today’s fic sites are generally built as searchable repositories, with only light social components like commenting. (It’s worth noting that before the LJ era, fans also tended to talk in one place—forums, mailing lists—and post fic on archives, but the mechanics of the early internet are so different from today’s ultra-scaled social web that there’s little sense comparing them.)
With the relative stability of today’s fic sites compared to fandom’s purge-and-migration cycles on the early web, the body of fic grows steadily year over year. In 2014, five years after the AO3 went into public beta, I attended a celebration for its millionth work; a decade later, the work count tops 14 million. AO3’s folksonomic tagging practices have long been admired by librarians and information scientists, but it’s the tag functionality that’s shifted the way readers encounter fic: with the ability to search a trope or story element across such an expansive pool of works, many people read without an affective relationship with—or sometimes even knowledge of—a fic’s source material. It’s fanfiction, sometimes wholly disconnected from fandom.
Story-first, fandom-second readers aren’t some tiny minority: when we ran a survey on this a few years back, we found that about a third of our ~7,000 respondents read stories for fandoms they didn’t know, and about half read stories for source material they knew but weren’t fans of. This, of course, encompasses things like the time-honored tradition of following an author into a new fandom, but I think it also offers a helpful snapshot of different ways into fic at the present moment. The trope-first approach has clearly altered much of what gets written today: styles and structures will always shift over time, but fanfiction’s trope-ification (and the corresponding meme-ification of those tropes, e.g., the ubiquity of phrase “there was only bed,” or the overlaying of “the grumpy one and the sunshine one” on seemingly any two characters) has certainly hastened its broader decontextualization.
So, too, has the increasing crossover with pro romance, a genre that in recent years has seen the effect of growing numbers of fic readers, as well as fic writers who now have romance writing and editing jobs. Fanfiction was never synonymous with romance, and that hasn’t changed: despite the suggestion that it’s all about shipping, works tagged “Gen” account for nearly a fifth of those 14 million on the AO3, never mind that plenty tagged with a ship don’t focus on romance at all. But the ever-blurring lines work in both directions: more and more romance readers are trying out fic, coming to stories like Manacled via BookTok and romance book clubs, and having zero context to understand why you shouldn’t order a bound copy of the story you’d like to read, just as you would any other book.
That decontextualization was also at work on WordStream, where the “Fanfiction” category sat at the very top of the page, undifferentiated beside “Romance” and “Science Fiction.” (I should note that anyone clicking on “Romance” now and expecting the modern romance genre is going to be sorely disappointed, since something seems to have gotten lost-in-AI-translation in the categorization of public domain works. The Sorrows of Young Werther is certainly capital-R Romantic, though!)
For tech people attempting to strip-mine fic via AI, this is obviously about paying zero dollars to get corporate-owned intellectual property onto sites that can otherwise only offer the public domain—or just the fraction of public-domain titles everyone’s heard of. But it also serves to signal how much broader attitudes about fic have shifted in recent years: what was once seen as something to speak of only in hushed tones is now a draw, the kind of content category that could attract paying readers. And even better, it’s totally free to acquire. A win-win—just so long as the authors themselves don’t happen to notice where their work has wound up.
Viewed through one lens, the broader de-stigmatization of fic is positive: I personally do not miss the days when it was a punchline on celebrity chat shows, or the days before that, when no one knew what it was, if I felt comfortable mentioning it at all. But the price of this de-stigmatization seems to be utter context collapse—and as fic breaks containment, you can see the markers of what makes a fic “successful” or “valuable” shifting in real time, to align more with the pro-media world.
Alongside the illegally sold copies, we’ve seen a rash of P2P in recent years, famously coming out of—though not limited to—Reylo fandom. As agents scour the AO3 for future clients, it’s not hard to tell what sort of stuff is seen as “marketable,” and how some writers are tooling their work for those potential horizons. Fic in the digital era has been as formally wide-open as web publishing allows: 100-word drabbles or 1,000-word character studies or 1 million-word epics, you have the relative freedom to make a story whatever shape you want, unencumbered by printing limitations or audience norms. But the stories getting pulled to publish are ones that already resemble more traditionally structured novels, and the prevalence of a certain type of M/F relationship among the stories people pay money for gives a pretty clear indication of what happens when the thousand-different-niches nature of fanfic meets the mainstream market.
To some degree, we’ve seen these dynamics before: we only need to look back, as we so often do, to Fifty Shades of Grey. I began to move from covering books to covering fandom when Fifty Shades’ success was the biggest book story in the world—partly because I was being slowly driven mad by every bad article about it. So many of them seemed to utterly misunderstand what fanfiction was on a basic level, but more troubling, the coverage often looked at fic’s one commercial success story and framed the rest of it as, well, content to be mined.
I remember reading speculation from publishing executives with cartoon dollar-signs in their eyes and feeling a sense of powerlessness—because at the time, it seemed inevitable that the people with the money, cultural influence, and structural weight could simply assert that going forward, fanfiction was what they said it was. But as well as the various Twilight P2P titles sold, after that blip, most of fanfiction continued on like normal—or rather, continued to evolve with changing fandom tastes, but largely unaffected by the desires of Penguin Random House.
That same sense of powerlessness echoes today, but scaled up to 2024’s reality. The cartoon-dollar-sign pool has expanded to include AI venture capitalists and BookTok influencers, not to mention dogged Etsy sellers who won’t be deterred by mere copyright takedowns. These bad actors feel different than the collective enemies of my fandom youth: the network, the corporation, the billionaire author in a castle, all wrapped up in the abstract untouchableness of “The Powers That Be.” As frustrated as we often were with them, I was lucky to come of age in an era where, save for a few famous examples, TPTB didn’t much care about fic; that left it for us, as a way to take back a little something for ourselves. Now, it feels like so many people want to take a bite out of fic itself—and so often, it’s just to make a buck.
As market forces loomed over fic in 2024, I thought of one of Alex Norris’s most famous “oh no” comics, in which a minority creates a space for themselves, the majority crowds into it, and then attempts to eject the minority in turn. OK, maybe “ejection” is a bit strong; “fic writer” is not a marginalized identity, and neither big publishing nor the AI Grifter of the Week are stopping me from writing my X-Men fanfiction. But what fic will become in the years ahead remains an open question—and it increasingly feels like fans get less and less of a say.
If this year was a fanfiction inflection point, you can bet that these incidents are just the beginning—because that body of fic is still sitting there on the internet, growing daily and ready to feed an ever-increasing appetite from the well-intentioned and the malicious alike.
AI ventures feel like the most worrisome: tech is clearly struggling with a content gap to fill up the products they’re building, and they know they’ll only get so much consumer mileage out of The Sorrows of Young Werther. And for all the deserved skepticism about whether AI tools will get better, it’s very likely that they will. WordStream’s janky website—which gave a good portion of my slash ship’s covers an M/F couple, never mind all the terrible generic AI men—might look legitimately good in a few years. But even if it doesn’t, these people clearly have no shame about going to market with the janky—or the stolen. Like much of the AI world, “ask for forgiveness, not for permission” seems to be the mantra. Unlike the traditionally published authors currently suing OpenAI, though, fic writers don’t have a lot of recourse.
But as infuriating as these tech ventures are, as a fic writer, I get more hung up on the swelling readership component of all of this—the way fic feels increasingly like traditionally published genres, with a binary, one-to-many relationship between authors and audience. I balk at the transactional language of commenting as compensation; when I watch earnest TikTokers try to onboard new fic readers with instructions to politely comment, I think about how all the polite comments in the world won’t solve the decontexualization problem, the disconnect of fanfiction from fandom. I think about my erstwhile Fifty Shades worries and all the times in recent years I’ve told someone I cover fandom, especially fanfiction—and they try to badly fansplain fic to me before I can elaborate. At what point do all these external definitions stick?
I get that sense that a lot of fandom folks are, like me, worried about the way the ground seems to be shifting beneath us: in meta after meta, I’ve seen frustration over a larger but increasingly passive fic readership; dismay that traditional publishing has a growing influence over a practice that partly exists in opposition to it; and anger that some guy can just copy-paste your work and charge money for it, and no one outside of fandom seems to care.
But people inside fandom care—a lot. I’ve watched these swirling controversies and marveled at the passion of fans’ arguments, the helpfulness of their practical advice, and their quick attempts to shut down irrational panic and fear-mongering speculation. Amidst all of this instability and change, I’ve watched people keep creating—uploading yet another work to the body of fanfiction, as their fellow fandom members rec, or beta, or prompt, or simply cheerlead, keeping those community ties strong. (And I can’t see you, lurkers, but if you’re watching all of this, then you’re in there, too.) I wrote fanfiction before I ever learned about fandom, but now I can’t imagine disconnecting them. It’s those ties that will have to carry us into the years ahead—no matter who comes for a bite of fanfiction next.
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Elizabeth Minkel is the editor and host of Fansplaining. She’s written about fan culture for WIRED, Atlas Obscura, The New Yorker, the New Statesman, and more. She co-curates “The Rec Center,” a weekly fandom newsletter, with fellow journalist Gavia Baker-Whitelaw.