The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction

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.