The Global Crackdown on Creativity
Governments around the world are censoring—and criminalizing—the currents in which fanworks flow.
On April 28, 2026, an Australian woman narrowly escaped jail time for writing an erotic romance novel centered on the roleplay lifestyle kink known as “daddy dom/little girl.” The author, Laura Ashley Tesolin-Mastrosa, had been awaiting trial for over a year after she was first charged in 2025 with possessing, disseminating, and producing child abuse material under the law in the state of New South Wales.
A judge ultimately determined that the book’s depiction of infantilization kink between a 45-year-old man and the 18-year-old woman about whom he’d fantasized since she was very young was tantamount to an actual depiction of child abuse between an adult male and a toddler. This representation was illegal per a recently expanded NSW legal statute that criminalizes any material that sexualizes a person who “appears to be or is implied to be” a child. While the judge sentenced Mastrosa to an 18-month community corrections order instead of the potential 10-year prison sentence she could have received for the offense, she made it clear in her ruling that fiction was not a defense, nor was the fact that Mastrosa's fictional characters were adults: in the eyes of the law, Mastrosa had created child sexual abuse material.
Less than a month later in Yekaterinburg, Russia, Alexandra Kuzyk, an adult writer of explicit male/male Stray Kids fanfiction, faced a judge for the charge of “illegal pornography.” Queer “propaganda” in Russia has been criminalized since 2022, and queer-positive media and websites have been legally sanctioned and banned. Kuzyk was sentenced to 18 months of forced labor for her Stray Kids fic; prosecutors had asked the court to sentence her to up to four years in prison for her crime.
Kuzyk, who pled guilty, told Parni+ that she was targeted by the state after the mother of one of her readers discovered her fanfic through her daughter’s account on the messaging app Telegram (which has since been banned in Russia). The reader’s mother allegedly traced the story from Telegram back to the fanfiction platform Ficbook—which is hosted in Latvia and which has been banned in Russia since 2024—taking screenshots of sex scenes and reporting the fic to the Russian agency responsible for media censorship.
At a glance, these two incidents in disparate corners of the globe might seem unconnected. One involved the robust prosecution of perceived child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in a democratic nation, and one was an act of homophobic state terrorism under an authoritarian regime. Yet in both cases, the axe blade swung extremely close to the neck for creators of fiction—and doubly so for creators of fanworks.
Right up until she unknowingly crossed a line from “subversive” into “criminal,” Mastrosa was writing fiction that was totally unremarkable until it wasn’t. The warnings she reportedly used as a guideline for readers could have been lifted straight from AO3 tags: “age gap, daddy kink, infantilisation, physical abuse, profanity, sexually explicit scenes and slut-shaming.” Meanwhile in Russia, Kuzyk was operating in as lowkey a fashion as she could, using VPNs to post her fanfiction for free on platforms hosted outside of the country, where her content had legal protections. These precautions didn’t spare her from community surveillance, nor from punishment.
