Okay, you’re here for the dirty.
So, guilty secret time, without further ado. Though I no longer write it, from time to time I still read…f**f******.
Wait, what was that Candy? I couldn’t hear you.
Reader leans forward and cups a hand around their ear.
Errr, yeah, okay. Author, in a hushed voice: I still read fanfiction.
There. Now you know.
I don’t know why that still feels embarrassing to say out loud given how mainstream fanfiction has become, but it does. It’s a bit like inviting a guest to tour your house only to have them point out the bedraggled twenty-year-old stuffed cow plushie that holds center-stage on your bed. It should have been binned years ago, but you kept it because it was comfy and familiar.
Just like my stuffed cow plushie, fanfiction is something I feel like I should have outgrown. I thought I had too when, for a few years, I stopped reading it. Of course all this did was allow for a plethora of excellent stories to build up.
While I primarily read Harry Potter fanfiction—sue me, that was my era—I have occasionally branched out. After Harry Potter, Lockwood and Co. is my other fandom. Stories in these worlds are comfort reads in the purest sense. More on that in a bit.
Every now and then I’ll pause to ponder why these fandoms in particular but at a surface level I think the answer is pretty obvious. They’re both packed with interesting characters (in Harry Potter’s case, some of the minor characters are more compelling than the main), there are many unresolved tensions, the world/setting is intriguing and rich, and there are a lot of possibilities for ongoing adventures. Even the endings leave room, sometimes accidentally. In Harry Potter’s, I’m looking directly at that epilogue which is both kitsch and cringe. It’s the vision of adulthood as a straight line into the most predictable pairings imaginable. Twenty years later and everyone marries exactly who you’d expect. It’s so milquetoast I want to gag.
I am also learning that it might be wise to stick one’s head in the sand concerning the personal beliefs and lives of some of our favorite authors, at least if you want to continue enjoying the worlds they made possible. I won’t say too much on the subject but it’s hard to ignore when they’re willfully trolling people on Twitter/X with hateful rhetoric. Still, Harry Potter fanfiction remains comfort reading.
This brings me back to my original observation: that fanfiction is comforting. The question now is why is fanfiction as comforting to read as The Great British Bake Off is to watch?
Well, for one thing, you already know the world. There’s almost nothing your brain has to do to orient itself. You can probably navigate Hogwarts in the dark. You know to look out for trick stairs and moving staircases. You know the portraits might gossip if they overhear you say something juicy. You know how Madam Pince will behave if you say anything louder than a whisper in her library. Lockwood and Co. has its own version of familiarity too—tea, George’s rules regarding biscuits, Lucy arguing with the skull in the jar, Lockwood accepting an assignment they’re probably not qualified to undertake.
This “known world” effect is part of why series are comforting and why I think things like school stories are so popular (Malory Towers and St. Clare’s for anyone growing up in a colonial nation—minus the States). In the case of series, once you get past the first book, the effort to get into the next is much lower as you already know the setting and characters and likely what’s at stake. As for the latter, when you’re reading school stories you’re often in school yourself, or you remember it. Not even those rooted in magic—Harry Potter, the Magicians trilogy, the Scholomance trilogy or the Magisterium series—can make you feel there isn’t a known (and comforting) framework.
I think it’s worth keeping this in mind if you’re planning on writing your own story. You don’t need to stick to the tried-and-tested, but is there something you can do to make some aspect of the book feel familiar to your audience, dare I say comforting? It could make it easier for you to write, and even easier for others to read. Perhaps it pertains to structure or setting, or a type of ritual? It definitely helps to think of the age of the reader you’re targeting too.
Another reason fanfiction is comforting (and popular) is that the cognitive load is low. You don’t have to learn new lore or characters from scratch, so your brain can just relax and feel. It’s a bit like why we keep returning to Bake Off when we need something comforting. It has the familiar beats—the challenges you know, the possibility of a handshake, that someone will have to get voted off. It’s also not mean like so many American cooking and baking shows which really does go a long way to saying we’re all seeking out the idyllic, really.
In the case of fanfiction and sites like Archive of Our Own, you can also rely on “tags” to further control the stakes. You can choose fluff. You can choose hurt/comfort. You can choose enemies-to-lovers with a happy ending. You can also choose your own kind of doom and gloom, but at least you’re consenting to it, right? Fanfiction authors, for the most part, are astonishingly good at tagging what’s inside the box. That alone makes it feel safer than wandering blind into a random novel and hoping you don’t get emotionally sideswiped on page 240. It’s also one of the reasons Archive of Our Own is a much better site to trawl through for stories than is fanfiction.net.
But when it’s all said and done, one of the things I love most about fanfiction is that it gives one a cast of known characters with whom you can do almost anything you want.
You can write canon-compliant stories where everything fits the original timeline. Or you can write canon-divergent stories where you pry open a “what if” and crawl inside. You can write alternate universes where the same characters are baristas or astronauts or rival chefs or two people who keep meeting at the same dive shop. Fanfiction is the metaphorical sandbox with all the familiar toys.
And it’s not just readers who benefit from that familiarity. Writers do too.
Working on my novel has taught me something humbling: creating deep characters is harder than I thought. Plot? I can handle plot. Character arcs? Not as hard as I thought. But characters with backstories that feel genuinely lived, who have motivations that make sense, contradictions that feel human, personality flaws that make them do irrational things, voices that don’t all sound like the same person—that takes real thinking. Fanfiction, by contrast, hands you a set of personalities already charged with a full life, including strengths, weaknesses and likely a distinct voice.
I think this is also why fanfiction can sometimes outshine even the original stories. It gives writers space to focus on relationships and transformation. All the other stuff is figured out.
And transformation—let’s be honest—is what we read for.
This is why so many beloved fanfiction pairings orbit the “forbidden.” Sometimes it’s age difference. Sometimes it’s enemies-to-lovers. Sometimes it’s the delicious tension of two people who are not supposed to want each other. Draco and Hermione. Harry and Draco. Remus and Sirius. Hermione and Snape. These are all, in different ways, stories about friction. It’s social, moral, and emotional. The romance is not the point, the transformation is.
Enemies-to-lovers stories are as old as time (think Darcy and Elizabeth), but they’ve exploded in popularity because they’re basically narrative steroids. They create chemistry. They create intrigue. They create stakes. And when done well, they create depth too—not because the pairing is “spicy,” but because the transformation required is meaningful. Someone has to change. Someone has to grow. Someone has to see the other person differently.
And yes, if you peek at what floats to the top of large fanfiction archives, it’s rarely the most obvious, canon-approved pairings. It’s the ones that rewrite the expected, or that build on interesting characters who were relegated to the background. It’s the ones that fix the endings some of us still can’t forgive. Snape dying? No thank you. That epilogue? Also, no thank you. Fanfiction is, in part, a long-running public referendum on what readers wanted and didn’t get.
Lockwood & Co. scratches a slightly different itch for me than Harry Potter, but it’s the same comfort mechanism at its core. Jonathan Stroud’s characters are deliciously strong. They leap from the pages more vividly than almost anyone in Harry Potter does. They’re funny and irreverent and prickly and clever. You can’t help wanting to spend time with them. You want to sit at the table with the Thinking Cloth. You want to listen to Lucy argue with a skull in a jar while someone offers you a biscuit like this is all completely normal.
What Stroud did especially well in Lockwood and Co. was to create tension both at the plot level and the character level. The series also has a stronger and more natural ending, a genuine feeling of completion. Still, even then, we—the readers—want to keep playing with the characters. The books might have drawn to a close but their lives sure didn’t. And that’s another funny thing that fanfiction does. It refuses to accept the boundary between the book ending and the characters’ lives continuing.
This brings me to something else that’s been happening more recently, both quietly and not so quietly. Fanfiction has started becoming a funnel for publishers.
One of the more surreal trends of recent years is watching popular fanfictions migrate into the book market. It happens like this: A story begins as a love letter to an existing world, racks up a mega following, then gets rewritten. Names are changed, the setting is shifted, and any obviously recognizable copyrighted property disguised just enough to stand as “original.” Sometimes the result is transformative enough to become its own creature, as in the case of Brigitte Knightley’s The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy (a Hermione/Draco fanfic). Sometimes it’s…less so and authors pull works down because the similarities feel too close for comfort. In case you’re wondering, I’m talking about Alchemised here.
If you’re curious, you can find the OG Brigitte Knightley fic, Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love here and the OG Sen Lin Yu fic, Manacled here, though they’ve tried to scrub access to the latter as the two stories really are very similar. Er, long live the Wayback Machine?
Of course, I’m not here to harp on about what people do with their fics once a publisher realizes they’ve got a marketable story. Mostly, I mention this because I think it reveals something else about why fanfiction works so well in the first place. It has a built-in audience. There’s a shared cultural context. Readers already care about their chosen characters and they can navigate the world blindfold which means a whole lot less explaining. In original fiction you have to work at that and it’s not always easy.
Ironically, this is also why I’m trying not to read fanfiction now. It’s not because I’m ashamed of it (though it is still kind of embarrasing sharing that I read it at all), but because it’s so effective at doing what it does. I gives me an instant hit of familiarity. And though it’s cozy, it means my brain is not working very hard at learning new tricks or at absorbing new ways of doing or saying things. It doesn’t inspire imagination unless the stories are wildly different. It just makes me lazy.
Unluckily, or maybe luckily for me, my timing couldn’t be better. Sites like Archive of Our Own—known for a higher average quality of writing than the old wild-west days of fanfiction.net—are becoming increasingly clogged with AI-generated fanfiction. It’s depressing in a new way because it floods what was a valuable community library with the generic. It makes finding really good, deep fanfics so much harder because guess what AI cannot do well? Build inner lives. It’s appalling at it. If you’re at all in tune with your emotions you’d notice it easily too. It just feels off.
So yes, I’ll still occasionally read fanfiction (probably only if it was written before 2024) but a lot less. Maybe not at all for a bit. I do like knowing it’s there though, a way for me to self-soothe if I ever have to. And truly, the beauty of it is that it reminds me of what readers crave—the familiar as much as the tense, the transformative, and the character rich. It shows us how powerful a cast of well-drawn characters is and it reminds us that we don’t want endings that flatten the world we escaped into that we grew to love.
On that note, I’m heading back to my current read: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. After this it’s on to finishing the second book in Maggie Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle quartet.
