The context you need, when you need it

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

How fan fiction went mainstream

The community that underpins Heated Rivalry, explained.

Archive of Our Own, or AO3, is one of the most popular websites in the world, with over 10 million registered users. Its users spend their time both reading and writing many, many words about their favorite fictional characters. It’s a place that allows normie readers to try out their characters in different scenarios and with different outcomes. In the last couple of years, sites like AO3 became fertile ground for publishers to find new authors who might provide them with their next big hit.

Last summer, reporter Rachel Kurzius wrote about how fan fiction is going mainstream for the Washington Post. “Fanfic,” as it’s known to its friends, is the underpinning of smash hits from Heated Rivalry to Fifty Shades of Grey. Kurzius anticipates that as more fanfic adherents grow up and get jobs in various roles in the mainstream, we’ll see more and more of this genre creeping into the mainstream.

Kurzius spoke Today, Explained host Noel King about why fan fiction is everywhere. An excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. For the whole interview, listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

This is such a fun question because there are a couple of different strains of thought here. So let’s start with the big tent philosophy, which is fan fiction is anything that is really derived from or inspired by preexisting works. But if we think about this broadly, basically everything that we know, including many of the classics are fan fiction, right? We could think recently about Percival Everett’s James, that’s Huckleberry Finn fanfic, right?

Does that really count?

In speaking with a lot of fandom experts, one person that I spoke with told me she used to want to define fanfic really broadly because it gave it a kind of legitimacy. Like, these are books that are considered part of the literary canon that are........

© Vox