Archive of Our Own

Written by Michele Theil

Fan fiction has long been a staple of the internet, with an untold – and ever growing – number of fan-written works published online, all based on existing stories.

Think of almost any book, movie, show, or franchise and it’s likely that you’ll be able to find at least one fan-written work about it. There’s fan fiction about Harry Potter, Star Wars, Gilmore Girls, Twilight, One Direction, Marvel, The Hunger Games, and much more. Many are hugely popular and famous in their own right.

Platforms like Fanfiction.net, Wattpad, and Archive of Our Own (AO3) are all large repositories for works comprising of dozens of chapters and hundreds of thousands of words inspired by an existing piece of “intellectual property”, IP for short.

AO3 is the most popular website for fan fiction – though the other two are no slouches – boasting over 13 million works across 67,000 fandoms alone. It was created in 2008 and is an open-source website for fanworks contributed by individual users.

Fan fiction is a lot bigger than people might think. Many write them because they love the existing story so much that they want to explore it even further or reimagine a particular storyline or relationship – in fact, relationships and romance are some of the most common aspects of fan fiction, as people might want their favourite character to end up with a different one than the author or show runner thought was appropriate.

This, in part, is why fan fiction is so popular with LGBTQ+ people.

Until recently, thanks to shows like Heartstopper, Elite, Red, White & Royal Blue, Our Flag Means Death, One Day At A Time, Schitt’s Creek, and First Kill, on-screen romantic relationships featuring LGBTQ+ people in general were very few and far between – and if there was an LGBTQ+ relationship, it either ended in heartbreak or death, or was the subject of stereotypes and crass jokes.

Lesbian and bisexual characters in particular were very much subject to the ‘Bury Your Gays’ trope. There was a massive lack of lesbian and bisexual characters on TV until recently, but even when they appeared, they would often be dead a few episodes later. This was the case for Tara in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Marissa from The O.C, and Maya from Pretty Little Liars.

When there is such a dearth of happy, not-dead queer characters on screen and in books, people who identify as LGBTQ+ are likely upset when they finally find one who then dies tragically. So, they turn to fan fiction where they can change the ending – or at least read stories where others have changed it for them – so that their favourites can live happily ever after.

Then there’s “LGBTQ+ subtext”, which in reality is often little more than queer-baiting.

Subtext is a phenomenon that happens when it appears as if writers are hinting at a queer relationship between two characters of the same gender but it never comes to fruition, frustrating fans.