One of the first stories I ever wrote was a Webkinz fanfiction, though I didn’t know at the time that that was the term for it. It was a story about an evil Google (which, in the Webkinz universe, is a kind of hapless, armless goose) whose nefarious plans had to be thwarted by an intrepid duck using the power of friendship. It was 9 chapters long, written in a composition notebook with a light blue cover, and had a glaring plot hole that I never quite managed to solve.

It’s funny how sometimes, in tracing a pattern of behavior back through the years, you’re forced to reckon with the fact that you were always going to end up the way that you are.

I’m pretty open about being a fanfiction author these days. After all, fic is less cringe now, bordering on mainstream—Stucky fanfiction gave us Heated Rivalry, and every second romantasy novel published these days has its origins in a different ship.¹ More than that, though, I try not to be ashamed of the things that make me who I am. And I am proud of my fic. In my career as a fanfic author, I’ve published 200,000+ words across 75 stories, amassed nearly half a million views, honed my writing style and voice, made several fandom friends, and become something of a fanfiction scholar.

That’s right: fanfiction is something you can study. There’s the history of it, of course, tracing its modern form back to Star Trek fanfiction from the late ‘60s. There’s the queer theory underpinning the proliferation of slashfic written by women. There’s the contemporary evolution of fic—the relentless censorship that chased authors from Dreamwidth to LiveJournal to FanFiction.Net (aka FFN) and that ultimately led to the creation of the Archive of Our Own (aka AO3)².

Like with any field of study, there are scandals and conspiracies, too, that make for great reading material if you ever have an hour to kill: whatever the hell was going on with My Immortal, or Anne Rice’s relentless lawsuits that led to a decades-long practice of adding disclaimers to your fics, or the Cassandra Clare… *gestures vaguely* everything.

I’ve immersed myself in fanfiction as both a hobby and an academic interest for bordering on 15 years now. In that timespan, I’ve accumulated a small collection of fics that I think are worth reading even if you don’t typically engage with fanfiction. These are fics that represent moments in fandom history, exemplify the transgressive nature of fanfiction, or otherwise just do something interesting, without requiring an extensive familiarity with canon. So for this month’s newsletter, I present:

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Onfindan by astolat

Link

Details: BBC Merlin (Merlin/Arthur); ~16k words; mature rating; magic reveal

Summary: Arthur discovers Merlin has magic. He’s kind of peeved about it, until he realizes he can team up with Merlin’s magic to rid the kingdom of monsters.

Notes: Given that astolat is the creator of the Archive Of Our Own,³ it would be difficult to curate a list of fanfiction’s greatest hits without including something by her. This fic is one of many that was originally published to LiveJournal, then ported over to AO3 in AO3’s incredibly early days following the censorship calamity known as Strikethrough.

Onfindan has many of the hallmarks of a classic fic from the late ‘00s/early ‘10s. It’s a lengthy one-shot (ie, just one chapter) by a Big Name Fan (ie, a well-known fan creator), written in the early days of an emerging IP, featuring a classic trope (magic reveal) and emotional reconciliation and endearingly snarky banter. And it’s clearly struck gold, as it’s a certified fandom favorite, sitting at more than 350,000 hits and nearly 22,000 kudos (analogous to “likes” on other social media platforms). In 2009, it even won fandom awards for its stellar characterization and genre fusion.

I think Onfindan is a solid introduction to astolat’s works, as it’s fun, has limited smut, and doesn’t require much familiarity with canon. I’ll admit, though, that it doesn’t even crack my top 10 favorite astolat fics. So if you enjoy this one, you’re in luck, because there’s a hell of a lot more (and better!) where that came from.

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United States v. Barnes, 617 F. Supp. 2d 143 (D.D.C. 2015) by fallingvoices and radialarch

Link

Details: Marvel (Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes); ~21k words; teen rating; multimedia

Summary: The Winter Soldier is put on trial for murder and treason. Watch the story unfold through press coverage, courtroom transcripts, and social media posts.

Notes: This is another fandom classic, this time less for the people who wrote it and more for its sheer technical prowess. This is a multimedia collage that gradually builds its narrative through in-universe media excerpts. There is no traditional prose, no narrator to string events together and provide scaffolding for the story. The reader watches the Winter Soldier’s trial unfold in real time through a collage of articles and interviews, tweets and transcripts and texts. Each media fragment is tonally accurate and impeccably formatted, making use of two-column layouts and different fonts and text colors to simulate reality. I can’t even begin to imagine how much HTML and CSS coding was required to achieve the final look.

Though Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes do end up together, their romance is not the point of this story. Instead, this is a thorough character study—an examination and analysis of Bucky Barnes, both as and separate from the Winter Soldier. You’re meant to sympathize with Bucky, yes, but the fic lays the necessary groundwork to earn that sympathy, rather than expecting it from the outset. It asks tough questions, grapples with the consequences of the Winter Soldier’s actions, presents arguments for and against his acquittal.

This is a technical and emotional masterpiece that engages with the MCU with more good faith, gravitas, and genuine love for the IP than any MCU movie has demonstrated in the past decade. If you enjoy the Avengers, courtroom drama, or just plain old unique storytelling, this is definitely worth a read.

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Unrequited by resonae

Link

Details: BTS (Jin/Yoongi; V/Jin); ~3k words; teen rating; Hanahaki Disease; angst

Summary: Seokjin starts coughing up crimson-red rose petals.

Notes: The Hanahaki Disease is a fictional disease that first appeared in print in the 2009 manga Hanahaki Otome, though it has certainly existed for decades in other unnamed iterations in East Asian culture and fiction. Translating literally to “flower vomit disease,” the Hanahaki Disease is an illness that besets people who have fallen in unrequited love, causing them to cough up flowers until they choke or asphyxiate to death. There are two cures: for the sufferer to have their feelings returned, or for the sufferer to undergo intensive surgery that removes their feelings. (In modern interpretations of the disease, this involves removing not just romantic feelings but platonic feelings as well, and sometimes even memories.)

I’ve been obsessed with the Hanahaki for a decade. When I first stumbled upon it, its origins were shrouded in mystery. Oh, it might have its own shiny Wikipedia page now, but for years, the only English-language description of the Hanahaki was a single unsourced Wattpad post. I spent countless sleepless nights in college trawling Japanese and Korean blog posts with the help of Google Translate in the hopes of uncovering even a single crumb of information about the trope.⁴

Here’s what I found: Unrequited is the first published English Hanahaki fanfic on any fanmedia platform. I firmly believe this fic was the springboard for the Hanahaki’s success in Western fanmedia—it introduced the Hanahaki to Western Kpop fandom broadly and the fast-growing Western BTS fandom specifically, and from there the trope slowly made its way out into the world. Moreover, the fic’s sincere and angst-driven approach to the Hanahaki lent it an air of gravitas that set the tone for Western fans’ reaction to it, in contrast to Japanese and Korean fans who (from what I’ve heard) see the Hanahaki as something of a joke. Unrequited singlehandedly formalized the parameters by which the Hanahaki operates in Western media, crystallizing a definitive form of the trope out of myriad Korean and Japanese iterations.⁵

In a world that now enjoys an abundance of Hanahaki stories, Unrequited might not seem like much at first glance. But it’ll always have a soft spot in my heart as the origin of the trope, and as a depiction of the Hanahaki in its purest form before fans started evolving and adapting it for their own desires.

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Closed Loop System by One_of_Them

Link

Details: The Murderbot Diaries; ~1500 words; general rating; interactive; multiple endings

Summary: Two SecUnits clear a minefield.

Notes: This fic is formatted as a fully playable game of Minesweeper.

No, seriously.

This is a fully coded, logically consistent game of Minesweeper.

The fic places you in the role of Security Unit (SecUnit) One, working with your partner SecUnit Two to sweep an area for hostile beetles. As you clear more of the field, your conversations with various other characters advance in synchrony. Ultimately, you are entirely in control of the fate of this fic and the characters within. Depending on whether (and how) you succeed or fail to clear the field, you can achieve one of 5 endings, which all trigger the appearance of a different plaintext epilogue.⁶

This fic has tremendous reread (replay?) value. Personally, it took me until my third replay (reread?) to feel like I was truly appreciating all the subtle genius on display here. Even if you’re not a completionist who’s inclined to hunt down every ending, I think it’s worth trying to find a couple.

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I Am Groot by sherlocksmyth

Link

Details: Guardians of the Galaxy; ~1300 words; “explicit” rating

Summary: An NSFW moment told from the perspective of Groot.

Notes: In contrast to the pillars of fandom history that are Onfindan and Unrequited and the stylistically ingenious United States v. Barnes and Closed Loop System, this fic exemplifies pure fandom silliness. I won’t do this justice in trying to describe it; you’ll just have to click the link and check it out yourself. Don’t worry, it’s a short read.

For a few years, this was the most-kudosed fic of all time on AO3. (Regrettably, it has since been surpassed, though it’s still holding strong in second place.) To me, this fic captures the heart of what fandom is: an inherently transgressive space where almost anything goes, so long as you’re having fun with it.⁷ Sometimes that means fandom is a safe space to try new things; sometimes it means fandom is a dumping ground for the worst grammar you’ve ever seen.

And sometimes it means fandom is a place where a fic like this can rack up more than 1 million hits just for getting kind of silly with it.

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I've Got Nothing To Do Today But Smile (The Only Living Boy in New York) by gyzym

Link

Details: Inception (Arthur/Eames); ~20k words; teen rating; coffee shop AU

Summary: Arthur's a corporate lawyer, Eames owns the coffee shop across the street, and all good love stories start with a quadruple shot latte.

Notes: In 2010, Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt exchanged a dozen lines of dialogue and made a tiny bit of eye contact, and Tom Hardy ad libbed a pet name while holding a grenade launcher, and out of those scraps sprang a feral and mighty fandom that’s still going strong 16 years down the road.

What Inception lacks in interactions between Arthur and Eames, it makes up for by being a goldmine of details and lore, which gives fic writers a lot to work with. As a result, this fandom has put out some of the most gorgeous and thought-provoking stories I’ve ever read, grappling with themes of identity and reality and unspoken declarations and moral ambiguity.

This fic isn’t any of that, though. This is a coffee shop AU: an alternate universe where the characters primarily interact in or around a coffee shop.

There’s a prevailing theory that fanfiction is most interested in exploring the things that are missing from canon. I think this idea helps explain why the coffee shop AU is such a well-worn and hugely popular fanfiction trope. It’s a sort of antithesis to plot-driven media, stripping canon bare of all its trappings and shining the spotlight squarely on the characters. The coffee shop AU does not concern itself with matters of plot or stakes. The coffee shop AU is primarily interested in forcing characters to talk to each other as a catalyst for bestowing unconditional happiness upon them.

I’ve Got Nothing To Do Today But Smile is absolutely a comfort fic for me. It’s got everything I want in a coffee shop AU: a meet-cute, concerning amounts of espresso, baked goods, banter, a very small mental breakdown, a happy ending. And it’s got an apt title, too, because I smile all the way through every time I read it.