I aim to bring pleasure, and if my fics can inspire people to experiment and discover new pleasures, I'm over the moon about it :D People underestimate just how much fanfic can do in so many respects (beyond the sexy ones, I mean). It's equally heartening to hear readers tell you that your writing's helped them deal with trauma and depression, or helped distract them from physical pain and whatnot--fanfic really is such a great force for good. Here's to another 10 million :D
Absolutely. I've become really allergic to the term "this reads like fanfiction" as a signifier of lacking in quality. Yes, sure. A lot of fanfiction is bad, but it has every right to be. Every person coming to fanfiction spaces is doing so for their own personal reasons. There are teenagers here and old grannies. Some are on their first forays into the writing world, others have been at it for decades. And some are published authors to begin with. But: Fanfiction isn't always bad. Just like published fiction, the quality varies wildly. I've read fics twenty years ago that I still think about because they impacted me in such a profound fashion. And I love that we can do this for each other ... gift each other with ideas and stories and that those stories will stick around. Maybe even after we're gone.
I write fanfiction because I can't get enough of certain characters. I love putting them in situations. I love seeing what they'll do. I write for myself, first and foremost. And I edit stories within an inch of their life until I release them into the wild. Not everyone has to be like this and that's okay. There's space for everyone and everyone will find a story they'll like. And that's what's so wonderful about fanfiction.
Gosh, it's not even 8am and I'm already waxing poetic.
Ayup. When girls write it, it's 'just fanfic' but when boys write it, it's a 'reboot':P And I hear ya about that thing re: fanfics you read 20 years ago still lurking in the back of your mind. I'm often thinking back to the kinds of fics and writers that shaped what I was to become like as a writer; it looks like I'm still influenced by (at least echoes of) some of the zine stuff I used to read way back when. One of my current m/m pairings was of a type that slotted into this style of dark, early slash, simply because of the setting and the characters, and there I go, going over what I wrote and going "whoa, this looks like a really oldschool dark slashfic I could've read in a B7 zine." Not that it was a pastiche, because I put my own twists on it (my sex scenes are a *lot* longer and more detailed than average, for a start), but that kind of dark and troubled mood was there.
IDK about everyone finding the kinds of stories they'd want to read; I think that still applies only to a) popular fandoms and b) popular m/m pairings. If you want high quality het or femslash, most of the time you still have to write it yourself, I find. But, of course, that particular problem encourages some of us to write like maniacs, so someone benefits from that at least:P! For example, that whole anal thing I mentioned earlier was because I was *so* pissed off there weren't enough good, long m/f anal sex scenes out there, written from a female POV and where the women would be enjoying it (not just being punished with it or whatever) and having great orgasms, so I ended up writing tons of it myself--to the point where I became something of a specialist at that art; whoops. And that's just one example of the kinds of themes/tropes/characters/pairings I write because I don't see them often enough in fanfic--or at least written with the same kind of dedication, detail and sensory/psychological immersion that I personally want to read. Feeling like you're starved of the kind of fic that gets you going is one hell of a motivator.
So I definitely get that about "I write for myself, first and foremost." It's great to know that there's always going to be someone else who enjoys the stuff you do, so it's never in a vacuum. And for writers who write their stuff well enough... well, they might end up inspiring a whole genre off the basis of what was, once, just their personal idea or kink or whatever (slash itself being one fantastic example)! And that's one of those things that's so fantastic about fanfic: there are no rules or limits, and you can go anywhere. One could argue that fanfic, in and of itself, is the speculative fiction genre par excellence--just in the realm of characters and relationships, romance and sex, rather than spaceships and alien planets.
Yes to fics percolating in the back of your mind ... I came back to fandom after a 15-year absence and I a) re-read the stories I had written and b) re-read old favourites. I was surprised how many themes and ideas I found in my own stuff that I had obviously taken from elsewhere *without* consciously doing so. Just shows how much influence other works have on our minds. It doesn't even matter if it's fanfiction or published work or the latest blockbuster. Ideas can come from everwhere.
Yeah okay, you have a point regarding big vs. small fandoms. I've always been a part of the big fandoms (BtVS, LOTR, LotRPS most notably) and there was never a shortage of stuff to read. So many good and diverse stories for every taste! I still know all about the drive to "write it yourself" because I have strange ideas and tastes and most of the time the thing I want to see hasn't actually been written or hasn't been written with the twist I want to see.
I (like you from the sound of it) come from a time when fanfiction was very much *not* a part of mainstream fandom but something that the weirdos did. This definitely has changed. When I wrote stories 15 or 20 years ago I didn't feel that they would reach into the future. They were done for the moment - for me and for the people I shared this fandom with. But now, so many years later and reminiscing about my own relationship with the fanfics that "shaped me" there's definitely a new layer to this. I see that these old stories are still being read. I still get comments on them. To imagine that they will live on, either here on AO3 or on someone's hard drive or maybe as a printout. That makes me extremely proud. And it humbles me at the same time. It's just beautiful. It's something I never envisioned but I embrace this idea wholeheartedly.
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