Fanfiction was my guilty pleasure that allowed me to unlock the internet

My first encounter with fanfiction was an English assignment. My tiger parents made me spend every spare moment in their local cram school at the tender age 12 It was July 5, 2006, at 6 p.m. We had all eaten dinner and Ms. L knew we were going to lose our English teacher. Ms. L looked at us over the top of her reading glasses, lips pursed, and said, “Your assignment for the weekend is to write a one-page alternative ending to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.”

At the time, I didn’t realize we were being told to write fanfiction, but that’s how the same medium that begot Fifty Shades of GreyIt became a decade-long guilty pleasure.

Normally, I dislike the extra homework school placed on my plate. Whatever the reason, I found that this was the best thing for me. Romeo and Juliet Assignment triggered something in my academically fried mind. Cram schools are all about brute forcing math and vocabulary drills that will make you factor quadratic polynomials in the comfort of your own bed. None of the 20-page homework packets ever asked us to ponder “what if…”.

What if Juliet decided Romeo’s corpse was a sign she should run away from her abusive family and get herself to the nunnery Ophelia shunned? My one-page masterpiece was a labor of love. I spent all night editing, rewriting and reediting it. It was awarded a B+, which is the equivalent of a double-F- in my family. Although I felt grounded, something deeper and more primal within me had changed.

It’s cringe to admit, but I spent most of that summer obsessed with Gundam Wing. I was raised on a healthy diet of Cartoon Network’s Toonami, and I have no defense other than being a weak preteen. My parents were asleep when I entered my living room. I protested my hard work and asked for forgiveness. Crackle of a 56K modem wouldn’t wake them up. Google was just starting to take off and it led me straight into the horny world. Gundam Wing fanfiction. It was the first time that I used the internet to access anything other than AOL games or homework.

Ninety nine percent of it made me feel sick. While browsing fan-curated libraries, I covered my tomato-red eyes with my fingers. But I was equally shocked and thrilled. Here were thouss of people reaching through the computer to ask “what if?” Granted, most of the questions were, “What if protagonists one and two boned in the most deranged way possible?” But they had the audacity to ask such a brazen question andIt is possible to write in detail about it. Publicly.

That confidence was appealing to me as a preteen anxious about my future. I wanted the freedom to ask unhinged “what if” questions and explore them. LiveJournal was my constant companion. I spent hours on LiveJournal lurking in the shadows of smarter people, wondering how I could tap into these communities. I clicked link after link, until I reached at Fanfiction.net. Instantly, I had access to a library with thousands of stories. It gave me a glimpse into another world than the one my parents had planned. It was the first time that I understood the importance of the internet and all the subcultures that it created.

Before I knew it, I started asking more of my own “what if” questions every time I finished a movie, TV show, or novel. I began to give myself permissions to write down answers.

My English teachers rejected it. This was an incongruous way to express creativity. Their view was that true genius comes from original work. It was a wasteful use of talent to think about legal dubious “what-ifs.” This is ironically how I learned all about it. The fair use doctrine.)

I wanted to spit in my tiredness. OnlyIt was hard to believe that dead men could write such stiff prose. I wanted to yell that there was an army of deranged authors online writing some of the most transgressive stories I’d ever laid eyes on. You can see that some of these stories are written by people with poor grammar skills (see: My Immortal?, Harry Potter Fanfic widely considered to be the worst online is Each has its own Wiki). But I couldn’t find anything like it on the shelves of my local bookstores. I tried to argue that 2001 was the year. This was one of few online communities that helped me realize that gay people can have a happy ending. But I didn’t have the vocabulary to say any of that yet, so I kept my mouth firmly shut.

Out of spite, I kept reading my uncouth fics on top of my more “legitimate” reading.

Reading The MummyMy year-long struggle to read and write hieroglyphics was stifled by fanfics. I read a 130,000 word alternate universe fic written in history by a student historian. It taught me more about Civil War than I ever learned from AP US History. The footnotes in that story rivaled the ones in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. After a two-year stint in France, I learned a lot about classism in French Slang. Les Misérablesfanfic community. (Did Victor Hugo actually write fanfic? The novel contains a 100-page digression.About French slang

Fanfiction isn’t such a taboo pastime anymore. It’s wild, but since the early days of Fanfiction.net and LiveJournal, it’s crept into the mainstream. Fifty Shades of GreyIs it a Twilight A fanfic was made into a movie. Rainbow Rowell wrote FangirlAn acclaimed novel about a college student that writes megapopular fanfics about a university. Harry Potter-esque series. The series was then spun into Continue to be positive Wayward SonThe incredibly meta sequel series, where you can read the entire story. FangirlThe protagonist writes. There is an entire Wattpad-to-movie pipelineWattpad is the place to find One Direction fanfiction that has a quarter of a million readers These movies have been made available on Netflix. The Love HypothesisAli Hazelwood’s romance novel has gone viral on TikTok. got a movie deal, The company was founded in 1898. Star Wars fanfic. There are There are many more.

The genre is still met with plenty of derision, but it’s also Openly CelebrateIn a way that seemed impossible to me when I was 12 years old. I don’t read as much of it as I did when I was a teen. Fandom has evolved. A little too far for meAdult life has less time for guilty pleasures. But old habits die hard. Archive of Our Own, which I use to hate the ending of stories, is still one of my favourite fics. I may have grown up a bit, but thanks to this delightfully weird internet subculture, I don’t ask myself “what if I had the confidence to write?” anymore.