I can walk into any bookstore and buy fanfiction today. This sentence baffles me in ways that are hard to explain to people who did not spend their middle school existence on tumblr and fanfiction.net. In less than twenty years, fanfiction went from a niche literary community that existed primarily on internet forums to an avenue for the Big Five publishing houses to find their next big romance novel or epic fantasy and cashing in on the Booktok hype surrounding fics like Manacled.
Fanfiction has arguably been around since before Dante, a guy who would’ve been at home on stan Twitter, wrote a self-insert fic where he shipped himself with his favorite poet and publicly flamed all of his least favorite people and Popes (literally). A translation for the less chronically online: Dante, who loved publicly picking a fight, wrote fanfiction where he was a participating character, created a relationship between himself and a poet he idolized (Virgil), and expressed his public and controversial dislike for members of the papacy, notably Pope Boniface VIII. This fanfic is, of course, his Divine Comedy. Fanfiction as we currently know it (as in, a piece of writing that involves characters or worlds from an existing piece of media, or real people) kicked off in earnest when fans shared fanfiction about The Beatles via handwritten letters long before the birth of the internet, as described by Kaitlyn Tiffany in her book Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It. Tiffany notes that most of these fanfics are lost to time due to their analogue format and the taboo around writing ‘real people’ fic.
Save for a few examples of fanfiction that have become capital-L literature (such as Divine Comedy), for much of its lifecycle, fanfiction existed as a counterculture where those involved would either write or read fanworks for free, or, as the kids say, for the love of the game. The phenomenon was a bit of a curiosity to mainstream pop culture where the creators of the source material either ignored or outright hated fanfiction. Corporations cashing in began in earnest with Fifty Shades of Grey. However, while Fifty Shades alerted the general public to fanfiction’s existence, I would argue that the moment when fanfiction truly broke into the general culture awareness was in 2021 with Manacled by SenLinYu.
Manacled, in its original life, was a viral fanfiction involving the Harry Potter characters Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy (whose ship name is ‘Dramione’) . Published throughout 2018 and 2019 on Archive of Our Own (a nonprofit archive that hosts fanworks, also known as AO3), Manacled was set in an Atwoodesque dystopia. The project found a huge audience when BookTokkers began posting about it in 2021. Bluntly, Manacled escaped its usual audience of fanfiction readers who discovered the medium via involvement with fandom—it was instead read by people with little to no awareness of the cultural norms of fanfiction because they had found out about fanfiction without prior involvement in a fandom. Instead, they had discovered fanfiction through a medium where reading is seen in terms of consumption. As such, new readers didn’t know that making money off of (or spending money on) fanfiction is illegal due to copyright laws and began buying bound copies of Manacled (and other Dramione fics) through Etsy and Tiktok shop. Even if the copyright hadn’t been a problem, this would still be a fandom faux pas, since the bindings were done without the permission of the authors;
With more people than ever reading fanfiction and potentially discovering it through backwards exposure via Manacled and other popular titles, it’s important that fandom scholars ask what exactly this means for cultural norms that have long been passed along as common knowledge in tight-knit, though often interwarring, communities, such as the knowledge that fanfiction cannot make money, which in this example was violated. While there have been no legal proceedings stemming from the resale of Dramione fanfiction, ,many who participate don’t understand why fanfiction of Anne Rice’s work is not hosted on the Archive or why older fics will go to great lengths to clarify they’re only writing for fun and are not trying to claim ownership of the characters they’re using.
(The answer to this mystery is that Anne Rice famously anti-fanfiction and kindly asked that websites not host fanfiction about her work, which is a little rich, considering she wrote Bible fanfiction.)
When SenLinYu announced that Manacled would be republished as Alchemised, with all references to the Harry Potter source material erased when it hit bookstores, one of the factors that pushed her to seek publication was “a growing issue with illegal sales of Manacled” that threatened the legal future of fanfiction. When Manacled found mainstream popularity on TikTok, sellers on Etsy were all too happy to sell bound copies of Manacled—some with special features such as hardcovers, gold foil lettering, and illustrations from the fanfic on the cover—to readers who wanted to own a physical copy. None of the money went to SenLinYu. None of it went to J.K. Rowling, either. In fact, the only people who got any money were people who had taken someone else’s work without permission and sold it to people who didn’t understand or didn’t care that fanfiction authors legally cannot make money and wouldn’t benefit from the purchase. While the discussion of whether fanfiction should be free or not is ongoing, the arguments tend to center the author as the party that would benefit from monetization, not third-party sellers. Fanfiction is known as a labor of love and play, often referred to as taking part in what critic Lewis Hyde calls the “gift economy” since it entails publishing written works to connect with other fans rather than to generate a profit. As fanfiction commercializes, more people will discover fic and not understand the difference between being gifted original writing as opposed to purchasing merchandise from a third party.
In fact, the role of an author gifting fic with the intention of engaging with the fandom might disappear altogether, as the relationship between fic author and reader might change into that of a mainstream reader/writer relationship where there is little direct interaction, or even into a creator/consumer relationship entirely divorced from interaction. For a personal anecdote, last year I received a comment on a fanfiction of mine whose comment section had been dormant for awhile, despite the statistics for kudos (likes) and hits going up. The comment let me know that my fic was being celebrated on a private server that I had no idea existed and was not invited to, which removed any chance of interaction between myself and other fans. Fanfiction is a labor of love done for the sake of participation in community, and with that, some sort of interaction is expected. This is further evidenced through the act of buying and selling fic without author permission, as in the case of Booktok and SenLinYu, where Manacled was widely read but not interacted with in the context of fandom—it was instead used for content and profit. Fandom carries with it an aspect of folk communities, with ‘fanon’ lore (that is, non-canon lore that has been widely accepted by the fandom) and behavioral codes being developed and shared by the close-knit community as a sort of folklore. In the past, if this folklore was ignored, one would find themselves unwelcome in the fan circle they were trying to engage with. Now, readers of fic need not worry about fitting in, not when the real group they want to engage with are other people who also don’t care for cultural norms and want to remove the work from its larger community.
Finally, while the loss of cultural norms and the alteration of relationship between fic writer and reader are both tragic for the future of fandom, there is also the legal threat that looms large. Manacled was pulled and published because it “[put] both me [SenLinYu] and the incredible community that shares fanfiction freely in legal jeopardy.” As previously mentioned, fanfiction cannot make money without risking legal repercussions, and the rapid spread of fandom without the cultural awareness could lead to the end of legal fanfiction and a total dissolution of the tools that allow fans to connect, such as AO3 or fanfiction.net. The dissolution of these platforms would be disastrous, as smaller fanfiction websites are much fewer in number than they were in the early 2000s.
Fanfiction feels a bit like Fight Club, and all the people who have found it without cultural awareness have made shirts saying ASK ME ABOUT FIGHT CLUB and then posted about how to join Fight Club on Tiktok and where to buy the shirts advertising Fight Club.
Manacled was removed from the internet at the start of the year, though listings for bound copies still exist on Etsy as of December 2025, and archived versions of the fic can be found via a simple online search. However, it is no longer available in any way that SenLinYu has approved. and was published as Alchemised at the end of September. It hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list in its first week, no doubt based off the hype provided by Booktokkers who wanted to read Manacled again. But, to paint Manacled and BookTok as a Bonnie and Clyde duo would be a gross mischaracterization. Given how Booktokkers profitting from Manacled was a major factor in SenLinYu seeking publication, the analogy would probably make more sense if Booktokkers and Etsy shops were Bonnie and Clyde and Manacled was the bank that they robbed.
Alchemised isn’t the only case of mega-popular Dramione fanfiction seeing traditional publication this year. Rose in Chains by Julie Soto, originally a fanfiction that gained a massive following outside of the Harry Potter fandom, was published in July. Bound copies of The Auction, the fanfiction counterpart, are still available through Etsy, more than five months following publication. Before Dramione had its moment, the pairing of Rey and Kylo Ren (‘Reylo’) from Star Wars seemed to dominate bookstores, with works such as The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood and You, Again by Kate Goldbeck both previously existing as fanfiction. However, no Reylo work has caused a reverse exposure to fanfiction in the way that Dramione work has.
The commercialization of fandom has been a topic of discussion for over a decade now. Questioning the way corporations rely on the free labor of fans as a way to promote their properties, or how fanfiction sites have become a scouting arena for literary agents is more than fair, given the rapid decline of a free internet. But it’s equally important to sound the alarm on the losses of a rich counterculture as it hits the mainstream and the content machine does what the content machine must do: monetize things that used to be free and exploit the artists who made free art.
At the same time, I can’t help but see this problem as a parallel to AI services. Fanfiction like Manacled was stolen and resold without permission in the same way that services like OpenAI scrape websites (and fanfiction!) without permission. Anything that has been posted for free is now available for someone else to take and turn into profit. There’s no longer a desire to exist together online and enjoy sharing stories back and forth—only opportunities to make a few dollars off people who don’t have the means to fight back.
And perhaps that’s what we lose when fanfiction becomes mainstream: friendship, connection, and the simple joy of enjoying a story together.
