In middle school, I had my after-school routine down to a carefully crafted art: put on pajama pants, microwave a plate of crackers topped with shredded cheese, flop on the basement couch, grab my laptop and engage in my most secret hobby. I would open an incognito tab, because at the time I shared an Apple ID with my parents and they could see the contents of my regular browser. This was far too scandalous a secret to reach the eyes of my mother. If this ever found its way into the public sphere I felt I might as well go into witness protection.
The deep dark secret in question was that I was an avid user of Archive of Our Own, colloquially abbreviated as AO3, a website designed for people to self-publish and read fanfiction. With my middle school sensibilities, I determined AO3 was the most sophisticated of the fanfic-repositories, Wattpad being strictly for anti-intellectuals with no appreciation for prose. My opinion here is admittedly based in pretension and ego, but I have my loyalties and I shall stick to them.
In any case, fanfiction provided me with strong female characters, opened my eyes to creative writing and gave me a safe space.
In American media, men receive more representation across the board than women. A study in 2022 found that in literature, male characters received four times as much representation as their female counterparts. Even now, in 2026, there has been a “backslide” in equal representation in television shows over the past two years, with women and nonbinary people receiving less representation in media than men. The historical precedent is that men are portrayed more, while women-centered stories — along with their desires and voices — are often ignored or trivialized.
Women’s interests are often labeled as dumb or infantilized, deemed unworthy of deeper consideration by the wider public. The Romance genre alongside its more contemporary companion, “Romantasy” (Romance and Fantasy combined) are lampooned by people — especially men — decrying the decline of literacy and intellectualism, when many of them simply center female characters and are not that dissimilar to lauded series such as British author George R. R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones.”
Fanfiction is similarly derided.
But, fanfiction exposed me to many strong female figures. Fanfiction provides female characters with the depth that they might have lacked in the original work, reimagining them outside the box in which their creator might have kept them.
Even the infamously ridiculed vampire “Harry Potter” fanfiction “My Immortal” has an assertive— if ridiculous — female protagonist in extravagantly named “Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way,” who sports fishnets and oscillates between love interests Draco Malfoy and an imagined Vampire Potter. Whether or not the character stands the test of time is a separate question. She is nothing if not interesting, which can be rare in other forms of storytelling. There is a certain confidence and individuality in melodramatic fanfictions that we do not get to see in industry-created memory. Tons of fanfictions have this sort of female representation in less absurd fashion. I have consumed stories centering fairies, witches, magical girls and ordinary women who have needs, wants, sexuality, love, ambition, intelligence and more. As a young girl in the throes of middle school, that representation meant the world.
Fanfiction also provides queer representation for LGBTQIA+ consumers. So much of queer media when I was in middle school was steeped in tragedy, infamously dubbed the ‘bury-your-gays’ or ‘dead lesbian’ trope. Corporations often used queerbaiting to hook viewers, leaving crumbs in stories about very close friendships or tense rivalries. Fanfiction provided an avenue for people to read stories about LGBTQIA+ relationships that end happily. Nowadays, more mainstream representation means people gravitate towards fanfiction genres like doomed yuri, relishing tragic art not because it is the only representation we have, but because tragedy is only one of a smorgasbord of queer experiences.
Lastly, fanfiction acts as an important gateway to literacy and writing. I can say from personal experience that I got my own start in writing through various fanfictions (never published, scrubbed off the face of the earth, of course). Clearly, I have an appreciation for the craft.
So I say this with love: shipping, fanfiction and fans themselves can go too far and certainly have in a plethora of ways. While fanfiction provides an avenue for female empowerment, it is not perfect. Of the top 20 “ships” — relationships either imagined or established that were celebrated by fans — on AO3 in 2025, 16 depicted romances between gay men, the rest of the slots occupied primarily by heterosexual relationships. Queer representation of any kind is valuable, but not all queer relationships are represented equally. Not one sapphic relationship cracked the top 20.
There could be a few reasons. Many intimate relationships between women are sexualized to appeal to the male gaze and therefore queer women may see themselves in stories depicting relationships between queer men that lack this objectification. Also, a large chunk of the population on AO3 consists of heterosexual women who find men attractive and therefore find the idea of men in a relationship attractive. Or, male characters are portrayed with a more emotional depth, and are therefore more ‘interesting’ to read and write about.
Some of those gay fanfictions also rely on the erasure, villainization or mischaracterization of the female lead, often the romantic interest of one of the men involved. For example, there was a mass craze around “Byler,” a ship between Mike Wheeler and Will Byers of hit television behemoth “Stranger Things.” Many of the fanfictions villainize Eleven, the protagonist of the show who happens to be Mike’s girlfriend, and write her as awful, purposefully standing in the way of these two men. Representation should not come at the cost of the female characters so many people value. I believe that it is possible to write a fanfiction about two men in which the female character retains her positive characteristics.
Imperfect as the art form is, I never would have gotten through middle school without it. I never would have discovered my passion for writing, let alone had the audacity to share my writing.
Fanfiction and shipping culture, in all their intricacies, weave an honest tapestry of humanity. There is no barrier to publication. It can be wholesome and romantic, filthy and raunchy, heartbreaking and tragic, yearning and funny. It puts on display our desires more plainly and obviously than almost any other form of art. Fanfiction at its core is evidence of humanity’s want for connection, and I am proud to be a reader of such a complicated, ugly, lovely thing. And I have not even covered the half of it.