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Washington Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Fan fiction is everywhere, if you know how to look
When Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings began pitching literary agents 15 years ago, they kept their interest in fan fiction a secret. Known by their combined pen name, Christina Lauren, the best-selling romance duo met through their shared love of Twilight fan fiction. At the time, Billings says, coming from fandom 'was much more of a black mark on you' if you wanted to break into mainstream publishing. This was just before 'Fifty Shades of Grey' — a novel that began as a rewriting of 'Twilight' — became a global publishing phenomenon. Now, Hobbs and Billings work in a publishing industry with a vastly different attitude: one far more receptive to authors who got their start writing unauthorized works online for other fans, based on previously existing characters and worlds. Fan fiction's ascendance comes as entertainment and media companies are turning to established intellectual property to shore up the eroding economics of their industries. It also helps that many of the decision-makers grew up online, with active accounts on Wattpad, Tumblr and other fan-fiction-friendly platforms. Agents directly solicit writers of popular fan-made works, and new books proudly advertise their 'fic' roots. Fan fiction didn't invent tropes like 'only one bed' or 'friends to lovers,' but fic websites popularized tagging and searching through them, and these categories have become a mainstay of promoting genre fiction of all kinds. The interest of many readers, meanwhile, has caught up with what fic writers, often women and queer people, have been up to all along: Joyful same-sex romances and stories told with the immediacy of first-person present tense, for example, now fill bookstore shelves. If you know how to look, fan fiction is everywhere, often climbing the bestseller lists and sometimes collecting awards. Percival Everett's novel 'James,' which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for fiction, is basically 'Huckleberry Finn' fan fiction. (The Pulitzers seem to be especially fond of this approach: Barbara Kingsolver's 'Demon Copperhead' reimagines 'David Copperfield,' and Geraldine Brooks's 'March' finds its story in the hollows and silences of 'Little Women.') Madeline Miller's 'The Song of Achilles' reworks 'The Iliad' with more explicit gay sex, a familiar approach for fan fic writers, who have long loved to pair up male characters with chemistry either implied or imagined. 'Rodham,' Curtis Sittenfeld's novel about an alternate history where Hillary Rodham never married Bill Clinton, is basically Real Person Fiction, popularly known as RPF. To say nothing of the many modernized versions of 'Pride and Prejudice': 'Pride and Protest' (Nikki Payne), 'Ayesha at Last' (Uzma Jalaluddin) and 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' (Seth Grahame-Smith), among others. Traditionalists may bristle at some of these comparisons, but it's hard to say what distinguishes any of these books from those that populate fan fic sites such as Archive of Our Own unless we start from the assumption that fan fic is Bad and mainstream publication is Good. (Plenty of fan fic is crummy, of course, but it's not like the gatekeepers in traditional publishing aren't whiffing it some of the time, too.) Once we begin down this path, though, where does it end? Think about classics like 'Paradise Lost' and 'East of Eden' — are they not Bible fan fiction? Isn't all Roman mythology simply Greek mythology fan fic? Isn't 'Romeo and Juliet' just Shakespeare's take on 'Pyramus and Thisbe'? There are some characters, worlds and stories that we just like coming back to, and it's hardly surprising that other writers — some blessed by the muses (and hefty book deals), others merely enthusiastic — want to take them for a literary spin. This may be where the usefulness of the category starts to break down. If everything is fan fiction, that 'means that there's not anything really distinctive about fan fiction as we mostly encounter it now,' says Anne Jamison, the author of 'Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World' and a professor of English at University of Utah. Elizabeth Minkel, a fan culture expert and co-host of the podcast 'Fansplaining,' used to want to claim the monoliths of classical literature as fan fiction. A big part of that impulse, she thinks now, was a hunger to legitimize fan fic by expanding people's notions of what it is. But she's telling a new story these days. It started when she got involved in the fandom of the BBC show 'Sherlock,' a contemporary depiction of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. People would often describe the show itself as a work of fan fiction for the way it modernized the characters and setting from Arthur Conan Doyle. Minkel disagreed. 'They're making a lot of money to write the sanctioned big-budget thing on the BBC. And they have a different set of priorities. They have a different set of monetary rewards, different relationship with the source material, with the rights holders,' she says. By contrast, 'fan fiction is all about the gift economy.' Jamison has also come to a narrower understanding of fan fiction, one that has more to do with writing for its own sake, without an eye to profit or reward. It's about 'the personal satisfaction of [writing] and then the personal satisfaction of reading something by somebody else who loves or has strong feelings about the same thing that you do,' she says. 'In many ways, fan fiction is so much more free because you don't have to worry about the market or the demographic.' And it's that freedom that makes fan fiction so delightful. Even as publishers are glomming onto its potential, most of the people writing it are still doing so for themselves — and for one another. They're puzzling through their feelings about desire or power. They're in conversation with the source material, and they're crossing swords with other people in their fandoms about their interpretation of the canon. In exploring this character's heart, might they better understand their own? Or maybe they just really think that Captain Picard should hook up with Lt. Commander Worf. And they're making it so, at least for the thousands — sometimes hundreds of thousands — of words they conjure. For Minkel, the urge to write about preexisting characters was instinctual. As an elder millennial, she didn't have internet in her home as a 10-year-old, so she wasn't inspired by other fics when she wanted to scrawl stories based on the characters from Sweet Valley High in her notebook. That's an experience that she finds many people in her age cohort and older share. 'They just had an instinct when they really enjoyed a story or when it really frustrated them and they wanted to fix something or felt like something wasn't done well,' she says. These days, teens living online are saturated with fan works. They find what they're looking for on sites such as Archive of Our Own, which has basically centralized any fandom you could imagine and some you probably couldn't, all with robust tagging and search. Many of the stories are straightforward. What if these two characters had sex? (Fan fiction tends to be most associated with smut — and you can absolutely find many of your favorite characters getting it on in a cornucopia of ways — but it's not all salacious.) What if this person who died in the show actually lived? What if we got to linger with these people, or in these worlds, in the mundane moments between all the action? Unbound by the constraints of the market (or even of good taste) and often buoyed by anonymity, fan fiction ultimately represents the primordial soup of storytelling, pushing forward the bounds of the stories we can or would like to tell. Jamison sees fan fiction authors sipping from the same wellspring as bards and troubadours. 'It connects with a storytelling culture where there would be wandering storytellers and stuff like that,' she says. 'They would tell stories about the same characters that everybody knew because that's what people wanted to hear about.' While many of those characters come from other works, there's also Real Person Fiction: stories about actors, athletes, politicians and other people in the news. After the arrest of Luigi Mangione in the murder of a health insurance executive, writers produced hundreds of fics about him, in genres such as legal drama and vampire romance — using conceptually familiar frameworks to explore a fascination with an alluring outlaw, itself a well-trodden archetype of storytelling. And there's a delicious strain of fan fiction in which writers set formal or narrative challenges for themselves just to see if they can pull it off. Can you write an entire fic through social media posts? Could you take the characters of ABC's first-responder procedural '9-1-1' and plop them into the world and plot of the NBC sitcom 'Parks and Recreation'? Sure, why not. (The '9-1-1'/'Parks and Rec' mash-up works shockingly well.) Hobbs remembers reading a fic about the boy band One Direction, only 'each of them were an apple and they were, like, living in this fruit bowl. And it was so weirdly emotional,' she says, because the apples observed one another as they rotted and were cut. 'It was just like the craziest thing that at the end of this fic you were like, wow, that was really deep.' There's a kind of puckish absurdism at play in such works that's not so far removed from postmodern literary fiction, but it's underpinned by very real, relatable feelings. And a built-in audience, too. Drawn by their investment in familiar characters, readers who wouldn't necessarily seek out experimental literature will eagerly dive into a story in which, say, the Harry Potter protagonists argue about the principles of philosophical rationalism, or Bucky Barnes's and Steve Rogers's love story is revealed through court transcripts. While some fic is achingly earnest, it's a mistake to think all of it is: A lot of writers are in on the joke. Cecilia R. Aragon, a professor at the University of Washington, conducted a deep ethnographic survey of different fan fiction communities of teens and young adults: 'These young people, who everybody was saying, 'Oh they can't write, they don't like to write, teachers can't get them to write,'' she says. But that's not what Aragon found. They were writing what they wanted to write and had 'a large crowd of peers that were giving them little tiny bits of mentoring,' she says. 'We showed that, as people got more feedback, it was correlated with an improvement in writing ability.' For Hobbs, who 'stumbled into fan fiction … it was a place to not only learn how to write, but also I didn't know that I had anything to say until I had this kind of community and platform to say it.' Hobbs lives in Utah and sees herself as more liberal than many of the other people in her town. Fan fiction 'really did surround me, in a way that I didn't have in my real life, with like-minded people — people who saw the world I did, who saw it the same way I did, who loved the things that I love.' It's possible that the egalitarian openness of fan fiction — the way that it invites anyone to try anything — explains something about its ubiquity. The likes of Percival Everett and Madeline Miller may be writing in a different key than the online fan fic masses, if only because they're getting paid for their work, and so are the people who edit and publicize it. But when their stories sell, and sell to a lot of people, it's partly because readers can feel the joy they take in playing freely with the stories and characters that we love, too. There's a pleasure to witnessing other people's passion, whether it overlaps with our own or merely entices our curiosity. Fan fiction is brewed with passion. And sure, some of the results are profoundly mediocre, riddled with typos, confusing, even offensive. Feel free to close those tabs. But there is also incredible fan fiction. Stunningly written, deeply moving, keep-you-up-all-night gripping, creative in ways that shock and linger. And what makes the form feel especially lovely is that each of these stories is a gift. Someone, somewhere has toiled, and perhaps giggled, over their keyboard. The only glory in it for them is the hope that their words might intrigue, arouse or amuse you. They're stirring the old storytelling soup because it's nourishing but also, even more important, because it's delicious.
Time of India
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
The Rain in España couple Heaven Peralejo and Marco Gallo's breakup confirmed months after Instagram unfollow; fans heartbroken
It's official. Fan-favourite Filipino love team Heaven Peralejo and Marco Gallo, who won hearts with their undeniable chemistry in The Rain in España, have broken up. After months of silence and subtle hints, Heaven has finally confirmed the split. The two, who were also romantically involved off-screen, had become a go-to pairing in local rom-coms, with fans rooting hard for their real-life relationship. Heaven confirms breakup from The Rain in España co-star Marco Gallo In a recent interview with journalist MJ Marfori, Heaven opened up about the breakup, saying it was a mutual decision. 'We're not together anymore. It was a mutual decision to move forward individually, so we're okay. We're good friends,' she said. She also expressed her hope that their supporters would continue backing both of them, even if they're now walking separate paths. Despite the breakup, she assured fans that she and Marco will still work together professionally, adding that friendship was always the foundation of their connection. Signs were there: From unfollows to photo wipes While the confirmation only came recently, breakup rumours had been swirling since early June. Fans first noticed that Heaven had quietly unfollowed Marco on Instagram and removed nearly all their photos together. Meanwhile, Marco still follows Heaven and still has pictures of her on his account, which only added to the speculation and confusion. For a couple that once made their relationship public with a sweet birthday post back in November 2024 and had never been shy to express their love, this felt heartbreaking. However, even after the split, they pulled up to an event together this month like it was no big deal, proving there's no bad blood between them. Fans react with heartbreak and support The news has sent shockwaves through their fanbase, with many expressing sadness over the end of a pairing that brought them so much joy. Their on-screen chemistry and real-life connection had made them one of the most beloved tandems in recent years. "I actually loved them so much together," one fan wrote, while another mentioned, "They are one of my favourites, but still we don't know what happened, so we can't judge. Let's just hope for good for both of them." "They were the bestestttttt; they grew up together, but life—idk what happened between them, but it's heartbreaking," a third fan mentioned, and a fourth shared the same sentiments, writing, "It was already rumoured they have broken up, but hearing it directly from her is hard, but it's for real." What made The Rain in España such a hit? Based on the viral Wattpad series by Gwy Saludes, The Rain in España (2023) follows college sweethearts Luna and Kalix, whose love is tested by ambition, misunderstandings, and time. The story resonated with Gen Z audiences thanks to its relatable characters, campus setting, and heartfelt lines that took over social media. The show's massive popularity boosted both Heaven and Marco's careers, turning them into household names and unofficial sweethearts of the new-age Wattpad-to-screen boom. It also helped revive the campus-romance genre in Filipino dramas and gave fans a reason to believe in love stories, both fictional and real.
GMA Network
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- GMA Network
Shuvee Etrata, Anthony Constantino turn up together at pre-GMA Gala 2025 dinner
Shuvee Etrata and Anthony Constantino made for an attractive pair at the special pre-gala event held at the Okura Hotel in Manila on Thursday. On TikTok, the GMA Network account shared a video of the two of them at the hotel lobby, with Shuvee handing Anthony his phone. They then headed to the GMA Gala Partners' Night together. "Shuvee, natagpuang may inaantay?" the post said. "Spotted: Sabay dumating sa GMA Gala Partners' Night ang Sparkle stars na sina Shuvee Etrata at Anthony Constantino." Fans gushed over Sparkle stars, saying they look like Wattpad characters come to life. Kapuso executives, stars, clients, and partners gathered for the GMA Gala Partners' Night ahead of the much-anticipated GMA Gala 2025. During the event, GMA Network donated a total of P2 million to the GMA Kapuso Foundation. Anthony was among the people who welcomed Shuvee into the outside world after her exit from "Pinoy Big Brother" with her duo Klarisse De Guzman. In an interview with GMA Integrated News back in June, Shuvee shared that Anthony has been courting her even before she entered Bahay ni Kuya. Earlier this month, Shuvee went home to Cebu, and Anthony accompanied her. —JCB, GMA Integrated News
India Today
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- India Today
The Summer I Turned Pretty just got ringed and entered its villain era
If you, like the rest of us, are emotionally invested internet dwellers, tuned into the latest episode of 'The Summer I Turned Pretty', chances are you haven't stopped screaming into the void since. And if you haven't watched it yet? Firstly, why are you living under a rock? Secondly, brace yourself, because things went from beachy to brutal faster than Jeremiah's second if you're sitting there wondering what all the chatter is about, allow me to catch you up. 'The Summer I Turned Pretty' is a hit Prime Video series based on Jenny Han's novel of the same name. The show follows Belly, a teenager trapped in a love triangle with the Fisher brothers, the quiet, brooding Conrad, and the sunshine-coded Jeremiah. The latest episode dropped on July 23, and it detonated the fandom. Right. Now let's talk about why everyone's losing it. Spoiler alert, because unprocessed drama needs context. The episode opens mid-chaos, his first proposal still echoing awkwardly in the air, no ring in sight, no grand gesture, no actual logic. Just Jeremiah being Jeremiah. Honestly, it felt less like a proposal and more like he remembered the word 'marriage' existed and decided to toss it out like a then, at the next moment, Jeremiah came up armed with a ring. Although calling it a ring feels incredibly generous. It looked like it had been thrifted from a 13-year-old's jewellery box or panic-bought during a Shein flash sale titled 'Last-Minute Weddings for People With No Taste.'The ring in question: (Still from The Summer I Turned Pretty) Now, while Jeremiah's up here fumbling his way through romantic milestones like he's in badly written Wattpad fiction, everyone else is looking around like, 'Is this real? Are we being pranked?' Laurel, Belly's mother, was visibly two seconds away from pulling the fire alarm just to stop this madness. Her disapproval wasn't subtle, it was practically a character of its own. We love a mother who senses danger and says, 'Absolutely not, not on my watch.'But let's address the moment. The one that turned the entire fandom into a sobbing, screaming, emotionally devastated mess, the one that broke the internet's soul and Conrad Fisher in the same Conrad finds out about the engagement, he doesn't speak. He doesn't blink. He doesn't breathe. Man goes straight into an existential crisis in real time. Like, full-on, 'is this real life or am I hallucinating this horror in real time' mode. You could see the heartbreak travel from his brain to his chest like a physical injury. Like someone took a sledgehammer to his soul. (Still from the show) If heartbreak, disgust, and anger formed a boy band, Conrad would be the lead singer, centre stage, eyeliner couldn't process the moment. And once everyone left the restaurant, he stepped out like a man who'd just watched his life implode in slow motion. It had 'love of my life is marrying my brother, and I've officially entered my villain origin story'-energy written all over if you've ever heard Taylor Swift's 'Right Where You Left Me', you know the devastation. He was living that line: 'Help, I'm still at the restaurant, still sitting in the corner I haunt.' Conrad was the lyric. Taylor wrote it for him. And I swear, in that one walk, Team Jeremiah lost half their members. Conrad didn't even say anything. He just looked like he'd been hit by a truck made of regret and emotional repression, and we all collectively said, 'Yeah, that's my man.'advertisementBecause a man who yearns? Who hurts quietly? Who tries to fix himself to be better for you? That man is dangerous. And I mean that in the most swoon-worthy, ruin-your-life kind of Team Conrad fans are in full force, flooding TikTok with edits, writing dramatic fan essays, and tweeting like it's a full-time job. Emotional growth? Check. Tragic backstory? Double check. Working on himself because he wants to be better for her? Triple check. The internet is in mourning with Team Jeremiah fans? They're out here trying to justify that proposal to trees, because frankly, no one else is listening. What's the defence, exactly? That he smiled through the chaos? That he tried? That effort is cute until you remember he cheated, is slower than dial-up internet, and he proposed with what looked like a cursed ring from a forgotten Etsy quote the collective mood of Jeremiah in a Sabrina Carpenter song, he is 'stupid, slow, useless, oh wait, there's a cuter word for it, MANCHILD'. And he can't be anyone's choice, and the internet my editor and I agree that Belly needs therapy. Not the 'light a candle and journal it out' kind. No. She needs certified, billable hours, dig-through-your-attachment-issues therapy. Immediately. Someone hand this girl a therapist, a timeline of red flags, and a playlist titled 'What Was I Thinking?'As for what's coming next? No one knows. Will she choose the right brother? Will she finally listen to Laurel? Will someone throw that ring into the sea where it belongs? Unclear. But one thing's certain, if Belly ends this season making the wrong decision, we should all agree to never speak of it again. next week, may your heartbreaks be poetic, your rings not look like party favours, and your love interests come with actual emotional intelligence. The first three episodes of Season 3 are available to stream on Prime Video. The season finale of the show is scheduled to release on September 17.- Ends
Indian Express
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Beyond the canon: How fanfiction became an LGBTQ+ sanctuary
What if Harry Potter fell for Draco Malfoy? What if Sherlock chose Watson over solving cases? What if Elizabeth Bennet married Darcy, but her heart always belonged to Charlotte? These are not just wishful rewrites, they're part of a sprawling literary movement. Fanfiction, long dismissed as juvenile, has become one of the most emotionally honest and radical spaces on the internet. For many LGBTQ+ readers and writers, it is not a hobby. It is survival. Written by fans using characters and worlds from existing books, films or shows, fanfiction reimagines the official versions, often centring voices left out of it. For many LGBTQ+ readers and writers, it is a radical act. A way to exist on the page when the canon never lets them in. Even Daniel Radcliffe has confessed to reading Drarry fanfics- yes, Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy as star-crossed lovers. If that seems subversive, you are only scratching the surface. 'I don't think it's a good way to train to be a professional writer when you're borrowing everybody else's world and characters.' That is the take of George RR Martin, author of bestselling fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, on fanfictions. One of many traditional writers who've dismissed them as unoriginal or even unethical. But fanfiction writers see it differently. For them, it is a way of expression. For decades, fanfiction has been rejected as childish, as derivative, as not real writing. But ask anyone who's cried over a 100k words slow burn between two characters who never kissed on screen, it feels more real than most things. These stories live and breathe on platforms like Wattpad, AO3, Tumblr and vast online archives where millions of users rewrite the rules of storytelling. At its core, it is a radical act. It flips authorship on its head. Instead of revering the official version, it challenges it. These questions are not just playful hypotheticals, they're creative uprisings. It gives readers the pen. Especially those readers who are traditionally excluded from mainstream narratives- LGBTQ+ writers, women, people of colour, the neurodivergent. For them, fanfiction is a way of reclamation, a way to become the main character. While mainstream literature has now expanded its LGBTQ+ offerings- Call Me By Your Name, Red, White & Royal Blue, They Both Die at the End– fanfiction was already there, years ahead, giving readers what they weren't finding in bookstores. Even as mainstream publishing treaded cautiously, offering one LGBTQ+ story for every dozen straight romances, fanfiction platforms were overflowing with these narratives in every shape and form. It wasn't about market trends or visibility, it was about survival, expression and imagining love without societal norms. Though it has had a quieter presence, fanfiction is gaining steady ground among Indian youth particularly closeted and questioning teens and twenty somethings. A growing community of desi writers imagining worlds far more inclusive than the one they live in. Even though Section 377 was struck down in 2018, LGBTQ+ in India still hides in shadows. But online, through fanfictions and forums, it can exist in usernames, in tags, in alternate endings. Even as court deny the right to marry, these stories dare to imagine queer futures not bound by law, but by love. Fanfiction in India remains personal. Often anonymous. But it's where youth are telling their truth. Unfiltered and uncensored. In heteronormative Indian media that still clings to heterosexual couples, fanfiction lets LGBTQ+ voices write their own stories. Fanfiction is about being honest, in ways mainstream spaces still struggle to allow. It is emotional. Vulnerable. Utterly sincere. And for LGBTQ+ writers and readers, that sincerity can be radical. As author of Eleanor & Park, Rainbow Rowell said, 'The whole point of fanfiction is that you get to play inside somebody else's universe. Rewrite the rules. Or bend them. The story doesn't have to end. You can stay in this world, this world you love, as long as you want, as long as you keep thinking of new stories.' Fanfiction dares to imagine what love could look like. What identity might feel like if it weren't policed. It does not ask to be taken seriously. It just asks to be felt. To some, it might seem cheesy, full of tropes and happy endings. But that's the point. And for a generation of LGBTQ+ youth raised in a world that told them they were too much or not enough, fanfiction's more than literature. It's home. (The writer is an intern with
