It’s okay to write fanfiction

Recently (as of late 2025) I saw a post in a subreddit for one of my fandoms that went something like this:

I want to write a side story about [minor antagonist] and his background. Do you think this would be possible?

Plenty of people replied saying yeah, that sounds great, put it on Ao3 and we’ll read it! But no no no, the OP was quick to clarify. They don’t want to write fanfiction.

Ridiculous as the notion is that [publisher] would hire some rando off the internet to write this kind of thing, as opposed to the original creators of the franchise… that’s not even the thing I want to talk about right now.

There’s nothing bad about fanfiction.

There’s this pervasive thing in some corners of fandom (notably Reddit) where people write stories but then are horrified that people call them “fanfiction”, when that’s exactly what they are! Usually accompanied by a general smug attitude, as if they’re better than the typical squealing fangirls who write stories about their blorbos kissing.

Because that’s what it really is in the end, right? The sneering about fanfic is usually just misogyny. (Of course, not everyone who happily embraces the label “fanfic” is female — hi, I write fanfic; but like… fanfic wouldn’t be bad even if everyone who wrote it was female.)

So you see these dudebros writing stories that take themselves so fucking seriously, where the first five paragraphs are spent introducing the characters as if we’ve never met them before, and even if they deign to post their story on Ao3 the title is always something like “Pokemon: Ash’s Journey” or “Dragon Ball Z: Return of Goku” or whatever. Because they think they’re so much better.