In Defense of Fanfiction as Porn

Fifty Shades of Grey has gotten a lot of well-deserved negative attention for everything from romanticizing abusive relationships to just being poorly written. However, Fifty Shades of Grey did one thing that I’m grateful for: It brought attention to female consumption of porn in a way that the Harlequin novels my mom buys at Target never have. But Fifty Shades of Grey is a very specific form of porn for women. It’s fanfiction.

By now I think it is fairly well known that Fifty Shades of Grey was originally published online as fanfiction of Twilight, another book that has become infamous for romanticizing abuse and its poor writing. When people label a piece of writing as “fanfiction,” they often use the term in order to discredit that story as frivolous or reductive, and so the label of “fanfiction” has been thrown into the pile of Fifty Shades of Grey criticism. However, even though fanfiction does have a bad reputation, it’s everywhere. Just walk into any bookstore and you’ll see about fifty titles that are so called “reimaginings” of Jane Austen novels. Even the celebrated novel-turned musical Wicked is a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz. It’s a derivation of a different piece of fiction. It’s fanfiction.

If that’s the case, then the difference between “reimaginings” and fanfiction seems to be a judgement on the quality of the work. Wicked is regarded as an intelligent work of literature and is sold in bookstores. But when people think of fanfiction they think of bad porn like Fifty Shades of Grey, or porn written by random people and posted online.

So, if fanfiction is porn, let’s talk about porn, starting with the mainstream. Whether it features heterosexual sex, lesbian sex, gay male sex, or anything in between, mainstream porn is almost always created with a male audience in mind, and thus caters to the male gaze. Some feminist and LGBTQIA+ indie porn exists for female consumers, but it is definitely removed from the public eye. As far as visual porn for women goes, indie is basically all there is. Though some mainstream porn is more female friendly than others, it is hard to find, and most of it ranges anywhere from women being used as objects for male pleasure to downright rape and abuse. For some, sexual content in movies can be used as a source of visual erotic pleasure that replaces porn, but treatment of women in mainstream movies is also abysmal. Movies get an NC-17 rating (formerly called an X rating) for blatant discussion of female masturbation, showing a woman’s pubic hair, or for showing a woman’s face while she orgasms. Female pleasure is basically a death sentence to a movie’s marketability.

Women’s alienation from mainstream porn is what makes self-published fanfiction so important. Not all fanfiction is written by women, but their exclusion from mainstream media means that women are incentivized to rewrite this media to better represent themselves. Therefore, women are the vast majority of fanfiction authors and readers. Fanfiction provides an outlet for women to reclaim male dominated industries (both porn and fictional media in general), subjecting it to a form of sexualization that caters to feminine sexuality, and in many cases making it more LGBTQIA+ friendly. It’s a form of writing in which a young woman can self-publish online and have a built-in readership of peers who will critique and encourage her work. Though the majority of fanfiction is erotic, there are also many fanfics that are well over 100,000 words long and either never include sex or only include it briefly. These fanfics may place characters in any alternate setting of the author’s choice, be it sweeping fantasy or classic detective noir, and use these characters that already have an invested fan base so that the author can create their own original work of fiction.

Unfortunately, the problem of gender bias in mainstream media does bleed into fanfiction, namely in the ratio of male to female characters in any given story. The vast majority of interesting, relatable, and desirable characters in popular fiction are male, so this trend transfers over to fanfiction written about these characters, as well. For example, look at the absurdly popular movie The Avengers. The main team of superheroes includes five men and one women, not to mention the male villain and male side characters. A search through The Avengers’ section of the fanfiction database Archive of Our Own shows that at the time I am writing this there are 34,226 pieces of fiction featuring a romantic relationship between two men, 20,996 pieces of fiction featuring a romantic relationship between a man and a woman, and only 2,580 featuring a relationship between two women. Though some fanfiction will purposefully focus their work on redeeming female characters who were given the short end of the stick by the original work’s author, the general lack of female characters to work with undoubtedly takes its toll.

However, even when fanfiction is centered around male characters, female sexual pleasure, as well as an assumed female authorship and readership, is almost always implicit. Fanfiction erotica usually has an intense focus on emotions felt during sex. Many young LGBTQIA+ people, including lesbians, write and read fanfiction as an outlet for homosexual erotic desires, using two male characters as the main couple simply because male characters are what mainstream media provides. Authors can impose the emotions and sensations they feel or wish to feel during sex onto these male characters to create an experience more geared towards female pleasure even if no women feature in the story. The fact that the medium is nonvisual can also help create a sensation of the erotic that is removed from the visual reality of a cis man’s body. Some authors will even write characters that are assumed to be cis men within the original medium as either trans men, trans women, or nonbinary within their fanfiction.

In addition to creating a community for young LGBTQIA+ people, communities of fanfiction writers, along with their readership, create an opportunity for women to have frank discussions about sex. These discussions range from sexually inexperienced young women who use fanfiction as a nonphysical way to begin exploring sexuality, to experienced women who write entire chapters’ worth of characters having frank discussions about consent and sexual safety.

This is not to say that every fanfiction ever written is a stunning depiction of LGBTQIA+ feminist porn with accurate and healthy depictions of sex and relationships. After all, Fifty Shades of Grey started out as fanfiction. A quick google of “bad fanfiction” will show you plenty of examples that seem to contradict everything I have just said. But for every badly written, sexually inaccurate, and sometimes even blatantly misogynistic fanfiction, there is another piece of fanfiction that actively strives to take mainstream media and turn it into something that women can relate to and enjoy. I don’t think that something hundreds of thousands of women are getting off to should be that easily dismissed.

How Life is Strange Ignored Its Gay Fans and Made the Most Boring Male Love Interest of All Time

When the first few episodes of Life is Strange were still coming out, I heard about it exclusively from queer women. It was clear that there was a romantic relationship budding between the two main female characters: Chloe and Max. To make things even better, Chloe’s voice actress was Ashley Burch, a well-known video game reviewer, internet comedian, and gay woman! I eagerly began playing the games, and was exited as new installments came out. I was eager to see how their relationship panned out. However, the game’s ending disappointed a lot of queer fans who had been following the story since the beginning. I want to look at where Life is Strange went wrong with queer representation by comparing the two possible relationship arcs: Warren or Chloe.

Warren is the male romantic option for Max, which allows the player to heterosexualized the story if they want. If the player romances Warren, they can choose to view Chloe and Max’s relationship as purely platonic. This option is not only a form of queer erasure, but it fails from a narrative standpoint. The main plot of the game depends upon Max’s attachment to Chloe, so the player must be invested in her no matter what. Even if the player is choosing to romance Warren, Chloe and Max’s bond is still the narrative driving force. Warren, by point of contrast, has no relevance to the game’s main plot and seems to be shoehorned in to avoid making heterosexual players uncomfortable.

Warren’s lack of character development made his relationship with Max extremely dissatisfying. He was such a minor character that there were long stretches of gameplay where I forgot about him entirely. His lack of overall presence in the game, and lack of meaningful interactions with Max means that the player needs to rely on other characters repeatedly telling them, “Warren has a crush on you,” to be introduced to the concept. Max and Warren simply don’t spend enough time on screen together to develop any chemistry. But even worse, if the player chooses not to date Warren, then scripted game sequences make him come across as that creepy guy who won’t leave you alone after you turned him down. By the end of the game, the discrepancy between Chloe and Warren’s arcs is staggering. I know basically everything about Chloe’s family, interests, friends, aspirations... What do I know about Warren? He likes science.

However, even if the player chooses to romance Chloe, the creators still shy away from explicit queerness for fear of making the game too overtly gay. The player gets confirmation that Chloe likes men as early as episode two, but there’s never any overt confirmation of her attraction to women. Instead the player gets “strong hints” about Chloe’s bisexuality. The extreme subtlety around it seemed strange for such a crucial relationship in the game. For a point of comparison, I can’t imagine a version of the game where Warren was confirmed to be attracted to men, and yet was ambiguous about his attraction to women.

The most frustrating part of Chloe’s character arc was the end of the game. (Obviously there’s a major spoiler warning here.) I’ll use my playthrough as an example: I had spent the entire game growing attached to Chloe and choosing all the romantic options for her. At the end of the game I was given the choice to save a town of people or save Chloe, and I thought “I didn’t spend all this time saving her and trying to date her only to kill her now.” If the player chooses to save Chloe, the game ends with Chloe and Max watching the town be destroyed, and then they drive out of the wreckage together in Chloe’s truck. This is not the choice the game encourages the player to make, and ultimately felt a little underwhelming. I then went on YouTube to watch the other ending, and saw that Chloe and Max only kiss if the player has been romancing Chloe and chose the “true” ending of the game where Max kills Chloe. This infuriated me. The entire game maintains the plausible deniability of “maybe they’re just good friends,” and only allows a confirmation of their romantic arc if Chloe dies.

In the end, Life is Strange only added to the list of queer women being murdered in fiction. It further teaches queer women that if you want fiction written right, you’ve gotta do it yourself.