Fanfiction x internet x reader

The internet would be a desolate place without fanfiction and the fandoms it nourishes

Opinions Helena Reyes Teruel — Published March 17, 2026 3 minutes

The student's eyes lit up, and with anticipation, they picked up the newspaper, their fingers working through the pages with fervour. Their eyes, in their bluish, greenish, brownish hue, softened when they fell across this page. 

They sat down and absorbed the article, the world narrowing to this quiet reading moment.

The preceding attempt at fanfiction's flowery narration is part of a tradition of storytelling that, some say, began in the late 1960s with Star Trek fanzines and would continue into the era of the internet and its multitude of online forums. 

But in 1998, the fanfiction community blossomed with the creation of the first multi-fandom archive, fanfiction.net (FFN). A fanfiction writer described the site in a 2002 Time article as a “giant shopping mall." Another interviewee highlighted that “nobody else is archiving so much or has such an open editorial policy."

What emerged afterward was not just a hobby, but one of the internet’s most enduring creative ecosystems.

The gift economy within fanfiction fosters community by having authors present their work for free to the audience, who, in turn, give feedback and recognition. This collaborative system is part of what has allowed fanfiction communities to survive for decades without commercial backing.

More crucially, this ecosystem is also a way for underrepresented groups, particularly the LGBTQIA2S+ community and women, to bond and take the spotlight that mainstream media constantly denies them.

This appeal has existed since the early fanzine days. A 1986 New York Times article observed that women Star Trek fan writers wrote work where “real-life concerns such as sexuality and equality can be discussed in the metaphorical language.”

Forty years later, this space has grown bigger and more diverse, thanks to FFN, Wattpad and Archive of Our Own (AO3).

However, this new visibility has also attracted the unwanted attention of conservative groups and governments that threaten censorship. If these pressures succeed, they risk dismantling one of the few spaces where marginalized communities have historically been able to create and share freely.

One such event occurred in July 2023, when AO3 went offline for more than 24 hours due to a cyberattack performed by an allegedly "religiously and politically motivated" group. 

Today, fandoms in the U.S. are concerned about the proliferation of bills such as the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), whose age verification mandate seeks to protect kids from, among other things, "the harms of sexual and transgender content."

Although KOSA doesn't target nonprofit platforms like AO3, users are concerned that the vague legislative language and janky age verification software could constitute a worrying precedent. 

While no censorship act or bill has yet affected fanfiction sites in any Western country, China provides an example of what could happen to the fanfiction community if governments are allowed control over our online spaces.

In 2020, the Chinese government banned AO3 and similar Chinese sites. 

A University of Pennsylvania study explored how Chinese fan writers were operating post-AO3. The interviewees reported that fanfiction is still produced and shared underground, but that the previous gift economy of AO3 has been disrupted entirely. 

Fan writer Yanghu, cited in the study, reflected after the ban: “I wrote fanfiction as [...] resistance to male chauvinism, resistance to the real world, resistance to the censorship system, and then I found that I could not resist any of them.”

This reminds us that protecting the online spaces that sustain the gift economy means protecting one of the internet’s most enduring forms of community-driven creativity: fanfiction.

This article originally appeared in Volume 46, Issue 11, published March 17, 2026.