Rewriting the love story

When asked to name the last thing I read, I usually internally debate whether I should answer with the book I read three months ago or the 42,000-word fanfiction I read last night.

But I get funny looks when I opt for the latter.

For those outside of Internet fan culture, fanfiction repurposes characters from popular movies, books or TV shows to tell original stories. Usually writers do this to right the wrongs of creators who didn’t understand why their characters are absolutely destined for each other. The fanfic writers then post their work online so other fans can cry about how perfect Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy are together.

The main difference between the original content and fan content often lies in who the characters want to kiss.

A lot of people falsely believe fanfiction is all depraved boy-on-boy smut. Some of it is — we don’t have nearly enough female characters to craft depraved girl-on-girl smut. But most writers are more invested in telling a story that doesn’t come through in the original work or revisiting old favorite characters in new situations.

Often that means establishing the LGBTQ+ relationships that popular culture teases but never executes. This “queerbaiting” is endlessly frustrating, as it makes it feel like queer relationships aren’t as important as heterosexual ones.

And fanfic writers’ efforts are worth it.

One of my favorite fanfictions clocks in at more than 230,000 words — which is a just little shorter than “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” the longest book of the series. In this particular fic, “The Shoebox Project” by Jaida Jones and Rave, the authors retell the Marauders’ Hogwarts years through letters, pictures and pivotal scenes. Their readers get to see how James Potter and Lily Evans fell in love, how Peter Pettigrew drifted away from the group and most importantly, how Sirius Black and Remus Lupin totally got it on all over the school.

What, you don’t remember that from the books? Dumbledore couldn’t have been the only boy who liked to kiss boys in “Harry Potter.” And I’m sure J.K. Rowling’s just holding off for the right moment to reveal on Twitter that Sirius and Remus were definitely a thing.

In “Shoebox,” the plot and the reinterpreted characters’ kept me reading — but the sex was a nice bonus. Plus, I like to read queer characters, and, unlike in traditional media, there’s no shortage of them in fanfiction.

Through fanfiction, writers transform mainstream media into something more palatable for minorities of all sexual orientations and race. In most fanfictions, writers at least change characters’ sexualities, but many writers also swap characters’ race or gender identity. They think that two, or more, characters have chemistry that wasn’t developed in the original work. And I usually agree.

Unlike mainstream work, where writing must appeal to the largest audience possible, fanfiction writers just want to see their favorite pairing smooch, and they don’t care if no one else wants to see how Ron Weasley fell for Winky the House-elf. Someone has to write it.

For fanfiction writers, the stakes are low when it comes to publishing their work.

Once an author posts a fic online, either people read it or they don’t — and maybe they leave a comment. But there’s no financial investment or stinging possibility of readers not liking your original characters. Plus, most fanfiction readers know how to find what they like and ignore what they don’t, so a writer’s more likely to have readers already invested in the storyline and those characters.

As a result, fanfiction gets specific. I’m almost certain that I’ll never see a genderfluid, polyamorous bisexual on television, but it wouldn’t be out of place in my fanfiction circles.

That’s why I read more fanfiction than I do “real” books. Fanfiction lets LGBTQ+ writers interpret already popular characters as queer, which, for me, makes it much easier to obsess over stories and draw all the characters in compromising situations.

On television and in books and movies, there are — thank God — LGBTQ+ characters, but there’s not that many, they leave out a lot of identities and they’re often just side characters. For both writers and readers, fanfiction becomes a queer haven.

Most fanfiction features a central couple, but a lot of writers can’t resist adding in side pairings as well, so the work ends up with a spectrum of LGBTQ+ relationships represented with different sexual orientations.

And to combat any naysayers, it’s not weird that there are six queer couples and one straight pair in the same story — I can personally attest that, in real life as well, queer people like to make friends with other queer people. How else would we find people to obsess over WolfStar with?

Additionally, fanfiction representation of LGBTQ+ characters is a good guide for younger readers. When I was younger, I latched onto the few queer characters in pop culture. But they didn’t teach me to navigate a queer identity or relationship, because while it was entertaining to see queer characters on television, a lot of times they didn’t say it in so many ways.

Fanfiction fills these gaps by showing healthy LGBTQ+ relationships. I’ve read a lot of fanfiction with transgender or asexual characters, which are good guides on how to begin to understand a queer identity. Plus, it’s kind of nice to have a fantasy where you flirt with the cute barista and they flirt right back — defying society’s “everyone is straight” etiquette.

Fanfiction — because anyone can make it and anyone can read it — covers a lot of ground. Some fanfiction doesn’t show healthy relationships — I mean, unless you think that Harry getting together with the guy who killed his parents is healthy.

Some fanfics are completely unrealistic in their understanding of how bodies work — for the love of God, don’t use that mayonnaise as lube. And some of it doesn’t have LGBTQ+ characters.

What makes fanfiction different, though, is that readers can pick and choose what they want to see in a franchise they already love.

I exclusively search in mature-and-up ratings with my favorite pairings, and, thanks to obsessive tagging, I only read fics labeled “angst” and “smut, like a lot of smut.”

Fanfiction is a low-stakes medium that allows LGBTQ+ people to read about popular characters who are actually queer.

It makes mainstream media feel just a little bit more LGBTQ+ friendly when you know, deep in your heart, that your two favorite characters are madly in love with each other, even if they don’t fit the cookie-cutter mold of boy-meets-girl.

I mean, have you seen the way Harry and Draco look at each other? I’ve read an entire book about it.