by: Siyona Singhal
Humor Editor
Every BookTok girl, Barnes and Noble frequenter, and self-proclaimed bookworm partially owes their love of reading to their middle school fanfiction-devouring self who stayed up way too late refreshing for the next chapter. Maybe they’ll never admit it, but I will: fanfiction is a cornerstone of society. The chokehold that Twilight AUs had on teenage girls needs to be studied, but what deserves even more investigation is the decline of these insanely popular and slightly unhinged stories that shaped a generation of readers. So buckle up, because I’m about to walk you through the rise and fall of fanfiction.
Fanfiction can be traced all the way back to the 1930s, but truly it peaked in the 2010s. I don’t know what was in the air from 2013-2016, but whatever it was, it had fanfiction authors working overtime. I mean, these people were uploading chapters from their deathbeds, writing author’s notes like, “Sorry, this chapter is 2 hours late, I got hit by a bus and had to get surgery. And then my mom literally went missing, so I had to find her; turns out she got kidnapped, so that was crazy. Anyways, here’s chapter 103 of ‘SpongeBob x Beast Boy Hogwarts AU.’”
It wasn’t just the authors; readers were unhinged back then, too. Comment sections were either full of trauma dumping, clowning, or violent anger at an author’s failure to upload. Websites like Archive of Our Own, Wattpad, and FanFiction.com became sacred corners of the internet full of chaos and historic pieces of literature. People were reading one million words in one night, but couldn’t read a three-page textbook assignment (I’m people). Pinterest boards full of the ugliest outfits ever put together skyrocketed, and suddenly messy buns were popping up everywhere.
And the tropes, don’t even get me started. I’m convinced people were writing scenarios directly derived from their dreams. No ship was too crazy, no setting too far: mafias, werewolves, undercover princes, you name it, someone wrote it. Every girl was smitten with Damon Salvator and fantasized about being sold to One Direction.
But then one day, something shifted. Suddenly, morally grey characters were popping up in bookstores. Slow burn, enemies-to-lovers, and “oh no, there’s only one bed” tropes became popular. Everything went mainstream. And maybe that’s the real “decline.” Not that fanfiction got worse, but that it stopped feeling like a community. It used to feel like you were part of something unhinged and borderline illegal. Everyone shared one brain cell and supported each other’s morally questionable choices. Now, the reading community is full of judgment and people complaining about books being overhyped. I mean, take Haunting Adeline for example. Today, people label it as psychotic, deranged, and an overall dumpster fire; it would have done numbers on prime Wattpad.
Still, no matter how polished BookTok gets or how aesthetic the Barnes & Noble hauls become, there will always be a middle schooler somewhere, tabs open, heart racing, whispering, “Just one more chapter.” And honestly? That’s the foundation of modern literature.