“Edgelord X’s current obsession is ‘Malfoid’, a girl version of Draco.” (Grok)
“Warning: this chapter contains attempted sexual assault, gore, and eye trauma.” So reads a content note in the popular fanfiction Manacled, a Harry Potter-inspired dark romance between Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger. The writer, an American woman known as SenLinYu, began posting installments of her fantasy series to Archive of Our Own, better known as AO3 — the internet’s foremost fanfic site — in 2018. More than 370,000 words later, Manacled became the site’s second-most-read story of all time, with more than 20 million downloads before SenLinYu removed it in preparation for an officially published version with copyrighted Potter elements removed. That book, Alchemized, became the fastest-selling debut novel in two decades.
Manacled and its ilk are foundational texts that define the strange yearnings of hyper-online young women — women who have been yearning especially hard since AO3 crashed last Thursday. Its 11 million users are now withdrawing from their customary dose of steamy fanfic; the site is expected to remain closed for maintenance for a few weeks yet. To my male readers: now is a good time to go girlfriend-hunting in the supernatural section of your local bookshop. It’s Black Friday for maladjusted fantasy foids.
If you can find a copy of Manacled in an internet archive, it’s worth skimming — not because it’s good (it’s not), but because it can be considered a Rosetta Stone for the sexual and romantic hinterlands of Zoomettes. The unmet desires of Gen Z women, now squinting around the dusty stalls of the marriage market, are laid out in technicolor in this strange compendium of snarling villains, whimpering damsels, groaning lovers and smirking captors. The plot, in brief, is this: Hermione finds herself in a Handmaid’s Tale-style arrangement with peroxide-blond bad boy Draco after Voldemort wins the Wizarding War. The evil regime assigns her to be a surrogate for Draco; she is kidnapped and violated, but she thoroughly enjoys it. In the end, they have a baby. Things work out.
Throughout, there is lots and lots of shagging. Often this comes with amusing Potter window-dressing, as if to reassure the reader that they are not simply perusing erotica. In one scene Hermione “cast a spell to unbutton his shirt and robes and then, with a practiced partial-levitation charm, she pulled him up so that he was leaning against her and pushed all the clothing down off his shoulders and arms”. There is endless throbbing and thrusting, lots of hot breath, a million “wolfish” smiles and pounding hearts, even the occasional appearance of a nipple or two. This is the bread and butter of AO3 and fanfic more broadly: torrid romance between an everywoman protagonist and a brutish but tender, misunderstood man. There is constant sexual risk on AO3 — themes of abduction abound, as do elaborate pretexts for gray-area sex like Manacled’s forced surrogacy plot. Dubious consent, known as “dub-con”, is probably the site’s most distinctive theme.
Launched in 2009, AO3’s rise to prominence was driven by a bizarre wave of fandom around X-Factor band One Direction in the early 2010s, with “Larry Stylinson”, the romantic “shipping” (fantasy) of the apparently heterosexual members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, becoming a key genre. But it wasn’t all gay. At one time, the internet was also brimming with stories about 1D, a mass-market teenaged boy band, kidnapping girls from concerts and turning them into (willing) slaves. Today, there are as many granular subgenres as you can think of: wingfic (essentially rutting with feathers); mpreg (male pregnancy); breeding kink; gay fanfic (yaoi) for the enjoyment of heterosexual women; RPF (real-person fiction) imagining sexual escapades between celebrities; even Drapple (stay with me: Draco Malfoy and a green apple he is shown eating in the third Harry Potter film). As you might have inferred, sex is often described in extremely graphic detail.
As niche and strange as these subcategories become, they can mostly be read as wish-fulfillment by young women cut adrift in a sexual culture which leaves them cold. The median age of AO3 users is 26. One 2022 study found 54% of them identified as female, while 41% identified as “non-cisgender”, a wildly disproportionate figure which I suspect comprises a healthy slice of AFAB enbys, he/theys and so on (basically the demographics of your local mask-mandated lesbian bar). Almost half of users not only read but write on the site. The writing is therefore abundant, fervent and often shit. But literary pretensions are not the site’s aim; instead, the most successful writers are there to quench their thirsty fans with escalating sexy scenarios. It is evident that posting is as exciting for the writers as for the readers; AO3 is a rare repository of free, non-visual pseudo-pornography in an online sex economy which prefers the most graphic, hardcore, and shareable material possible. For the site’s largely female constituents, this matters: these readers are in flight from the mainstream and in thrall to their own, quaintly analog nerd erotica. The very different private habits of the internet’s men and women is our riven sexual culture in miniature.
The curious thing about AO3 is that, as powerful and prolific a cultural institution as it may be, it is largely invisible to the public. Nevertheless, its sexual themes have long since bled out into the mainstream. The boom in fantasy smut — published novels about minotaur milking farms and other such nonsense — is a direct consequence of internet fanfiction. Fifty Shades of Grey began as Twilight fanfic; the new film Wicker, in which Alexander Skarsgård stars as a sexy man inexplicably made of rattan, is unmistakably AO3 in nature. Then there’s Heated Rivalry, the gay hockey romp which was adapted by HBO last year, which not only began as a series of posts on AO3 but has now inspired a whole new genre about sexual tension between competitive, horny men (again, to be clear, most of its readers are female). I suspect most young women today — even those who, like me, never read fanfic — are subconsciously honed by its sexual values: the valorization of taboo, secrecy, extraordinary emotional dramatics and undying loyalty. There are, of course, male-coded fandoms: edgelord X’s current obsession is “Malfoid”, a girl version of Draco who is blonde, evil, hot and from what I gather, mostly a meme. But none are as sincere, and as reliably twisted, as the female fanfic which Malfoid parodies. To read these stories is to peep through a window into a generation’s sexuality — and the view is frightening.
It is troubling for a feminist to realize that lots of her peers have spent years reading and fantasizing about submission, surrender, abduction, and sexual enslavement. Nevertheless, that is what AO3 is all about; the site reveals the furtive and unrealizable desires of girls unsatisfied by the modern sexual settlement. To see fanfic as a revolt against the gains of feminism is too easy, though; instead, we might consider its themes an uplifting consequence, if a slightly unsettling one, of those gains. In the West at least, institutionalized forced marriage, coercion and rape are so unimaginable as to be deemed fodder for fantasy; that women want to daydream about them is testament to how thoroughly they’ve been expunged, how remote they now seem. And like other corners of modern sexuality gatekept by women — heterosexual polyamory, for example — fanfiction is highly regulated. AO3 prides itself on almost never censoring any fiction, however egregious the content. This is justified by the extremely strict enforcement of tagging rules on the site; so it is that even rape content can remain if appropriately labeled. As with so many “queer” and/or feminine-coded sexual subcultures, taboo is permitted only within the most rigidly enforced rules imaginable.
None of this makes for good writing. But AO3 is nevertheless an invaluable archive, an uncensored record of what women daydream about when no-one is watching. There is perhaps no more unflinching guide to “what women want” than the weird warrens of this website whose uninhibited readers share their desire to be kidnapped, romanced then wedded by a borderline abusive werewolf CEO. I won’t make the case that AO3 tells us how women secretly want to live; instead, it shows up the fault lines in real-world dating, which has been drained of romance by apathetic casual sex and sterile hookup apps. Women might not want to be kidnapped and forcibly impregnated by an erotically insatiable Draco Malfoy; really, it’s about them wanting to be overwhelmingly desired. The scenario is almost unimportant, the more far-fetched the better — the emotional payload it carries is what matters. To be pursued, to relinquish control, to experience and inspire unfettered passion: fanfiction’s underlying tenets are not so difficult to understand. We may deride the genre as weird, subterranean and obsessive — but really these girls’ yearnings are, upon closer inspection, universal.
