In recent years, interest in fan fiction has risen right alongside Hollywood’s persistent investment in adapting pre-existing IP. Novels and plays in the book-to-screen pipeline are now simply another part of the ecosystem, and it seems fanfic as a viable IP isn’t just the latest trend, but an industry-wide move to appeal directly to pre-existing fanbases and trust narratives that have been tried and tested repeatedly.

Fanfic — the practice of fans writing fiction based on pre-existing work and characters, often with relationships that differ from the original canon — has grown so popular and expansive that it’s impossible to ignore. Contemporary fanfic is said to have originated in the late 1960s, when the “Star Trek” fandom wrote fanzines; a popular pairing was James T. Kirk and Spock.

Today, fanfic has moved online; one of the leading fanfic platforms, Archive of Our Own (AO3), hosts over 18 million works across more than 81,250 fandoms and averages over 125 million page views a day.…