“While many people think fanfiction is about inserting sex into texts (like Tolkien’s) where it doesn’t belong, Brancher sees it differently: “I was desperate to read about sex that included great friendship; I was repurposing Tolkien’s text in order to do that. It wasn’t that friendship needed to be sexualized, it was that erotica needed to be … friendship-ized.” Many fanfiction writers write about sex in conjunction with beloved texts and characters not because they think those texts are incomplete, but because they’re looking for stories where sex is profound and meaningful. This is part of what makes fan fiction different from pornography: unlike pornography, fanfic features characters we already care deeply about, and who tend to already have long-standing and complex relationships with each other. It’s a genre of sexual subjectification: the very opposite of objectification. It’s benefits with friendship.”
YES. THANK YOU! This is why it bothers me so much when people call fic “porn.”
I’ve seen replies like – “yeah, but PWP still exists” – and I’m gonna disagree. PWP can’t exist in fanfiction!* Because the Plot and the character development are already baked in, from canon and from our shared understanding of the characters. Even a fic that’s 100 percent sex is told within existing context of the characters and the canonical story (and often within the context of other fic). Which is the point of writing a sex scene about specific characters. And not just writing about context-free bodies.
*very generally speaking and for the sake of this conversation; I’m sure there are rare exceptions
I’m not entirely sure whats going on with my writing because the characters I write have some sort of horrific scarring/traumatic past and they’re with these pretty boyfriends and I’m just sitting here wondering what this all means.
Vengence is Key 