“I’m not going to die yet, and a strange guy with horns is determined to give me oral pleasure. It’s just that... out of all the worst-case scenarios I’ve come up with since being abducted by aliens, being licked until I come isn’t anywhere on the list.”

My unshaven legs dangle out of the fourth-floor window of my apartment in Berlin as I flick through the latest adventure in the Ice Planet Barbarians universe. The erotic sci-fi series with seven-foot blue males with horns, tails and cocks the size of baseball bats has become my life. Thirty books into the series, I have given up all pretence of reading the serious prose stacked on my nightstand. The set-up of each book is similar and comforting. There may be quirks and twists in the world-building but, at heart, a girl is abducted, meets a monstrous-but-handsome alien, hijinks ensue, and fucking abounds.

I’m not a “smut reader” as Gen Z would label me, or at least I haven’t been since I was a teen. But, after months of a global lockdown, desperate loneliness and unrelenting boredom, the TikTok algorithm turned me back into a devotee. Chinese machine learning was correct: Ice Planet Barbarians had become my life raft, and the algorithm had already deduced a couple of things about me. I’m neurodivergent, I’m bisexual (actually it figured that out before I did) and I’m a nerd in a hideously millennial way.

Even CNN was commenting on the popularity of Ice Planet Barbarians in lockdown and TikTokkers debated whether it was just Avatar fanfiction or original. This term — fanfiction — had come back into my life, playing around the edges of my TikTok feed in between my usual fiction recommendations of shape-shifting dragons, bisexual voyeuristic Orcs and possessive Mafia bosses. When these suggestions appeared I quickly scrolled away, trying to communicate to faceless lines of code that I was an adult now and I’d only read arousing fiction written by proper authors with real names.

If I tell a loved one the secret of my Harry Potter fanfiction habit as a youth, I clean it up, saying that I dabbled occasionally. The truth is that I had a full-blown addiction that inhabited most of my waking moments from the age of 13 to 15. Sexual awakenings are often described as a singular moment, like you’ve been activated as a sleeper agent. Mine was slower — desire slumbered in me and had been nudged a few times before. The 1999 cast of The Mummy nearly awoke it, but fanfiction made me sexually conscious. This arousal was coupled with a deep sense of shame as what I had read became lodged forever in my prefrontal cortex. Something inside me knew that these beloved Harry Potter characters shouldn’t have been 69ing in the middle of a living room.

It was incorrect, and not canon, and I needed more. Harrypotterfanfiction.com became my after-school lover. My family barely used the shared computer in my mother’s counselling room so I was free to peruse thousands of stories with different ships (relationships) and scenarios. Only occasionally did someone walk into the room, and I would frantically tab down the browser so it looked like I was playing The Sims.

I put the fanfiction community away along with other childish things when I left my teenage years. I was having real sex and reading real fiction. It had just been a phase that we all went through, and despite the friendships and community, who’d sustained me in those awkward years of bullying and familial turmoil, I left it behind. Now, when I see that the community is alive and thriving in these Tik-Tok comments, my heart aches and I am dragged back in when a certain fanfiction crosses my feed.

The Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian had been a rousing success the year before and was awaiting a second season in 2020. The gushing praise for a Mandalorian fanfiction called Rough Day was becoming harder to resist. It was hot, it was sexy. Was everyone in love with Pedro Pascal? Sure, he was cute in Game of Thrones. But, the whole point of The Mandalorian is that he lived by a code. He couldn’t take his helmet off in front of another person. Oh, oh. That was even sexier apparently, with two words I’d never seen written together posted with love hearts and sweating emojis: helmet kink.

My all-too-eager thumb hovered over the link. Was I, a thirty-year old woman, actually considering reading fanfiction? Again? Because I am stuck in my room and horny and bored? Again?

On a balmy June night, I binged ten chapters, feeling more joy than I get from reading literary fiction than I’d like to admit. The characters were perfect, the subtle slow build towards utterly filthy talk and the delicious unknown of The Mandalorian never removing his helmet building to perfect crescendoes at the chapter endings.

“...I-I’m gonna cum,” you breathe, everything inside you quickly pulling up fierce and tight, your chest heaving and your grip in his hair turning to iron. “...Oh, fuck, I’m g-gonna cum...I-I...”

A quiet mhmmm sound rumbles low in gentle encouragement, and then he takes a second to softly suck on your clit as if he could pull it out of you that way. His fingers curl, press up hard against something absolutely fucking devastating inside you, and it’s all you can do to stifle a sob when your body suddenly erupts in searing hot ecstasy under him.

Rough Day, Chapter 2, guardianangelcas

As I breathlessly press the Next Chapter button at 2am, I wonder if a friend of mine would be interested in this fanfiction. Like me, she’s a Star Wars nerd and eagerly awaits season two. But a hot wash of shame stops me from copying and pasting the link, passing the URL on like a box of porn found by railway tracks. Is it wise to come out of the fanfiction closet to a virgin reader?

Unlike the spicy fiction side of TikTok, the fanfiction contingent is less clean-cut and marketable. No publishers beg them to do promotions or give them a five-star review on Goodreads. The authors work under digital pseudonyms, avatars that we all form and collect as teenagers and some of us carry into adulthood. The online community reflects the back alley nature of fanfiction, still living in secret; desire and shame entwined as it always has been.

The most thriving part of this community — and where Rough Day was born — is Archive of Our Own. AO3 is one of the most popular fanfiction websites, built in 2008; its name was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s classic essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’. Unlike the heady days of the early 2000s which cultivated a scene through MSN, AIM, and Yahoo

Groups message boards, the modern fanfiction community is fostered in Discord, Twitter and TikTok. AO3 is considered the “mature” fanfiction readers’ website. Like Reddit, it has embraced its vintage internet style. Older readers find its stripped-down look comforting and younger users praise its accessibility.

Its quirky, more entry-level, romantic sister is Wattpad, founded in 2006 and boasting 90 million monthly users. The book series, then film, After was born on Wattpad, originally as Harry Styles fanfiction. Unlike AO3’s minimalist design aesthetics, Wattpad features glitzy fan-created book covers. Both sites work in the same way but in Wattpad, readers can comment on lines within the story itself. Popular stories can amass thousands of comments; new readers can enjoy commentary immediately after reading a sentence and re-readers get to exalt how much of a simp they are for a particularly pithy bit of prose.

The online playground may have changed but fanfiction erotic discourse remains steadfast. Friendships are still forged and lost, driven by the same incandescent lust that I feasted on as a teenager. This hormone induced frenzy now takes place in the comments section. People praise the flowing prose, intriguing plot twists, and how artfully Darth Vader’s cock is described to the exact dimensions that they wanted.

In my exploration of Rough Day, I was surprised by the candour on both sites. Anonymity had remained, with users hidden behind fandom pictures and silly usernames. But the comments were bolder, more openly infatuated than my young self had ever dared to be. The BookTok smut recommendations were comments like “Wish I had a man/dragon like Stryker ♥”. AO3 comments were along the lines of: “If there isn’t anal in the next chapter so help me GOD”. The icons didn’t have pictures of happy midwestern moms or cherubic teens. They were blank, anime, or just a picture of the man of the hour, Pedro Pascal.

If you asked me to eat glass for another chapter I literally would gfgjkhdetjb wtf that was so beautiful — angelactivities

This is truly amazing writing, the way you portray the details of their relationship is so beautifully done. You got this queen!! We're all eager and behind u<3 — maddy

BUTT STUFF BUTT STUFF BUTT STUFF BUTT STUFF BUTT STUFF BUTT STUFF YEEEEEHAW — via_hiptop

Bitches are thirsty for mando (it's me, I'm bitches) — katewinchester87

Wanna see an ocean? GATHER ALL THE TEARS I CRIED WHILE READING THIS CHAPTER — Okinnee

Desire isn’t so intensely coupled with shame when you’re anonymous online. But fanfiction authors break literary taboos, putting characters from an original work and bending them to fit into every conceivable scenario. Was this so illicit that it rendered fanfiction unspeakable? Did the problem stem from copyright infringement? Would CS Lewis be affronted by a threesome between the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe? And what happens when the reader becomes the author and the author is in conversation with the reader? They share their desire, trapped in a hyper-fixation with a type of media that can only be shared with other believers.

Fanfiction authors are considered the holders of lore within the community, the meta within the meta, wielding power until they drop that awaited next chapter. Their lives for the most part remain a mystery. A prominent part of fanfiction is Author’s Notes. These appear at the top of each chapter and can share trigger warnings, context and life updates. The authors apologise for a delayed chapter. They might be getting arrested. They just had a baby. A hurricane destroyed their house. Or, they got off their meds and just lost their obsession with Frodo. Once, somebody said they’d just finished a medical degree and would be busy with a gruelling rotation schedule for the next few years.

The Author’s Notes for Rough Day didn’t speak of any world-changing scenarios but the author sometimes took weeks to upload a new chapter. Whilst I yearned for new content, I mused on whether to share my newfound obsession with others. I spoke to my therapist about it, worried that being married to a made-up person was a sign of maladaptive daydreaming. As a teen, I could live in my imagination for hours. As an adult, I had bills to pay, and I had to date in real life. But I didn’t want to. It would betray my husband, The Mandalorian. I just wanted to bang the big man in the helmet.

Sharing desire with anyone, friend or lover, comes with the fear that you will be rejected. Online we can search for unusual desires that we might have in secret. As fanfiction has developed, its qualities can be shared with online porn. With books, a friend recommends them, the cover and blurb caught your fancy, or you read a good review. With fanfiction, you choose not only the subject matter and characters, but can whittle down your ideal scenarios from an endless list of tags. On porn sites, categories such as MILF, lesbian, Asian and pegging are presented to you in a smorgasbord, and fanfiction’s tagging system mirrors this. Want a light-hearted romance-filled romp? Then choose “fluff”. Have you fantasised about a character revealing their hidden trauma to a potential love interest? “Hurt/comfort” has all your cathartic needs. Pick “slow burn” for those who want to be teased, “porn with a plot” for a quick fix.

Other categories will come with a warning that you are about to read adult content, similar to the confirmation you are above 18 on porn sites. Delving into explicit categories will usually be accompanied by the Dead Dove Do Not Eat (DDDNE) tag. This is a reference to a scene in Arrested Development where the character Michael finds a bag labelled with that phrase in the fridge, opens it, and says “Well, I don’t know what I was expecting.” This is a warning to readers to pay attention to tags so when they get annoyed at the “Cannibal Play” “Rape/Non-Con” “Religious Trauma” “Blood as Lube” themes in a Hannibal fanfiction they will get no sympathy in the comments because, well, what were they expecting?

Readers can choose to see their characters in various situations, from making a non-explicit relationship in a piece of media very explicit to transposing the original setting in an Alternative Universe fanfic. It’s a veritable pornographic choose-your-own-adventure. These tags have been controversial — ape and incest are common themes. There are 301,237 works on AO3 with the tag “underage”. But not all of these will be explicit and AO3 ardently defends inclusiveness and opposes content censorship. In 2018, AO3 chair Matty Bowers reported that only 1,150 stories had ever been flagged as offensive by users.

This playground of desires is mainly used by Gen Z, which flies in the face of the current hot take that they are a group of sexless woke prudes who have to shake their heads in public while reading Lolita, lest anyone think they agree with the subject matter. While Gen Z might be reading more taboo fiction, they aren’t having sex, according to recent studies. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 30% of teens said they’d had sex at least once before. A 50% reduction compared to decades prior. However, online communities have never been more thriving, with Discord, Twitch, TikTok and other social media apps blasting into our social consciousness in recent years. Fanfiction is inherently anonymous, usernames are fictitious, and authors are a mystery. Despite its problematic nature, fanfiction is still a haven in which to explore taboos and test sexualities and kinks before unveiling them to the world. In 2023, research at the University of Central Florida revealed that the top sexualities among AO3 users were bisexual, asexual and queer.

In a study by Jennifer Duggan in 2020, it was found that 50% of Harry Potter fanfiction writers identified as female or femme-leaning, 13% as masculine or masc-leaning, 11% as transgender, 21% as nonbinary, genderfluid, or genderqueer, and 4% as agender. Fanfiction enjoyers are more likely to be female-presenting, neurodivergent and queer. These identifying factors have been desexualised or over-sexualised in kind.

With this kind of imposing societal pressure, there’s a lack of In Real Life (IRL) space to explore sexual mores and kinks without fearing either stereotyping or fetishisation or having to hand in your woke card. Fanfiction creates an “Archive of One’s Own” to live out fantasies through “comfort characters”, their chosen media representation that they feel safe with. It’s a way to buck heteronormative conventions through unashamedly horny simping with a community that will not only not judge them, but cheer them on from the sidelines.

We can see this unabashed desire and creative freedom take root in the fanfiction genre of the Omegaverse, where even the most devoted fanfiction zealots might cringe by association. The Omegaverse is based on the now-debunked theories of wolf pack dynamics . Its origin is difficult to determine but most people agree that it started with fanfiction around the popular fantasy show Supernatural.

Supernatural has featured infamously queerbaiting storylines and had a large audience of queer, mostly female-identifying, teenagers. The Omegaverse is dominated by “slash” (male/male) pairings and is credited with popularising several tropes in queer fiction. Most notable is the idea of “Mpreg” referring to male pregnancy; other concepts include “rutting” “heat cycles” “scent marking” “imprinting” and the elegantly named “knotting”. This last idea is drawn from real-world canid mammals: during mating the “knot” in the penis can enter and lock the other party in place. Knotting has passed through the Omegaverse into mainstream erotic fanfiction.

It’s a radical act to take characters from beloved media to fall in love, potentially change their sexuality/gender, and create a world in which they can become pregnant. This change isn’t rooted in dislike, but rather in adoration of comfort characters. It’s freeing to think that an army of typically disenfranchised writers and readers create genres within genres and reanimate forgotten media all in the pursuit of being relentlessly horny.

The uncanny elements of the Omegaverse and to a larger extent the concept of “monster men” have tangible, historical roots in literature. The first person who got a tingle from reading Dracula’s relentless pursuit of Mina Murray in 1897 was feeling the same odd delight I got from reading about The Mandalorian having sex on a spaceship. These situations give the reader an “out”, a way to feel more comfortable. The torrid sex is not like it is in a saucy mass-market beach read. By being further removed through fantasy or science fiction elements, we can explore our more extreme desires. Because, well, it’s not real.

Fantastical elements have always been a part of fanfiction, with Star Trek being the blueprint for early non-canonical pieces and Harry Potter being one of the largest bodies of work in the space. Sci-fi and fantasy are rooted in escapism, heroism and the abandonment of logical constraints. In recent years, the genre has exploded out of fanfiction and into the traditional publishing world. A Court of Thorns And Roses by Sarah J. Maas is an example of mainstream interest in the smutty fantasy genre. While Maas’s books started out quite tame, as readers began to get more invested in her stoic-yet-witty-ripped-but-lean-masculine-but-inexplicablyfeminist-Faerie men, the books became less “plot with porn” and more “porn with plot”. Our shared “monster men” fetish crawled from AO3’s depths. Now, it’s read in public, wins awards, and you can make money from talking about “impressive wingspans”.

Eventually, my therapist tells me it isn’t an issue for me to be consumed with thoughts of a helmeted Pedro Pascal. So, I share my beloved Rough Day with my friend. It was anxiety-inducing to out this hidden part of myself, revealing a much weirder, nerdier side. Only seeing the younger women in Discords and in fics' comments gave me the confidence to wonder if I could build a community of smut lovers in real life.

A few weeks later my friend texted me. Dread filled me. Perhaps it was too much for her, there’s a handjob scene 400 words in. He never takes his helmet off, he eats her pussy while she’s asleep sort of consensually. “When’s the next chapter? It’s been three weeks!”