loading . . . How Fanfiction is Literary Resistance Mood: Firery, cozy, and currently plotting the overthrow of capitalism via Romance tropes and cookies.
I have a confession to make. A secret that sits in the center of my chest like a warm, purring cat.
I write Fanfiction. I also read Fanfiction too.
I have been doing it for years, under a handle that has absolutely no connection to my government name, building a quiet little kingdom on the servers of Archive of Our Own. And no, before the whispers start, I am not the author of _My Immortal._ I lack that specific, chaotic genius. I cannot weave a spell of spelling errors that potent. Though, if you haven’t listened to the dramatic readings of it, you are denying your ears a specific kind of jagged, confusing joy. Go find them. Treat yourself to the auditory chaos.
But I want to talk about the silence. Specifically, the difference between the noise of my "professional" life and the beautiful, heavy silence of my secret one.
If you read my polished work, the stuff with ISBNs and price tags, you are reading Robert Kingett: The Brand publishers demand I become. You are reading a version of me that has been sanded down, edited, and packaged to fit on a shelf. But if you stumble across my work on AO3, you are reading something else entirely. You are touching the raw wire.
And frankly? I think the raw wire is better because it is imperfect.
We live in an era of "Marketing Sludge." You can feel it, can’t you? The texture of the internet has changed. It used to feel like a chaotic, open field; now it feels like a shopping mall where the air conditioning is broken and everyone is screaming at you to buy a solution to a problem you didn't know you had. Publishing—and I say this with all the exhausted love of a career writer—is an industry built on stripping away agency.
They tell us we aren't just writers anymore. We are "content creators." We are "brands." We are expected to flatten our complex, jagged souls into a smooth, marketable surface.
That is why publishing, if you were to take the Sightless Scribbles archive and try to sell it, would never have a clue how to market it. Because, it's not content. Publishers don't know how to package a soul.
To be an author is to be a constant brand for publishers and never ourselves. We have to post on social media, we have to hustle, we have to perform our trauma for clicks. It is a system designed to turn Art into Product, and the Artist into a Vending Machine.
And that is why Fanfiction is the last radical act left to us.
Think about the economics of it. It is, perhaps, the only truly functioning internet socialist utopia I have ever lived in. It is a digital gift economy. I spend hours—labor that capitalism tells me should be billed by the word—creating a world. I pour my grief, my lust, my rage into it. And then I release it. For free.
There are no paywalls. There are no ads interrupting the smut to sell you car insurance. There is no algorithm punishing me because I didn't post at 10:00 AM on a Tuesday. There is only the work, and the people who need it. It is anti-capitalist by its very definition because it refuses to commodify the connection between the storyteller and the listener. It says that joy does not need a transaction fee.
And the community? It’s not a "network." Networking is just a fancy word for people using each other to climb a ladder. Fandom is a potluck. Everyone brings a dish. Some people bring audio adaptations of Fanfiction, Some people bring art, some bring beta-reading labor, some bring comments that feel like a warm hand on your shoulder after a day of crying. We feed each other. We build these massive, sprawling architectures of support without a single dollar changing hands. It proves that we don't need profit motive to build something beautiful. We just need each other, and a shared obsession with a world or characters that deserve exploration or a diverse story.
There is also the matter of the "Rules."
If you take enough creative writing classes, or listen to enough "gurus," you start to realize that 90% of writing advice is just gatekeeping wearing a monocle. It’s classist, it’s often ableist, and it is obsessed with "restraint." _Kill your darlings. Show, don't tell. Trim the fat._
Fanfiction teaches you to burn the rulebook. It teaches you that "indulgence" is actually a rigorous study of emotional resonance. It allows you to sprawl. It allows you to write 50,000 words of pure angst just to explore the specific texture of grief, or an entire chapter dedicated to the domestic intimacy of two people sharing a bed, focusing on nothing but the warmth of skin and the sound of breathing.
Traditional publishing calls that "pacing issues." Fanfiction calls it "what we actually came here for." It is a better teacher because it prioritizes _impact_ over _propriety_. It taught me how to write not for a critic in a tweed jacket, but for a person alone in their room at 3 AM who desperately needs to feel like they aren't the only broken thing in the universe.
And yes, I am thin-skinned. I am the person who reads a bad review of a book I loved and immediately constructs an elaborate fantasy where the reviewer is buried under an avalanche of ice cream. Just mountains of Rocky Road, suffocating them in marshmallows and chocolate, a sweet, cold, sticky justice for their bad take.
But on AO3? The dynamic is different. Because I am not a brand there. I am just a voice in the dark. If someone hates the story, they hate the _story_ , not the "Robert Kingett Brand." They can’t demand things of me. They can’t insist I owe them something because they bought my book. The transaction was emotional, not financial, so the entitlement—while it still exists in fandom drama—feels different. It feels less like a customer complaint and more like a disagreement at a dinner party.
I love reading "Self-Inserts" and "Author Avatars" in fanfic for this very reason. I love seeing how another disabled person navigates a fantasy world. I want to feel the weight of a sword in a hand that trembles like mine. I want to know how a blind mage navigates the corridors of a magic school using echolocation and their cane skills. Traditional publishing often scrubs those details out to make the character "relatable" to a general audience. Fanfic lets us be specific. It lets us be weird.
So, no. I won’t tell you my handle. I won’t merge the streams.
I need that space. I need a place where I can take off the "Author" costume, hang it in the closet, and just be a gremlin at a keyboard, typing out fantasies about bodies and magic and systems that actually work.
I will keep publishing professionally because there are certain parts of it that are fun. I get to meet an audience that will never read Fanfiction and I like seeing my name on covers. But my heart? My heart lives in the tags. It lives in the comments section at midnight. It lives in the unpolished, un-marketable, glorious mess of the Archive.
You should try it. Come play in the sandbox where the money doesn't matter. It’s the best writing class you’ll ever take, and the tuition is zero. Just bring your own shovel.
If you enjoyed this rant, you might enjoy Unapologetically Me by Danesha Little https://sightlessscribbles.com/how-fanfiction-is-literary-resistance/
