Reading Time: 3 minutes

Recently, a friend urged me to join her in reading Manacled – the first foray into fan fiction for both of us.

It quickly consumed our lives.

If you’re not familiar with fan fiction, let me give you a quick run down. Fan fiction is content written and shared online for free, usually featuring the characters or world-building from popular fandoms. Sometimes these stories rewrite aspects of the originals, others build onto them or create new endings. Some fan fiction authors will take well-known characters and drop them into an otherwise entirely original story.

Fan fiction (a la Wattpad) has also always been recognized for its tendencies toward self-insert fantasies. These are often written by teenagers as a fun and silly form of expression, creating scenarios where their main character (often just a regular teenager) gets into a relationship with well-known celebrities or pop stars.

I’ve always known about fan fiction, but never really got into it as a reader. For one thing, it’s free, unedited content – which doesn’t always lend itself to quality. Fan fiction is notorious for its specific quirks, tropes, and writing styles. For another thing, I have never considered myself much of a fangirl. Meaning that I have never been someone to go out of my way to find new content featuring beloved characters. Canon was always good enough for me.

Manacled has entirely shifted my perspective on what’s possible for fan fiction.

If you haven’t heard of it before, Manacled is a twist on the Harry Potter universe that incorporates elements of The Handmaid’s Tale. In this story, Voldemort won the war and Harry Potter is dead. Hermione Granger, our main character, has been imprisoned for a year. She’s been shackled with special manacles that render her magic-less and unable to defend herself. Voldemort, now officially in power, has created a repopulation effort to breed more wizard purebreds, to which they subject Hermione as a handmaid. She’s been given to Draco Malfoy, Voldemort’s right hand.

There’s one big problem for Hermione, and it’s the only reason she’s still alive. Hermione’s memories are locked away in isolated fugue states around her mind. And Voldemort wants those memories to find the last surviving Order of the Phoenix member.

My friend and I initially started Manacled on audio through Spotify. Our little adventure into fan fiction started off innocently enough – the story was intriguing (and free, importantly), so we used it as motivation to exercise. We’d only listen to chapters while on walks or at the gym.

That went out the window about a third of the way through. The intensity of the story and the degree to which we needed to find out what happened next had us throwing out those exercise plans and switching to eyeball reading, stat.

I never thought I could feel so consistently devastated by a fan fiction story. When I say this story ripped my heart out, then kept ripping apart over and over, that would still be an understatement.

I now have a much greater appreciation for fan fiction as an art and as a form of expression.

There are aspects to fan fiction I never truly considered before. For one thing, these stories benefit from the readers already knowing and understanding the world-building it’s based on. So less time needs to be spent explaining things like how the magic works, or who certain people are, or what their previous relationships looked like. So we can go straight into the meat of the story.

Fanfiction can be a great avenue to write representation into beloved stories that someone didn’t get to see themselves in – for example, taking well-known characters and putting them in queer relationships. Or taking a white-normative fictional world and adding better cultural representation.

It’s also free. Since fan fiction is created using existing intellectual property, it’s illegal to make any money from it. So for many people, the lack of cost is an important draw, especially on sites like Archive of our Own where you also don’t need to make an account to access the content. It’s a great way to encourage reading.

Should you read fan fiction?

If you’re like me, fan fiction may be something I recommend you consume leisurely – starting with the best and most recommended.

If, however, you might enjoy selecting your reads based on moods, characters, fandoms, or tropes, the tagging system in fan fiction may be right up your alley. You can find stories that fit the exact thing you’re looking for.

It’s not for everyone. Fan fiction is free and available to all, and so much of it goes unedited. It can be difficult to find those hidden gems. But if you’re willing to search, there are some truly well-written stories online, with sophisticated style and plot.

Happy reading!