Lesbian Fanfiction
An introduction to fandom culture through the lens of lesbian shipping
Introduction
Human culture is nested fractally. There is no bottom. - XKCD
Since we’re doing reviews of things that aren’t books, I’m going to review a human subculture: Lesbian Fanfiction.
Actually, if I’m being truly specific, I’m going to review:
Fiction
Fanfiction
Lesbian Fanfiction
Lesbian Fanfiction hosted on Archive of our Own
A Fraction of the Lesbian Fanfiction hosted on Archive of our Own, including some of the most popular.
A Fraction of the Lesbian Fanfiction hosted on Archive of our Own, including some of the most popular, that I’ve read. <- This
Let’s get something out of the way immediately: I’m not a lesbian. I’m a male-identified more-or-less straight person. So my review of Lesbian fanfiction is necessarily going to be the view of an outsider. That being said, I’ve read a shitload of it, it’s arguably my favorite genre, and I think I have some interesting things to say. Besides, it’s fun to dive headfirst into a subculture you’ve never heard of and look at all the wacky jargon they come up with.
Other warnings: this dives into certain aspects of sexuality, so while there are no NSFW images, the content is briefly R-rated. There are also plenty of spoilers for various shows and books.
Shipping Subculture Basics
First we’ll need to do a brief overview of shipping subculture, because there’s some vocabulary and because Lesbian Fanfiction is a subset of the Shipping Subculture. A lot of my examples will be pulled from Harry Potter, because it’s one of the biggest fanfiction communities and because many people are familiar with the characters and setting.
A ‘Ship’, short for ‘relationship’, is a pairing, usually (but not necessarily) of two characters. A ‘Shipper’ is someone who is emotionally invested in the relationship between those two characters and its success. A shipper ‘ships’ (as a verb) those two characters. Relationships between characters are often expressed as
A ship can be canonical (the relationship happens explicitly in the source material) or noncanonical (the relationship doesn’t explicitly happen in the source material, although it might be hinted at or ‘teased’). This is referred to as a ‘canon’ ship or a ‘noncanon’ ship. Ships can be between any number of characters of any combination of gender identities.
The characters of Avatar: The Last Airbender engage in fierce debate over whether or not Kutara should have ended up with Aang or Zuko.
As an example of all this, I am a shipper who ships the Harry Potter/Hermione Granger ship, also known as the Harmony ship. This would be an example of a noncanon het (straight) ship. This means that I think they should have been the primary pairing of the Harry Potter novels, and when I read Harry Potter fanfiction, I tend to gravitate towards stories explicitly advertised as having the two in a romantic relationship.
Other Vocabulary
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OTP: Shippers will usually have an ‘OTP’, or ‘One True Pair’, the ship they hold dearest in their heart. If three people are involved in the ship, this is replaced with ‘OT3’.
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AU: Alternate Universe. This is when a fanfic transports the characters from their original setting into an alternate one.
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There’s minor AU, where a few elements are changed from the original setting but the rest is kept intact (imagine if Harry Potter had been raised by Dumbledore instead of the Dursleys!), and
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Major AU, where the setting is completely different (what if the Justice League were all ordinary teenagers attending high school together!)
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AO3: Archive Of Our Own, one of the biggest (and best organized) repositories of fanworks on the internet.
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Fic: A work of fanfiction, which is a work of fiction using an established world that someone else wrote.
Popular Ships (And My Favorites)
Given that most fiction is heteronormative (not saying this is good or bad, just true), the majority of lesbian fanfiction centers around noncanon pairings. Without going too in-depth, I’m going to list some of my favorite pairings, whether they’re canonical or not, and a brief blurb about them along with a recommended fic (warning: read the tags on the fics; some of them are very R-rated). You can skim this if you want.
- Wenclair, NonCanon: Wednesday Addams and Enid Sinclair from the Netflix show Wednesday. They’re roommates who learn to get along, and Enid appears to be the only person Wednesday accepts physical and emotional intimacy from who isn’t trying to kill her. Recommended fic: In the Heat of the Moment
- SwanQueen, NonCanon: Emma Swan and Regina Mills from the ABC show Once Upon A Time about Disney characters in real life. The two of them literally co-parent a child, and the men they’re paired off with are male versions of each other. Recommended fic: every winter fades away (into the spring)
- SuperCorp, NonCanon: Kara Danvers (Supergirl) and Lena Luthor from the CW show Supergirl. The two have a very close friendship, a perfect Romeo-and-Juliet backstory (their families are enemies), and are intensely emotionally intimate. Recommended fic: reflecting in your eyes (like an endless summer)
- Kigo, NonCanon: Kim Possible and Shego from the Disney Channel show Kim Possible. They have an ‘experienced older person/younger person’ dynamic along with ‘enemies to lovers’, and Shego regularly calls Kim ‘Princess’, ‘Cupcake’, and other terms of endearment. Recommended fic: Alone Together
- Clexa, Canon: Clarke Griffin and Lexa from The 100. They do kiss, but Lexa is killed pretty early on (a classic case of ‘Bury Your Gays’, the trope where, like black people in horror movies, gay characters are killed off at suspiciously high rates). Recommended fic: The Lay of Looking-Glass Land
Tropes of the Genre
Lesbian fanfiction, and fanfiction in general, has its share of common tropes.
Common Fanfic Tropes
Enemies to Lovers, where the two characters in the ship start out as enemies and grow closer over time, is very popular. I tend to find it most often when the characters are actually enemies in the canon they come from: Rachel Berry and Quinn Fabray from Glee, Regina Mills and Emma Swan from Once Upon A Time, etc.
For some reason people love coffee shop AUs, where the characters are transplanted into baristas and customers, and high school AUs, where all the characters attend a normal American high school.
Then there’s 5+1, where a fic will be structured as a series of six scenes, five where the scene plays out one way and one where it plays out differently, e.g. “Five times Harry and Hermione almost kissed and one time they did.” I don’t know how or why this became popular, but I suspect it has something to do with listicles.
Some other general tropes: the infamous There Was Only One Bed, wherein the two characters are stuck in a situation where, you guessed it, they need to sleep and must sleep in the same bed. This trope is old as dirt - it was lampooned on 30 Rock - but it’s still quite popular as a way to force physical intimacy. There’s also a plethora of soulmate-based tropes that crop up from time to time.
Lesbian/LGBT-Specific Fanfiction Tropes
Lesbian fanfic in particular has a few tropes that are less well represented in het fics, usually for obvious reasons.
Comphet is a common trope - one or both of the characters involved never realized that they could view women sexually until the other character ‘awakened’ them. This tends to come into play when characters are from a more traditional or conservative background, like Quinn Fabray in Glee (when paired with Santana or, my preference, Rachel Berry) or Alicent Hightower (when paired with Rhaenyra Targaryen) in House of the Dragon.
Gay panic is another, related, trope that pops up a lot; I tend to view this as authors processing their own experiences through their writing. There’s also a wealth of fics that deal specifically with discrimination in regards to gay or lesbian pairings.
And They Were Roommates is a popular trope, especially given that historically, many lesbians have been referred to as ‘roommates’ when in reality they were romantically together (and had to conceal that fact).
One of my favorite tropes is Sun Lesbian, Moon Lesbian, where the pairing is between two girls with opposing personalities that nonetheless mesh: one is cheerful, bright, and outgoing, while the other is quiet, brooding, and quirky. Their aesthetics will reflect this, with the sun lesbian dressing in bright colors and the moon lesbian in dark colors. The best canon pairing of this nature I know of is RWBY’s Yang Xiao Long and Blake Belladonna:
Yang on the left, Blake on the right. Guess which one’s the sun and which is the moon.
And my favorite noncanon pairing of this nature is Wednesday Addams and Enid Sinclair:
AND THEY WERE ROOMMATES.
Sexuality in Lesbian Fanfiction
There’s a lot of smut. Just so, so much of it. But it’s almost always passionate and emotional, not exploitative or crude. It’s in character. It develops plot. I don’t think there’s necessarily more sex in lesbian fanfiction than there is in gay or straight fanfiction, but I do think that the focus on the emotional aspects comes through clearer.
In fanfic of The 100 pairing Lexa and Clarke Griffon, for instance, the sex is almost always laden with emotion. There’s hate sex revolving around Lexa’s betrayal of Clarke, life-affirming sex in fanfics where (spoilers) Lexa survives, and gentle, caring sex where the emotional weight of the two women’s in-story burdens are explored.
Something that interests me greatly is that there is very often - far more than chance, I would argue - a dominant/submissive dynamic, and the dominant partner usually corresponds to which character is represented as the more ‘masculine’ of the two. Between Lexa and Clarke, for instance, Lexa is usually dominant in the bedroom in most fics, and she’s a trained soldier and commander in the show - a traditionally masculine role. If you look at how she dresses:
Not exactly traditional feminine wear.
It’s also quite masculine.
Wednesday and Enid from the Netflix show Wednesday also tend to exhibit strong D/S dynamics, although Enid is canonically a werewolf, which introduces a whole world of weirdness.
Look, fanfiction is weird about wolves, okay?
There’s a common fanfic trope referred to as ABO, or Alpha, Beta, Omega, which introduces a secondary set of sexual characteristics and dimorphism to humanity. It originated in the Supernatural fandom as a way to pair two men together such that they could have children, as Omegas of either gender are capable of conceiving. The use of Alpha, Beta, and Omega come from a study about the behavior of wolves in captivity, and its use in fanfiction is a whole other topic that essays, video essays, and even court cases have dealt with. That being said, it’s a small but meaningful subset of lesbian fanfiction and almost always contains a great deal of sex.
Fanfiction Quality
Sturgeon’s Law and Large Numbers
Fanfiction obeys Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap.
While there’s still a great deal of poorly-written and nonsensical lesbian fanfic, the top 20% of fics are every bit as well-written (is not as well-edited) as the average novel, and the top 1% are as good as any writing you’ll find elsewhere. While that might not sound like a good ratio, remember that a popular fandom will have thousands of fics.
As an example, let’s look at the Once Upon A Time fandom. On Archive of Our Own, there are (as of time of writing) 58,911 fics in the fandom. 16,904 of those are tagged with the SwanQueen pairing (‘Evil Queen | Regina Mills/Emma Swan’), or a little over a quarter. It’s the most popular pairing in the fandom. Even if we’re only looking at the best 1% of those fics (I usually try to find these by sorting on ‘Kudos’, a sort of upvote system that AO3 uses), that’s almost 170 fics that are as well-written as any professionally published book containing my preferred pairing. While the length of these fics may vary from short story to doorstopper, it’s basically a guarantee that I can find a few novels’ worth of writing for any pairing I prefer.
Speculations on Why Lesbian Fanfic Is Better Written
This is pure speculation on my part - I’m not even sure how you’d get the data to prove this one way or another - but in my experience reading both male/female and female/female fics, the female/female ones tend to be better written. I’ve got two theories:
- Het writers have a bigger paying audience. If someone wants to write books with male/female relationships, they can attempt to write and publish their own original stories in the market, thus that’s what they do. Writers who want to focus on female/female stories have a much smaller potential audience and paying market, and thus aren’t as rewarded for publishing original work. Hence the distribution of talent favors lesbian fanfic writers because there’s less of a demand for the professional version of their work.
- Something I’ve found generally true in the LGBT spaces I’ve interacted with is that, because the people in them deviate from societal norms, they have to think more critically about the nature of their relationships. In a male/female relationship, there’s a preexisting roadmap in each culture for how the relationship is supposed to work. In American culture, for instance, men usually instigate and women are supposed to be more receptive. Men are supposed to be more physically able and women are supposed to do more of the emotional labor. (I want to be clear that I’m being descriptive, not normative.) When two women or two men pair up, however, they don’t have that cultural script to follow, so they have to pay attention and make it up as they go along. I think this leads to deeper writing as authors are forced to engage with human relationships without being able to fall back on old patterns.
Life of a Pairing
How does a pairing start? Or, to use the correct vernacular, how is a ship launched?
Usually a pairing will begin with a spark in the canon. There will be a scene in the book or show or movie where the characters meet, and a shipper will interpret it as sexually-charged. This is a common beginning for lesbian ships when a scene wouldbe sexually charged if it were taking place between a man and a woman, but since it’s two women the source material doesn’t interpret it that way. A good example might be from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One of the early scenes between Faith and Buffy feature this:
Faith is drawing a heart in her misted breath and looking at Buffy. Definitely something straight people do for their gal-pals.
If this scene happened between a man and a woman, it would clearly be indicative of romantic or sexual subtext, although the show didn’t explore that subtext between Faith and Buffy themselves.
A few short fics of the pairing might appear as someone explores the idea, a small community sprouting up centered around the pairing of the characters. The watershed moment comes when someone writes the “canonical” or “best” fanfic of that pairing, which is then called the
I saw this process happen in real time for the Lightcannon pairing, which ships the two League of Legends characters Jinx and Luxanna Crownguard. The pairing was born from a single frame of a launch trailer for a mobile game:
Lux on the left, Jinx on the right. And yes, this is all it takes to get a shipper going.
There were a few fics that sprouted up here and there, until the Lightcanon bible emerged: Flashbangs and Frag Grenades, by Calchexxis, a half-million word series of short stories and novels covering the two of them meeting, falling in love, and going to war together. The author established a clear characterization for the two of them, drawing on Netflix’s Arcane for Jinx’s characterization but (as far as I can tell) inventing Lux’s almost single-handedly as someone who’s even more insane than Jinx but hides it better. I watched as other authors began to use the two tags (that I think Calchexxis created) ‘Jinx is Crazy’ and ‘Lux is Crazier’, the ideas spreading throughout the fandom rapidly as the popularity of that incarnation of the characters and their relationship grew.
Once a ship has a bible, future works usually incorporate and spread those ideas, the ship proliferating as more fics are written about it.
Queerbaiting
What It Is
In the age of social media, especially the 2010s, the LGBTQ+ community had a lot of power to make a topic - or a tv show - trend. This (along with a desire to be seen a progressive or ‘woke’ when the ideology is ascendant) gives companies an incentive to court that demographic. That being said, while the LGBTQ+ community is very loud online, it isn’t big enough to support large-budget projects through audience viewership. Additionally, featuring a queer relationship creates problems for shows in other countries; the more central the queer relationship is to a show, the less able the producer is able to create a version with said relationship edited out. So a company, say…Disney, has an incentive to court the LGBTQ+ community without actually featuring main-character queer relationships.
These competing incentives drive the phenomenon known as queerbaiting, where a queer relationship is teased but never actually delivered upon. Now, sometimes shippers are just gonna ship and there’s not a whole lot the writers or showrunners can do. That happens. But there are egregious cases of queerbaiting, and they’re usually identifiable by asking oneself: if I flipped the gender of one of the two characters in the queerbaited ship, would the story, scenes together, and dialogue normally have romantic or sexual overtones? Would the story naturally feature a romance between these two characters, except that they happen to be the same gender?
A good example of queerbaiting comes from the movie Pitch Perfect, where Beca Mitchell and Chloe Beale are the most popular lesbian ship. While not their first meeting, at one point Chloe ambushes Beca in the shower, naked, in order to recruit her for an acapella group. The scene - and Beca and Chloe’s relationship - is so sexually charged that they literally admit it in the sequel, with Chloe telling Beca that she regrets not ‘experimenting more’ in college.
Actresses Brittany Snow (Chloe Beale) and Anna Kendrick (Beca Mitchel) not playing it straight.
The most egregious example of queerbaiting I’m aware of, however, comes from Once Upon A Time (OUaT), an ABC show where Disney characters are living in a modern-day town in Maine. Emma Swan, daughter of Prince Charming and Snow White, arrives in town at the behest of her son, who she gave up to adoption…whose adopted mother is Regina Mills, the Evil Queen. The SwanQueen ship arose from the chemistry between the two leading ladies, who go from immediate enemies to intimate friends all while raising a child together. If you want to know more, here’s the shipping wiki link for the pairing, and a history of femslash article that explicitly called out the showrunners for Queerbaiting.
Friends hold their friends’ faces tenderly in their hands, right?
Then there’s the pattern where gay characters get killed off at much higher rates than than straight characters, leading to the Bury Your Gays trope, which can function as another way for showrunners to seem supportive without ever having to feature longrunning lesbian or gay relationships. Notable examples include Lexa from The 100 and Tara from Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
Effect On Fanfiction
Some lesbian fanfiction extends canon relationships, like fics about Korra and Asami Sato from Avatar: The Legend of Korra, but I’ve found that most fics tend to be about noncanon pairings, like SwanQueen. Fics featuring canon relationships are like any other fanfiction - they explore different ways things could happen or different settings, deepening characterization as they go. There’s an element of peace to them, a sense of “we love the original work and we’re just adding to it.”
Fanfics featuring noncanon pairings, in contrast, often take on the tone of correcting a mistake. There’s a bitterness there, a response to an inherent injustice. The writers feel wronged by the canon, and they’re writing like they’ve got something to prove. The sense I get from reading noncanon pairings is usually “the original work created a good setting and characters, except that it completely screwed the pooch with its pairings and I won’t stand for that for one second longer.”
Bashing, a term for when a fanfic author dislikes a character and uses their fanfic to make fun of or otherwise highlight the flaws in that character, appears much more often in fics featuring noncanon pairings, which often bash the women’s canon partners.
What If?
Fanfiction in general asks: what if? What if things went differently in a given story? How many ways could these characters in this setting have turned out? Shipping is a part of that, but only a part.
When you think about it, fanfiction is a depth-first search of the possibility-space of a given fictional world. It explores different permutations of plot, setting, and character within a single framework, allowing authors and readers to stay within the world (and with the characters) they love while keeping things fresh and interesting. Skilled fanfiction authors permute settings and plots while keeping characters true to their characterization in the new context they’ve created. What would Harry Potter have been like, if Harry had been raised by his parents instead of the Dursleys, and Neville was The Boy Who Lived? How would Game of Thrones have ended, if the characters hadn’t all become morons after season 4?
Every book, TV show, or movie can only really chronicle a single storyline, one way in which the characters made choices and events played out. Fanfiction allows other authors to crowdsource additional background, continuations, and alternate choices in a way that gives a fictional world a true depth to it that only lore-dense canons can really match.
Fanfiction also allows amateur authors an opportunity to play within established universes, altering characters to better represent themselves and their own lives. The animated show RWBY, for instance, involves a racial dynamic between normal humans and people with animal traits called faunus, but the racial undertones are explored far more thoroughly in fanfiction than they ever were in the show’s canon, where it lives as a vague allusion but little else. Fanfiction allows people to create adult takes on children’s shows, queer takes on shows with only heterosexual relationships, and rational takes on stories that make no sense.
Why Read Fanfiction?
Why read fanfiction?
There are a couple of different reasons I read fanfiction. For one it’s free to read, and when you read as much as I do that’s not insignificant.
There’s also a sense of comfort and familiarity involved. I started reading fanfic in college while depressed, and it felt good and safe to spend time in a setting I already knew about with characters I already loved. When picking up a new book, there’s always a period of friction while getting to know new characters and a new world, and fanfiction allowed me to skip this entirely.
When you read a work of fanfiction, you don’t have to waste time learning how a new magic system works or why faster-than-light travel is possible in this particular setting. You can skip all that and get straight to the fun parts: plot, shipping, smut, whatever floats your boat.
Perhaps the single biggest reason I read fanfiction is this: I love my favorite stories and characters, and I want to spend more time with them. I think every reader has had the experience of finishing a book or series and feeling a sense of mourning, a sense of having to say goodbye to people that you’ve spent a great deal of time with and grown to care for. With fanfic, you don’t have to say goodbye - there are always more adventures right around the corner.