August argues that all adaptations are ultimately works of fanfiction
All adaptations are works of fanfiction. That might be provocation, but nowhere is it truer than in Emerald Fennell’s recent blockbuster Wuthering Heights. Fennell herself frames the film not as a faithful adaptation of Brontë’s 1847 novel, but rather one of her memory of reading it as a fourteen-year-old girl. Wuthering Heights, wet dream that it is, operates very much like fanfiction: derivative, simplified, and preoccupied with reworking established characters through obsessive, horny, and egocentric interpretations shaped by adolescent desire.
Fennell’s scandalous fanfic is symptomatic of broader shifts in culture. The art form has conventionally been understood as a reactive one, as it always responds to centralized cultural production. This is why its most recognizable objects of desire cluster around mass-cultural phenomena, whether fictional, real, or royal; Harry Styles, Harry Potter, or Prince Harry.
Such fanfics tend to emerge where official culture creates desire that it then refuses to satisfy. This can, for instance, be a sex scene cut short, a queer subtext between two characters or subliminal hints given through coded interactions. The aching, never-consummated chemistry between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson has generated an entire universe of “Johnlock” fiction where the text finally commits to what it kept implying. The same logic underpins freaky fanfic shippings like Larry Stylinson, Dramione, or Thorki.
But fanfiction also indexes stranger, more granular libidinal investments. There are hundreds of fics centered on Jungkook, the publicly straight member of BTS, filed under #bottomkook. There are homoerotic Drain Gang fics featuring “highboy digital.” And there are fics shipping niche rappers like Nettspend and Osamason, where one story unfolds like this: “As they leaned closer, an unspoken tension hung in the air. Nettspend took a deep breath, summoning his courage. ‘I think… I think I’m falling for you, Osamason.'”
However, when Wuthering Heights was released, fanfiction had already ceased to be what it once was. One Direction are broken up. Justin Bieber is a father. Harry Potter is being remade for a new generation that wasn’t alive for the first one. The great Wattpad era of the 2010s feels like a distinct cultural moment. As the Nymphet Alumni podcast declared in a recent episode on Romantasy: fanfiction is dead.
But I don’t think that’s quite right. Rather than disappearing, fan logic has been absorbed into centralized cultural production. What I want to outline for the rest of this piece is the extent to which fans have shifted from passive consumers to active forces shaping culture itself. Or, as James Joyce once asked in Finnegans Wake (1939), “my consumers, are they not my producers?”
Fanfiction Cinema in Disguise
One of the clearest examples of this shift is how fanfiction is lifted from platforms like Wattpad and either repackaged by major publishers or adapted into film. Interestingly, its origins as fanfiction often have to be erased due to copyright constraints, producing a strange situation in which texts with fanfiction structures circulate as “original” works. Did you know that the 2024 film The Idea of You was originally based on a Harry Styles fanfic? Or that the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy began as Twilight fanfiction?
In the case of Fifty Shades, this origin might seem surprising, but it quickly makes sense upon closer inspection. Both stories unfold in the grey, overcast landscapes of the American Pacific Northwest. Bella and Anastasia share the same narrative function – passive figures through whom the reader can project – while Edward and Christian Grey embody variations of the same archetype: the controlling, enigmatic, and distant man. Even the most obvious difference between the two movies, the supernatural allure of the vampire in Twilight, is translated coherently into the more realistic allure of BDSM. Importantly, from the perspective of the fan, both films produce the same atmosphere structured around desire, danger, and submission.
But there is something stranger at work. Once Fifty Shades became a phenomenon in its own right, it began generating its own ecosystem of tales. A fanfiction of a fanfiction, generating further fanfictions.
This loop of inconspicuous imitation is worth noting in the context of the familiar complaint, declared by cultural critics like Fredric Jameson and Mark Fisher, that contemporary culture is running on empty. Faced with the sense that we are stuck in an endless cycle of sequels, remakes, and reboots, the pipeline from fanfiction to cinema offers the Culture Industry a useful workaround: a way to keep producing derivative work while appearing not to. The fanfiction origin gets quietly erased, the remake relaunched as something original, and the cycle continues. Only now, it does so with plausible deniability.
Fanfiction as Recursive
A less obvious, more distributed sign of fans as producers can be found in the film adaptations of A Minecraft Movie and Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNAF). Both are based on video games that, by their very nature, lack a sufficiently developed narrative to be directly translated into film. The “source material,” in any traditional sense, barely exists.
In the case of FNAF, creator Scott Cawthon established a loose framework, but the series’ lore was built in active dialogue with its fanbase, drawing heavily from communities in r/fnaftheories, FNaFapedia and fnaflore.com. As a result of this sustained engagement, characters were renamed, plotlines expanded, and narrative directions shaped by fan speculation. Theories such as “VanessaAfton” and “Dream Theory,” along with fan-invented characters that never appeared in the original games (like Sparky the Dog) found their way into the film adaptation. Even the fan-made song “It’s Been So Long” was incorporated into the official soundtrack, while superfan theorist MatPat was ultimately invited to join the cast itself.
In this sense, the FNAF movies were basically co-created with fans. There is something genuinely beautiful about this. The film as it exists today is a collective work, a kind of folk object assembled from thousands of contributions made by people who had no stake in it beyond their love for the thing itself. As such, it punctures the dreadful myth of the auteur, the singular genius who conjures meaning from nothing.
However, the fan-influence on FNAF also points to something else: a kind of anticipatory cinema, one that flips the conventional axiom stating that part of cinema’s allure lies in its unpredictability, its capacity for surprise. For the fan who has spent years immersed in the lore, the cinema visit is not an encounter with the unknown but a process of verification. The film is consumed before it is seen, cinema being reduced to Easter eggs and inside jokes. This predictive, consensus-driven quality makes fan cinema, in a strange way, structurally similar to generative AI. Both operate by aggregating existing material and producing outputs that reflect the statistical average of what already exists, rather than anything genuinely new. As Hito Steyerl has argued, generative AI structurally forecloses surprise. The result, in both cases, is midness – output that is familiar enough to satisfy but hollow enough to forget. The FNAF movie can therefore be thought of as a form of fanfiction slop: the output of an AI model trained on a decade of forum speculation.
Fanfiction Starring the Original
Another interesting example of fans as producers can be found in the rise of audio erotica. On platforms like Quinn, Dipsea, and Bloom, users can tune in and immersively experience the parasocial fantasy of fanfiction, consuming desire in its most frictionless form. But what is particularly interesting is that some of these platforms have begun incorporating real actors, like Connor Storrie, Andrew Scott, and Tom Blythe, to record the content. Where traditional fanfiction placed real people at a safe textual distance, audio erotica collapses that distance entirely. Voices that fans previously could only imagine are now speaking directly into their ears.The most interesting example of this is the audio erotica featuring fan-favourite Christopher Briney. Best known for playing Conrad in the teenage drama series The Summer I Turned Pretty, Briney essentially reprises the same character under a thin fictional pretext on the platform Quinn. Both the show and the unofficial audio erotica spinoff “Hidden Harbour” centre on an incestuous love triangle between two brothers and a girl, set against the backdrop of a summer town to which the characters return each year. While names and settings are slightly altered, the parallels are so precise that the audio erotica barely qualifies as a departure from the source material at all. Briney is essentially performing in a fanfiction based on himself, thereby realizing the fan’s ultimate fantasy.
What does this collapse represent? Not long ago, the subjects of fanfiction wanted nothing to do with it. When Larry Stylinson fanfictions first proliferated in the early 2010s, both Styles and Tomlinson were vocal about what a violation of privacy it was – with Tomlinson eventually blocking the word “Larry” from his Instagram comments entirely, stating that the speculation had actively damaged their real relationship. Fanfiction was something that happened to you, in spaces you weren’t supposed to see, and to acknowledge it was to risk legitimizing something that felt deeply intrusive.
That boundary has dissolved with remarkable speed. That an actor from a series that has generated tens of thousands of fanfics can step into what is effectively the same fantasy space and perform in it without shame, embarrassment, or ironic distance suggests a fundamental shift. Fan desire has moved from something the culture industry managed and suppressed to something it actively recruits and sells back to the people generating it. We have entered a hyperreal loop: the fanfiction was always a simulation of something that didn’t exist, but now the “real” thing is simply a higher-budget simulation of the fanfiction.
Fanfiction as the Style of Too-Late Capitalism
So it seems that culture is in the process of becoming fanfiction. It is important to pay attention to this development because what links these cases is a shared logic of immediacy. Contemporary art theorist Anna Kornbluh describes this as a dominant style of too-late capitalism, where mediation, distance, and delay are stripped away in favor of direct access and instant gratification. Kornbluh connects this to a specific mutation of capitalism that can no longer generate growth through production, so it compensates by intensifying circulation. When circulation rules, attention becomes the scarce resource, and immediacy becomes the highest aesthetic value: culture must be instantly accessible, affectively legible, immersive, and shareable.
This logic can be read across contemporary life – from DoorDash ordering to emojis, Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present, or Brad Troemel’s description of immersive art spaces as “daycare centers for adults.” Fanfiction, too, articulates this immediacy, albeit in different ways. Sometimes very literally, as in audio erotica, where fantasy is no longer mediated through text but arrives in the immediate form of voice, its emphasis on overtly sexualized, hyper-affective scenarios further intensifying this privileging of affect over distance. At other times, immediacy operates more indirectly, as scripts are shaped through feedback loops with fans, collapsing the distance between audience and artwork until the idea of the work as something separate from its consumers dissolves entirely. What disappears in both cases is what Kant called disinterested contemplation: the idea that aesthetic experience requires a certain gap between subject and object, a distance from which interpretation becomes possible. Fanfiction culture treats that gap not as a condition to be preserved but as a problem to be closed and, in closing it, dismantles the very conditions under which art, in any traditional sense, was supposed to be encountered.
By following this logic of immediacy, fanfic culture both articulates and intensifies the capitalist conditions of concealed mediation that obscure the processes through which culture is produced. And if anything, we are only at the beginning of this shift. Films like The Love Hypothesis, originating as Star Wars fanfiction, are set to be released later this year and won’t be the last installment of #fanfiction cinema. Indeed, the future of cultural production will likely not move away from fan logics, but deeper into them.
| Words | August Kaasa Sundgaard |