about fanfiction.lol

hi, i'm Brennan (he/they), a Queer Red River Métis author and web developer based in Mohkínstsis, Treaty 7 territory. i've been publishing online since 2011 on deviantART, writing poetry, longform essays and lyric nonfiction across writing craft, literary criticism, and digital culture. i run Berry House, a values-driven studio building accessible websites, and founded Write Club, a creative collective for emerging writers that i ran for three years. i've been chronically online since Windows 98 and Limewire.

i created fanfiction.lol because i'm a webdev that loves writing. i wanted a website that focuses on the joy and positivity of fandom and transformative works like fanfiction, so i made it! forking the Archive of Our Own codebase is notoriously difficult, and there are only a handful of AO3 forks in existence. now, this is one of them!

our main rules

fanfiction.lol is designed by people who still, despite everything, have optimism and goodwill for fandom and people in general. our main rules are that we are:

  • meant to be fun
  • spread joy
  • be excellent to each other
  • express yourself creatively

who we are

we are a small, fledgling team of one developer and a handful of wranglers. we will mess up and we ask you give us the same amount of grace and forgiveness that we will extend to you! the site is also in active development and may explode, so please keep redundant back-ups and copies of your work elsewhere!

if you're new to fandom, or writing in general, fanfiction.lol is a great place to start! we're a low-stakes, low-stress website. We believe any and all fandoms, ships, and writing quality are valid and all deserve a place to call home. we're here to centre marginalized voices and identities that can go underrepresented in fandom, and we will meet you where you are.

fandom and discourse agnostic

we're also fandom and discourse agnostic. what does this mean in practice? i care about the writing of fans, not discussions about what writing is good or problematic. there is no interest in fandom's internal politics or getting into the weeds of meta aspects. write whatever you want. tag it honestly so readers can find what they're looking for and avoid what they'd rather avoid. there are many other places on the internet for those conversations, just not here.

fanfiction.lol is for fanfiction, but also for original fiction, multimedia fanworks, and more. you're allowed to publish any writing, so long as you made it and it follows our content policy guidelines.

why build another archive?

a few weeks ago, i wrote a guide for setting up a cheap, accessible server. after being a front-end developer for over a decade, i realized the full-stack wasn't as scary as i'd thought. but with the server up and running, i needed a real project to sink my teeth into.

being on the IndieWeb for half a year now, i've encountered a lot of impressive, talented web developers and webweavers. one of them is a sysadmin who runs SuperLove, a fork of the otwarchive codebase. i was told this is notoriously difficult to set up, and that there are only a handful of these AO3 forks in existence. SquidgeWorld was the first, launched in November 2020. since then, a small constellation of independents has followed.

i decided to try my hand at it, specifically because of the challenge. i purchased the domain fanfiction.lol for two bucks, set up my CloudFlare tunnel, populated the database, wrote quite a bit of janky Ruby script, and to my surprise things didn't take that long to get up and running.

the stack is a bit of a beast. there's Ruby on Rails 8.1.0 running on Ruby 3.4.6, MySQL for the database, Redis, Elasticsearch (which takes 2GB of RAM alone), and Memcached. they're all containerized with Docker Compose. i wrestled with database initialization, Elasticsearch indexing, site skins (the CSS is stored in the database, not files, which makes design work hell), and configuring ReSend for SMTP email notifications.

i deployed it to the server currently living in my basement behind a Cloudflare Tunnel, handling SSL and routing without opening my home ports to the internet. the whole thing runs in Docker containers: the Rails app, a background job worker, a scheduler for recurring tasks, and all the supporting services. it's a lot of moving parts, but Docker makes it manageable.

so, after sitting at my IDE for 20 hours straight and looking at the site surprisingly running, i asked myself: do i actually want to do this for real? do i want to be a webmaster for a fandom writing community?

the answer was an unhesitating yes.

the history of transformative works

i've been writing my entire life, and have written a lot already about how i believe writing is sacred, even going as far as to proclaim it is literal magic. writing is how we process the world and relieve some of that constant flooding of our minds. it's how we figure out our identity until something fits. writing is good medicine.

and fandom in particular is where a lot of that writing lives. the history of transformative works is much longer than most people assume.

the practice of taking a story that matters to you and doing something new with it is as old as storytelling itself. Virgil wrote The Aeneid as an expansion of Homer, Dante planted his self-insert and contemporaries in Hell, Shakespeare himself recycled plots from Holinshed and Ovid with creative abandon. people have always extended or deconstructed stories. always have yearned for a rewritten ending or to give a voice to a background character.

the Internet liberated this practice. LiveJournal in the early 2000s. FanFiction.net. even zines before that, the physical stapled things circulated at conventions, mailed between strangers who found each other through classified ads in the back of genre magazines. fan communities gave historically marginalised people (women and Queer people especially) spaces to write stories that the mainstream wouldn't write, to explore identities that the mainstream wouldn't represent, and to say things the mainstream wouldn't print.

there is an incredible outpouring of love and creative labour in fandom, often dismissed by the general population, as well as by the "more serious" writing circles i've moved through. fanfiction communities produce extraordinary writers. they have produced communities that have held people through some of the hardest years of their lives.

they deserve independent, free infrastructure. and yes, it is that serious.

what makes fanfiction.lol different?

the site runs on the same open-source otwarchive codebase, which means it has the same robust tagging system, the same work search, the same kudos and comments and collections infrastructure. what does that mean in practice?

i take content warnings seriously. these are important signals for readers who need them. the archive warnings have been updated to include:

  • Graphic Depictions Of Violence
  • Major Character Death
  • Rape/Non-Con
  • Ableism
  • Colonialism
  • Queerphobia
  • Misogyny
  • Racism
  • Systemic Oppression
  • Real Person Fiction (RPF)
  • Incest

the relationship tags currently include:

  • F/F (Female/Female, Femslash, Lesbian, Sapphic)
  • F/M (Female/Male, Het, Heterosexual)
  • M/M (Male/Male, Slash, Gay, Homosexual, Queer)
  • Gen (General, no romantic or sexual relationships)
  • Multi (Multiple relationship tags)
  • Other (Unconventional dynamics, crossovers, complex relationship structures)
  • Poly/Ensemble (Polyamorous relationships, ensemble casts, multi-partner)
  • Asexual (Asexual spectrum, Ace)
  • Aromantic (Aromantic spectrum, Aro)
  • QPR (Queerplatonic Relationship, non-romantic committed partnership)
  • Queer (Other queer relationships or identities)
  • Getting Together (Developing romantic relationship, from not-yet-lovers to established)

a tagging system should reflect the full range of what people actually write. if you think i've missed something, let me know and i'll add it!

nearly all tags are canonical. on AO3, only certain approved tags are "canonical", which means they're searchable and wrangled by volunteers into consistent forms. the rest are secondary and freeform. here, everything you tag goes into the searchable record.

fanfiction.lol is small. it's personal. it's mine. and yours, too, if you'd like.

anybody is free to register

no waiting list. you want to post your story, you sign up. that's it.

acknowledgments

this project wouldn't exist without two people:

Kat (Melo), who runs superlove (superlove.sayitditto.net)
and wrote the Docker deployment guide that made this possible: superlove.sayitditto.net/works/171

Walter, who runs SquidgeWorld (squidgeworld.org) — the
first AO3 fork ever deployed — and whose bare-metal guide is the foundational reference for anyone doing this:
squidgeworld.org/works/34491

other AO3 forks

fanfiction.lol is one of several AO3 forks. here are the others:

contact

this project is a labour of love, and we operate with good faith. if you mess up, that's okay! because we will too—we're new to running a fandom site ourselves! we will always assume the best in people, and try our best in return. you can email me, Brennan, at [email protected] with any comments or concerns.

please read our ToS, content policy, and privacy policy for more details.

find me across the web: brennan.day/accounts

fanfiction.lol is not affiliated with the Organization for Transformative Works or Archive of Our Own. it runs on the open-source otwarchive codebase, licensed GPL-2.0-or-later.

love writing, love fandom!