If you’re a woman of a certain age, you’ve probably encountered fanfiction at some point in your life. I once read a Harry Potter fanfiction that totaled 500,000 words and 188 chapters over the course of about 3 days. I never went as far as writing my own fanfiction for any fandoms that I perused, but sometimes when you were in a pinch and wanted to read about a very specific arrangement between specific fictional characters, the AO3 archives filter could help you out with that. It’s easy for people who have never read fanfiction to pathologize it as a bunch of fujoshi teenage girls who care more about Harry and Draco than they do about their own schoolwork, but that isn’t the truth, Ellen.

Most of the teens who engage with fanfiction grow up to be perfectly functioning members of society who don’t engage in antisocial behaviors related to said fanfiction. Unfortunately, there are always some outliers.