Recently, there’s been a rise in interest in fan fiction, the genre entirely made up of stories written by fans using characters, settings or plots from an existing, copyrighted work rather than original creations. The Organization for Transformative Works’ Archive of Our Own (AO3), a non-profit archive for fanworks, saw a record high of 879 million page views in the first week of 2026 alone. 

It’s important to encourage writing fan fiction as a creative outlet, especially because it appeals to so many people. There are plenty of websites and online spaces, in addition to AO3, dedicated to publishing fan fiction to larger audiences. And with the rise of fan fiction writers, the debate of whether fan fiction should be published in similar fashion of original works has come to light.

First, the intent to profit off of writing with a foundation of characters, setting and plot that aren’t original is inherently malicious. Profiting off of another’s Intellectual Property (IP) is copyright infringement, and legal action can be taken as a response. Ultimately, no one can own someone else’s source material.

The way that fan fiction is written also leads to challenges within the publishing space. In general, fan fiction has less world-building and introduction because readers are expected to know all of these aspects from reading the source material. The plot can even be tweaked or completely changed based on the direction of the fan fiction author. Thus, even if a fan fiction writer receives rights from the original author to publish their work, it can’t always be considered good quality without the aspects stated before.  Because of this, traditionally published fan fiction done for profit can easily misrepresent the story the original author wanted to create.

Additionally, fan fiction doesn’t even have to meet any specific writing quality, length or other requirements set by the expectations of the publishing sphere. The nature of fan fiction is inclusive because anyone can write for any aspect of the fandom because there aren’t any tangible restraints that involve time and money. Throw a fan fiction work into traditional publication, and there’s bound to be many issues just from that switch. 

What if the fan fiction author changes the names and other recognizable features from the original source material, then publishes that work for profit? Can it even be called fan fiction at that point? If every important aspect of fan fiction has been changed just to evade copyright infringement, the result might as well be an entirely different work. There’s nothing wrong with publishing an original work for profit, but this originality does not encompass the foundation of fan fiction. Ultimately, the act of traditionally publishing a work for profit inherently means removing it from the fandom sphere. 

Once something is written as fan fiction, it should stay as fan fiction. There is nothing wrong with it being written or shared online, but because of its nature and relationship with the source material, it’s best to keep fan fiction separate from how original works are published.

The views in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of the HiLite staff. Reach Katelyn Chen at [email protected].