Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

Does it really matter what fanfiction pairings people read?

Trawling around the internet this week, I came across a video by YouTuber ColeyDoesThings which was exploring the internet drama that had apparently broken out about a birthday cake.

The cake in question had been shared to X by the original poster who was celebrating their birthday and wanted to show off their AO3 fanfiction themed cake.  It had little signs with the AO3 tags, pairings, kudos button, etc. sticking up like candles or the more typical ‘Happy Birthday’ signage.  The poster then received a lot of comments with some particularly negative ones questioning why anyone would read straight canon pairings.  Luckily the negative commentary did get pushback and there was plenty of birthday wishes for OP.

It prompted me to think about the pairings I read and write about in fanfiction because many of my pairings are straight pairings. 

My most popular fanfiction is A Marauder’s Plan in the Harry Potter fandom.  It’s a predominately a ‘Sirius raises Harry after the Prisoner of Azkaban’ story, but there is a Harry Potter/Hermione Granger pairing.  It’s the number one for ‘kudos’ (filtered by completed works in English) in the Harry/Hermione tag on AO3.  My A Step to the Right fanfic is number two.  Of course, while Harry/Hermione is a straight pairing, it’s hardly canon. 

I actually started writing Harry/Hermione because I wanted to explore Harry’s first teenage love as part of A Marauder’s Plan and felt that Hermione was the more obvious choice of love interest than a girl he had never befriended.  I always felt it was weird that Hermione ended up with Ron in canon.  I’ve continued writing the pairing because I enjoy it, although I may challenge myself some time in the future to write a different pairing in the fandom.

The majority of my fanfiction stories are in the Stargate universe.  My OTP there is Sam Carter/Jack O’Neill, an alternative universe/timeline canon pairing, but it was never confirmed as canon on-screen for the main universe/timeline.  I think like many Sam/Jack authors, I began writing the pairing because it was clear that we were never going to see it on the show itself except in alternate settings.

Yet if I explore the pairing tag in AO3, my most popular fanfic which has that pairing tag is actually a John Sheppard/Marshall Sumner story, Distant Stars, which sits at number twenty-four.  Sam and Jack are a pairing in the story, but a minor one in comparison to the main slash pairing.  For a fic which has Sam/Jack front and centre as the pairing, my fanfic Blessed sits at number one hundred and twelve.

I actually started out in fanfic with Airwolf because my OTP of Stringfellow Hawke/Caitlin O’Shaughnessy was teased through the show’s storylines but never actually happened in canon.  Much of my inspiration for my Lost Season series came from my want to explore them as a couple and for them to ultimately have a happy ending.

When I ask myself what straight canon pairings I’ve actually written, the number is fairly small. 

My main Star Trek TNG OTPs are very much straight canon pairings – Jean-Luc Picard/Beverly Crusher and Will Riker/Deanna Troi.  If I write more Star Trek TNG, it would always be with these pairings because I love the pairings too much to play with alternatives.   

I’ve only ever written straight canon pairings in Doctor Who too.  I love Rory/Amy and The Doctor/River Song.  When I have written in the Who ‘verse, it has generally been episode codas/TAGs, exploring aspects of the story not on screen.  Two of my fanfics in Who are a crossover with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but I did keep the pairings since I love them. 

And I’ve generally written canon pairings in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  I’ve written Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Clint Barton/Laura Barton, Bruce Banner/Betty Ross, and Wanda Maximoff/Vision.  Partially that’s because the majority of my stories in the MCU are essentially coda stories such as my Part of the Journey is the End series which followed after Endgame, or they are alternate takes on existing MCU movies where I’ve changed the timeline or events but kept the characters very much in their usual dynamics.

In Hawaii Five-0 I did start out exploring the canon relationship of Danny Williams/Rachel Edwards, but the show took that relationship in a whole weird direction with Rachel going back to Stan and lying about Charlie.  Ultimately the dynamic between Steve and Danny was always going to trump it for chemistry. There is also plenty of subtext in the show about Steve and Danny’s relationship, moments and character beats where the audience can extrapolate that perhaps there is more to their feelings than friendship, even if their relationship on-screen remains platonic.  Once again, by the end of the show, it was obvious Stave/Danny was never going to be actually acknowledged for canon, and I had shifted to writing Steve/Danny when I wanted to write H50 fanfic.

Similarly, I started out writing Tony/Ziva in NCIS before I branched out and started writing Tony with anyone else, because frankly I decided as a writer that Tony deserved a much better relationship given the mess of the canon situation with that ship.  (It’ll be interesting to see what the writers do with it when they’re writing it as a fully formed relationship in the new spinoff).  That said, my first alternative was another straight canon relationship, Tony/Jeanne; Too Many Shoes explored that pairing working out instead of ending as it did in the show.  Then I branched out into exploring Tony with a host of other male partners from Gibbs to original characters to crossover pairings.

Indeed, much of the rest of my writing is a very eclectic exploration of different slash pairings.  I haven’t written much in the way of female/female because I truly haven’t been inspired by any particular pairing to do so, but I have a lot of male/male pairings with my favourite male characters.

Reading wise, I’m pretty much pairing agnostic.  I will read good stories with favourite characters outside of my own OTPs or written pairings.  If it’s a good story and it captures my attention, then it’s likely that the writer has constructed a setting or situation where the pairing makes sense, and I can happily read along – whether that’s a straight canon pairing or not.

I guess what prompted this exploration through my own habits was the idea that some people may have seriously derided someone for reading and enjoying straight canon pairings, and that in their view, that isn’t what AO3 is for.

I don’t disagree that AO3 could be considered a safe space for LGBTQ+ and that many of the readers are searching out male/male or female/female fanfic.  But it is a site for all types of fanfiction, and many of us write and read in fanfiction because we want to explore facets of canon or twists beyond the pairings.  Fundamentally, my most popular fanfic was not written to explore a romance but to explore a father and son relationship between Sirius and Harry.

I guess my musing ends with this: namely that ‘live and let live’ is the key phrase. 

There’s really no reason to be mean to someone on the internet because they like something you don’t, even if the drama of someone saying something mean is just another day on the internet.