Fan fiction, stories that take inspiration from characters, setting, or plots from already existing pop-culture staples, has been around for decades. It gives fans an opportunity to explore and share their own imaginings from love confessions between Scully and Mulder to alternate endings to the Hunger Games or what marriage was like for Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth. Often posted online, these stories can take on a life of their own, and recently there has been an influx of traditionally published novels that either started out as fan fiction or were inspired by fan fiction.
The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood originated online as fan fiction written about Rey and Kylo Ren from Star Wars. While their names were changed and any potential copyright infringements from the Star Wars universe edited out, the illustration on the cover of the book is based off of Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley, the actors who played Kylo Ren and Rey in the original movie. Reylo, a portmanteau of the two Star Wars characters' names, is one of the most popular ships in fan fiction, and numerous stories have been created featuring them. The Love Hypothesis tells the story of a fake-dating scenario between those characters as a Ph.D. candidate and a professor.
For more Reylo goodness, this time set in a fantasy world, The Hurricane Wars by Thea Guanzon is an adult fantasy romance that started life as a Reylo fanfic. The world and character names have been changed from the original fan fiction, but the enemies-to-lovers elements that make Reylo such a compelling couple remains present.
When discussing enemies-to-lovers, Dramione can't be left out! Dramione is the ship name for the Harry Potter characters Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger. While the characters hate each other in the original text, books like Alchemised by SenLinYu and The Irresistible Urge to Fall for your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley imagine that something more romantic simmered under all their tense interactions. Before its traditional publication, Alchemised was a fan fiction called Manacled that was posted online from 2018 to 2019. As with many fanfics that become published novels, the original fan fiction was removed from the web, a process called "pull-to-publish." It's important to note that The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy is considered to have been "inspired" by Harry Potter, rather than starting as fan fiction itself. The author did publish a fanfic called "Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love" years earlier that can still be found online and the title alone indicates it has a very similar vibe to their book.
The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison started off as fan fiction of the BBC show Sherlock. Set in the late nineteenth century, this gas lamp fantasy features supernatural creatures, a serial killer, and a reimagining of Sherlock Holmes as an angel named Crow. Addison adds in the novel's ending note that the book began as a subgenre of fan fiction called wingfic, wherein a character or characters have wings. The dynamic between Sherlock and Watson, in both the show and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original works, is ubiquitous in pop culture, so seeing these infamous characters in situations involving vampiric hunts and hellhounds is particularly entertaining.
Naomi Novik, in addition to being a prolific author, is also the co-founder of Archive of Our Own (AO3), a non-profit, non-commercial archive of transformative works. Her alternative historical fantasy series, Temeraire, while never published on the internet as fan fiction, was heavily inspired by the world of Master and Commander, and the fan fiction she did write for those novels is still available today! The echoes of Master and Commander are particularly strong in the first book of the series, His Majesty's Dragon, which is full of similar Napoleonic-era naval warfare, but with the fascinating addition of dragons shaping the plot.
What's your favorite book that was inspired by fan fiction?
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