bai-xue:

I was an extremely precocious young reader who regularly checked out books for people aged anywhere from 16 and upward. My parents encouraged this, and while they occasionally were curious as to what I read, they generally trusted me to choose appropriate books for myself. Spoiler alert: I didn’t. I read a whole lot that was way out of my league.

Around eleven or twelve, I checked out my first smutty book from the library. I had no idea it was smutty, and very little on the cover or inner fly indicated this. It was called The Book of Shadows by James Reese. I read it during my lunch breaks at school. Inside was the following (that I can remember):

• A woman bleeding to death from her vagina
• Underage lesbian sex between an intersex girl and a cis girl
• Bondage rape of the underage intersex girl by an incubus
• A threesome between a cis man, the underage intersex girl, and a succubus
• Sex in a church between a priest and a woman, who later were turned into the incubus and succubus
• Graphic descriptions of torture and death

Around thirteen, my grandfather gave me a book. He had no idea what was inside. He just knew it was a scary book, and that his little granddaughter loved scary books. It was called The Laughing Corpse by Laurel K. Hamilton. Inside was the following (that I can remember):

• Graphic depictions of gruesome whole-family murders
• Discussions of children being taken along to their father’s visits to the red light district
• Discussions of handicap fetishes
• Discussions of extreme BDSM practices such as extreme knifeplay
• Human sacrifices

Around fourteen, I found a book at a bookstore while on a very boring vacation. I convinced my mother to buy it for me, and she did so without looking very closely at the cover. It was called Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. Inside was the following (that I can remember):

• A boy my age deepthroating a grown man, complete with descriptions of what his semen tasted like
• A dog giving oral pleasure to a young boy
• Massive, and I mean massive, amounts of emotional abuse
• A teenage boy seeing his mother getting oral sex from another woman
• The same teenage boy seeing his mother and another woman having sex in a bathtub full of glass
• Multiple attempted rapes

I read all these and more. Much more. This was before even fanfiction.net existed. They were easily accessible at bookstores, libraries, anywhere you might find books. Literature has always been full of this kind of material – and it needs to be. It is a place for humans to purge themselves, to safely explore that which cannot be explored elsewhere, to deal with the strange animalistic impulses that make us so deeply human. That last book? It was a memoir. Those things actually happened to Augusten, and literature was the place he went to safely purge the horrors that he experienced and witnessed as a boy.

Fanfic is no different. Fanfic, in fact, is even safer than regular fiction, because it has a much smaller and more niche readership. Much of the bad stuff in fic you can’t find unless you specifically look for it. Not so with regular fiction. I had no idea what I’d picked up when I checked out The Book of Shadows. The sex scenes and violence blindsided me. There were no tags, no warnings, nothing. I had been a kid in search of spooky stories, and I got rape and death.

But here’s the kicker: I have no hard feelings against the writers of those books, or against the books themselves. They did nothing to me. My parents probably should’ve looked a bit closer at what I was reading, but they didn’t, and I have no hard feelings against them either. I was the one who, when at 11-14 I came across material I knew was too much for me, kept reading. I knew I should’ve closed those books and stopped reading. I didn’t. That was my choice, and mine alone.

That aside, back to my original point: all this happened well before even FFN existed, let alone AO3. And it’s always existed. It always will exist. It needs to exist. Those Purge movies have one thing right: humans need outlets, places to explore the animal darkness that still lingers inside us. Literature is one of the few places where that can be done safely.

In essence, fanfiction is no different from literature outside of the ways I’ve mentioned above. If you support purging sites like AO3, you need to ask yourself why you don’t support purging libraries. And then you need to ask yourself how you’re any different from the book-burners of the past, who started their pyres with pornographic “filth,” but in their desire for purity, expanded them to include even literary treasures like the Decameron.