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Back to me. I raised comment because I wrote a fanfic where a thirteen-year-old girl is groomed and sexually abused by, and I’m fumbling for context here, a much older iteration of her best male friend. Think of the girl and her best male friend as clones, and the older man in this case the genetic original; she herself is a clone of someone the man was unrequitedly in love with. This is all sounding pretty SFF; I should’ve tried to rewrite it and flog it. The rapist is the POV protagonist: he explicitly and with intent grooms and abuses his quarry, which is perhaps a little heavy for source material where the running joke is that we don’t know where a pumpkin is. The story ends with him being murdered by his teenage clone in revenge.

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The accusation was that the story was intended to titillate, as it was written on a kinkmeme. (For the uninitiated: a ‘kink meme’ is where people anonymously request porn fanfiction, or ‘fills’, but oftentimes a kink meme sags away from porn and becomes a place for funny-story fills, for gen fills, for romance or shippy fills. In my time there I ended up writing one piece of mild pornography, four ‘gen’ stories with nary a kiss, the sexual-grooming story I mentioned up there, and a sonnet sequence.) The story was written because someone had requested ‘age gap kink’. I put it up on AO3 rated E for Explicit (you have to click a little box that says you are not under 18 when you try to read it). It is also tagged as ‘child abuse’, ‘rape’, and ‘underage’. I apologise in the author’s note for writing a darker story than requested by the requestor: they were so kind about it, and it was not intended as a kind of “take this, pervert” comeback. I thought the request was really interesting. I wanted to write about the complications of an alien race who have, in their canon work, been separated from the younger members of their race on account of the adults being physically overpowering and violent; I wanted to write the interaction of an older out-of-time predator with a much younger, idealistic girl with big ideas of revolution and no actual concept of the kind of monsters she’s dealing with. I also definitely wanted to write about a thirteen-year-old boy who sees himself reflected in his much older predecessor, watches his best friend get taken in and abused by the same, and violently rejects it. It’s a nasty story. The end revenge is, at best, pyrrhic, and it is certainly not the girl’s revenge. The title is taken from Lolita, from the final couplet of Humbert Humbert’s Wanted poem: And I shall be dumped where the weed decays/And the rest is rust and stardust.

In a very real way I am the wrong person to discuss dark fanfiction with, because I have not written age-gap/underage stories to titillate. I’ve written loads of stories about grooming and sexual abuse, although sometimes it is metaphorical (The Magician’s Apprentice, first published in Weird Tales and edited by the wonderful Ann VanderMeer, is a story that sets up sexual grooming as a throughline but the grooming is for… something else) and sometimes it is not metaphorical (Chew, first published in Nightmare Magazine, edited by the excellent John Joseph Adams — a teenage girl is raped and murdered in post-WWII Stuttgart, and her story begins there). I don’t think anyone talked about my pro fiction in the Tamsyn Muir PSA.

Maybe they didn’t know it was there, but I have a sense that the problem for some people was the fanfiction part: because all fanfic is obviously porn, then if you’re writing fanfic with child abuse, it’s got to be child porn by definition. Like, why would you put anything in a fanfic unless it was to gratify the deepest and most secret desires of yourself and/or your audience. Why would you bake something into a cake unless it was something you wanted to eat? But fanfic doesn’t have to be cake any more than pro fiction does, and I think we’re undervaluing a huge amount of incredible work by assuming it was all done as a kind of baroque variation on jacking off.

It’s also not as easy as “If you’re writing from a place of personal damage, maybe you get to write this.” People have written brilliantly about personal damages they have not suffered. People have personal damage they don’t, can’t, or won’t disclose. Living cheek-by-jowl with rape culture and teen sexualisation, and total dismissal of teenage girls period, is more than enough of an ‘excuse’ to write about sexual abuse one has not suffered physically but has arguably suffered spiritually. Some people are going to write about the topic with the intent to do it in a thorny and damning and complicated way. Some of them are going to write about it with the intent to titillate. Some of them are going to write about it intending both, trying to start a specific conversation with the reader, going for a deliberate effect. For some readers, their hard line is that they don’t want to see any of this stuff, they want to protect teenagers at all costs, they want to stop the people who would use this material to groom and abuse teenagers. However, the community policing seems to start with often-queer, often-female-identified creators, doesn’t interrogate the work itself, and seems to… not leave the community. A critique that begins with soft targets and never rages against hard targets stops looking like any critique at all. Author as leading moral light is a lovely idea, but it was always one that bore down hardest on women and fiction for women. Ladies and their novels, you know? Read Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl. It has some befuddling loving sermonizing. Know what’s naughty? Fringes