Or, according to 100,000 works of fanfiction on AO3: two souls destined to find love amidst the chaos, transcending the boundaries between heaven, hell, and earth to be together.

For shippers of “Destiel” (that’s the shipping portmanteau of “Dean” and “Castiel”), the wait was a long one. Initially introduced as a minor character in Season 4 of Supernatural, Castiel’s appearance would go on to spawn one of the biggest ships in internet history, building a legacy of fanfiction, art, video edits, zines, songs, theories, discussions, and conventions, all dedicated to exploring the rich subtext simmering beneath the surface between the two characters.

Like many other popular slash pairings in media, the romantic and sexual undertones that may or may not have existed between the lines were generally understood by fans to be “non-canon.” Non-canon broadly describes any ship, setting, plot, or other elements of the story that are not explicitly confirmed in the source material, but exist as alternative possibilities that fans can flesh out through fanfiction and other creative means. Those three seconds when Dean’s gaze seemed to linger on Castiel’s face? That’s inspiration for a 20,000 word romantic fic right there, regardless of what the scene originally meant to convey.

Ever since the James T. Kirk/Spock days, fans have been drawn to ships that exist beyond the canon of the original material. Non-canon ships make up the overwhelming majority of pairings on AO3, accounting for nearly twice as many ships that exist canonically.

Of course, what counts as “canon” and “non-canon” can vary over the course of the story’s run. Destiel spent 12 years as a non-canon, largely fandom-driven ship until Castiel confessed his love for Dean before dying in the final episodes of Season 15, thus acknowledging their relationship as a semi-canonically romantic one—and blowing up the internet.

This question of canonicity has long been a subject of contention. In the early A.D.s, religious leaders clashed over conflicting interpretations of the Bible (from which the term “canon” is derived from). Since at least the 18th Century, scholars have scrutinized and debated who authored Shakespeare’s body of works. And in the internet age, fans spam gifs and think pieces at each other in a battle to prove which ship is more real. Ask any big fandom and they’ll probably be able to point you to the still-smoldering crater of some ship argument that invoked canonicity (or lack thereof) as a metric of superiority.

Given this endlessly recurring debate, it’s thus worth asking: Why are people way more invested in non-canon content than in the established canon?

As discussed in the slash section, there are a myriad of reasons why fandoms tend to be dominated by slash ships. Given the heteronormativity of mainstream media, it thus comes as no surprise that the majority of these ships are not canonical. Far from discouraging fans from shipping their favorite characters together, these non-canon ships instead allow plenty of room for speculation and exploration of the characters’ dynamic — precisely because of, rather than despite, the absence of a romantic relationship.

Subtext is the key factor here. Canon relationships are often bound to typical romance arcs that play out in conventional trajectories: the steamy “enemies to lovers,” the playful “will they or won’t they,” or the classic “happily ever after,” to name just a few. When writers work in elements like jealous misunderstandings or meaningful glances, they expect the audience to pick up on and follow the progression of this romance. It’s a predictable cue — not necessarily a bad one by any means, but certainly frequent and familiar in media.

But what happens when the audiences flip the script and project these cues on the canon instead, subverting the intended narrative?

This experience then becomes transformative. Instead of adhering to the formulated storylines, fans can instead use the source material as a “springboard for [their] own creative and analytical work”, pushing past the boundaries of the canon to reimagine new narratives. A quiet, fleeting moment between two characters can be reinterpreted as intimate. A heated confrontation between the hero and her enemy can become sexually charged. Such is the freedom of fanfiction: fans have the agency to interact with the story as if it were “a tangible place they can inhabit and explore.”

For queer audiences, a relationship that appears unromantic on screen, but hints at a deeper emotional subtext under the surface may hit particularly close to home, reflecting their own experiences of navigating relationships and identities that may not be acknowledged or validated in their personal lives. Furthermore, rooting for a ship that you know will likely never materialize in the text also means not having to brace for the fallout of said relationship — no messy breakups, tragic endings, or unrealistic portrayals that often accompany queer relationships in mainstream media (like when The 100 famously killed off fan-favorite character Lexa right after she had sex with Clarke, sparking a wave of scrutiny against the Bury Your Gays trope).

In this context, the ambiguity and open-endedness of non-canon ships allow fans to explore possibilities that go unaddressed and unfulfilled in the original text without the risk of being mishandled or cut short by the writers. Fans come together to swap theories, validate observations, share headcanons, and fill in the narrative gaps, forming a community where queerness is celebrated, studied, and foregrounded in a media landscape where it often lacks the attention or respect it deserves.

While the allure of non-canon dynamics isn’t exclusive to slash ships (Fox Mulder/Dana Scully from The X Files originated the term “shipping,” after all), there’s a noticeable lack of them among the top femslash and straight ships.

Still, despite the long-running popularity of ships like Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor and Regina Mills/Emma Swan, femslash remains the least popular ship genre on AO3. It’s still quite rare to see multiple female characters who are complex and interact within a shared narrative (as contemporaries, partners, or rivals), and even when they do, it’s easy to pass off intimate interactions between women as platonic rather than romantic. Furthermore, female characters are more likely to be paired up with a partner or have their relationship status serve as a central plot point in their arc, often at the expense of developing deep connections with other characters.

It’s not all bleak for femslash shippers, though. Marlene McKinnon/Dorcas Meadowes, the #6 most popular femslash ship, has gained a cult following thanks to the explosive popularity of the Marauders fandom, despite each character only being mentioned once in the entire Harry Potter series.

Non-canon ships offer fans a creative outlet to explore relationships that are traditionally underrepresented in media, but their popularity may also encourage producers to exploit fan interest without actually providing meaningful representation on screen.

You may have noticed that most of these top ships feature characters whose sexualities are either established or treated by the canon as straight.

Often, the queering that happens in fanfiction isn’t just in the fans’ heads. Productions from “Sherlock” all the way to “Frozen” have been called out for incorporating character traits, dialogue, or narratives that allude to queerness but stop short of delivering genuine representation, allowing producers to capitalize off the buzz without alienating mainstream audiences and, more crucially, their money.

Check out Netflix’s promo for Wednesday: an Addams-family themed drag party titled WednesGay and an “opposites attract” tweet about Wednesday and her roommate-turned-friend Enid.

Or these videos by Teen Wolf actors Dylan O’Brien and Tyler Hoechlin — the real world counterparts to their character ship Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski — calling for fans to vote for the show in the 2012 Teen Choice Awards while embracing in suggestive poses. And it worked: Teen Wolf won Choice Summer TV Show that year.

Or Disney’s live-action remake of the Beauty and the Beast, which made headlines for featuring the “first LGBTQ character in Disney’s history” only for it to amount to a two-second blink-and-you-miss-it scene of LeFou dancing with an extra.

The common thread? Each example is a token gesture aimed at appealing to queer fanbases for marketing and promotion purposes, “baiting” fans with promises of queer content to drive engagement.

Meanwhile, queer-led shows are facing increasing cancellations as networks continue to slash promising productions after just one or two seasons. Shows about queer women are even more vulnerable to cancellation despite logging high viewership, ratings, and fan support.

While the popularity of non-canon ships can be linked to wish fulfillment and escapism, it also highlights deeper structural issues rooted in the overrepresentation of the straight male perspective in mainstream media. Fans project onto these characters because there are simply more of them, and they’ve benefited from being around longer, with well-established tropes, greater attention, thriving fandom spaces, and richer development — unlike the often short-lived and underdeveloped stories about queer and female characters.

Sometimes, these non-canon ships draw more attention than queer ships that canonically exist in the show, and may especially overshadow queer characters of color. Case in point: Supergirl fans had biracial couple Alex Danvers/Kelly Olsen right in front of them, but chose to produce close to 18,000 more fics about on AO3 about non-canon pairing Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor instead.

Take a look at this summer 2023 gender and race breakdown from centreoftheselights.

Out of the 202 characters that make up the top 100 most popular ships on AO3, there are only four Latino characters, one Indigenous character, and one Black (Afro-Latino) character. In contrast, roughly a third of these characters are Asian (55 characters), while over half are white (134 characters).

It's a cyclical problem: mainstream media favors characters of certain archetypes, which influences fandoms to reflect these preferences, and which then reflects these preferences right back to mainstream media. Rinse and repeat.

This fosters fan spaces — even queer ones — that notoriously alienate fans of color by rejecting dialogues around racism and intersectionality, especially in regards to how fandoms treat both characters of color and their actors.

For example, Bridgerton, a show whose cast has been subjected to racist abuse for “race-bending” its originally white book characters, recently attracted further controversy for “gender-bending” Michael Stirling into Michaela Stirling and confirming a future lesbian romance between her character and Francesca Bridgerton.

This reinterpretation of a straight white man into a Black queer woman has prompted fans to complain about the excessive “wokeness” of the show, resulting in a petition with over 40,000 signatures demanding the character’s identity be “restored.” Even when creators push for greater diversity and representation, fans do not always respond positively, so “palatable” ships remain on top while less conventional ships struggle to gain visibility.

AO3 is often lauded for being a safe haven for fans with marginalized identities. But even within a space designed for inclusivity, the characters that people love to fantasize about still tend to be overwhelmingly straight white men, reinforcing a feedback loop that continues to favor dominant identities in media.

Subverting the canon can go beyond transforming enemies into lovers or friendship into sexual tension — the entire universe of the story can become a sandbox that’s ripe for reimagining.

Writers can transpose characters into new settings to explore how they would exist in a different environment, like mashing multiple fandoms together (think Harry Potter in the Avengers universe with Percy Jackson as his rival) or throwing them three thousand years back in time. It’s the ultimate practice of “what if?”, one that allows writers and readers to reimagine and reinterpret their favorite stories over and over in new and exciting ways.

But the age-old adage “write what you know” applies here, too. Out of the 20 most popular Alternate Universe tags — where the setting itself, not just the characters, diverges from canon — nearly half are set in everyday circumstances like “high school” and “coffee shops” or transform extraordinary characters into “humans” with “no powers”.

Beyond the wish fulfillment aspect of fanfiction, fans can also use these alternate universes as a vehicle to ask “speculative and reflective questions about their own lives.” Fanfiction can be a great medium to explore deeply personal questions through fictional — but just as real — scenarios. For example, what would it be like for Steve Rogers to come out at his high school? How might Dean Winchester deal with a quarter life crisis? How did Harry Potter cope with living in an abusive home? When fans come together to exchange comments and ideas, offer advice, or simply leave kudos on a fanfic, it might just help make life feel a little less lonely.

Ultimately, the fascination with non-canon fanfiction speaks to the interplay between creators, fans, and the story itself. It’s an old practice — older than the internet at least, going by those James T. Kirk/Spock zines from the 1980s — but as long as stories continue to inspire people, there’s just no limit to how far the imagination can go.

Or, according to over 200,000 works of fanfiction on AO3: two enigmatic vocalists having their sexual awakening with their fellow boy bandmates.

Often we think of fanfic fandom as moving in one direction: from the pages of the internet to the “real world,” ala E.L. James’ original Twilight fanfic to “50 Shades of Grey” to suburban mom book club favorite.

But the opposite also happens: real people become characters in fictional 100 chapter sagas. It’s the ultimate rewriting of “art imitating life” into “life imitating art.”

Over the last 11 years, roughly 13% of the fanfiction on AO3 has been reserved for this type of storytelling, or Real Person Fiction (RPF).

Like all of fanfiction, RPF heavily skews slash (M/M) and non-canon, but even more so. Slash fics make up 56% of all fanfic on AO3 compared to 82% of RPF, while non-canon fics account for 59% of all fanfic, but 83% of RPF.

The list of top RPF ships (all slash and all non-canon) reads like a Spotify playlist with some YouTube and television content sprinkled in. Sixteen out of the Top 20 are boy bands (or bands of all boys).

Slash shipping boy bands (or bands of boys) is nothing new. In the 1960s it was the Beatles’ John Lennon/Paul McCartney; in the 1970s it was Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page/Robert Plant (sometimes shipped by the pseudonyms “Tris and Alex”); in the 1980s it was Guns N' Roses’ Axl Rose/Slash; and in the 1990s it was New Kids on the Block’s Jordan Knight/Joey McIntyre. And decades later AO3ers are still writing about these ships.

So why are boy bands tailor made for romantic reinventions?

In her book “Larger Than Life: A History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS,” author Maria Sherman explains that boy bands embody a softer, more innocent masculinity that enables fans to safely experiment beyond traditional identity and desire, and to swivel between romantic types.

Because boy bands exist through a “female gaze” (opposite of much of the world), Sherman theorizes that “[boy bands] dare not to uphold straight cis men’s interest, but to celebrate marginalized people’s humanity.”

Although this theory doesn’t always work for the band members themselves — think *NSYNC’s Lance Bass hiding his sexuality to uphold a stereotypical masculinity — it does hold true for fans’ interpretations: the queer women who can’t decide if they want to be Harry Styles or be with him, the drag kings who interpret the Backstreet Boys’“I Want It That Way” to be about anal sex, and of course the ever growing amount of RPF.

Boys in fanfic are quite literally stuck in the phase before they become Boyz II Men.

Although much of popular fanfic is dictated by what is happening in the “outside” or “real” world, with M/M RPF there also might be a bit of a “Peter Pan” effect, where boys can essentially age out of the fanfare.

Let’s see how this plays out over time with the biggest RPF fandoms by number of fanfic works with ships.

Let’s take a closer look at the top two fandoms: BTS and YouTube RPF. One group sings about wanting to “light it up like dynamite,” and the other builds Minecraft dynamite. So… not much in common at first glance.

But consider this, both fandoms come from cultures with rigid gender norms, especially around masculinity.

First up: BTS. They’re from South Korea, home to the largest gender wage gap of OECD member countries. The Washington Post’s Michelle Ye Hee Lee writes the country’s “deep-seated view of women’s role in society can be summed up in one Korean word: jib-saram, or “home person.” It’s a word for ‘wife.’”

But the burden to conform to gender roles doesn’t stop with just women, men also must meet a certain stereotype of masculinity. In the 1990s, that was the Korean equivalent of a “finance bro,” a “salaryman” with expensive suits and luxury watches. But, K-pop has started to stretch and expand the country’s definition of what can be masculine. Enter K-pop inspired “flowerboys.”

K-Pop artists are often instructed to play up this “versatile masculinity” and gender fluidity through “fan service,” or the practice of pandering to the desires of fans. And, fans can be demanding.

Despite the lack of fan service by One Direction, fans still shipped Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson, famously causing friction in their relationship.

But in the case of Jeon Jungkook/Park Jimin, everyone’s in on it, from BTS’ management right down to BTS themselves. It’s intentional and orchestrated. Of course, it’s easy to instigate parasocial delusions when you’ve got a wink like Jimin’s.

If they are flirting with each other, that means they are not flirting with other women, which means that there is a tiny glimmer of a chance they could date you. If you are playfully suggestive toward men and conveniently available for women, well, you’ve got the market on lock, as evidenced by the makeup of BTS ships: 41% are slash ships (M/M) and 23% are XReader ships, where the author inserts themselves in the storyline.

Fan service may come off as inconsequential queerbaiting, but it’s set against a backdrop of hypocritical homophobia. South Korea, like much of Asia, has yet to legalize same-sex marriage or civil unions and lacks many other protections for queer people. Yet, arguably one of the country’s biggest exports — K-Pop — is built on purposefully romantic-ish relationships between men. And, the same playbook is being used for K-Pop girl groups to amplify same-gender relationships between women like Red Velvet’s Irene/Kang Seulgi.

By creating slash ships of some of the biggest K-Pop stars, fanfic authors directly challenge this dichotomy, rewriting the current limits of masculinity, sexuality, and gender identity.

Much the same antiquated limits around masculinity, sexuality, and gender identity impact YouTube RPF as well.

A decade ago, the gaming community was forced to take stock of its toxic masculinity after Gamergate, a misogynistic online harassment campaign and a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture. The harassment spanned the gamut from “make me a sandwich” memes to death threats, but the message was clear: only cisgender straight white men belonged.

Not much has changed in the last 10 years. In 2023 a former Call of Duty champion — whose nickname is “Censor,” despite doing none of that — said a homophobic slur on his Twitch stream. He apologized. Then a week later he said the n-word.

All of this in the name of being an alpha male.

That’s why it can be so refreshing to see YouTuber bromances — even if their identities are wrapped up in the characters they play online. Somehow, they’ve been able to subvert the “masculine stereotypes that make young men reluctant to open up emotionally and likely to assume a competitive distance from peers.” According to fanfic on AO3, these friendships rank right up there with the likes of Marvel’s Peter Parker & Tony Stark.

Because these types of unfiltered relationships between men are so rarely visible in the “real world,” fanfic authors jump on the chance to expand the intimacy, creating a fantasy blueprint of their hopes for reality, sometimes blurring the lines between friendship and romance. 67% of YouTube RPF ships are friendship sagas, followed by M/M ships at 26%.

According to researchers at the University of Winchester, bromances and queer relationships are inherently linked:

You’d think this would have the video game community rushing to deal with its sexism, racism, and homophobia, but the progress is slow and often the product of individual instead of collective actions.

YouTubers like popular pairing Dan Howell/Phil Lester and Ranboo each openly vlogged about their sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2018, Howell uploaded a video titled “Bascially I’m Gay,” and two weeks later Lester posted his own “Coming Out to You” video. Then, four years later in 2022 Ranboo, began openly talking about their gender identity and being non-binary.

While representation and inclusivity have improved, they’re still far from the default. The video gaming community’s fatal flaws still get reflected right back into the games produced and played, multiplying unjust and imbalanced worlds.

In the 2010s, there were roughly 91,000 video games documented by the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, a project organized by Temple University’s Adrienne Shaw. But, only about 1% had any type of queer representation. And in the rare chance that a queer storyline was included, they were often treated like “side quests.”

Writing fanfic about BTS and YouTube vloggers is transformative work, turning the “side quest” into the “main quest,” where all of the swirling systemic, structural, and societal problems that plague your favorite real person can be erased with a flick of the wrist. You get to create the representation you need.

It also creates a safe (or safer) space for women, non-binary, and genderfluid authors — the majority on AO3 as seen in the Slash section — to speak back against a heteromasculine culture that pits them as “groupies” or as infiltrating and “cock-blocking” men’s spaces (think how Yoko Ono was framed as allegedly “breaking up” the Beatles).

Looking at Top 5 RPF ships by relationship type, we can see that 4 out of 5 straight ships are canon, meaning that, at some point they existed in real life. And the one non-canon? It’s Olympic champion Canadian ice dancing pair Scott Moir/Tessa Virtue, who are not technically romantically involved, but whose careers thrive on their intimate chemistry.

Conversely, the Top 5 ships for M/M and F/F are nearly all non-canon, with the exception of femslash soccer pairing Tobin Heath/Christen Press, who have been together for eight years.

This speaks to a sexual orientation and gender identity representation gap between today’s biggest celebrity stars and their fanbases.

Since musicians make up most of these top ships, let’s start there. Only 3.9% of top 1,000 solo music artists self-identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community, but 9.8% of millennials and a whopping 22.3% of Gen Zers do.

Of course, the stakes to conform are higher when your career, livelihood, privacy, etc. are so attached to your public persona. And these celebrities are VERY well known. We’re talking millions upon millions of social media followers. Harry Styles himself has a cumulative total of close to 100 million across Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube.

With all those eyes on you, it’s easy to think that having fanfiction penned about you should “come with the territory.” But having fanfiction essentially leak out into the mainstream is still a bit uncharted.

When Spockanalia, the first Star Trek fanzine, launched in 1967, people were writing about the future, but no one could predict the internet. Pre-internet, fanfic looked like Spockanalia: “somewhere around 20,000 copies” that sold for 50 cents a piece and were put together by hand without a heavy duty stapler:

Post-internet, fanfic (including Spockanalia) is at the fingertips of millions, and without you being stabbed by staples.

With increased visibility comes increasing ethical questions around real person fiction — you know it’s heated when the Fanlore wiki entry has a whole section devoted to pros and cons and there are hundred of Reddit thread rabbitholes.

Like everything truly worth anything in the world there’s a spectrum, but the crux of it may come down to this question posed by the University of Texas’ Center for Media Engagement in their “The Ethics of Digital Real-Person Fan Fiction” case study.