With the term first appearing in 1938, fanfiction as a practice of rewriting already established works of fiction has been around for a while. Fans have been writing new versions of their favourite stories or taking beloved characters and creating completely new storylines for the longest time. Beatrice Fanucci describes how for many queer people who don’t see themselves represented in mainstream media, fanfiction is a way to reclaim their rightful places in the story and write their queerness into their favourite characters.

Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost are fanfictions of the Bible.

That’s a joke, yes, but hear me out. While fanfiction is a category of storytelling that rose to popularity only since copyright became a legal reality, the practice of retelling stories is as old as time. Think “Roman Emperor Augustus commissioning Virgil to write The Aeneid on the basis of Homer’s Iliad” old.

Many retellings have nowadays become popular stories of their own, like The Wide Sargasso Sea following on from Jane Eyre and Bridget Jones’s Diary as a spin on Pride and Prejudice. And I know what you’re thinking: retellings are not the same thing as fanfiction. You’re right, but the two have much more in common than they don’t.

Retellings tend to be 'new versions' of old stories, whereas fanfics are usually new stories involving already established fictional characters. But the lines between the two are blurry and, essentially, retellings seem to be a more formal version of fanfiction, with the main differences lying in the fact that the formers are based on works that are not copyrighted.