LOS ANGELES, Nov 7, (Net) : One of the world’s most popular fan fiction libraries has been dark for over a week after a cyberattack forced it offline, leaving millions of fans without access to their favorite stories.
Since October 29, anyone trying to reach Archive of Our Own — known to devotees as AO3 — has been met with a message saying the site is down for maintenance.
“It’s all over my social feed. People are in withdrawal,” Johanna Sarriot, a writer and co-founder of pop-up romance bookstore Love Love Books in Los Angeles, told AFP.
Fan fiction refers to stories written by amateur authors using characters and worlds from already-existing books, films or TV shows.
Contributors rewrite endings, invent romances or give minor characters their own adventures, then share them online for free.
Once a niche hobby, it has become a launchpad for the publishing industry, generating breakout smashes like E.L. James’s “Fifty Shades of Grey,” which began as “Twilight” fan fiction, and Ali Hazelwood’s bestseller “The Love Hypothesis,” which sprang from the “Star Wars” universe.
Launched in 2008, AO3 has become the genre’s main home, with more than 11 million registered users and nearly 18 million works stored on the platform.
In 2019, it won a Hugo Award for Best Related Work, one of science fiction’s most prestigious prizes.
“We wanted to make sure that there was a place for fans to engage in non-commercial creativity in ways that wouldn’t barrage them with ads, censor them to placate advertisers, sell their data, or do anything but provide a space for fandom,” said Harvard Law School professor Rebecca Tushnet, who helped found the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) which runs the site.
– ‘AO3 is not gone’ –
Romance fans have been among the hardest hit by the outage.
“Romance readers read really fast and they read a lot,” explained Sarriot.
For the bookseller, what is at stake goes beyond a website. Fan fiction is where many future authors learn their craft and where readers disover new writers.
“Writers who were able to cut their teeth on fanfiction, and just write as much as they wanted with all the joy and no constraints, can lead to really great novels,” she said.
