Towards a Definition of “Fanfiction”

3,564 people took our survey. Here’s what we learned.

As a podcast, Fansplaining is pretty passionate about fanfiction. We’ve run a survey on fans’ favorite fictional tropes, declared war on the dictionary over a misplaced space, and held forth on Mary Sues. But if we don’t even trust Merriam-Webster to spell “fanfiction” correctly, how can we trust any dictionary to define it? So earlier this year, we ran the Fansplaining Definitions Survey, which claimed to “help us come to a collective definition of what ‘fanfiction’ means.”

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