Fanfiction, broadly defined as literature written by admirers of existing works of fiction that borrows characters, settings, or universes from those stories, has surged in popularity over recent decades. While many fanworks incorporate romantic or sexual elements drawn from their source material, a substantial subset is written partially or exclusively for pornographic purposes. Archive of Our Own, commonly known as AO3, is the leading host for this content, holding millions of stories and attracting traffic that rivals major commercial websites. According to traffic analytics cited by the authors, English-language stories make up roughly 87 percent of the site’s approximately three million explicit works, which is why the research team chose to restrict its sampling to English-language fiction.

The study was conducted by Ezelbahar Metin and Eran Shor of the Department of Sociology at McGill University in Montreal. Despite fanfiction’s popularity as an alternative form of pornography, the authors note that it has garnered far less research attention than visual mainstream pornography or commercial erotic fiction. Content analyses of pornographic videos have repeatedly documented high rates of aggression, including spanking, hitting, choking, and verbal abuse, and have sparked decades of debate about whether such content shapes attitudes toward violence against women. Written erotica produced largely by and for women has rarely been subjected to the same quantitative measurement, leaving a substantial gap in the evidence base.

To fill that gap, the researchers assembled two samples from AO3. The first consisted of the 525 most popular sexually explicit fanfiction stories on the platform, capturing the content most widely read and endorsed by users through the site’s kudos and bookmarking systems. The second was a random sample of 360 explicit stories, designed to represent the broader universe of explicit fanfiction rather than only its most celebrated works. Sampling was drawn across fandoms spanning multiple media categories, including films, television series, books, and video games, with well-known franchises such as Marvel and Star Wars strongly represented. The authors acknowledge a slight oversampling of the Marvel and Star Wars fandoms due to a collection error, which they chose to retain in the analyses, and they excluded the Minecraft fandom because most of its fanfiction involves real people rather than fictional characters.

The core analytical strategy relied on AO3’s distinctive tagging system, a crowdsourced classification infrastructure in which authors voluntarily label their stories with descriptive tags covering pairings, themes, and warnings. This system allowed the researchers to conduct a large-scale textual analysis of aggression-related tags across nearly 900 stories. The results were striking: approximately half of the stories in the overall sample carried at least one tag conveying aggression. Even more notably, acts of non-consensual aggression or rape were present in almost 20 percent of the sample. In the most popular stories, aggression tags appeared at similarly high rates, suggesting that aggressive themes are not a fringe interest but a mainstream feature of the genre’s most-read content.

Because tags depend entirely on voluntary author self-classification, the researchers took the additional step of verifying what the tags actually captured. They conducted a verification content analysis, reading the full text of 60 stories from the sample to determine whether aggression coded in the tags corresponded to aggression depicted in the narratives themselves. This deeper examination suggested that the true prevalence of aggression may in fact be substantially higher than the tag-based estimates indicate. Some authors, the analysis implies, may under-tag aggressive content, either because they do not consider certain depictions aggressive or because they wish to avoid warning labels that might deter readers. The verification step therefore functions as a methodological caution for any researcher hoping to use platform tags as a proxy for content in user-generated corpora.

The findings sit within a rich and contested literature on aggression in sexual media. Prior content analyses of best-selling pornography videos, including work by Bridges and colleagues and by Fritz and colleagues, have documented that a majority of mainstream scenes contain physical aggression, most often directed at women. Studies of online pornography by Shor and Seida and by Klaassen and Peter have similarly found aggression woven into popular content, while meta-analyses by Wright, Tokunaga, and Kraus and by Ferguson and Hartley continue to debate whether consumption of such material is linked to real-world sexual aggression. Written erotica has its own smaller research tradition, with analyses of romance novels, slash fiction, and transgressive themes in commercial erotica documenting long-standing representations of force and domination in fiction marketed to women.

What makes the fanfiction case especially provocative is its audience demographics. Survey evidence and platform research indicate that cisgender women form the largest single category of AO3 users, with nonbinary people forming a substantial second group. The authors frame their analysis as an important step toward illuminating women’s sexual preferences precisely because fanfiction is mostly read and written by women, in contrast to mainstream pornography, whose production and consumption have historically been male-dominated. The high prevalence of aggression tags raises challenging questions for theories that attribute aggressive content in pornography solely to male demand or male-controlled production. When women are the primary authors and readers, the presence of force fantasies in erotica complicates simple supply-side explanations and aligns instead with a broader body of research documenting that sexual fantasies involving force or submission are reported by a nontrivial share of women in general-population studies.

The authors are careful to situate these findings within their limits. Fanfiction is fiction, produced within communities that maintain elaborate norms about consent, warning, and reader choice, and AO3’s tagging architecture is explicitly designed to let readers curate their own exposure. Depicting rape in a story is not equivalent to endorsing it, and a long scholarly tradition in fandom studies reads transgressive fanworks as explorations of power, trauma, and desire rather than straightforward expressions of preference. The researchers also caution that some sampled stories may no longer be available on the platform and that some tags may have been updated since sampling, introducing a degree of temporal uncertainty into the estimates. Still, the scale of the corpus, the combination of a popularity-based and a random sample, and the verification of tags against full texts give the study an unusual degree of robustness for research on user-generated erotica.

The broader significance of the work lies in what it reveals about an enormous and largely invisible pornographic ecosystem. Millions of readers consume explicit fanfiction daily, often on the same devices and under the same roof as mainstream video pornography, yet the genre remains absent from most policy debates, content analyses, and public discussions of sexual media. By quantifying aggression in this space with standard social-scientific methods, Metin and Shor have opened a new empirical front in the study of sexual media, one that centers the preferences of the women who write and read it. Whether the aggressive themes documented here reflect fantasy, aesthetics, narrative convention, or genuine desire is a question the study does not resolve, but it firmly establishes that any complete account of sexual media and aggression must now include the written worlds of fandom alongside the visual industries that have dominated the conversation for half a century.

Subject of Research: Textual analysis of aggressive and non-consensual content in sexually explicit fanfiction on Archive of Our Own

Article Title: The Prevalence of Aggressive Content in Online Sexually Explicit Fanfiction

Article References: The Prevalence of Aggressive Content in Online Sexually Explicit Fanfiction. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-026-03523-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10508-026-03523-0

Keywords: fanfiction, Archive of Our Own, pornography, erotica, aggression, non-consensual content, sexual aggression, content analysis, women's sexual preferences, fandom, sexual media, textual analysis

The timing of the research could hardly have been more charged. In October 2025, Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter reported that AI had entered WWE’s creative process, and months later TKO Group Holdings President Mark Shapiro acknowledged that Chief Content Officer Paul Levesque, better known as Triple H, uses AI in storylines. WWE clarified that its current AI use is largely confined to video edits, highlight packages and audio noise reduction, but for fans who had spent years reading between the lines of every backstage leak, the distinction felt almost irrelevant. The genie, as the researchers put it, was already out of the bottle.

Professional wrestling occupies a unique position in this debate because it is arguably the most liminal genre in popular culture, neither pure sport nor pure theatre but a hybrid resting on a fragile contract known as kayfabe. Kayfabe is the sustained illusion that rivalries and victories are real, even when everyone knows they are scripted. It is not about deception but about collective buy-in. The study asks what happens when the presumed writer is no longer human but an algorithm trained on decades of television transcripts, and whether AI in effect turns heel by breaking wrestling’s oldest covenant.

Using netnography, a form of ethnographic research adapted for online communities, the authors analysed public discourse across three subreddits, r/SquaredCircle, r/WWE and the satirical r/SCJerk, over a ten-week period between November 2025 and May 2026. They gathered live event threads, conducted keyword searches for terms such as AI and ChatGPT, and applied snowball sampling until every identified topic reached saturation. Reflexive thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke’s six-phase procedure produced three dominant themes, each revealing a different strategy by which fans negotiate algorithmic authorship.

The first theme the researchers call the forensic gaze, a heightened form of textual and visual inspection in which fans evaluate content not by whether it advances a storyline but by whether a human created it at all. The phenomenon crystallised around the April 2026 NXT video package featuring Zaria, which fans overwhelmingly condemned for its AI-generated appearance, citing asynchronous mouth movement, missing background blur and a plastic sheen on skin textures. More than 150 separate comment threads debated the package, with side-by-side comparisons to older, human-made WWE videos serving both as evidence and as demonstrations of community authority. The gaze extended to language itself, with fans claiming they could identify machine-written promos by their symmetric sentences, absence of colloquialisms and lack of heat behind the words.

Yet the forensic gaze also uncovered an uncomfortable truth. A minority of fans confessed that formulaic human writing had become so predictable that they could not reliably distinguish it from machine output. As one commenter asked, would AI really be worse than the fifteenth identical cookie-cutter promo of the year? This liminal case, the authors argue, suggests that algorithmic kayfabe can taint the viewing experience retrospectively, raising the possibility that humans have already been performing something close to algorithmic work long before machines arrived to formalise it.

The second theme centres on affective rejection, condensed in the label fans gave to unwanted AI content: AI slop. The term carries theoretical weight beyond its insult value, connoting waste, matter out of place and something generated without intent, care or craft rather than created. Outrage spiked after the NXT video packages, and 62 mentions of AI slop appeared on r/SquaredCircle compared with 34 on r/WWE and only 12, mostly sarcastic, on r/SCJerk. The researchers connect this fury to the moral economy of creative labour, noting comments such as the observation that WWE will pay Roman Reigns twenty million dollars but will not pay a video editor sixty thousand. Fans, the study finds, have become political economists of culture, framing AI authorship not merely as poor output but as dispossession.

Beneath the anger lies what the authors identify as an ontological violation. Fans distinguished carefully between the first fake, the deliberate theatrical artifice of kayfabe in which they knowingly participate, and a second fake, an algorithmic simulation of that artistry with no human intention behind it. One fan summarised it bluntly: the problem is not that wrestling is fake, which is obvious, but that when AI writes it, there is no human performance behind it at all. Drawing on Goffman’s frame analysis, the researchers describe this as a keying of a keying, a simulation of a simulation that audiences cannot trace and therefore cannot re-enter, rupturing the ritual contract between performer and spectator.

The third and most theoretically generative theme is parodic absorption, exemplified by r/SCJerk, where fans neither detect nor rage but instead swallow the AI threat whole through elaborate comedy. Users crafted a fictional AI-written return storyline for Bobby Lashley obsessed with Japanese culture, an absurd promo that mocked the real AI’s ignorance of wrestling continuity while exceeding its failures with deliberate ridiculousness. By producing funnier AI promos than the machines themselves, fans affirmed their own creative agency, and the community’s memes, such as the phrase AI is the new authority, allowed members to engage with the technology through strategic ambiguity, never committing to acceptance or rejection. The researchers call this an anti-affordance, a community-enforced discursive constraint that channels suspicion into irony, and they describe humour here as grassroots ontological repair, a communal mechanism for managing anxiety about a future no individual fan can control.

The study’s culminating contribution is the concept of dialectical algorithmic kayfabe. Rather than a single rupture in wrestling’s ritual contract, the authors argue that algorithmic kayfabe unfolds as an ongoing oscillation between detection, outrage and ironic repair, moments that coexist across platforms and can even be experienced by the same fan in the same evening. The framework extends affordance theory by showing that platform norms shape not just how fans speak but which emotions are legally acceptable in each space, and it advances Foucault’s author function by revealing its forensic side, in which fans deny authorship to any text lacking traces of human labour. As the researchers conclude, machines may increasingly help produce wrestling’s stories, but they hold no jurisdiction over togetherness, the collective performance of fandom that remains stubbornly, defiantly human.

Subject of Research: How WWE fans on Reddit perceive and negotiate AI-generated or AI-assisted wrestling storytelling on streaming platforms

Article Title: A netnography of WWE fans grappling with AI storytelling on streaming platforms

Article References: Pandey, S., & Roy, A. (2026). A netnography of WWE fans grappling with AI storytelling on streaming platforms. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 249. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00597-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00597-y

Keywords: WWE, artificial intelligence, netnography, fandom, streaming platforms, kayfabe, authenticity, Reddit, AI slop, algorithmic kayfabe, creative labour, digital culture