Stephen King Doesn’t Have People in His Fridge:
Fanfiction, Trauma, and the Infantilization of Fandom
[February 5, 2026]
While I stopped using Ao3 in October 2025, I want to talk about the troubling trend I’ve been seeing—especially from the under-35 crowd—in online fandom spaces over the last several years: the rise of Purity Policing in fanfiction. It feels like déjà vu in the most exhausting way, except this time it’s coming not from pearl-clutching outside forces, but from younger fans inside the house, pointing fingers at other fans and declaring that if you write anything they consider “problematic,” you are just as bad as the thing you’re writing about.
This is not a new phenomenon. I was there for Strikethrough and Boldthrough on LiveJournal in 2007, when fanworks and personal journals were mass-deleted under the guise of protecting children from “inappropriate” content. It was censorship, full stop—and fandom responded. Archive of Our Own (AO3) was created because we knew we needed a space that valued context, creative freedom, and a “tag, don’t police” ethos. AO3 exists as a direct response to that moral panic, built by women and queer people who were tired of being told their fiction made them bad people.
So when I see the younger generation now doing the same damn thing—insisting that writing dark or taboo fanfiction is equivalent to condoning abuse or being an abuser—it makes my blood boil.
It's often said that Purity Policing is about “protecting trauma survivors.” I see that phrase thrown around a lot, like it’s some kind of moral shield--we’re just trying to make fandom safe for survivors!—but as someone who actually is a survivor, and lives with C-PTSD, I need to say: that’s not how triggers work.
Yes, it’s true that I often avoid stories where I know there’s going to be graphic rape, abusive relationships, or other dynamics that are hard for me. That’s my choice. That’s part of managing my mental health and knowing my own limits. But that does not mean I think those stories shouldn’t exist. And it definitely doesn’t mean that someone writing them is causing me harm.
What actually triggers me—what makes my chest tighten and my brain go sideways—is often weird, random shit. A song. A look someone gives me. A specific phrase. A situation that emotionally echoes something I went through years ago. You cannot sanitize the internet—or fandom, or AO3—enough to prevent that. It’s not about content being “clean” or “wholesome.” It’s about individual associations and trauma responses that are unique to each survivor.
And here's the thing: some of us write to cope. Some of us survived things you can't imagine, and our fanfiction isn’t about glamorizing those experiences—it’s about transforming them, confronting them, or just making sense of them in a space where we have control. Fiction is a sandbox where we process feelings and power dynamics and fear and desire in ways that are safe and consensual and not real. That’s the whole point.
And what really gets me is how often the people shouting the loudest about “protecting survivors” are the ones doing real harm. I’ve been harassed in fandom—repeatedly—by so-called “antis” who decided they were the moral police. I was dogpiled by a Big Name Fan and her friends over creative differences and harassed for five years. It was brutal. It wrecked my mental health. So don’t tell me you’re standing up for trauma survivors while actively traumatizing other survivors. That’s not advocacy. That’s bullying in a progressive trenchcoat.
If your activism involves harassing people off platforms, talking shit about people on fandom hate forums, demanding takedowns of fiction you don’t like, or sending nasty comments on Ao3, you’re not “keeping fandom safe.” You’re replicating the exact kind of control and cruelty many of us came to fandom to escape. You’re not protecting survivors—you’re silencing them.
Some of us need the dark to feel seen. Some of us are writing through hell just to find the door out. Don’t you dare lock it behind us in the name of “protection.”
And let me say it loud for the people in the back: fiction is not reality. Writing a murder scene does not make you a murderer. Reading a fic where a character makes morally repugnant choices does not mean you endorse those choices in real life. If that were true, Stephen King would have a basement full of corpses in refrigerators, and George R.R. Martin would be baking Frey pies in his spare time.
The conflation of reading or writing about something with approving of it is not only intellectually lazy—it’s actively harmful. It erases the nuance of storytelling. It shuts down conversations about trauma. It shames people who are already carrying pain. And it infantilizes fandom into a playground where the only acceptable content is content that passes an ever-shifting moral litmus test—where being “clean” is more important than being honest or creative or free.
I am not saying you have to read content that makes you uncomfortable. You are always allowed to curate your own experience. Use tags. Block. Mute. Walk away. But do not, for the love of all things fannish, tell me or anyone else that writing a character doing a bad thing in a fictional story makes the author a bad person.
You want a safe space? So did we. That’s why AO3 exists. But “safe” never meant “sterile.” It meant freedom—to explore, to create, to bleed on the page if we needed to.
So maybe instead of wagging fingers, you could learn a little history. Read the tags. Mind your business. And stop acting like a fic author is personally responsible for every trauma you’ve ever encountered.
And here’s the thing that really chills me: calls for censorship—no matter how progressive they claim to be—always end up in bed with the religious right. Always. You start with “protecting people from harmful content,” and next thing you know, the same frameworks are being used to silence queer creators, to ban books by trans authors, to pull stories by abuse survivors off shelves. Because moral panic doesn’t care who lights the match—it just wants to burn.
History shows us this every time. Whether it’s parents banning “perverse” books from schools or platforms deplatforming creators for violating “community standards,” censorship always lands hardest on the already marginalized.
And in fandom, too, this plays out with depressing consistency. The first creators to get attacked are always the ones writing queer stuff, kinky stuff, trauma-heavy stuff—anything messy or inconvenient or uncomfortable that doesn’t conform to some sanitized idea of morality. These purity crusades don’t uplift survivors or protect children. They target people who are already living in the margins and trying to find expression, solidarity, and healing through fiction.
So if your stance on “problematic” content is functionally indistinguishable from Focus on the Family or Moms for Liberty, maybe it’s time to ask yourself: whose side are you actually on?
This is not a new phenomenon. I was there for Strikethrough and Boldthrough on LiveJournal in 2007, when fanworks and personal journals were mass-deleted under the guise of protecting children from “inappropriate” content. It was censorship, full stop—and fandom responded. Archive of Our Own (AO3) was created because we knew we needed a space that valued context, creative freedom, and a “tag, don’t police” ethos. AO3 exists as a direct response to that moral panic, built by women and queer people who were tired of being told their fiction made them bad people.
So when I see the younger generation now doing the same damn thing—insisting that writing dark or taboo fanfiction is equivalent to condoning abuse or being an abuser—it makes my blood boil.
It's often said that Purity Policing is about “protecting trauma survivors.” I see that phrase thrown around a lot, like it’s some kind of moral shield--we’re just trying to make fandom safe for survivors!—but as someone who actually is a survivor, and lives with C-PTSD, I need to say: that’s not how triggers work.
Yes, it’s true that I often avoid stories where I know there’s going to be graphic rape, abusive relationships, or other dynamics that are hard for me. That’s my choice. That’s part of managing my mental health and knowing my own limits. But that does not mean I think those stories shouldn’t exist. And it definitely doesn’t mean that someone writing them is causing me harm.
What actually triggers me—what makes my chest tighten and my brain go sideways—is often weird, random shit. A song. A look someone gives me. A specific phrase. A situation that emotionally echoes something I went through years ago. You cannot sanitize the internet—or fandom, or AO3—enough to prevent that. It’s not about content being “clean” or “wholesome.” It’s about individual associations and trauma responses that are unique to each survivor.
And here's the thing: some of us write to cope. Some of us survived things you can't imagine, and our fanfiction isn’t about glamorizing those experiences—it’s about transforming them, confronting them, or just making sense of them in a space where we have control. Fiction is a sandbox where we process feelings and power dynamics and fear and desire in ways that are safe and consensual and not real. That’s the whole point.
And what really gets me is how often the people shouting the loudest about “protecting survivors” are the ones doing real harm. I’ve been harassed in fandom—repeatedly—by so-called “antis” who decided they were the moral police. I was dogpiled by a Big Name Fan and her friends over creative differences and harassed for five years. It was brutal. It wrecked my mental health. So don’t tell me you’re standing up for trauma survivors while actively traumatizing other survivors. That’s not advocacy. That’s bullying in a progressive trenchcoat.
If your activism involves harassing people off platforms, talking shit about people on fandom hate forums, demanding takedowns of fiction you don’t like, or sending nasty comments on Ao3, you’re not “keeping fandom safe.” You’re replicating the exact kind of control and cruelty many of us came to fandom to escape. You’re not protecting survivors—you’re silencing them.
Some of us need the dark to feel seen. Some of us are writing through hell just to find the door out. Don’t you dare lock it behind us in the name of “protection.”
And let me say it loud for the people in the back: fiction is not reality. Writing a murder scene does not make you a murderer. Reading a fic where a character makes morally repugnant choices does not mean you endorse those choices in real life. If that were true, Stephen King would have a basement full of corpses in refrigerators, and George R.R. Martin would be baking Frey pies in his spare time.
The conflation of reading or writing about something with approving of it is not only intellectually lazy—it’s actively harmful. It erases the nuance of storytelling. It shuts down conversations about trauma. It shames people who are already carrying pain. And it infantilizes fandom into a playground where the only acceptable content is content that passes an ever-shifting moral litmus test—where being “clean” is more important than being honest or creative or free.
I am not saying you have to read content that makes you uncomfortable. You are always allowed to curate your own experience. Use tags. Block. Mute. Walk away. But do not, for the love of all things fannish, tell me or anyone else that writing a character doing a bad thing in a fictional story makes the author a bad person.
You want a safe space? So did we. That’s why AO3 exists. But “safe” never meant “sterile.” It meant freedom—to explore, to create, to bleed on the page if we needed to.
So maybe instead of wagging fingers, you could learn a little history. Read the tags. Mind your business. And stop acting like a fic author is personally responsible for every trauma you’ve ever encountered.
And here’s the thing that really chills me: calls for censorship—no matter how progressive they claim to be—always end up in bed with the religious right. Always. You start with “protecting people from harmful content,” and next thing you know, the same frameworks are being used to silence queer creators, to ban books by trans authors, to pull stories by abuse survivors off shelves. Because moral panic doesn’t care who lights the match—it just wants to burn.
History shows us this every time. Whether it’s parents banning “perverse” books from schools or platforms deplatforming creators for violating “community standards,” censorship always lands hardest on the already marginalized.
And in fandom, too, this plays out with depressing consistency. The first creators to get attacked are always the ones writing queer stuff, kinky stuff, trauma-heavy stuff—anything messy or inconvenient or uncomfortable that doesn’t conform to some sanitized idea of morality. These purity crusades don’t uplift survivors or protect children. They target people who are already living in the margins and trying to find expression, solidarity, and healing through fiction.
So if your stance on “problematic” content is functionally indistinguishable from Focus on the Family or Moms for Liberty, maybe it’s time to ask yourself: whose side are you actually on?
