Archive of Our Own, or AO3, is one of the most popular websites in the world, with over 10 million registered users. Its users spend their time both reading and writing many, many words about their favorite fictional characters. It’s a place that allows normie readers to try out their characters in different scenarios and with different outcomes. In the last couple of years, sites like AO3 became fertile ground for publishers to find new authors who might provide them with their next big hit. 

Last summer, reporter Rachel Kurzius wrote about how fan fiction is going mainstream for the Washington Post.  “Fanfic,” as it’s known to its friends, is the underpinning of smash hits from Heated Rivalry to Fifty Shades of Grey. Kurzius anticipates that as more fanfic adherents grow up and get jobs in various roles in the mainstream, we’ll see more and more of this genre creeping into the mainstream. 

Kurzius spoke Today, Explained host Noel King about why fan fiction is everywhere. An excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. For the whole interview, listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What is fan fiction?

This is such a fun question because there are a couple of different strains of thought here. So let’s start with the big tent philosophy, which is fan fiction is anything that is really derived from or inspired by preexisting works. But if we think about this broadly, basically everything that we know, including many of the classics are fan fiction, right? We could think recently about Percival Everett’s James, that’s Huckleberry Finn fanfic, right?

Does that really count?

In speaking with a lot of fandom experts, one person that I spoke with told me she used to want to define fanfic really broadly because it gave it a kind of legitimacy. Like, these are books that are considered part of the literary canon that are winning awards. And so fanfic is that too. But she came around to the idea that if you define everything that way, then that’s such a broad category that it kind of loses meaning and so a more narrow version of understanding fanfic would be these transformative works that are based on preexisting property that exist in the gift economy. And this is key. The idea that this is something that people are doing not to make money and in fact ought not make money doing this, that it’s just they’re doing it because it is fun or exciting or community building to do.

Where did this start?

Last century, there were people who were writing zines, for example, very popularly, Star Trek among them. But those were very specific as to one fandom. People were writing fan fiction about particular characters in one world, and that tradition passed forward to various websites and online newsletters that again, were balkanized into a particular fandom. 

It was only later when we saw broader websites like, for example, fanfiction.net, that were bringing all of these different fandoms together and saying, if you like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you might like Supernatural. Let’s see what these characters could do, or what happens if we put these beloved characters from different worlds together and have them meet with one another. 

That brings us to the modern day with Archive of Our Own, which I would say is kind of the big powerhouse archival player these days. And certainly where I look for fanfic when I read it. 

Explain what Archive of Our Own is.

Archive of Our Own is a website where people can post and read fan-created transformative works, and it is organized in such a way that it’s clear it was created by librarians, right? You can certainly search by fandom, by character. You could also search by the kind of story you want to hear, or a trope that you’re interested in. You would be amazed at just how extensive the archives are on Archive of Our Own.

You would say, even if you don’t know what any of this is, it is being mainstreamed. It has been mainstreamed into culture, now. You are actually consuming things that started out as fan fiction. What are they?

The big one, the Kahuna that became the juggernaut, would be 50 Shades of Grey, which was actually Twilight fan fiction. 50 Shades of Grey completely changed the game. It was a bestseller as a book. It became an absolute bestseller as a movie series. And it got publishers thinking. I spoke with romance duo Christina Lauren [the pen name for co-author duo Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings], who actually met writing Twilight fanfic, and they said that when they first spoke to people about going into the traditional publishing world, and this is more than a decade ago, they were told, “Don’t say a thing about fan fiction. That’s a scarlet letter.” Well, that is not true anymore. 

These days, particularly last summer, you saw three works in particular that either had been Draco/Hermione fan fiction, or at least a prominent Draco/Hermione writer wrote a series that wasn’t exactly the fanfic, but certainly the fanfic roots were actually being advertised by the publisher as a selling point. One very famous one is The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, which was originally a Rey/Kylo Ren fan fiction from Star Wars. And what is so kind of funny and meta about that is that that is now being adapted into a movie. And the male lead is actually married to the actress who played Rey in Star Wars.

If you look at genre fiction these days, publishing houses, when advertising those works, are using very similar tags to the ones that you would see on Archive of Our Own. So they are broadcasting those same tropes as saying, if you like that, you’ll find that in this book. Because they’ve realized, thanks to fan fiction, that’s how a lot of readers like to find what they’re going to read next.

Another thing that I found incredibly fascinating is a decade, a decade and a half ago, fan fiction writers were writing in the first-person present tense, and it created this kind of urgency and immediate connection, but you weren’t seeing that a lot in traditional publishing. Now that has been subsumed by traditional publishing. So a lot of really popular trends, even in terms of writing, began in fan fiction. You might also see joyous queer romance was a huge part of fan fiction before traditional publishing got on board.

So it seems clear to me, based on what you’re saying, that writers of fan fiction and the work itself are being taken more seriously than they were, I don’t know, 20 years ago. Why do you think that is? Is it just because, hey, some of this writing is pretty darn good, let’s take it seriously?

I think part of it is just a broader mainstreaming of fanfic, and that people are kind of waving that fanfic flag proudly in a way that they hadn’t a decade or so ago. And if we’re understanding the structures of traditional publishing, whether it is the editors who are acquiring works or literary agents, a lot of these people are people who grew up on fan fiction, right? So they might not have the same hangups or ideas about fan fiction that previous generations had. They’re interested in it, and they see it as a legitimate form of writing. 

Part of it, I think, is because traditional publishing is in, some may say, dire straits, and there’s a broader hunger for IP, intellectual property, things that have already been proven successes. And if you look at some of these fanfics on Archive of Our Own, they have millions of views. I think traditional publishing looks at this and says, “This is basically as safe a deal as we are going to get in terms of thinking that that might be able to translate into book sales.” 

What I find really interesting about it is, if one of our elemental definitions of fanfic is that it exists in the gift economy, what happens when fanfic becomes a legitimate path to traditional publishing? What does that mean for fanfic as an art or as a community? And I think that that’s something that a lot of fanfic writers and readers are wrestling with right now.

Editor’s note, January 24, 12 pm ET: Federal agents shot a person in Minneapolis on Saturday morning, according to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The shooting appeared to be captured on video, which shows federal agents wrestling someone to the ground and shooting them multiple times. The story below was originally published on January 23.

In the last year, ICE has doubled in size, which is all part of President Donald Trump’s agenda to turbocharge the government’s mass deportation efforts. 

But the agency’s massive push for new agents has led to reportedly poor vetting of applicants and a lowering of the agency’s standards. Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell recently got his hands on an internal ICE document outlining the agency’s recruitment plans for 2026. The agency wants to find 14,000 new ICE employees — on top of the more than 20,000 officers and agents it currently has — by appealing to fans of NASCAR, UFC, and patriotic podcasts. They’re calling it their “wartime recruitment” strategy, and Harwell says the meme-fied and macho tenor of ICE’s online advertisements tell us a lot about who the agency is trying to bring into its fold. 

Harwell spoke with Today, Explained host Noel King about ICE’s recruitment efforts and what they say about the present and future makeup of the agency. 

There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What’s this internal ICE document and what’s in it? 

This is an internal confidential document that ICE officers spread to each other that outlines what they call their “surge hiring recruiting strategy.” It lays out $100 million in recruiting spending that they want to pour into social media advertising and real-world advertising. 

They want to reach pro-ICE influencers who can get the message out. They want to go to gun fairs, gun shows, hunting shows to reach people — to reach more than 10,000 potential deportation officers, lawyers, and other staffers that can help them carry out this giant deportation that the Trump administration has been promising. 

They’ve never done anything like this. If you’ve gone on X or YouTube or Instagram, they have these really patriotic machismo ads that say the “enemies are at the gates,” [that] you need to join ICE to “defend the homeland” and repel these “foreign invaders.”

There’s also these ads that they feel like will appeal to their sense of honor and patriotism and their aggression. A lot of these ads are in the model of video games and action movies, and there are these buff guys with guns who are shutting down the border. So they’re really [giving] this cinematic, patriotic sheen to it all, when really these are government law enforcement jobs. They’ve never been framed in this way.

All right, so they’re blanketing the internet. Then there’s also real life. If I were to come upon one of these ads in real life, where would I be likely to be? Where would I be hanging out if I saw one of these things?

They’ve done “geofencing,” where they’ll actually look at a specific event like a UFC fight or a gun show or a rodeo or a NASCAR race, some event where they feel like their target market is going to be, and they’ll draw a circle around where that real-world event is. And then if you step foot inside that real-world circle, you’re going to get a targeted ICE advertisement telling you to join the agency.

Do they talk openly in this document about the kind of person that they want for ICE?

The big thing they keep going back to is to “patriots.” They keep saying that the people they want are real hardcore border protectors who want to, in their words, “protect the American way of life.” On a lot of these posters, you will see the action movies and the video games. But there’s also a line of marketing in their campaign that uses these very classic nostalgic Americana posters that almost look like wartime propaganda posters, where it’s like old-timey white people on the frontier defending the homeland. Uncle Sam features very heavily in a lot of these. 

There’s also ones that use this cowboy imagery to make it like you are on the frontier, fighting these outlaws. One of them says, “Are you going to cowboy up or just lay there and bleed?” and it just speaks to this idea [that] your country is being taken from you by — as all these ads show — brown people, and you have to partner up with your fellow ICE agents to take these people out. And so they’re really kind of appealing to this idea of frustration at a changing America and wanting to pull in people who want to fight that.

You reached out to DHS for comment. What was the response?

We’ve talked to a number of people who are currently inside ICE and DHS who are, to be honest, pretty unnerved and disturbed by how the agency has changed. And so we got a lot of reporting and a lot of documentation out of the agency, and we went to DHS and ICE and told them what we had. They wouldn’t confirm or deny the document, which is pretty classic for them. They wouldn’t dispute any of the claims we had pulled out from it. 

But what they said was, we’re thrilled that the Post is highlighting how successful this campaign has been. Their argument has been that this strategy is working. Their goal in the document was to hire 14,000 new people. And so their argument is, this model is working. We’re ahead of schedule, we’re under budget. We’re getting hundreds of thousands of job applications in. We’ve put out 18,000 job offers. 

So the patriotism and the machismo and some of the stuff that they’ve been criticised on, they’re very proud of that. They feel like this is an ad campaign that they feel like Americans will support, that they have a mandate from the voters to lead this massive deportation operation. And so yeah, they feel like what they’re doing is right, and they’re proud to do it, and they’re getting all the right people in.

You said that you also spoke to people inside of ICE who are kind of disturbed by this recruiting effort. What did they tell you? What’s their complaint exactly?

ICE is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which was started after 9/11. It has always been a “Let’s protect Americans” agency. Immigration is a component of DHS, but so is protection from a lot of other stuff, right? Cyber attacks, natural disasters. So it’s always been a law enforcement triage operation. And under the Trump administration, it has been made into all immigration, all the time. So they’re frustrated by that, but they’re also kind of unnerved by this campaign and how bold it is. 

With this kind of campaign, they feel like they’re going on the internet and basically just saying, “Hey, if you want to pick up a gun and start shoving people around, you want to join us.” And their worry is that this appeal to aggression is going to be getting aggressive people who aren’t trained, who have this idea in their head that they can start being this warrior on the street, when they realize that the reality on the ground should be a lot more nuanced and a lot more careful, because these are real people. These are real people’s lives. This isn’t just a meme.

How is the public responding to being hit with these in the wild and on the internet?

So you’ll see on social media, a lot of people who are already kind of pro-Trump, pro-ICE, are celebrating them as like, “Yeah, let’s really get out there and do this thing.” But you also see a ton of criticism and backlash, like [on] Spotify, where if you’ll be listening to music on the free service, you’ll get a commercial that’ll pop up that’ll say, “Join ICE.” And you can actually see on the Spotify message boards where people are outraged. They’re saying, “I’m going to cancel my subscription. I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to be thinking about this.” 

You’ve also seen some of this because of this campaign being so targeted. Part of it is they’re also targeting people to self-deport. So they’re targeting genres of music they feel like will be listened to by people who may not be in the country legally. And so people will be listening to Latin music and they’ll be getting a commercial in Spanish telling them to leave the country, and they just feel very disturbed by that. These commercials are basically finding their ways into a lot of people’s daily lives, and they are angry at the reminder of what’s happening around the country. And so they’re lashing out and they’re saying, any company that’s taking money for this kind of ad campaign, we don’t want to support it.

What did you learn about the imagery that ICE is using in these ads? What is it telegraphing? What is it trying to say?

On X especially, you’ll see a lot of these very edgelord memes. These are like 4chan-style kind of dark jokes about “join ICE.” One of them says “deport illegals with your absolute boys.” And it shows a minivan. And it’s just this joke about “join ICE and you can crack some skulls with your friends.” 

And they’re really flattening this conversation around immigration into this video game battle, right? I mean, one of the posters is from the video game Halo and it says, “destroy the flood.” And in it, basically, they’re saying, if you join ICE, you become this super soldier protecting Earth from this flood of aliens, literally. And they’re also making a joke of it. 

I think this is the other thing. DHS has been putting out a lot of deportation memes, so has the White House. They’re very common on X. You’ll see them everywhere, and some people get a little laugh out of it, but it’s also pretty disturbing because they’ll end up using images of real people who are being deported out of the country, who may not have a criminal record, but are being called the worst of the worst. And so you see just the level of bile in the discussion around these people, and it just flattens this really nuanced policy issue into, again, this kind of good-versus-evil battle that they’re framing like an action movie or a funny online joke, but is really so much more complicated.

President Donald Trump announced that the US would intervene to end the civil war in Sudan. This promise came at the request of the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. The conflict in Sudan — which has been marked by serious human rights abuses by both sides — recently reached a turning point. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took control of the town of El Fasher, effectively splitting the country in half between the paramilitary group and the Sudanese military. 

At the heart of this brutal conflict is the relationship between two men: the leader of the Sudanese military, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Muhammad Hamdan Dagano Musa, also known as Hemedti. 

To better understand the conflict, Today, Explained host Noel King spoke with Alex DeWaal, the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts. Dewaal has been studying Sudan for over 40 years. He says the two leaders are a product of the cycle of violence that has embroiled the country for decades. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What has been happening in El Fasher?

What has happened in the last couple of years was that the people of Al Fasha, the different groups that were there, initially wanted to stay neutral in this war, but they couldn’t sustain that. So, they sided with the so-called government, and they became the last place in Darfur that was resisting the Rapid Support Forces, this very vicious paramilitary. Then, just a few weeks ago, the RSF overran that garrison.

The people of El Fasher had been living in a state of suspended terror for 18 months, because when the RSF overran previous cities — notably a city called El Geneina, close to the border with Chad — it had committed the most horrendous massacres against the people there. What the people of El Fasher had been experiencing was shelling drone attacks, targeted on the hospitals, on the clinics, on everything that made civilian life bearable. Then, when the troops or the paramilitary men came in, they went house to house pulling people out, murdering men in the streets, raping women and girls in front of their families. 

Perhaps just as horrific as the crimes themselves is the way the men who are perpetrating them film themselves. They put themselves on video, and you see their relish, the enjoyment with which they torture and torment their victims before killing them. These are videos that are simply too horrible to watch.

So, there are two sides in this war, and there is a general leading each side. Let’s start with Sudan’s regular army, the SAF. Who is the general leading that force?

General Abdul Burhan is a regular career military officer. And like many of those regular officers, he has a pretty mixed record. Some 20 years ago, he was one of those who served in the vicious war in Darfur. He was then head of a contingent of Sudanese soldiers that served in Yemen, paid for by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. He has his fingers in a number of crony capitalist enterprises that make money. 

But, within his coalition, which is a very fractious coalition, he has some people who are utterly ruthless, among them an Islamist brigade. He relies on them, because they have money. They also have some of the best troops, and they are bitter and vengeful. When General Burhan has said he’s ready to come to peace talks, it’s the Islamists in his coalition who say, “no way.”

What does General Burhan want?

He calls himself the government of Sudan, even though he didn’t actually control the capital. The United Nations recognized him, rather foolishly in my view, and he wants to basically restore the status quo, which is certainly better than what we have now. 

But it was that status quo against which civilians rebelled against seven years ago.

How has General Burhan conducted himself and his forces during this war?

So, there’s no doubt that his forces have committed war crimes. They’ve tried to cut off international assistance to rebel held areas. They’ve blocked the UN. Some of it is a lack of discipline, some of it is the vengefulness of local commanders.

The other side of this war is the Rapid Support Force, the RSF. This is a paramilitary group. Who is the general leading them?

His name is [Muhammad] Hamdan Dagalo [Musa]. He’s widely known as Hemedti. I first came across him 20 years ago when I read a report from African Union monitors. There were some peacekeepers in Darfur at the time in which a notorious militia called the Janjaweed, which had been rampaging on a genocidal campaign throughout Darfur, they destroyed a village called Adwa in the centre of Darfur — killed 128 people, 38 of them children. When these African Union monitors showed up, this fellow Hemedti was there, and he didn’t conceal the fact that they were responsible. In fact, he said, we’ve been planning this for a long time. 

So, he was one of the most ruthless and capable commanders. He’s also a very charming man. Many of these killers are; they don’t have horns growing out of their heads. He became, over the succeeding years, a very capable commander serving the government, also a businessman. So, he took control of gold mines and became extremely wealthy. 

He is a different kind of animal; he’s much more sort of a mercenary commercial operator. He doesn’t want to rebuild the state as it was. He basically would like to see power in the hands of him and his family, running the country as though it’s really a family business with his own private army, his own companies in charge.

How has Hemedti conducted himself and his forces during this war?

Hemedti claims to be standing for democracy, and he claims to be the champion of the poor, and the marginalized, and all those who oppose the Islamists. That doesn’t cut much ice. We see how his forces have behaved throughout the war; it is utterly atrocious. Right at the beginning of the war, they ransacked and pillaged the national capitol Khartoum, terrorized so many of its inhabitants, looted, raped their way through whole residential neighborhoods. 

Then, in Darfur, they conducted what is candidly a genocidal campaign in this city of El Fasher. That was a longstanding goal of some of the groups that are allied with Hemedti and his forces.

You’ve been living in and writing about Sudan on and off for 40 years. These men have been shaped by years and years of war. Is the future of Sudan just more and more generations of men who’ve been shaped by war?

One of my very first hosts when I went to Darfur 40 years ago was an old sheikh from a nomadic Arab tribe, who told me, “We are so poor, we are so impoverished. We’ve lost our camels. The desert is encroaching. Our way of life is coming to an end.” And he said what this famine means isn’t so much that our people are starving, but that our way of life is ending. 

Now, his son, same age as me, 20 years later, became head of the Janjaweed, this notorious force. Then, that man, Musa Hilal, the head of the Janjaweed, was himself displaced by his second in command Hemedti, who said, this man is not ruthless enough. So, what we see is over those 40 years, you can trace how the pressures on the traumas of hunger and of conflict have translated into this merciless political culture that we have today.