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I’m not too proud to admit that I was 30 when I discovered fan fiction. While many people spent hours, days, or if we’re honest, years consuming One Direction fanfic on Wattpad during high school, I only unlocked the treasure trove of content in 2023.
I’m a romance reader to my core, and I love nothing more than diving into a world where two hot characters go from enemies to lovers, pretend to be married, and spend ludicrous amounts of time rolling around in bed together.
So, it shouldn’t have come as a shock when I fell head first into the world of fan fiction and decided I never wanted to leave, especially once I discovered Dramione.
For the uninitiated, Dramione fan fiction is both exactly and nothing like you’re picturing. In a literal sense, each fic tells the story of how Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger fall in love after thoroughly exploring one of your favourite romance tropes — enemies to lovers, forced proximity, childhood sweethearts, fake marriage, fated mates, they’re all there.
But the excellent fics go deeper. There are heart shattering fics (Secrets and Masks, if you know you know) and healing fics (The Mortifying Ordeal of Being In Love is considered the most healing of all), and every imaginable story in between. They deal with the complexities of friendships, generational trauma and healing, forgiveness, and navigating an unkind world where you’re ostracised. The latter point may seem counterintuitive given JK Rowling’s own bigoted comments against trans women in recent years, so it’s probably a good time for me to note that Harry Potter fan fiction isn’t thriving because of Rowling, but in spite of her.
“I’m pretty sure JK Rowling would hate most of the fan fictions written about her beloved characters, and that’s just another reason that I love them.”
The fan fiction world is a notoriously inclusive one, and for the most part, LGBTQIA+ stories are told as a standard in every fic and without any raised eyebrows or neon arrows pointing to the storyline as a point of difference. Rather, it’s the standard.
Magic folk in the Harry Potter fan fiction world don’t have the same closed minded views as our world, or Rowling herself. And she doesn’t make a cent from any fic published because the authors don’t either. In fact, I’m pretty sure Rowling would hate most of the fan fictions written about her beloved characters, and that’s just another reason that I love them.
I’d considered diving into the world for a while before I took the leap, but the knowledge that Rowling wouldn’t benefit was definitely a selling point. In the end though, one specific TikTok video finally convinced me to dive in.
“So I thought it would be fun to try and review Manacled after I finished it this morning,” says Claudia, one of Australia’s leading BookTok (and Dramione) creators. “This is the result,” she continues, gesturing to a flushed face that makes it clear she’s been sobbing. In fact, she hasn’t been sobbing, she still is sobbing. It was her first Dramione fic and it had wrecked her, and as someone who loves nothing more than having my heart torn clean out of my chest and stomped on while reading, I wanted to be wrecked too. I needed to read Manacled, and I needed to read Manacled right now.
A story that reimagines the ending of Harry Potter, Manacled author SenLin Yu warps the world you know into one where Voldemort wins. Almost every one of your favourite characters are killed in the first chapter and there’s a hefty sprinkle of The Handmaid’s Tale themes added in to ramp up the trauma to almost an unbearable degree. Needless to say, it’s not for the faint of heart (and you should definitely note the content warnings before reading), but it’s also considered to be one of the best fan fictions ever written.
Credit: Both book covers illustrated by Avendell
By the end of 2024, Manacled had been read by 10.3 million people and Yu had signed with Penguin to release her debut novel, set entirely outside the Harry Potter universe. The book, Alchemised, is due to be one of the biggest book releases of the year and comes out in September. Though the world, characters, and even the magical signatures of the book are completely different to Harry Potter, the brief book synopsis tells us that it will embrace the unique plot points of Yu’s fan fiction to some extent. The novel is also 1,040 pages, which is also in line with Manacled, which was over 370,000 words.
But when Claudia’s video was posted in September 2023, I honestly didn’t know anything about the world I was stepping into. That changed quickly, as over the next year, I read almost nothing but Dramione fan fiction, immersing myself in the world of ‘grown up’ Harry Potter.
They started taking over every waking moment that I wasn’t physically at work (and some of the hours when I was at work). I started taking my lunch break later in the day just so I could be left alone for 15 minutes while I devoured a single chapter. I stopped watching TV almost entirely, and instead, spent every night reading and bedding down in one of the most popular yet niche subgenres of fan fiction.
“Fan fiction authors craft stories for the love of storytelling without the possibility of financial gain.”
But just like every experience in the 2020s, it turned out that it wasn’t an even remotely unique one. Because while I was busy getting sucked into the many worlds of Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger, the publishing industry was scooping up some of the most popular Dramione authors and commissioning them to release traditionally published novels. SenLin Yu is one example but she’s certainly not the only one.
Two other popular fan fiction authors are also following the fic-to-traditionally-published-book pipeline in 2025. The first, was Julie Soto’s Rose in Chains, which was released on July 2. It’s the first book in a trilogy series where the war is over and Princess Briony Rosewood is stripped of her magic and sold to the highest bidder.
Soto is best known for her Rights and Wrongs trilogy fan fiction, and in particular the third book titled The Auction (another of my favourite dark fics). It’s set in a world where the remaining Order members are sold off to the highest bidders (like I said, dark) after Voldemort wins the war.
The second author is Brigitte Knightley, whose debut novel, The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy, was released on July 8. This hilarious and banter-heavy enemies-to-lovers romantasy adventure was an instant Sunday Times Bestseller and tells the story of a gorgeous, curly-haired healer and a rogue platinum-tressed assassin who must work through their mutual hatred of one another to complete a mission.
Knightley wrote the healing fic I mentioned earlier, The Mortifying Ordeal of Being In Love. Early reviews are saying this is a book that will break you out of your reading rut and have you giggling and kicking your feet the entire way through.
Of course, fan fiction authors adapting their works to completely original, traditionally published novels isn’t uncharted territory. The best selling Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy by E. L. James was originally Twilight fan fiction, and The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood is a Star Wars fan fiction turned novel turned film adaptation starring Lili Reinhart.
It makes sense. Fan fiction authors craft stories for the love of storytelling without the possibility of financial gain, and it’s a powerful way for fans of a franchise to go deeper on a character after the canon story wraps. You only need to look at the 208 fics on AO3 about Fourth Wing‘s Dain Aetos and Sloane Mairi to prove there’s a very real and current appetite for it.
So, while it’s impossible for me to say yet whether the Dramione-adjacent novels will be as good as the authors’ original fics, what I can vouch for is the quality of the fanfic genre at large. Because many of these fics aren’t just “good for fan fiction” or “good for free content”, they’re just plain good. In fact, many of them are the best books I’ve ever read (and in a few cases, re-read).
“Fan fiction is the closest I’ve ever come to the same immersive, giddy, kicking-your-feet-with-joy feeling.”
It’s one of the reasons fan fiction readers are so protective of the community. Selling fan fiction as bound books is strictly forbidden and puts the entire genre as a whole at risk, due to the precarious nature of intellectual property laws, but it’s been an issue for as long as fanfic has been around. Bound copies of Manacled abound on Etsy and sell for hundreds of dollars each, and it’s an issue Yu herself expressed concern over when announcing Alchemised on Tumblr in February 2024.
“Fan fiction is incredibly special to me, and I have tried to do my best not to undermine its legal protection or allow my works to do so either,” Yu wrote. “During the last several years, there has been a growing issue with illegal sales of Manacled, putting both me and the incredible community that shares fan fiction freely in legal jeopardy.”
She goes on to explain that this is one reason she has explored traditional publishing, with all Harry Potter world building removed, with the “fundamental plot” of Manacled being maintained.
“I feel uniquely privileged that both my publishing teams are familiar with Manacled and understand how special it is to so many people, and how important it is that this reimagining captures the same spirit while also having its own wings.”
It’s an exciting moment for Dramione fans. Devouring Dramione fan fiction is the closest I’ve ever come to the same immersive, giddy, kicking-your-feet-with-joy feeling that I had when reading the original Harry Potter books as a kid. All the better that I’ve been able to dip back into a world that was so important to me growing up, without supporting the horrible author who birthed it.
Instead, with the publication of these three fan fiction authors (and hopefully more to come), I finally get to finally support the predominantly women authors who so generously gifted us their exceptional work for years without expecting a dollar in return. And that’s the biggest gift of all.
The post The Mortifying Ordeal Of Being In Love With Dramione Fan Fiction appeared first on ELLE.
