Written out

An ultimatum

After Russia’s media regulator Roskomnadzor blocked access to the site for users in Russia on 12 July, Ficbook announced that there had been a “misunderstanding” and that they were working to resolve it.

Ficbook had attracted the unwanted attention of Russia’s unofficial censor thanks to its substantial “slash” and “fem-slash” content, stories that depict male and female same-sex relationships respectively. Three days before blocking the site, Roskomnadzor had warned the owners of the Latvian-based platform that it would do so unless content “promoting non-traditional sexual relations” was removed. Ficbook declined to discuss the situation when approached by Novaya Europe for comment.

Though Ficbook’s administrators initially set up a mirror site to temporarily circumvent the ban, within days, the site’s founder, who posts under the name Entrery, announced that Ficbook would comply with Roskomnadzor’s demands to restrict access to stories featuring same-sex couplings.

“As difficult as it was, we have decided to shut down some of the fanfics and sections on Ficbook in the Russian Federation in order to get the ban on the main content lifted,” Entrery said.

In a Telegram post on 30 July, Ficbook said that it had met all of Roskomnadzor’s requirements, but warned that it could take some time for the regulator to confirm that to be the case and to order the site’s unblocking.

Community building

Fanfiction, normally abbreviated to “fanfic”, refers to stories written by fans about existing characters from books, film and television, as well as real-life celebrities and public figures. Ficbook, in turn, is a Russian-language site that was created in 2009 as an alternative to other, predominantly English-language fanfiction platforms.

Ficbook normally gets over 100 million monthly views, which Vladimir Kharitonov of online publishing house Freedom Letters describes as comparable to the traffic enjoyed by Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.

Ficbook features over 25,000 “fandoms” — communities of fans who share a passion for a specific series, movie or other form of entertainments — some of the most popular of which are Harry Potter, The Witcher, Supernatural, Naruto, and K-pop groups such as BTS and EXO-K/M.

Although Ficbook is often regarded as a site exclusively for fanfiction, it has long showcased original works of fiction too, and Lebedenko and blogger Rotten Kepken both noted that the critically acclaimed coming-of-age Russian novel, A Summer in a Pioneer Tie, was first published on the site.

“Authors initially put out their story on Ficbook in order to test it on an audience, and then try to get it published,” Lebedenko explained.

After Vladimir Putin signed a law criminalising the dissemination of so-called “LGBT propaganda” in December 2022, the creators of Ficbook launched Slashbook, an attempt to silo queer content from the main site.

Slashbook didn’t last long, however, and is now inaccessible. Kepken describes the split as “disastrous”, saying that it was inevitable that many stories would be lost when Slashbook went down, and pointless because “no one really understands what constitutes propaganda and what doesn’t”.

Political romance

A separate, albeit less discussed category of fanfics, are those that depict real people.

“For the most part, famous people are used as pop culture icons, whom it’s interesting to play with, fantasise about, imagine what they could be like,” Lebedenko explained. “It’s fun if you have a sense of humour and you don’t work for Roskomnadzor.”

Rotten Kepken said that political fanfics usually appeared in response to current events, and Lebedenko observed that the number of fanfics based on the leaders of the Wagner Group mutiny in 2023 had surged, depicting various scenarios involving its late leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, his rival, former Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu, and even Vladimir Putin himself.

“For many people, fanfics are a way of making sense of events they are living through, via erotica, through fantasy,” Lebedenko said, adding that he didn’t find it surprising the site was taken down, given the Russian authorities think that any form of expression deviating from the official narrative “should be banned as soon as possible”.

Other popular pairings include Barron Trump and Alexander Lukashenko’s son Nikolay, Putin and Emmanuel Macron, and Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky.

Oleg, a fanfiction writer, told Novaya Europe that he created a small series that focused on the relationship between Putin and Biden, as well as Putin and Zelensky. “We were inspired by the current political situation,” he said, adding that the idea had been to combine crack fic — fanfic based on an outlandish premise — “and then take it to an absurd level”.

Recalling the backlash faced by Russian author Vladimir Sorokin for his 1999 novel Blue Lard, in which he portrayed Stalin and Khrushchev as lovers, Lebedenko stressed that fanfics intended to provoke or upset real people were relatively rare.

The fans react

“I’ve been reading fanfics on Ficbook every goddamn night since I was 12. I can’t imagine my identity without it,” wrote one distraught Ficbook user following Roskomnadzor’s decision to block the site.

“This site is my route to self-expression and self-realisation, my way of experiencing wondrous feelings of lightness and freedom, my way of closing myself off from the world and getting through a difficult time in my life,” wrote another.

The platform’s administrators have encouraged users to show their support by sharing the hashtag #BringBackFicbook.

Kirill, a 31-year-old Russian now living in Europe, told Novaya Europe that the ban had come as a surprise to him. “I’ve heard about websites with LGBT content being blocked in Russia, but I never thought it would happen to Ficbook. It’s just a platform for posting amateur literary works. What kind of propaganda can there be?”

Once a frequent visitor to the site who authored fanfics himself as well as reading its non-slash content, Kirill said he was ambivalent about slash stories, but stressed that people had always had — and would continue to have — a desire to write them.

Yelena, a 50-year-old from the city of Yaroslavl in central Russia, has a strong preference for detective and science fiction fanfics. In slash fiction, she exclusively reads works from the Good Omens fandom, based on the novel turned television series by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, and the Thor/Loki fandom based on the Marvel universe. Yelena notes that, having read countless books over the years, it’s become increasingly hard to find new material that captures her imagination.

“The people on Ficbook surprised me. They have rich imaginations, and they want to bring their invented stories to life on paper, even if not everyone is a literary institute graduate,” she said. “But they want to share their work. The plots are interesting, and they’re often written in very literary language. There are so many talented people in the country who should keep writing.”

Yelena said she thought the ban was foolish, arguing that it would simply motivate more people to read and write fanfiction, whereas if the authorities hadn’t got involved, the topic would have remained a marginal one in society.

“Fiction writers are free people who like to unleash their imagination”, according to Lebedenko. “For them, fanfiction is also freedom of self-expression, meaning that slash fanfics will be very abundant on any site.”

Kharitonov also stressed that a significant proportion of all fanfics were queer-themed in one way or another, as literature normalised the subject many years ago.

"Fanfic often builds on radically expanding plotlines and possibilities,” Kharitonov explained. “This is why fanfiction frequently features pairings like Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, Prigozhin and Shoigu, or Biden and Trump,” adding that Roskomnadzor’s crackdown on the genre was sadly only “to be expected”.