1. Sleep
[1.1] My vision tunnels, clouded at the edges. It's as if cotton presses around me; body already envisioning the weight of a duvet.
[1.2] I feel spinny, hungry, in the 8 a.m. light. Empty. If I fall on the sidewalk, I could crack open my head.
[1.3] It's hard to focus, unless I'm walking home. It's like vision only exists in a direct line to my bed.
[1.4] If I turn, I could fall. No-one exists on the sidewalk around me.
[1.5] I get home. Close the door into blessed green silence. It's hard to walk to the bathroom—straight down the hallway—to wash my hands. Vision fades.
[1.6] I wash by rote, feeling my hands and water under me.
[1.7] I finally, finally go to bed. The tunnel closes.
[1.8] It's 8:10 a.m. I can't sleep. Sunlight creeps through my curtains.
[1.9] I hold my phone; hands carefully balanced outside my covers. (I haven't finished washing them; they're sticky with soap.) (I try not to think about this.)
[1.10] I turn on my screen (note 1).
[1.11] Hatake Kakashi is battered, and bloody. He probably has a broken rib. He struggles to keep his eyes open—if he rests, here, outside of Konoha, he will die. A sharp pain clogs his chest.
Clouds spin, above him, like sheets in the laundry.
[1.12] My body starts to relax. Bones sink to leaden under the weight of this character's injuries.
[1.13] He had fallen. Kakashi can't remember when, just that a hand is now over his face, glove protector flashing in the sun.
"Hatake-san, are you okay?!"
No.
He hasn't been okay in a long, long time.
[1.14] The screen goes dark, for a minute. I hadn't been scrolling often enough; my body and breath slowed with my hand.
[1.15] Kakashi can't sleep. He doesn't remember being brought to the hospital; can't focus on more than the pain. He must have passed out. It's not sleep.
He only half-remembers climbing out of the hospital window, trying to get home, somewhere with dim grey comfort and lack of white fluorescents. Gravel digs into his knee.
"Sensei! You should be resting!"
He doesn't have to look at Iruka's hand, this time, to know who he is. His vision is too blurry anyways.
"Please…" Kakashi rasps, his body deflating. He can't go back.
[1.16] My hand dips, under the weight of my phone.
[1.17] Kakashi is pulled along, through eddying currents of pain. He wonders, mildly, if he's going back to the hospital.
Kakashi only registers the change in setting through the pad of tile, on the floor. And Iruka's whispered: "We're here. You can rest in a moment, sensei."
He gets tucked under the kotatsu, like a child. Kakashi closes his eyes, to ward off his migraine. Deep, black spirals fill his vision.
Warmth sinks to his toes.
[1.18] The phone falls from my hand. My body's lax, like a collapsed lung. I roll over, and sleep.
[1.19] Kakashi falls asleep to the smell of jasmine tea.
2. Fan fiction as a disability aid
[2.1] In the following sections, I compare personal experience with academic analyses of fan fiction. I describe how fan fiction meets my access needs. In this section, I flesh out my own story. Section 3 covers short-form fan fiction and how it differs from professional short fiction in its use of affect. Section 4 covers reader's advisory and further explains affect. Section 5 explores hurt/comfort and a sense of care through depictions of pain.
[2.2] For half a year, in the autumn of 2021, I was on medication that made it difficult to sleep. It was spotty: some nights I'd sleep just fine; others I wouldn't sleep until 2 a.m. I had also dropped out of school. Not fully, but after finally hitting a wall due to previously undiagnosed and untreated ADHD, I was enrolled in online school.
[2.3] The one exception was choir. I would get up, at 6:45 a.m. and walk to my high school. We would sing until 8. I hadn't eaten. I was often running on 1.5 hours of sleep. Walking back, I would almost faint. It was a struggle to rigorously wash my hands (a confluence of exhaustion and OCD). I would end up, miserable, in bed with partially clean hands and an aching body.
[2.4] To sleep, for those six months—two mornings a week—I would read fan fiction.
[2.5] I still do this—though less frequently—when I'm majorly dizzy, headachey, and in pain. Though I've always been a reader, there's a reason that I pick fan works when my body's in agony. It's simply, for me, more accessible. I might even say I consider fan fiction a disability aid.
[2.6] For me, there are many ways that fan fiction is accessible:
[2.7] It can be very short, and focused on only one concept—a blessing, for a pain-numbed brain.
[2.8] It can turn my favorite comfort show or manga into writing, when loud noises or bright colors are off the table due to a headache.
[2.9] It takes away the labor of interpreting characters as disabled, when they aren't explicitly so in canon. It lets me rest my mind.
[2.10] And, reading about a character who's exhausted, or in pain, or on the verge of unconsciousness, has an incredible affective effect. Eventually, my bones grow heavy, and I'm less aware of my headache, my joint pain, or the dread of wakefulness for another few hours. When the character falls asleep, I sleep.
3. Focus: Form and affect
[3.1] How rare is it to read a story that's just about sleep? Whether 200 words long, or 3000, or 4,800—a tale whose main focus is its protagonist sleeping. Tiredness permeates the whole story. There might be a few scenes, a smattering of locations, but the plot curves around feeling more than events. This is what I look for in fan fiction, when my body won't let me sleep. And I can't find it anywhere else.
[3.2] Fan fiction, as a form outside of professional publication, benefits from a lack of constraints. It is acceptable to write a drabble, or a ficlet, or a snippet of under fifty words. More than length, though, is the lack of emphasis on plot.
[3.3] Nonfandom short stories, as well as nonfandom flash fiction, are constrained by more than length. As published for the professional literary world and readership, there is an expectation of a certain zing. Most literary magazines want stories with a sense of freshness, something never seen before, and an intriguing plot or twist. Many authors begin in short fiction, with an intention to publish professional novels after building up a presence. Flash Fiction Online defines a "complete" story as having "a character, some sort of problem or conflict, [and] a satisfying resolution, which finds the character(s) somehow changed." (https://ffo.submittable.com/submit). Every Day Fiction, another flash fiction site, discourages common topics. Memory loss, vampires, and cats are apparently overdone (https://everydayfiction.com/submit-story/).
[3.4] Fan fiction, though, has its own standards. As McCain explains, fan fiction has certain "expectations tied to […] form" (2015, 80) like any other type of literature. Writers and readers enjoy an abundance of repeated tropes; a plethora of stories filling gaps in the canon; a string of descriptions tied with the word "and." Spelling errors and shallow plots are less important than good characterization, or a beloved trope.
[3.5] And, it's about emotion—fan fiction, crucially, has a focus on affect.
[3.6] Wilson (2016) explains affect as "the physical and mental responses that comprise feelings" (¶ 1.3). She ties fan fiction to affective hermeneutics, "gaining knowledge through feeling" (¶ 1.4), and to affective reception, "a form of reception […] organized around feeling" (¶ 1.2). For me, this is the part where I feel a character's state in my body—more fully than my own pain—and fall asleep.
[3.7] Lowe (2020) describes fandom as "affect seeking content," as "not […] text specific but affect specific or even body specific" (¶ 1.3). In this affective view of fan fiction, "we are metaphorically phototropic, moving toward fannish objects that describe and redefine our emotional biome" (¶ 6.13). Reading through the "Hurt/Comfort" and "Literal Sleeping Together" tags until I forget my own pain and fall asleep is certainly redefining my emotional biome.
[3.8] In this vein, fan fiction may be more similar to poetry than to other literary genres. Short works of fan fiction, which focus on affect more than on a brisk and inventive plot, have a lot in common with lyric poetry.
[3.9] But if I go to The Poetry Foundation's website and search for poems, I don't know what I'll find. Poetry—though affective—is not organized by familiar tropes or emotional states (as opposed to some fan fiction sites, which make use of tags). More than that, though, there is no central theme. If I look up "ocean"—because I love the sea, and I'm sure poets do too—I could get poems about grief. Poems about hating the ocean. Poems with so many varied tones and styles and takes (a warm sea or a cold one, storms or calm, marine life or empty water?) that it is completely overwhelming. I don't want to look up "poems about sleep" when I'm in pain.
[3.10] In such an urgent, emotionally vulnerable place, I need familiarity. I need exactly what I need. Something that will give me comfort, within a world where everything else I know, and is familiar, and is expected. I'd rather sleep in a friend's bed than a stranger's, though both may be equally comfortable. I need a safe emotional space; confined and predictable.
4. Familiarity and love
[4.1] Sandvoss (2014, 71) describes fandom as "[corresponding] with a textual field of gravity, rather than a text in its classical sense." This is why, when I read Naruto fan fiction, I'm aware it's a shortcut to political intrigue and found family and intense friendships and tending to battle wounds. It's why—as someone who finds the Call of Duty franchise generally upsetting—I will read slash fic about characters from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Because it's about a small, specialized military team that goes on dangerous missions, I can expect lots of "#Literal Sleeping Together" and "#Huddling For Warmth" and "#[insert character] Has PTSD."
[4.2] This is, essentially, reader's advisory: library science's solution to getting readers books they'll like. Most readers want something more specific than genre when they're looking for that next good book. They don't just want a mystery—they want a cozy mystery, set in a small town, preferably with a sassy protagonist. These specifics, things like tone, setting, and character, are called appeal factors. In fandom, there are two shortcuts to these. First, tags, being able to sort stories by characters, tropes, or even settings (Coffeeshop AU, anyone?). More to Sandvoss's point, though, fandom revolves around a sort of vibe, something extrapolated from the canon text.
[4.3] This gives me the best possible shortcut to familiarity. I can pick a fandom, based on what I want to read, and simply know what sort of appeal it will fit. Instead of looking for setting (fantasy) and tone (warm) and content (found family), I can plug in a fandom and have it all in one go. It prevents me, when my brain is tired and unfocused, from having to try out a new book. From having to sus out the tone, to learn new characters, and to become familiarized with a new world. Familiarity, beyond being a tool for comfort, is a great reliever of mental labor.
[4.4] The other thing that I need when I'm in pain and reading fan fiction is a sense of love.
[4.5] According to Wilson, "To define fan fiction only by its transformative relationship to other texts runs the risk of missing the fan in fan fiction—the loving reader to whom fan fiction seeks to give pleasure" (2016, ¶ 1.2). "Fan fiction does not emerge in isolation only on the basis of shared knowledge of a text with a recipient but also out of a shared love" (¶ 3.6). Wilson explains this cycle of love in fan fiction. When I'm reading a fic, I feel a great deal of fondness for the characters and setting. The author shares this love. We care for these characters by seeing them cared for. I feel with them. Through the text, I am feeling the author's affection for these characters—and, in turn—for myself.
[4.6] Leetal (2019) describes this act as a form of Activism of Care. When stories are written to provide a sense of comfort for the reader or writer, shown through affective love for a character, fan fiction becomes a tool for community care. Leetal describes reading a work of fan fiction about a depressed character being cared for: "Around that time, an author I love wrote a story for me, personally. She wrote it about characters I loved, going through things similar to those I was" (46). "It was obvious for the [protagonist's] friend, that the protagonist was wonderful and important. And it was clear that the author agreed" (47). Leetal explains this act of care as radical, as a statement that disabled people's needs are valid. As a way to envision—in a world where disability is vilified and devalued—an alternate paradigm of love and care.
5. Hurt/comfort: Seeing disability as "already there"
[5.1] In professionally published stories, I tend to avoid depictions of disability. The emotional risk is too high—characters are often flatly written, self-loathing, or miserable. And it's hard, eking good representation out of a character who might be disabled but (maybe to their advantage) isn't explicitly made out to be. This issue is common across marginalized populations—including the trans community.
[5.2] Page, in their article on trans fandom, explains that society's high levels of transphobia create a generally negative view of trans bodies in storytelling. Trans people are "portrayed as self-loathing, isolated, and yearning for assimilation—that is, when they are not depicted as caricatures or villains" (2023, ¶ 1.2). They cite Ledbetter, saying that "society is 'so transphobic' that the level of imaginative labor needed to create accurate trans representation is quite high" (¶ 1.2).
[5.3] As a disabled person, I find this speaks to disability and ableism as well. That extra bit of labor—to see a character I relate to as explicitly disabled—is quite tiring. As is the emotional toll of ableist tellings of disability.
[5.4] In canon—especially in fantasy stories, which I tend to prefer—characters are not often explicitly disabled. Sure, a character may be blind, or have PTSD, or have lost a limb, but very rarely have I seen a story showing that character interact with the world as a disabled person. Often, we only get the parts when they're using magical powers or generally being cool. The "superpowered supercrip" and the blind prophet are examples of this (Schalk 2016, 81; Wälivaara 2018, 1047). We don't see the crashes, the flare-ups, the sensory overloads. Social barriers seem not to exist.
[5.5] When I am tired, and achy, and have few spoons to think, I am less inclined to watch a show or read a book with a possibly disabled character, less inclined to do the work of thinking between the scenes.
[5.6] Luckily, fan fiction relieves me of this work. This comes, often, in the form of hurt/comfort.
[5.7] Fan fiction inherently focuses on moments between canon's scenes. It fills in gaps and, as McCain describes, allows fans to write about things that they already see—even if not explicitly stated—in canon (2015, 83). For myself, and many others, we see characters hurting. We interpolate these moments between scenes when they get tension headaches, or clean wounds, or suffer insomnia. These are not necessarily "read into" the canon material; they are simply omitted from canon, and we are showing them (McCain 2015).
[5.8] In hurt/comfort, for me, the protagonist is always disabled. Sure, the author may not intend it this way: maybe this character is briefly injured or has a headache. However, h/c is primarily focused on bodies in pain. Whether or not a character is disabled (has a long-term, lived experience of this pain) or not (the pain leaves once the fic is over), it is this focus on the experience of pain or illness or incapacitation that I relate to. And this is something often left out of canon.
[5.9] As Linn (2017) explains, pain (both physical and psychological) is the raison d'être of hurt/comfort. "Intense physical pain and physical need are the focus. The pain that preoccupies h/c (especially h/c labeled whump) is expressed through the body" (¶ 2.5). But the deeper pain, Linn says, is the psychological (¶ 3.3). She explains that in whump, or "horrifying hurt/comfort," the narrative is about "the hurt character coming back to themselves" (¶ 3.5).
[5.10] Linn describes immense pain as abstraction and the "comfort" part of h/c as breaking that abstraction. "The hurt character is in chaos and floats anchorless until he encounters the comforter. […] With the comforter's help, the hurt character must rename his obliterated world to give it meaning" (2017, ¶ 24.3). For me, fan fiction itself acts as this comforter. It describes my pain, allows me to break it down and come back to each part of my body. It gives me something to cling to, when my brain is in a cloud of boredom and hurt. To come back to myself, when I am trapped in my own mind, I need to be reminded there's an external world. Even if that world is a fictional one.
[5.11] Linn's perspective, though astute, is abled. She describes "horrifying hurt/comfort" from the perspective of a reader who has not felt this extreme pain. To her, the "uncomfortable and relentless focus on the body in agony […] produces feelings of discomfort in the reader. The abject is, after all, an uncomfortable place" (2017, ¶ 7.7).
[5.12] What about readers who feel these stories as comfort?
[5.13] For me, hurt/comfort (including the horrifying) is validation. As a lived experience, as a fictional other experience, as an alternative for my body when I'm in a different type of pain: it invokes comfort.
[5.14] Linn's essay ends with "They [the readers] want to see whether pain's crushing power and the resulting abjection can be breached and remolded" (2017, ¶ 7.9).
[5.15] I need to do this regularly, at many points in my life. To face the feeling of "will it be like this forever?" and choose to survive. To see joy, as well as pain. This, to me, is a familiar labor. It is also very internal. Few people in my life understand me, and those who do do not live in my house. I cannot summon a friend when in pain. (I imagined, for years, teleporting myself to my friend's squishy brown couch. Just being in their space—where I am understood and accepted—would be a relief.) Hurt/comfort is this understanding. It provides a sense of being seen, and understood, and of kinship.
[5.16] Mingus (2011) describes this feeling as "access intimacy." It's the feeling when you are unquestioningly accepted, "the way your body relaxes and opens up with someone when all your access needs are being met." Hurt/comfort embodies this. As Fathallah (2011, ¶ 3.2) explains: "In h/c, transmission is unnecessary—the comforting character understands, though no one else does."
[5.17] The author, as well, understands. A character may need a day off, or a low-sensory environment, or to sleep in an odd place so that they feel safe. And, instead of their accessibility needs creating barriers between them and their peers, this brings characters together. As Page (2023) says about trans representation in fan fiction: "Here, transness is the catalyst for connection as opposed to something that separates the trans character from their loved one" (¶ 4.9). "It is this rescripting of uncomfortable yet extremely common moments that can act as such a vital area of identification" (¶ 4.9). Or, in Mingus's words: "It is a freeing, light, loving feeling. It brings the people who are a part of it closer; it builds and deepens connection."
6. Conclusion
[6.1] Fan fiction, as a literary form outside of the professionally published world, has its own stylistic traits. Many of these traits, incidentally, make fan fiction more accessible for me—they even make it a good disability aid, for coping with symptoms like pain.
[6.2] Fan fiction's short forms, such as oneshots and ficlets, are easier to absorb than a longer story. Their focus on affect over plot—unlike professional short forms—make fics a godsend for fatigue or mind-numbing pain. And affect, vitally, can be used to self-regulate. It allows for a deeper sense of comfort and immersion from a story. A good, affective fic can relieve my pain enough that I can sleep.
[6.3] Fan fiction steeps in familiarity. It provides shortcuts—through tags or general fandom milieu—to my favorite tropes, when I'm low on spoons to seek out anything else. Its focus on between-the-scenes moments and on moments of pain lets me see characters live with their disabilities. It removes the labor of imagining these scenes myself, when interacting with canon. It's affirming. Fan authors' love of my favorite characters, and care for them, extends this care to me—especially when a character is experiencing my symptoms.
[6.4] Through our love for these characters, we extend love to other writers and readers. We feel affirmed, and affirm others, as disabled people living in an ableist world.