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What is the most influential fanfiction of all time?
(hexbear.net)
The New Testament probably 
Unfortunately for everyone alive, it's probably Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
it's wild how it fueled big yud's rise to fame and tangentially spawned a death cult considering how catastrophically bad the writing is
I hate that there's a direct line from a rationalist freak writing harry potter fan fiction to me having to drag a mattress around in the middle of the night last night because the google AI told my dad the wrong location for bulk trash pickup.
...wait, he was writing that between the ages of 30 and 35? Jesus Christ, this whole time I assumed it was written by a smug teenager.
also lol, how did I never realize that he was born on 9/11
literally only if you are a redditor
Or someone stabbed to death with a katana by a redditor
I still am.mad that rationalist are just liberals that are less intelligent than average.
So "fan fiction" is a bit of a hard thing to label any myth pre-20th century and intellectual property/copyright nonsense, but if we take "fan fiction" to be very loosely "a story that uses characters from another story" then the answer 100% has to be The Odyssey, if we're limiting it to things that we know exist and have written records of. Scholarly consensus is that The Iliad and The Odyssey, which in classical Greece were both considered to be by an author named "Homer," were actually created by the different poets, and that The Iliad is the older of the two. So The Odyssey, which is the return home of one of the characters of The Iliad and indeed the basis of like every "adventure" story made in the Western world, has gotta be the most influential extant fan fiction. That said, really all Indo-European cattle raid/warrior type stories (think The Iliad from Greece, Mahabharata from India, Táin Bó Cúailnge from Ireland) are all fan fictions of an original proto-Indo-European story of that nature, but we have no written records of it existing, we can just sort of assume that it does based on similarities between all of these stories.
My Immortal
Damn it beat me too it. Also worth shouting out the star trek ones where "mary sue" came from.
Paradise Lost.
Trans Wizard Harriet Porber And The Bad Boy Parasaurolophus
50 shades if we're being strict about the definition of fanfiction. If we go full chaos everything is fanfiction mode, maybe the bible?
I dont know about of All Time, but the most influential fanfiction of recent memory is the Chris Chan SonicChu Fanfic. The author is supposedly "the most documented person in history" and the culture around it led to the creation of KiwiFarms and a whole lot of other awful nazi shit
Fallout: Equestria is some pretty amazing fanfiction if you've never heard about it
Diane Marchant’s 1974 Kirk/Spock story “A Fragment Out of Time.”
The first slashfic
Sexy times with Wangxian
Tbf, a fic causing a change in policy of one of the biggest fanfic sites is influential in a way
The Phantom Menace
The Lusty Argonian Maid
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025
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