It is time to spread the love with our June 2026 Comment Bingo. Try and fill four in a row, column, or diagonal, or let all the creators out there know how much you appreciate them 🤍🩶🖤 and go for a full black-out!
(textual version behind the readmore ↓)
Brag about your progress and inspire others to follow in your footsteps! Use the #fandomwithbenefits and #FwB2026 Comment Bingo tags to make your post findable.
As a reminder of our general rules, there is no deadline to contribute, if you wonder 'Is X allowed?' the answer is probably yes, and we highly appreciate all kind of works—not just fanfic or fanart!
If you have any questions or feedback, drop us an Ask or a DM! ❤️ Need even more inspiration? Check out our previous events.👀
The comment prompts are listed in order of the grid (rows 1 through 4, columns A through D):
1A: user's first work
1B: a drabble (exactly 100 words)
1C: comment more than 100 words
1D: a work you have bookmarked or saved
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2A: written before canon (jossed)
2B: less than 500 hits
2C: non-fic (audio, art, poetry,meta,...)
2D: liveblog in comments
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3A: quote your favorite sentence
3B: a genre or trope you've never read before
3C: first comment on work
3D: one of oldest 20 works in a fandom or ship
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4A: anonymous work
4B: describe how it made you feel
4C: an old fandom of yours
4D: by user with less than 10 works
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Credit:
background image by Eva Bronzini @ pexels.com
heart vector by kjpargeter @ freepik
OH HEY I wrote a fic for The Pitt! It is such a rare pair I am just one of two fics for this ship wooooow you guys get on my level.
I'll be back to my regular stucky posting next, but big thanks to @ficwip for hosting - this was for their "be kind, rewind - Tiny Ship Fleet Fest" event!
What You'll Give Me
Words: 2,018
Rating: Explicit
Relationships: Dana Evans/Frank Langdon
Additional Tags: POV Dana Evans, Caretaking, Foot Fetish, Langdon is a simp and we love that for him (more tags on AO3)
Summary: After a long shift, Langdon shows up at Dana's with nothing but a plea.
In the end, they went to a remote tropical island, far far away from political turmoil and from people’s prying eyes, where all four seasons were like spring, and the Pacific Ocean sang the sweetest lullaby.
“Where same sex marriage is actually legal, can you believe that, Stevie?” His voice was full of wonder, eyes bluer than the summer sky.
Of course he’d said yes, he’d said yes. That was how it was always meant to end, not with a whimper, but a quiet June wedding and Pride balloons as their witness.
—————
This art was made for Pride Month, and to celebrate the legalization of same sex marriage of my hometown Taiwan, which went into effect on May 24, and the very first in Asia area. Happy Pride Month everyone!!!
It ties into the ancient tradition of collective storytelling much more than modern "original" literature.
It's telling stories around a virtual campfire about heroes and villains widely known, or not really known at all that like myths keep changing and exist in many separate versions at the same which all still influence each other
And like ancient myths, fanfictions will always be directly shaped by the needs and wishes of their authors and their audience, whether that is the yearning and dreaming about incredible far away places or dealing with the mundane reality of work at Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
This is based on my personal views on fanfiction which have only gotten more passionate over the years since I first started reading and writing it in 2008, helped in part in recent times by the wonderful @headspace-hotel articulating thoughts on it much more clearly and radically than I managed to (or dared to) before.
From a recent post I particularly liked this part:
"the buckyfic universe extends way beyond the confines of what 'canon' could offer or appeal to people, and it is not beholden to canon, it is a collective story we are telling together"
It was part of a conversation about a particular character (Bucky from the MCU), but I think it applies just as well to any fanfiction community centered around a character (like Naruto), setting (Vertumna), or even just general premise (Pokemon Mystery Dungeon stories, which are only united by having a world with a pokemon society and no human-looking humans). Because I don't want to derail it when turning that into a general point like that, I thought I could make my own post here.
Like premodern storytelling, fanfiction is a collective experience!
It's (almost) always done in a community, where a bigger or smaller group of people write or read them in the same place together, now usually through a website, or before that through fanzine contributions and conventions.
Whereas both writing and hearing/reading mainstream literature has become much more or even entirely solitary, in a way that fanfiction at the most basic level is not. In fact, writing an "original" story is perhaps one of the most prototypical solitary jobs in modern times, unless they are collaborations (which is rare), or the author has a big team of proofreaders and other people employed that keep close contact (even rarer).
Like myths, fanfictions tend to have many origins, but also always one connecting element!
1. Source materials
As the quote above shows, contrary to what many people (wrongly) believe about fanfiction, there's never just a single source material for all fanfics of any community, and much less one authoritative source that all have to follow.
Many authors enjoy using more than one source material, either explicitly in crossovers (making their story part of several communities), or as inspiration the way it is normally seen in mainstream literature and discussions about it.
Even many stories that don't overtly draw from various existing works will ignore whatever they want from their "canon", as the popularity of Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe and parody shows. They exist for basically every fandom, even small ones with just a couple writers and a few hundred stories.
2. Other fanfictions
But, as the quote emphasizes, it's by far not just existing works that serve as sources of inspiration! ALL fanfictions rely to various degrees on other fanfictions as inspiration (whether other stories from the same, or from other communities) as much as the single thing that connects them and binds them all together as a community.
Which can be, as said above, the passion for someone like Bucky, an exoplanet that you only got glimpses of or the fascination with the idea of a society of a huge variety of weird creatures, but no normal humans at all, that leads to thousands of people imagining thousands of settings each with their own characters!
The last one basically requires you to do everything that an author of mainstream literature also has to do, describe and bring to life an original setting, with original characters (even if their appearance is based on existing designs) and an original storyline.
3. Archetypes, tropes and storylines that often originated in fan communities
Though it's not just communities like that which end up giving rise to shared archetypes, popular tropes and recurrent storylines, every fanfiction community has those! Some types of characters might reappear in the work of many different authors, or popular interpretations of source material (or "canon") characters that didn't exist in the source get widely adopted across a big range of works, which is sometimes called "fanon".
Romance (usually called shipping, from relationship-ing) stories, which make up the bulk of fanfiction, particularly will also re-use many tropes that have no presence in the source either, such as the infamous But There Was Only One Bed, or And They Were Roommates, which originate more as "funny or interesting situations to put characters into".
And while many popular storylines will be lifted from "canon", such a journey stories in Pokemon fanfiction taking after the anime or the games, many, especially those that have become popular across communities were entirely fan-created independent of any work, like Coffeeshop AUs! Cozy "original" coffeeshop literature only appeared relatively recently around 2020.
4. Personal feelings, experiences and passions... and the mundane
And of course, personal feelings of any fanfiction writers will consciously or sometimes unconsciously show up in what they write, just like with any other author! Fanfiction is used to deal with difficult emotions or experiences just as much as "original" writing is.
Many people will also happily include small and big joys of their lives, their passions, or their jobs in it. And having a more mundane workplace such as the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation hasn't stopped fanfiction writers.
They will simply have Naruto and Sasuke's dynamic show up in their approach to office politics and bureaucracy, or have Naruto's ambition include becoming adapt at packing boxes and factory banter instead of ninja stuff. This is known as the Take Your Fandom to Work approach.
FanLore, a wiki encyclopedia dedicated to fan communities or fandoms in general has an article on the Public Bureaucracy Naruto story and how popular it has become with Canadian public servants:
The Factory Operative Naruto idea goes back to the user manta on a small writing community on Discord, the WIP Project:
"ugh naruto, don't you know anything? any REAL factory operative knows you need 612 code cardboard boxes for pouches, not 621s... stop embarrassing yourself and just quit already..." "oh just you see sasuke. I'm going to become the best factory operative you've ever seen. Someday, I'll even wear the specialist green coat. I'll treat all the temps with respect. I'll be the height of efficiency AND playful banter! That's my factory operative code! Believe it!"
--manta (mantaofthebanter)
The only meaningfully different change compared to premodern times is that we now have additional means of communicating and hence passing on stories.
But I haven't heard anyone say that this makes other kind of modern literature or stories fundamentally different from premodern ones.
Like, love stories are still love stories, stories about adventure are still stories about adventure. etc.
Like with fanfiction, the style, themes etc. and means of preserving and telling them has changed, but fundamentally they are still very similar.
But as said in the beginning, fanfiction retains in many ways the collective storytelling part that mainstream literature, especially commercial literature, absolutely does not have anymore.
In fact, fanfiction is fundamentally all that which commercial literature struggles to be or simply can't be, because fanfiction is unmarketable and refuses to bend to market or social pressures at large, and so never has to follow what's currently popular, profitable or promoted by a government.
It makes room for all those who find no place in mainstream literature, especially for many of those at the margins of society like queer people or anyone who seeks a community of completely free self-expression, authentic representation, radical themes that does writing exclusively for the art, where money matters nothing and truly anyone can participate.
Or to sum it up with an edit of one of Sarah Anderson's webcomics, Sarah's Scribbles:
"Let us not forget that [myths, fairy tales, folklore stories] were improvised in social spaces as an early form of collective bargaining, with call and response, give and take, and a chatty back-and-forth that often took the form of 'That's not how I heard it.'"
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