I think almost all narrative interpretive or transformative works are fan fiction.
The Renaissance is, in a lot of ways, Biblical fan fiction. People revisiting the same stories, reshaping them, recontextualizing them, layering meaning on top of meaning to reflect their own time and beliefs. Historical fiction does the same thing. It takes real people and real events and builds narrative and emotional continuity where the record is incomplete.
People were still writing about Gilgamesh and Enkidu centuries after their earliest stories were recorded. Achilles and Patroclus did not just exist in text, they existed in ritual, in culture, in devotion. Their relationship was interpreted and reinterpreted across generations. Alexander and Hephaestion were part of that tradition as well, consciously aligning themselves with Achilles and Patroclus, shaping the way their own story would be understood and remembered.
So when we talk about fan fiction, we are not talking about something new or lesser. We are talking about something foundational. A continuous human practice of returning to stories that strike emotional chords and trying to understand them more fully.
Modern fan fiction has a history too, and a very specific turning point. It formed in zines, in small communities, in people printing and stapling stories and passing them hand to hand. And it centers on Star Trek, on James T. Kirk and Spock, and on the explosion of K/S work that followed.
This is when modern fandom becomes recognizable as itself. This is when "shipping" becomes a defined practice, where transformative work becomes a shared language, and where queer interpretation is not only present but actively created, circulated, and protected within a community. The zine writers who built that space were not just participating in fandom, they were creating a path into modern queer literature.
Gene Roddenberry based Kirk and Spock on Alexander and Hephaestion, drawing directly from that model of devotion and partnership. What emerges from that is not just a pair of characters, but a bridge: from Alexander and Hephaestion, to Kirk and Spock, to K/S zines, to the modern fan fiction community, and into queer literary tradition.
And I think that matters when we talk about Alexander and Hephaestion themselves, because their story has already been told and retold through a very narrow lens for a very long time. They have been interpreted, flattened, and reframed over and over again, usually in ways that strip out the very thing people keep returning to.
I am not particularly interested in repeating that.
They deserve to be read through a queer lens. They deserve to be approached as the kind of story they have always been: one that invites interpretation, that resists being fixed into a single, stable narrative, and that has always existed somewhere between what is recorded and what is felt.
So yes, I consider my work canon compliant slash fan fiction. Deliberately.
I am proud of fan fiction. I am proud of slash fiction. This is the tradition I am writing in, and it is the tradition that made space for stories like this to exist in the first place.
I am aware that calling it fan fiction will make some people dismiss it outright, or assume it lacks rigor or credibility before they ever engage with it. That does not change how I approach the work. I stay as close to the historical record as possible, and I try to operate within their cultural framework as much as I can. Every choice is grounded in what we know, what is plausible, and what fits the world they actually lived in. I care deeply about accuracy, but accuracy does not erase the fact that this is still an act of interpretation.
It can only ever be an interpretation.
There is no complete version of their story to recover, no objective emotional truth preserved cleanly in the sources. What we have are fragments, shaped by politics, distance, and the priorities of the people who recorded them. To turn those fragments into something coherent, something human, requires decisions about how they fit together, what they meant, and what kind of relationship makes sense of what remains. That process, by definition, is fan fiction.
And because my interpretation understands them as romantic and sexual, because I read them as queer in some form, it is also, by definition, slash fiction.
That is not something I am trying to soften or obscure. It is the point.
For Alexander and Hephaestion, I do not think there is a more honest way to tell their story, both as historical figures and as part of a long tradition of people trying to understand what they were to each other.
And if you are curious what canon compliant slash fan fiction looks like in terms of Alexander and Hepahestion, I cannot wait to show you.
