Virginia Weaver, Senior Staff Writer 

Microwaved Beef is a column by Virginia Weaver that reflects on flashpoints from the last few years in the culture wars. The rapid pace of contemporary discourse makes it easy to forget critical moments and trends that have defined our social and academic lives. Microwaved Beef brings those moments back into the spotlight. 

On December 11, 2021, bestselling author Anne Rice passed away. Rice is remembered fondly for her bestselling Vampire Chronicles and Sleeping Beauty series. In certain corners of the Internet, however, Rice’s passing renewed conversations about the legendary efforts she had undertaken in the early 2000s to ensure that her beloved series did not find a place in the world of fanfiction. 

The phenomenon of fanfiction predates the widespread availability of the Internet, but computers and the Internet instantly made it easier than ever to write and disseminate fan works based on popular intellectual properties. Today, Archive of Our Own (AO3) is the dominant platform for sharing fanfiction, but in the early 2000s, FanFiction.net was a go-to site for “fics,” shorthand for pieces of fanfiction. Founded in 1998, the site would soon find itself in the crosshairs of one very angry vampire novelist. During the 1990s to early 2000s, Rice identified the increasingly popular world of fanfiction as a threat to her own success and resorted to any means necessary to stop fans from meddling with her characters.  

In 2000, Rice posted on her website: “I do not allow fan fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.” Why, exactly, Rice was upset by the idea of fanfiction authors using her characters is unclear; she implies that the issue is not merely legal but also in some way emotional for her. Regardless, it would indeed become “absolutely essential” for would-be fanfiction authors to do what Rice demanded.  

Not long after posting this message, Rice emailed FanFiction.net, demanding that the site remove all fics it hosted based on her work. As Michelle Pauli explained shortly afterward for The Guardian, “[t]he legal position of fan fiction can be murky,” and rather than face the murkiness of this area of copyright law, FanFiction.net capitulated to Rice’s wishes, deleting all fics based on her popular series. After her triumph over FanFiction.net, Rice became notorious for doling out cease-and-desist letters against fanfiction writers. 

Allegedly, Rice’s animosity toward fanfiction authors extended well beyond the use of normal, legal methods to have potentially copyright-infringing materials taken off the Internet. According to allegations in “Where has Anne Rice fanfiction gone?”, a widely circulated blog post written in 2000, Rice “was using the excuse of fanfic to cyber-stalk and harass the fanfic authors, even after said authors removed the illegal fanfic from their sites.” Per the post, “Personal information about fanfic authors was also dug up by Anne Rice employees and used as part of the harassment.” It is on the basis of these allegations that Rice’s anti-fanfiction stance has remained legendary.  

By the early 2010s, Rice had made an uneasy peace with the world of fanfiction. In 2012, she remarked on the role of fanfiction in young authors’ careers: “I got upset [at fanfiction] about 20 years ago because I thought it would block me… However, it’s been very easy to avoid reading any, so live and let live. If I were a young writer, I’d want to own my own ideas. But maybe fan fiction is a transitional phase: whatever gets you there, gets you there.” But wherever her opinion may have landed before her passing, Rice will always be known as the author who fought fanfiction – and ultimately lost.