Kathy is a working mother of two young girls. Her oldest, Sara, is 11 years old and a huge Harry Potter fan. After Sara had devoured all of the books, she started reading stories that fans had written and posted online. Kathy says, “I try to supervise her Internet usage, so for a while I checked all of the stories that she was reading. They were all pretty much like the books, so after a while when she told me she was reading Harry Potter stories I just let her read what she wanted.”
Sara became more and more involved in the fan fiction community. She got to know some of the people who wrote stories, and they encouraged her to write her own tales. Her mother was elated. “I thought it was great. Instead of just reading, she was being creative and coming up with her own plots and story lines. It seemed that she had finally found her talent.” Sara started sharing the stories with her friends, and one day Kathy got a call from the mother of one of Sara's friends.
“This woman was very upset about a story Sara had written and given to her daughter,” Kathy recalls. “It involved a very ‘adult’ relationship between two of the novel’s young characters. I couldn’t believe what she had written. It even made me blush!” Kathy asked Sara where she had come up with the ideas for her story. It turned out that Sara had stumbled onto a genre of fan fiction called chanslash, which depicts sexual relationships between popular characters. “I have no problem with adults reading and writing this kind of material, but Sara is just a young girl. I should have been more involved; I should have checked all of the stories she was reading.”
To learn how to protect your child from chanslash, see the encyclopedia entry on Chanslash
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