We Delved Into the Terrifyingly NSFW World of Dancefloor Fanfiction

Man has always reworked narrative. From the word of mouth days to the age of the printed page, stories have been shared, retold, reshaped, rejigged – man, despite his protest otherwise, has never been an original beast. This kind of textual reclamation has been going on since a few bored Georgians had a go at adding new chapters to Samuel Johnson's deathly dull Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded — the most famous of which, Henry Fielding's absurdly unfunny but naughty for the time satire Shamela, basically led us to where fanfic is now: a smut-riddled-swamp of grossly described imagined sex between famous people. Though Fielding didn't have his eponymous cipher engaging in the kind of depraved acts we see splattered all over ArchiveOfOurOwn and WorldOfSlash today, his work set a precedent. It turned out that what humanity had been craving was rude versions of things they already knew about.

The world of fanfic, and it's racier cousin slash, are filled with engorged meditations on episodes of Dragon Ball Z, novella length descriptions of Harry Styles' cock, and fantasised-about comings together of Mulder and Sully. So to speak. They blend the real with the imagined and the imagined with the wished-to-be real. They come from a place of perverse personal enjoyment, a place where the quality of prose matters far less than the potency of the situation in which the author places its subjects. Sometimes, as we're about to see, the creator drops them in the club. Welcome to the best the internet has to offer in terms of dance music fanfiction.

The mainstage main men and women of dance music, as you'd imagine, have reams of digital space allocated to these labyrinthine fantasies. Some are innocent, like this Skrillex/Deadmau5 flu-fighting scenario, or Diplo taking Skrillex for a swim. Others examine the seedier side of the imagination – check out Tiesto and Hardwell's afternoon of yoga for a terrifying example. This is standard fanfic stuff: people who don't have sex very often write long stories about people who don't have sex with each other so other people who don't have sex very often can imagine the two people who do have sex but not with each other having sex.

That's all well and good, and it isn't surprising that huge names have vast fandoms out there ready to drop 20,000 words on speculative copulation, but with all things fictional, you've got to peer into the deeper realms to find the juicy stuff. While we've not yet found anyone out there crafting detailed fantasies about what DJ Deep and Romain Poncet get up to when the 808s turn off, or how the lads from Ame relieve themselves of tension every so often, we have been impressed by how far reaching the smut-peddling web can be. The imagination is a terrifying place, and here's three annotated extracts from stories that made my brain do backflips before I slapped down my laptop lid in horror. Well, kind of.

Straight up, this might be the oddest bit of writing I've ever encountered, and I've read at least 50 books. The premise is simple: Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo has mutated into a shark and his helmeted partner in crime, Thomas Bangalter, is forced into accepting that his best friend is, well, a shark. We've all been there right? We've all got mums who flip flop between human and shark at will, haven't we?

In a way, it's a touching tale of friends overcoming differences, accepting one another for who they truly are, even if one of them has two dicks and a tail. Except, it's about ONE OF DAFT PUNK BECOMING A FUCKING SHARK and it goes on for TWENTY THOUSAND WORDS and it is about ONE OF DAFT PUNK BECOMING A FUCKING SHARK FOR TWENTY THOUSAND WORDS.

I cannot recommend Suck My Dick, I'm a Shark highly enough. It is the work of absolutely addled genius and in decades to come we will unfurl every meaning of every word like we do with Ulysses.

As the name suggests, this story — clocking in at an incredibly slim 1879 words — is concerned with a very, very soggy biscuit. Rather than being set in a boarding school dorm, princessmars has taken us away to a sleepover. Porter Robinson's there, and so's Madeon, and so's Dillon Francis and so's Zedd and they're all having fun, just having a laugh, just a few lads enjoying what lads enjoy at sleepovers: glugging fizzy drink, playing Need For Speed and trying to sneak in a watch of The Parole Officer before the host's mum asks them to turn the lights off and the noise down.

And then they decided to wank onto a biscuit. Now, the weird bit here isn't the fact that someone's decided to write nearly 2000 words about some EDM DJs masturbating onto a biscuit — in the world of fanfic this is completely and utterly normal — but rather the specificity of the conjured scenario. Why two minutes? Who decided that two minutes was the time you had to blat by? What if you felt a bit shy. What if you'd never wanked in front of your mates before. What, more importantly, happens if you don't find the biscuit in question sexually attractive?

Disturbingly, Madeon, the bloke who looks literally twelve years old, loses. He is forced to eat the cookie.

Somehow, it gets filthier from there. Admittedly, it's not as stunning a read as Suck My Dick, I'm a Shark, nor is at inventive, but Sticky Cookie exudes a kind of boyish charm that's hard to resist.

We've had mind-bending oddness and saucy smut, so it makes sense to delve into slightly different territory. This story concerns itself with the relationship between the two hairy, greasy blokes from Justice and the joy of it stems from it's simple, bald, romanticism. Repackage it slightly and you've got a perfectly serviceable airport romance, or at least the kind of fiction that Bella might run if Bella ran short stories. Kind of.

Written in the second person — that method so beloved of short story writers who feel like the repeated "you"s are ingratiating rather than an incredibly contrived annoyance — exploringtravesty tries to imbue the romance of their own creation with a kind of brushstroke sensitivity that inevitably leads to the whole thing reading like the contents of a half-arsed condolence card bought a few days too late. Oddly, that's part of the appeal of it. It's trying so hard to be sensitive and insightful and meaningful that you can't help but smile a bit patronisingly at it. Sections like the one below are perfect examples of this. Exploringtravesty's clearly a Raymond Carver fan and this is the kind of writing that people who read a lot of Dirty Minimalism think makes for good writing:

It's not "great writing" at all, but, then again, the whole point of fanfiction is that it isn't great writing, that it isn't writing modulated and mediated by the cult of the chattering classess and creative writing seminars and the Observer New Review and Julian Barnes and Zadie Smith. It is writing that comes from somewhere inner, writing that's pure and unsullied, writing that's invigorating, exciting, and about one of Daft Punk turning into a shark.

Long may it continue.

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