Meet MsKingBean89, the author of AO3's most popular fanfic

"I think it's important that I have something in my life that I'm not trying to sell."

Welcome to Extra Garbage Day! These Thursday issues are typically paywalled interviews with people who I think are on the forefront of tech and web culture. 

This week’s Extra Garbage Day is a real fun one. Garbage Resident Allegra and I got to sit down with the author of one of the most viral fan fictions of the last few years — MsKingBean89.

If you aren’t familiar with MsKingBean89, in 2017, she started writing a fan fiction titled, “All The Young Dudes” and uploaded it to fan fiction mega-site Archive Of Our Own. The story took her 18 months to complete and according to AO3’s metrics, it’s now been read over four million times. As of this month, it became the fanfic with most amount of hits on the site.

So what happened between 2017 and 2021 to make “All The Young Dudes” the biggest thing in the world of fan fiction? Well, TikTok kids found it, obviously.

(TikTok/#AllTheYoungDudes)

The #AllTheYoungDudes, #atyd, and #MsKingBean89 tags have over a million combined views on the platform. The fic started circulating on the short-form video app last winter and has become a fixture of the Tumblr → TikTok → Twitter fandom pipeline in the months since.

“All The Young Dudes” is a marauders story, which is to say it focuses on four characters from Harry Potter: Remus Lupin, Peter Pettigrew, Sirius Black, and James Potter. “All The Young Dudes” is told from the point of view of Remus Lupin and is focused on a ship commonly called “wolfstar” (Sirius Black and Remus Lupin).

Slate recently called “All The Young Dudes” the “best Harry Potter novel” that “wasn’t written by J.K. Rowling.” But throughout all the “All The Young Dudes” viral mania, the identity of MsKingBean89 has reminded a mystery. Some users have even gone so far as to speculate that she’s actually Taylor Swift. Considering Swift is still a big-time Tumblr user, I suppose that’s not a totally crazy idea. But, as you’ll read in our interview, MsKingBean89’s privacy is super important to her. Though, I can confirm that she is a real person and very lovely.

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Ryan: OK, so I can confirm right now that you're not Taylor Swift. I had read that you possibly could be.

MsKingBean89: No, I'm not unfortunately. I hadn't even listened to any Taylor Swift. I obviously have heard of her. And I worked in a shop for a bit and you can't really avoid Taylor Swift’s hits.

I listened to all of Folklore because of “All The Young Dudes,” because everyone on TikTok was like, “oh my god, this is the soundtrack to ‘All The Young Dudes’.” And I was like, “I'm pretty sure I gave them a soundtrack. How dare they?” But yeah, I have now listened to Taylor Swift. Yeah, pretty good.

Ryan: I want to start with TikTok. What was it like to watch your fic blow up?

Surreal. I didn't have TikTok. I didn't have an account. I think I was getting messages on Tumblr. I was obviously seeing the hits go up. And I was seeing [Archive Of Our Own’s like system] kudos does go up. And then somebody said to me, “it's on TikTok,” and then someone sent me a video. And that's how I ended up in this wormhole of like, just thousands, I think thousands of videos.

So, it was very overwhelming and, obviously, really funny. At first, I thought, “oh, this is a cool, like, niche thing.” And memes were all pretty cute. And it was for a while. It was really just 15 year olds sobbing and crying. And I just couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that they were filming themselves crying. Or that, you know, that they've got themselves worked up over my story. So yeah, it was really weird. And then it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

And, honestly, I got a bit addicted to it. I was scrolling through because I wanted to watch them all and you can't sort by oldest on TikTok. I was really keen that I saw all of them.

It very, very quickly got pretty old, honestly. Because there are new ones every day. I can't ever keep up with it, though. I've sort of installed and uninstalled TikTok a few times on my phone because I’ve sort of always got one foot in the door, one out the door with how much I actually want to see of it. Because it's so much for one person to see. It's so much.

Allegra: And the TikTok stuff was after the story had finished, right? Did you assume that it had sort of reached its peak?

Definitely.

I wrote it in 18 months. I think it finished towards the end of 2018. And I thought, “well, that's the most engagement I'll ever get with that last chapter.” I did have loads of comments, like 100 comments in the last chapter. There were people following it and, you know, it was well received while it was published and I really thought, “wow, that was really fortunate of me, like not many people get that kind of engagement with fanfic. But now I will just see that dwindle.”

And it did for a while. I was getting a comment every day and then a comment every week, then maybe two or three a month. And then, suddenly, I was getting 75 a day. I was waking up to them and it was just sort of keyboard smashes. Like what do you do with that? And so, eventually, I had to stop responding to them. I used to respond to all of them, but I had to stop.

Ryan: So for my readers who might not be in the fanfic world, can you talk a little bit about what it's like to work on a fanfic for 18 months? That’s a huge amount of time! For someone who isn't familiar with AO3 or any sort of fan fiction, that feels like a lot of time for a fan work.

I suppose it is. I don't know. I've just finished another one that, to me, is way better. But thankfully, it’s in a very quiet corner of the internet where no one will ever see it.

I think it’s about how much time you want to put into your hobby, right? How much time do you put into doing something you enjoy every day? And if I'm perfectly honest, when I started writing it, there wasn't much I did that I enjoyed in my life. I went to work and I came home and I watched TV. And I went to therapy. I was going through depression at the time. And it was just something that was like, “ah, I always loved writing.”

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer. And, in fact, I had a go at writing fan fiction when I was in early secondary school. So I would have been about 13. And I hadn't done it for such a long time. And I remembered how happy it made me and I just felt like doing it. And, I don't know, it was a sort of possession. I think when you have a story in your head, I think when you do something creative, and you have a creative idea in your head that you have to get out, whether or not it's a piece of music or just a rock song or whatever — or a TikTok video — you really want to make, you can't get that idea out of your head. And you have to do something with it if you're that kind of creative person. And so, as soon as I had the idea, it really felt like the only thing to do was finish it. It ended up being 18 months. I thought it would take me a year, but it got longer and longer and longer. So yeah. It was a lot of time to spend on something. But I was totally devoted to it. It was all I thought about when I woke up in the morning and it made me happy. So that was the most important thing for a long time.

Allegra: Did you have the idea for the story all at once? Did you know how it was going to end as soon as you started it?

Sort of the joy of fan fiction is that you're on rails — or you can be as much as you want to be. And with this, I think so. I had been reading some fiction, I hadn't really read any news. And then, as I say, I was going to therapy. And I wanted something to read on the train going to therapy. I had quite a long train ride. And I could have read a book, but I couldn't read books. You have just been sobbing in a room for an hour. So you're just not in the mood to read something brand new or something smart.

My husband had never read Harry Potter. So I was like, “oh, you've got to at least read it.” We listened to the audiobooks together. And I think just really listening to it, I thought, “oh, you know, I wonder if there's any fan fiction I could read or that I would enjoy.” And so I started reading some and I quickly found the fan fiction I like and eventually I was like, “oh, I could do this. I could do another version. That's not how I would write that.” Or, “that's that's not how Remus would respond to that situation.” Those sorts of things.

But yeah, I pretty much always knew where I was going and I think that's why I got it done so quickly and at such speed. Because I always knew what had to happen.

Ryan: What do you think about TikTok’s ability to find random internet content and then turn it into the biggest thing in the whole world? Now that you've been in the center of this.

I don't want to say I find it scary, but I do find it difficult to comprehend. And that's scary. And the speed with which stuff can travel like that? I mean, most people would kill for that kind of exposure, that kind of engagement with something they've done. And that's why TikTok is, you know, a valuable commodity. But there's something about the speed with which it happens and your inability to keep up. Me, just trying to keep up with the seeing every video that someone had made and tagged with me, was eventually exhausting and quite a scary sort of challenge. So I had to stop doing it.

It never ends. It's the endlessness of it. It definitely wasn't good. For me, it wasn't good for me to look at it or see. I can't imagine being a 14 year old and trying to cope with a similar sort of thing. Because my head at 14 was not capable of dealing with that much content or that much information. So it's fascinating to me, and with all of them crying, as well, it's this sort of hysteria that was part of the allure of it.

I think people were saying, “you know, this will break you, this will destroy you.” And that's really appealing to 15 year old girls, 16 year old girls, to be emotionally destroyed. That's something that we crave deep inside. And so I think that’s why we listen to sad music — we listen to Taylor Swift — and read things about our favorite characters falling beautifully in love and then being destroyed. And I think it's just a really classically exciting and interesting story. And I think it was just a perfect storm really because it happened during the winter of COVID. I think it really petered out by maybe late spring 2021.

Allegra: Scrolling through the TikTok tag and on Twitter, you see people talking about “All The Young Dudes” as an alternative to Harry Potter. I imagine that makes you feel pretty — I don't know how that makes you feel, but it's a interesting sort of advertising strategy.

You want your story to be more important than fan fiction to somebody and thinking that way is doing a disservice to fan fiction because some of the most important stories to me are fan fiction and I think to other people, as well. And there's nothing wrong with that, but yeah, obviously, it's great to hear people saying, “hey, this is replacing it,” but it also comes with a burden and it's not really what I asked for, you know? I didn't come in to say, “no, I'm a better writer than anyone.” Or, “I want to replace JK Rowling, I want to present to you an unproblematic Harry Potter universe.” Because I'm not capable of doing that. I'm just a person who was really intensively writing for a year and a half and maybe should have been doing other things.

Yeah, it definitely feels like quite a lot of pressure and it's not something I've ever said myself.

Ryan: To dig into that a little bit more, what do you think about the post-50 Shades Of Grey instinct, or impulse, to legitimize fan fiction into something beyond? The people who are like, “oh, you should strip out the names of the characters and make it into something real”?

I hear that a lot. It actually came up at work recently because I told a colleague about it and she mentioned it to my manager. And his first question was, “oh, do you get any revenue from that?” And I was like, “well, no, them's the breaks, there's nothing you can actually do.”

You can't make money out of fan fiction. I always understood that it's someone else's property. They are someone else's characters. I didn't invent Remus. I invented a version of him for my own purposes. And, you know, he is what he is. But I think that doesn't mean it's not good. 50 Shades of Grey did a couple of things to fan fiction. A lot of people hadn't heard of it before. So like just talking about fan fiction became a thing.

I still sort of just want to be private. As I said at the beginning, it's a hobby. I mean, I have other hobbies. I do sewing and people are always saying to me, “oh, why don't you sell your sewing? You know, if you made some patterns, you could do this or you could do that.” And I think it's important that I have something in my life that I'm not trying to sell, and that I'm not able to make money off of in that way. It would really be wonderful to be a published author to have written something original that people feel as strongly about as they do “All The Young Dudes,” but I'm at the point now where I'm okay with that not happening, as well. Because although I have original ideas and I write original things, it's much harder to get published from fan fiction.

I feel like I've experienced what having a work blow up feels like and I'm not sure I need it to create more work. It used to be comments really, really spurred me on and made me want to write more, because it's like, “I'm being read.” And I think what this whole experience has taught me is that I need to remember more than anything else is that it’s enough just to be read at all. Having someone else read it and go, “oh, that's amazing. Or when you said that, it really, you know, changed the way I thought about this, or you know, or that really made me laugh, or that made me cry.”

I can't imagine being happier with any other state of affairs.

I can make money other ways. I have a job. And I don’t think I would make much more from writing a novel, you know? You hear that they make like $40,000 on average for a book. Okay, well, I could make more than that doing various other things.

Allegra: This might be something that I you've answered on Tumblr, but people fancast the marauders and your OCs and stuff like that? Did you ever have a cast in mind? Or is that private?

I actually posted it on Tumblr. I did have one.

I was just having fun with 70s actors because I really wanted to only have them be people from the 70s for some reason, and, also, I didn't actually have these people in mind when I was writing the story.

I think chose Malcolm McDowell as Remus. If you see him in if.... he's got this manic schoolboy thing and it's excellent. I mean, it's a brilliant film. Watch it anyway.

I couldn't come up with a Sirius. Sirius Black is just ineffable. Oh, Jane Asher was Lily, obviously, because how many redhead celebrities could I think of. Jane Asher will do. And Marianne Faithfull was Marlene. And I can't remember the rest of them.

I'm not in love with the fancasts I see except for the one they pick for my original character. There's an original character in the story which people really loved which is my favorite thing. Honestly, I love that and they cast [1917’s] George Mackay as him. I think because then they could use a lot of GIFs from Pride.

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If you’ve been forwarded this email, welcome! You can check out a full list of the previous Extra Garbage Days here. And here’s a short list of who I’ve interviewed recently:

• Avery Monsen, minor K-Pop sensation and author of All My Friends Are Dead.

• Alice E. Marwick, author of “To Catch A Predator? The MySpace Moral Panic”

• Nat "LeftAtLondon" Puff, former Vine star and current TikTok creator

• Sarah Z, YouTube's preeminent Tumblr historian

• The original artist behind Miss Officer And Mr. Truffles

And, lastly, here’s a Tumblr thread I’ve been meaning to show people that isn’t related to anything else in this email, but is still just kind of mind-blowing.

***Typos in this email aren’t on purpose, but sometimes they happen***