9. YA fanfiction

There are four large online repositories of fanfiction about Young Americans (YA). Three of them contain "sequels" substantially longer than the original drama.

The largest online repository of YA fanfiction is the "Young Americans Fanfiction Archive."  As of February 2024, it contains 143 works, ranging from 2000 to 2019 in date and up to 118,000 words in length.  Among the more interesting is "Hotel Fire" (2002); it contains, in chapter 6, the earliest written record of fan perception that Will Krudski is no more a teenager than Jake is a girl, but rather a mature writer who "goes to Rawley" to rejuvenate morally: "Hamilton was thinking ... 'Is he really our age?' He had thought this before ... and Jake had said, 'Nah, he's a botox'd up 40-year-old infiltrating the class on behalf of the faculty.'" Perhaps the most insightful work on the "YA Fanfiction Archive" is not fanfiction, but rather the self-introduction of Depudor, the author of four works on the archive averaging about 20,000 words in length. Depudor wrote of the show's Jake-Hamilton story-line: "Watching it was like being kissed."

During the first half-dozen years after YA's U.S. broadcast in 2000, the most prolific author of YA fanfiction was a young woman writing under the name, Nicky. Among the works of YA fanfiction that she wrote were "Nicky's YA Episodes," now accessible only via the "Wayback Machine" of The Internet Archive (archive.org). She proposed to take the protagonists of YA through their graduation from Rawley Academy, dramatizing each of the intervening six semesters in roughly the same form and length -- eight episodes of roughly 45-minute length -- as the original drama. Between 2002 and 2006, Nicky brought them through five-and-one-half semesters, then slowed to one episode a year and stopped, in 2009, one episode short of completion. In Nicky's sequel, reality overwhelms the fairy-tale of true love, both in the original Jake-Hamilton romance and in a truly-gay romance that replaces it as the drama's emotional core, involving Ryder and an original character even needier than Jake.

Between 2002 and 2008, a duo who wrote under the names of Estee and Harmony generated a comparable volume of YA fanfiction. They, too, undertook a sequel that would take YA's protagonists through their graduation from Rawley in eight episodes for each of six semesters. Their "New Beginnings" saga did so, although, after 16 episodes each for sophomore and junior years, senior year was dealt with in only eleven episodes (the eleventh being added in 2018, after a decade-long hiatus). True love withstands the assaults of realism more successfully in Estee's and Harmony's sequel than in Nicky's, and Jake and Hamilton retain the lead roles in the drama; an original character who threatens to upstage them is killed off. Arguably the work by Estee and Harmony that most enhances appreciation of the original drama is "War and Love," one of their non-sequel YA fanfiction stories. It retells the Jake-Hamilton story with Hamilton rather than Jake as the emotionally needy character.  "War and Love" thereby isolates compassion in response to emotional need as the core of the drama, as it is in any test-of-true-love fairy tale.

Because Young Americans has never been released in an authorized tape or disk form (reportedly due to a rise in the price of Nick Drake songs in its soundtrack after Nick Drake's songs became popular in 2001), the advent of YouTube in 2006 expanded YA fandom. In 2006, all eight aired episodes as broadcast in the USA in 2000 were posted on a YouTube channel then called "Alienious" (now called "Avir").  The visual quality was poor, 240 pixels per inch. Nevertheless, as several actors for whom YA had been a "first gig" became famous -- including Kate Bosworth, Michelle Monaghan, Ian Somerhalder, Charlie Hunnam and Matt Czuchry -- people who had never seen the show when it was broadcast watched it on YouTube, while others re-watched it for the first time since its US broadcast in the summer of 2000. As of January 2015, the YouTube channel of "Alienious," which contained (and still contains) nothing but YA footage, had been viewed more than two million times. However, in January 2015, most of that channel's content was removed by YouTube. By then, other YouTube channels displayed YA with better visual quality.

The availability of YA online seems to have diminished the output of YA fanfiction despite increasing the number of YA fans. Fans wanting to share their fondness for the show now increasingly did so by making and posting fan video clips or by sharing YA online, rather than by writing fanfiction.

Since the advent in 2009 of Archive of Our Own (AO3), a not-for-profit, advertisement-free venue for posting fanfiction online, most of the reduced volume of YA fanfiction has been posted on Ao3's Young Americans Fanworks Archive. Between mid-2009 and February 2024, only ten works of YA fanfiction were posted on Fanfiction.net, while 35 were posted on Ao3. 

The third large sequel to YA, "Lest faith turn to despair," was posted on AO3 by "If all the world and love were young" in 2014 -- not, as it claims, at Thanksgiving 2000, nine years before AO3 existed. Like the sequels by Nicky and by Estee and Harmony, "Lest faith turn to despair" is several times larger than the original drama. Unlike them, it covers not three years but only five days around Thanksgiving 2000, after the summer in which Young Americans ostensibly is set. In those five days, all of Rawley and New Rawley are pulled into the Jake-Hamilton true love story to resolve all the original drama's problems in what the author calls "a happiest possible ending." That ending is achieved by interpreting Hamilton's character in YA in the most favorable possible sense, as a shrewdly devious personification of true love. As this is revealed, the other characters are moved to outdo Hamilton at his own game of loving unimaginably well.

In addition, a number of early (2000-2004) Young Americans fanfiction sites, including the largest of them, are preserved substantially intact by The Internet Archive (Archive.org) and accessible via its "Wayback Machine." Many stories on these sites seem not to be available elsewhere. Each of these fanfiction sites also contains a "links" page; together, these links pages reveal dozens of YA fansites that existed in 2000-2001, of which several are still preserved by Archive.org. These early YA fanfiction sites now available only through Archive.org include:

Nelle's The Stories of Us, linked here as it appeared in February 2003, a few months before Nelle removed all fanfiction from that site. Although a large collection, it's just the fanfiction section of Nelle's Kate and Ian YA fansite, linked here as it appeared in April 2003.        

Courtney's Required Reading, linked here as it appeared in January 2004. All the links seem to be intact, but one must click on various archiving dates for each of them to find the most recent date on which it was preserved.

Although Courtney's "Silver Oar Awards" Young Americans fanfiction contest site is still accessible at The Silver Oar Awards - Best of YA Fanfic, its links to stories and sites work far better if one accesses it as preserved by Archive.org. However, one must sometimes click on various archiving dates for any given link to get an intact link.

Patty's Simply Fanfic, linked here as it appeared in February 2010. On the main menu page, under "Categories," the titles of the "Jake/Hamilton" and "Will/Bella" categories don't appear, but they are the top two (vacant) lines, and clicking on them takes one to the stories. Most although not all of them can still be opened, although one must sometimes click on various archiving dates to find an intact version.

Fehrkitten's Young Americans Fan Fiction site, linked here as it appeared in December 2000, has stopped working since 2014 due to a change The Internet Archive's policy with respect to "robotstxt" (robots exclusion standard). However, that might once again change; the information is preserved, although inaccessible to the public. 

Kat's This Year's Love, a smaller site containing only Kat's own works, linked here as it appeared in September 2009. The stories are intact.

Jean's Young Americans Fanfiction, a smaller site containing only Jean's works, linked here as it appeared in April 2001. The stories are intact.

Aunty Mib's Young Americans Slash, a very small site containing only two stories, both intact, linked here as it appeared in February 2001.  "History and Potential," although slash, is both well-written and insightful, grasping the symbolic contrast of the characters of Scout and Sean in YA.

Until it closed in July 2020, the most active venue for fan discussion of YA was the 'Young Americans' board at Fanforum.com.  Still online among Fanforum's archived boards, it contains content dating back only to a Fanforum software crash in 2004, although the "Young Americans" board of Fanforum, originally called Rawley Academy Online, dates back to 2000.  It contains substantive threads on diverse topics, including YA fanfiction.

Ichabod Grubb

First posted December 2016

Last updated February 2024