my favourite work of fanfiction

16 Nov, 2025

...is "The Pack Survives" by Astolat. It is her longest work, at 176,759 words. It is about how Robb Stark saves Westeros by... umm... you should read it to find out. Mind the sex scenes; there are lots of them, and as is so often the case in fanfiction, important character work happens in them.

The Pack Survives is Astolat's five hundred and thirtieth work of fanfiction. Between when she wrote fanfiction number one and number five hundred and thirty, she founded a convention dedicated to the fannish art of vidding, wrote a manifesto about why fanfiction writers need to own their own servers, brought that vision into reality by founding the Archive of Our Own, and published several novels, which led to this interaction:

You can't write five hundred and thirty works of fanfiction and several published novels on the exact same subject, of course. But there is a theme that she keeps returning to, over and over again, something kind of hard to pin down, so I'll try to give a few different formulations of it:

• If you have power, considering the state of the world, what would you do? (And in what ways would you hide from the terrible burden of it?)
• Is it good or bad to care for people you love, at the expense of people you don't? Is love ultimately redemptive? To what extent?
• Love can make you do evil things, even though it is self-evidently good. But does this always have to be the case? Can we build resilient social technology to prevent the evil that bursts forth from the good?
• If a society isn't just, what can you do? What are the constraints?
• If a society isn't just because of the amount of love in it, what should be done?

She explores different facts of it at different times, and it's been neat, to see how her answers shift over time, over fandoms, over contexts. ¹

The earliest central example (that I've read) is a fanfic I love to recommend because its "hear me out" nature cannot be beat: Victory Condition (2018, Transformers, 37k). "Yeah, it's about Megatron and Optimus Prime discussing poetry and having weirdly hot robot sex, and it's also about how society is a thin veneer of civilization perched atop a gaping maw of exploitation and suffering where everyone at the top is in a silent conspiracy to hide the truth as much as possible. And it's reasonable for those who are crushed by it to think that everyone who is complicit deserves the bullet, but also it's genuinely unclear how much room they have to operate differently?"

In 2019 she tried another variation of the dialogue between the two robot factions, Coming Home (21k). This one tilts the worldbuilding so the philosophy is slightly more more in Megatron's favour, and we get to see the ensuing slight difference in the resolution.

Then she publishes the Scholomance series, which is a YA-ish trilogy about an unforgiving magic school for teens that sometimes eats its students. When I considered what she was trying to say, it felt genuinely really in dialogue with her transformers works, returning to that same well of questions. She's able to go deeper into the emotions and flesh out the actual actors behind the state of the world, because she has three entire books to work with. But the question that is being wrestled with is difficult, and the ending is one that seems... well... I don't know, it seems like a bit of a cop-out, a Politically Correct Conclusion that sort of papers over a lot of the complex questions raised through the trilogy.

More cheerfully for me, however, it was also a clear indication that she was still worrying at the same fascinating core problem that she left only half-resolved in her fanfic. Victory Condition came out in 2018, Coming Home in 2019, and the Scholomance books came out between 2020 and 2022. And then, starting in 2022, she started publishing a slew of Game of Thrones canon divergence fic, with many of them being at least in part dialogues between the Stark and Lannister philosophies:

• Raised by Wolves (26k) in March 2022,
• Royal Flush (85k) in May 2022,
• Let the River Run (61k) in December 2022,
• The Pack Survives (176k) in December 2023.²

Yes, those are some insane numbers in a ludicrously short time frame. It's possible she wrote some of these concurrently with Scholomance but didn't publish them until after the series was done.

I am kind of insane about all of these works? The Transformers fics, and Scholomance, and her post-2022 Game of Thrones fic run³, and the central thread that is so... self-evident between them? By her 2022 Game of Thrones run, there slowly emerges a second, complicating thread: "after we trust each other, and learn how to coordinate, how do we bring more people into the fold?" Like, the dialogue on The Central Tension (whatever it is) is just between the Starks and the Lannisters in Raised by Wolves. In Royal Flush, the other actors of Westeros begin to get a little more screen time - if House Stark does move X against House Lannister, how might the Tyrells react, and what geopolitical shifts might result?

And Royal Flush resolves more than satisfactorily, but it does so in a way that... doesn't quite work for every single character, or lets them have the HEA without having put in the requisite amount of work. It's still a wonderful fic, and if you read it on its own I don't think you'd find anything wrong with the way it ends. It's just that then Astolat keeps writing additional variations on the theme, and you begin to see what she's aiming to do if you're reading all these fics in chronological order, and the ways that Royal Flush falls short of those specific goals becomes more obvious in retrospect.

So after Royal Flush, she returns to the drawing board in Let the River Run. It's more "zoomed in", less geopolitics, more talky character interactions, the focus more on specific people's hinge points. And after that's done, The Pack Survives becomes her second attempt at a fix-it for Westeros, and it's such! A! Good! Fic! I can see why it took her a year and so many words; many characters don't want to be brought to heel, are afraid in some ways of being in the fold, and this necessarily takes a very long time to resolve.

And something about it really worked for me, made it click. I loved reading all these formulations and reformulations of the problem and the various attempts at resolutions, but the philosophical appreciation was sort of intellectual, impersonal. But the through-line was simpler and starker (no pun intended) in The Pack Survives: do things with honour and everything will flourish, and without it, everything will go to shit. It is scary to do things with honour in a world of defectors, and you will need to be clever to come out unscathed, but that is the only way that we will survive all of this. And it is only after you are honourable that you can love, without the love leading to evil.

This was a message I needed to hear at the time, but I didn't realize it at first. I was not being honest with myself, or conducting myself with as much honour as I would have liked to, but these did not even ping as problems to me, because I knew I was "a good person". But there was something about the work that captivated me, that demanded reread upon reread. The work was published through December 2023. Over the first two months of 2024, I must have read the story beginning to end a dozen times; going right back to the beginning as soon as I finished.

Straightforwardly, I loved all the characters, and I loved the way the story ends, and I can continue to gush about it, but there's something a little more interesting that I'd like to say instead.

That is, secretly, I saw myself in the character of Jaime Lannister. There's this passage that discusses him, and I related to it so incredibly hard:

“He’s not worthless. The gods were generous with their gifts when they made him, and he—he wants to be better than he is. But he’s not worthy, not of you or any true woman of honor. He’s a selfish coward, who’s never been put to a real trial. He hungers to be better, but he’s never made himself so. Instead, he lies to himself: he hasn’t a choice, there’s nothing he can do. He knows better, but he won’t admit it.”

His redemption arc, which he began for the want of a woman, and fought against the entire way through, meant so much to me. It was very fortunate that Astolat adored the character, because I think in the hands of anyone else he would have been written as fundamentally irredeemable, or a tragic figure who has to die for his sins. But she handled his story with so much tenderness, this terrible awful spoiled man, and that it made it okay for me to be him.⁴

I wanted to be Robb, but I was Jaime. And so the only thing to do was change. To be brave in the face of doing strange things I was unpracticed in and had real stakes; to have difficult conversations and reset expectations, to come to terms with all the small shitty ways I was subtly defecting from civilization with the excuse "well everyone else is doing it" and to slowly stop them one by one at real cost, to slowly become better than I was before.

So I guess I have two points to make. The first is that there's a thing that fanfiction writers do a lot, where they fall in love with terrible men and they try to make them better. This is derided, but I think it is a genuine public service, especially when traditional media forms seem to be currently very ambivalent about moral vision, and quite unsophisticated about it besides. A regular fix of terrible men becoming fixed fixes me.

And second, I think that's sort of where this all ends philosophically, too. Those broad philosophical questions are still interesting abstractly, but in the end if we want to actually go to the healed world, the answers need to be lived and not just derived. And while we are not yet there, stories can help you bridge the gap. And I feel so incredibly lucky to have an author I adore help me see the way through.

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