Are you what you eat? Reflections on Consuming #DeadDoves After 10+ Years in Fandom

On By kyraalexandriaIn L I F E ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When I first started reading fanfiction 12 years ago, fanfiction was still very uncool. I read fanfiction only under the cover of darkness or in public with a carefully dimmed screen. I shared my hobby only with my closest friends and only in hushed whispers. The combination of secretive embarrassment and youthful slyness was part of the appeal, for a time. And I had no idea how large a part of my life fanfiction would become. (How I stumbled upon fanfiction, and my experience entering the community as a minor is a separate essay. Maybe I’ll write it someday…) Over a decade later, and fandom has become a huge part of my life: it’s lead to online and IRL (in real life) friendships, exploration of new art mediums and media, hundreds of dollars of merch purchases, and hours of my life combing the internet for excellent writing and reading some of the best works of fiction in existence. (I’ll gladly argue about this with anyone, and I’d win that argument.)

Today, I am deeper into fandom than ever before. The joys of maturity and adulthood: I get to do a lot more of what I want with my time and money, and have little to no shame about my personal interests. I read hundreds of fanfics a year and gladly purchase all types of stickers and zines (fan magazines) from my favorite authors and artists. Fandom is one of the greatest sources of entertainment in my life, and I’m hardly alone in this: there are over 10,000,000 fanworks and 5,000,000 registered users on Archive of Our Own, affectionately known as AO3 within the community, alone.

I cannot confidently claim today that fanfiction is now cool, but there’s certainly been a cultural shift. 2024 was a big year for fandom: from the release of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, an excellent adaptation of a film deeply mired in the legality of fanworks, fanfiction theft on a previously unheard of scale due to Amazon and AI, and closer to my primary fandom community’s backyard, the announcement of HBO’s new Harry Potter series kicking off a contentious and important conversation about the ethics of Potterheads’ engagement with Rowling’s IP (intellectual property), fandom was in the news and those of us who are active in the community had plenty to chatter about.

So, what’s a dead dove? In fanworks, the term dead dove literally means ‘this fic is exactly what is advertised,’ you can watch this short clip for the phrase’s origin, an episode of Arrested Development: “in which a character inspects a bag labelled “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat”, opens it to see what’s inside, and then (having found a dead dove) remarks that he isn’t sure what he was expecting”1. In fanworks, the term dead dove most often colloquially means “a fanwork that is particularly disturbing or disgusting due to its subject matter.” While technically any fic about any topic can be labeled ‘dead dove: do not eat’, often shortened to DD:DNE, I personally associate the term dead dove with dark fics. And because I identify as a reader who “inhales dead doves”, I’m going to be really candid about the types of topics I’ve encountered: dubious consent, sexual assault, graphic violence, homicide, etc. 

In 2024, I saw and engaged in quite a bit of intra-community chatter on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and TikTok about those who read dead doves. In the vein of research indicating Gen Z is more conservative than its predecessors, it seems younger and/or newer members of the fandom community find readers and writers of dead doves to be distasteful, often calling for cancellation of those who partake in any capacity. Now, I should note that in my insulated fandom spaces, i.e. my many beloved fanfic discord servers, such rebuke is still disallowed and frowned upon. I’ve found that in fandom spaces with more seasoned participants, such blanket disregard of dead dove partakers is seen as juvenile and ignorant, but the multiple conversations online caused me to reflect as a fanfic writer and reader who frequently and happily munches on dead doves: am I what I eat?

Obviously (hopefully), the short answer is no. Or at least, not exactly. As I mentioned earlier, the dead doves I tend to read are violent. Yet I have never committed any grievous bodily harm to another living human being. The longer, more interesting answer is “well, yes!” I staunchly believe that exposure breeds acceptance. There’s plenty of data to support that watching violent television, whether a fictionalized crime drama or your local news, does in fact numb the psyche to violence. I know this to be true from my own personal experience: I grew up in a household where Oxygen’s Snapped was practically background noise, and as a result the average news broadcast doesn’t spark the empathy and concern in me that is normal or expected. And in fact, I’ve set a personal goal in 2025 to recalibrate my intake of world news for my own mental well-being: I care deeply about the plights of Palestinian, Sudanese and Tigray folks but taking in their suffering daily while needing to continue working a 40-hour work week is slowly degrading my ability to be present in my daily life. My brain and spirit literally cannot handle remaining fully informed, which is a whole other tragic essay (capitalism and imperialism, you will crumble!).

What’s the impact of eating dead doves? Well, sometimes I like them. *GASP* I know. One may wonder, what is there to like about violent fanfiction? Well, the usual things one might enjoy in, say, a murder mystery novel or horror film: the storytelling quality, attachment to a particular character or two, an eloquent plot twist, or frankly, the shock value of certain types of violence. And often when I like something, I seek out more of it. So, maybe I search a particular tag for similar content or bury myself in an author’s work history or bookmarks for similar intrigue. And yes, the more I seek a dead dove or triggering topic, the more I expect it, the less I’m shocked by it, and the less desensitized I am to it. So the cycle goes. Relatedly, as a fanfiction writer (wow—there is a time I would never have admitted that in public), my writing does occasionally go in darker directions than even I anticipate. Not because I’m drawing on personal experience or even desires, but because the language and scenarios are floating around in my brain from years of reading dark content.

So, are we what we eat? Eh. Reading dead doves is not necessarily different than watching graphic war news daily or watching the Terrifer films. (Yes, I have judgement for fans of that series. If that makes me a hypocrite, then so be it!) Yes, you are desensitizing your mind to violence which may come with psychological consequences, but no, you are not necessarily more likely to participate in said violence IRL. And frankly, as a horror girly who finds great intrigue in the genre, I’m used to reflecting on this topic. I think there are more interesting questions to ask oneself: why am I drawn to the media I am? Do I have healthy methods to process the media I engage with? What can I learn or unlearn about my own life from media? I think we can all agree that some media is inherently negative to consume, but that agreement won’t stop said media from existing or individuals from engaging with it. The more fruitful dialogue is one about why rather than what. And while I won’t be unpacking my particular whys in this essay (my preferred AO3 tags are between me, God and my therapist), I am happy that we are discussing ethical media consumption in fandom spaces. And as the daughter of a prolific spicy romance reader, allow me to say: I’m grown. What I read is my business, and doesn’t inherently hurt anybody.

My name is Kyra, and yes, I do eat dead doves 🙂

  1. “dead dove.” Wiktionary. 27 Sep 2024, 11:21 UTC. 13 Jan 2025, 01:56 <https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=dead_dove&oldid=81967118>. ↩︎

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