Alchemised — Kinky Fan-Fiction Disguised as Literary Fantasy

Some context about Alchemised

You might not know what Alchemised is, so here are the cliff notes:

Alchemised is a 100,000+ word ‘dark fantasy’ novel adapted from a Harry Potter (Dramione)¹ fan fiction called Manacled.

Manacled itself is 200,000+ word hostage romance drama, loved and lauded by a mostly female fan-base eager to badge their kinks and literary, many of whom double as TikTok evangelists who shoot videos of themselves with smudged mascara, sobbing about how it ‘destroyed them.’ The cult-like fervour, as is often the case, is part of the point.

The appeal of the story, as far as I can tell, is it’s perverse thrill; domination, coercion, humiliation, bondage, all whilst smuggling in enough pseudo-political intrigue that fans can tell themselves it’s high tragedy rather than guilty-pleasure.

(Incidentally, I’m not judging. If that’s what you’re into, more power to you.)

Other context. This thing is a massive, balls-to-the-wall, runaway success.² It’s sold a shit-ton of copies, heavy pre-orders, and secured a huge deal with Legendary for the movie rights before it even released. If you were on social media in September 2025 talking about books or writing, it was impossible to avoid, which is how I’ve found myself talking about it.

Normally, I would have let it wash over me. Not for me. Next please! But during the weeks of its release, I was met with so many frustratingly stupid takes, opinions that embodied some of the worst parts of our current culture, that it felt worth talking about.

So, here we are. Three of the stupidest Alchemised takes I’ve seen, what makes them so stupid, and the bigger cultural problems lurking behind them.

The Legal and moral implications of reworked fan-fiction

Let’s get the boring legal bit out of the way first. The standard is usually “substantial similarity”,³ which this doesn’t qualify as.

Whilst inspired by Harry Potter, Manacled had an original plot. It used the setting, lore and characters from Harry Potter, but the plot itself was original. Alchemised then removed the lore, the setting and the characters, changed the bits needed for it to make sense, then published the result.

One interesting side-effect of this ‘stripping’ process is that the book ends up having to do a lot of extra heavy lifting in its first act. Readers of Manacled had seven books of prior context going into the story. They knew what wizards were and what Hogwarts was. They knew Umbridge and Snape and Voldermort. They knew how magic worked and they knew all the interpersonal relationships that existed before the book started.

And, indeed, reading Alchemised (I read about the first 150 pages), you feel like you’ve started a book in the middle of the series. If you didn’t know its origins, you might ask yourself: Who on earth would choose to tell a story this way? The opening chapters are thick with exposition and character introductions. Who are the characters? What are their relationships? What did the world look like before? How does the magic work? What are all the different factions? It’s heavy going and hard to follow.

So, you might might well object to the practice of reworking fan-fiction on purely artistic grounds, and I’ll get behind you, but morally and legally, the best you can say is that Harry Potter is a source of inspiration for Alchemised. And inspiration is no crime, if it were, we could say goodbye to…

Clears Throat

Basically all of Shakespeare’s plays, but let’s use Romeo and Juliet, based on the The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. Let’s chuck West Side Story as well, whilst we’re at it, inspired as it was by Romeo & Juliet. Wide Sargasso Sea, one of the best novels of the century, according to The Times, has to go as well because it’s an imagined prequel to Jane Eyre. Bye to Ulysses and bye to The Hours. Farewell to 10 things I Hate about You, Wicked, and Bridget Jones’s Diary. Apocalypse now has to go, it being inspired by Heart of Darkness. Taxi Driver almost certainly has The Catcher in the Rye for inspiration. You don’t get The Matrix without Ghost in the Shell and there’s no Inception without Paprika, and no Black Swan without Swan Lake. And why don’t we get Tarantino in the bin too, as his entire filmography is rooted in homage and illusion.

Let’s even go further and say every work of art ever created has at its genesis multiple sources of inspiration, some more obvious than others, and we should not be in the business of policing those inspirations.

What we have here is a version of ‘originality policing’ that comes up a lot in online spaces,⁴ usually from people who’ve never made anything artistic in their lives, and for whom the merest trace of similarity, homage or allusion becomes damning proof of forgery. In the pre-digital age, influences could be lost to bygone eras; now, everything exists simultaneously in the void-age of an ever-expanding now. It’s that sense of perceived proximity, combined with a misunderstanding of how art is conceived and created, that is to blame.

So no, legally, ethically (if not artistically), Alchemised is in the clear. It’s an original story set in an original world with original characters, no-matter how it started out.

Alchemised helps enrich J.K. Rowling, don’t you know?

We live in an age of moral puritanism, performative outrage, and public virtue signalling. It’s nauseating for anyone of sound mind and body. Whether we are in the midst of a golden age of such behaviour, or whether we are just seeing innate psychological impulses amplified by social media, I don’t know; what I do know is that algorithms will reward certainty and self-righteousness more than nuance and pausing for thought every time.

(By the way, if you have no idea what I’m talking about with any of this, I’d like to invite you to consider that you might be part of the problem).

J.K. Rowling has become a cultural lightning rod in recent years because she doesn’t believe men can ever truly become women⁵ (something 99% of the population believed until ten minutes ago). And so the moral puritans have taken it upon themselves to abash, denounce, and shame anyone that seems to be supporting her in any way, however indirectly.

It doesn’t matter to them that Rowling has done more for children’s literacy than almost anyone in our lifetime — maybe anyone ever. It doesn’t matter that she’s donated over £200 million to charity, much of it going directly to women who’ve suffered abuse. (In 2011 alone, she gave away more than 15% of her entire net worth.) It doesn’t matter that she’s repeatedly said things like, “I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable,” and “Trans people need and deserve protection.”

All that matters is that she opposes their strict and uncompromising ideology, and so must be boycotted.

Well… that’s their right. Do all the boycotting you want, I say. If you don’t like something someone made, or the someone that made it, you are free not to engage in it, but stop squawking at people who do. It’s undignified and it outs you as a singularly boring type of person. Get a job.

As for the idea that Alchemised, successful though it is, will result in any meaningful increase in sales for Harry Potter, one of the biggest franchise’s in the world, soon to be the biggest TV show ever made, then I do not know where you are living at the moment, but it isn’t reality.

Let’s break it down. You’d need someone who’s never read Harry Potter (already rare) who’s either never heard of it or decided it wasn’t for them. Then, after reading Alchemised, a book with no names, lore, or setting in common, they’d need to be so moved that they’d turn to the decades-old children’s series that once inspired the fan-fiction this was loosely based on.⁶ If there were more than 100 such people in the whole world, I’d gladly eat a copy of Order of the Phoenix.

So no, of course this will not translate into meaningful sales for Harry Potter. And also, mind your own bloody business.

Alchemised as a beautifully written masterpiece.

As mentioned, I read about a 150 pages of Alchemised, lest I be accused of blind judgement, and here’s what I’ll grant you. The prose is entirely competent. Perfectly functional. Even good. The sentences flow well, the grammar holds, and there’s a sense of rhythm and flow to each chapter, which isn’t nothing, but it is where the praise stops.

To say Alchemised is “beautifully written” is to over-egg the pudding.⁷ The truth is that any decently written fan-fiction, even former-fan fiction, gets called “beautiful” because the bar for quality is buried somewhere deep beneath the earth’s crust. When your baseline is unreadable Drarry sludge on Wattpad, any sufficiently strung together sentence starts to read like Nabokov.

The real force behind Alchemised, just as it was with Manacled, isn’t its grace, it’s its kink; domination, coercion, humiliation, the whole Stockholm syndrome swing (that’s the real ‘dark fantasy’), all wrapped in a pretence of political drama and high tragedy.

Its “themes” — bodily autonomy? Trauma? The aftershock of war? They are window dressing. They are a moral fig leaf that allows reader to enjoy it’s fantasy while insisting on its seriousness.

It hurts to hear that. I know. Because your not supposed to get off on that stuff. But you do. Not in a crude, incognito tab open, sort of way (although, for some, maybe) but in a psychological sense. The thrill of the taboo. The rush of the loss of control. You like it, and that’s okay. Hear me. It’s okay. It doesn’t make you bad or strange, it makes you human.

In fact, if you’re a woman, it makes you pretty normal. There is a long history of women reading smut. It’s not men, after all, that allow Mills & Boon to sell one book every ten seconds!⁸ The difference is, everyone once accepted this stuff was trash. But now, there’s magic in it and we call it Romantasy. And if we criticise it, it’s misogyny. As if men don’t read trash, too. What the hell do you think Dungeon Crawler Carl⁹ is?

What i’m trying to say is that there’s nothing wrong with reading smut, but there is something faintly embarrassing about pretending it’s Tolstoy.

Final Note

I love reading. I love people who read. If you’re reading anything, I’m happy. When I went into Waterstones the week of Alchemised’s release, they’d put up a big display for it, they’d gone all out, but there was barely a book insight. They had two left, one with a crinkled dust jacket, and one in the window. And I’m all for that. Good on Sen Lin Yu and good for you if you bought it, read it, and loved it.

If you’re one of those people, I’m happy for you, but It’s not a beautifully written masterpiece. It’s populist smut in a nice dress. Which is fine.

And to the people that didn’t but who want to harp on at people who did, well, I actually don’t have anything to say to you. I’ll do for you what you should have done and keep my mouth shut.