Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
In a story I was hoping to be inaccurate clickbait but unfortunately seems to be legit, Russian photographer Alexandra Kuzyk was sentenced to 18 months in a labor camp after being convicted of producing illegal pornography. The “illegal pornography” in question was a gay fanfiction involving members of Stray Kids.
Like many fanfic authors, she wasn’t being paid for her work, and she was apparently found because a parent panicked about her daughter reading the story.
The case against Kuzyk began a year ago when a woman reported to police that she had found Kuzyk’s fanfiction, which featured same-sex romance, on her daughter’s device, per the Mirror. Police then raided Kuzyk’s home and seized books and electronics from her, including two laptops, smartphones, CDs, and an iPad.
Kuzyk said that she was not selling or publishing stories at the time, but rather that the fanfiction was hosted on the controversial social media site Telegram. The woman took screenshots of the material and sent them to Roskomnadzor, the Federal service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, per the Mirror.
She faced four years in prison, but pled guilty and was sentenced to labor and garnished wages of 10%.
This is all related to a larger push by the Russian authorities to crackdown on anti-LGBT “propaganda”.
Fanfiction has increasingly drawn the ire of the Russian government since its 2023 expansion of the anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda law, which labeled the LGBTQ+ movement as extremist, per the Gazeta. In 2025, a Russian court fined MangaLIB, the largest Russian-language manga website, over 14 million rubles (about $190,000) for propaganda. Judge Alexandra Anokhina said that the manga was a “cultural threat to national security.” Aside from fining the site, the court also levied fines against individual manga publications, each amounting to about $25,000, per Mediazona.
A lot of stories about parents, friends, others finding their fanfic/fandom stuff is done in a humorous tone most of the time, because social awkwardness/embarrassment is basically the result. But this was a stark reminder that the stakes are still very much deadly serious in some parts of the world.
