Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2025: Week 10
Manacled is an incredibly popular and often-recced dark romance Dramione fanfiction by senlinyu, first published from 2018 to 2019. The premise of the fic is that Voldemort has won the Second Wizarding War and has enslaved the Muggle-borns and executed the entire Order of the Phoenix. In February 2024, the author announced that they were reworking the story to be published as an original novel, and that Manacled would be removed from Archive of Our Own at the end of 2024. The work was removed from AO3 on 1 January 2025.
For many new readers, Manacled was their gateway fic to the Dramione pairing. While the story was illustrated by Avendell after completion of the fanfic (these illustrations can be found throughout the work), the fic also spawned its own fandom and inspired a huge amount of fanworks for it, ranging from podfics, translations, fanart, fanbinding and other fanmerch.
The fic also broke containment and was shared outside of fannish circles, mostly on TikTok. Its popularity on BookTok may have indirectly lead to the unauthorised publishing and sale of the fic as a book.