Given the dominance of pairings in fan fiction, (…) the opposition between romance and sex can look like a sliding scale of visibility between G-rated stories, in which romance itself is only implied, and NC-17 stories, in which sex is explicitly represented. This emphasis on the visibility of sexual content through the use of the ratings system reveals the extent to which this assessment is drawn from the generic conventions of pornography. However, very explicit stories may also be very romantic, and the most popular romance stories may focus explicitly on sex. The genres are not poles at either end of the scale but axes between which every story can be plotted as more or less romance and more or less porn. Porn may be a slight or dominant element of a fluffy romance, and romantic completion can be used to ground PWPs as a rationale for the sex. Even this imaginary graph is a gross simplification, because porn and romance are not so separable in fan fiction and because they are not the only terms by which fan fiction is classified. Nevertheless, I would argue that while much fan fiction is explicitly romance and/or porn, all fan fiction is implicitly both.