Royal Road has deleted Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Tsundere, the Malfoid rewrite by the X writer known as GuardBro (@GuardTm), and the site’s own rules back the removal. Most of the fiction is J.K. Rowling’s text, and Royal Road requires authors to hold the rights to what they post.
GuardBro now hosts the work in a Google Doc, where he says more than 100 people have had it open at the same time. He says a chapter was reported before the deletion. He has not said that Royal Road gave him a reason.
What the Writer Said
On the removal and the report, GuardBro said: “Royal Road seems to be taking umbridge with some chapters containing “minimal” changes, so there may be chapters missing from the website. As well, the offending chapter was reported, so there’s some wild turkey out there thumbing their ticklers through my s***. Anyway, you can find the chapters in the link above as we wait for other websites to start working agian.”
On why he leaves out chapters: “I’m trying to keep the chapters in-line with the original story as much as possible so people aren’t lost as s*** when the read the fic, why I completely omit unchanged chapters. I tried just doing my changes in little blurbs in the earlier chapters of the book but people were completely lost as to when and where they were in the story, which was getting frustrating.”
Then the deletion: “Royal Road deleted the whole thing, lol. Ah well. Still gonna keep plugging away at updating, changing, and deviating the story with Malfoid, y’all are just going to have to use the google doc until AO3 shoots up.”
He has since said the Google Doc has gone viral, with more than 100 people accessing it at one time.
The document opens with his own label for the work: “The following fanfiction is obviously parody, if not outright satire due to internet memes.”
Royal Road’s Fanfiction Rules
Royal Road allows fanfiction, and its content guidelines set these terms:
Authors who post represent that they hold the necessary rights and are not infringing a third party’s rights. Content that infringes another person’s intellectual property is removed.
Work based on another author’s setting, characters or terminology must be tagged as fanfiction, with credit in the description.
Fanfiction cannot add donation links or buy internal advertisements.
Titles cannot be “infringing on someone’s intellectual property rights.”
Fictions are checked against the guidelines, and one that breaks them can be deleted and the account banned.
In a June 2024 post, the site called fanfiction “a legal gray zone” and said its lawyers advised against allowing monetization of it.
Those terms give Royal Road grounds to remove a rewrite built on Rowling’s own chapters. GuardBro’s own phrase, chapters containing “minimal” changes, is the issue the site’s rights clause is aimed at.
What Is in the Document
The Google Doc runs about 204,000 words across Books 1 to 3, plus a Book 4 stub that points to a second document. It says the story deviates “at the exact point in which Harry meets ‘Draconia Malfoy’ during their robe fitting,” and that chapters where nothing changes are omitted.
The chapters it keeps run for thousands of words each. Fewer than one paragraph in ten mentions Malfoy, so most of the page is the surrounding narrative of Rowling’s books with Draco’s pronouns and some added lines and thoughts. The title also reuses the structure of Rowling’s first book title.
The work contains no explicit sexual content.
The Malfoid Backdrop
Female Draco fan art, called “Malfoid,” has been spreading since September. A Sept. 22 post from @redteneri has 21.9 million views and 174,000 likes, Know Your Meme added an entry Sept. 30, and a Weeknight explainer on YouTube has 249,000 views. Fandom Pulse’s earlier report covers the trend and the reaction.
The backlash has reached artists. yunayu deleted a drawing from Bluesky and apologized. The attention on GuardBro’s rewrite comes from the same wave, and the Google Doc that replaced his Royal Road page now holds about 204,000 words built from Rowling’s books in front of readers who arrive a hundred at a time.
With Royal Road’s rights clause behind the deletion and a Malfoid craze sending a hundred readers at a time to a Doc full of Rowling’s pages, how long before the Google Doc goes the way of the Royal Road page?
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