Do you read Heated Rivalry fan fiction? If you don’t, it may surprise you to learn a large corner of the internet has been ablaze this week with accusations flying on private Discords and Tumblrs run by people with usernames such as @pregnanthudson. I called in fandom scholar and longtime fic writer Allegra Rosenberg to make this conflict legible to a lay readership (me).
Last week, the New York Times published an article on the recent kerfuffle over the use of AI-generated text in Heated Rivalry fan fiction. It came on the heels of reports by outlets such as Fansplaining and, uh, my own Substack.
“Breaching containment” is how fans often describe this kind of mainstream exposure. It’s perceived as a threat, something worth being scared about. Some fans who agreed to be interviewed by the Times came into a Reddit thread to defend their choice to do so. Even some who found the article an even-handed treatment of the subject had an issue with the reporter naming and summarizing individual fanworks. This reaction can be confusing to journalists and nonfans. Are all internet subcultures this prickly and protective when it comes to being covered by the media? Also, don’t writers usually want their work to garner the widest possible readership
Heated Rivalry has a unique origin in the overlap between AO3 fan fiction, BookTok-beloved romance, and TV. In a Möbius strip of mainstreaming, the unprecedented popularity of the show has led to an explosion of new fic-reading and -writing fans, alongside a parallel increase in interest in the writings of those fans, whether purely for pleasure or for purposes of commercial exploitation.
The endangerment of fan fiction’s status as a purely noncommercial hobby began years ago, but HR marked the moment when the graph went vertical. As fan fiction becomes more visible and further incorporated into the broader cultural machinery, it loses some of the subversive cachet. And because HR is obviously a fandom with queer people and queer fiction at its center, the idea of more eyes on it is, in this political era, a little scary.
In a pre-social-media age, mainstream media coverage was one of the main ways new fans found out fandom was a thing at all: A 1986 LA Weekly article about slash fiction caused a massive increase in fanzine sales, even as it made many fans deeply uncomfortable. But the internet accelerated that trend, and for decades now, a widespread sentiment among longtime participants in transformative media fandom (that’s fan fiction, fan art, etc., as opposed to, like, convention-going and collecting merchandise) has gone something like: “We’re full, no more.” That’s a bit of a lost cause at this point; as internet ethnographer Katherine Dee put it, “The culture that fandom built won.”
Exposure aside, one Times commenter took issue with the reporter presenting the AI scandal as a one-off or something disruptive or new when in reality it’s a symptom of a larger issue: “It frames the issue with AI in fandom as having stemmed from a single document, when the problem has a history rooted in plagiarism, Big Name Fan culture, and rampant consumerism.”
As Heated Rivalry fic readers would be the first to point out, the issue isn’t just that authors are using AI to help write their fics. It’s that those AI-assisted fics are exploding in popularity with eager readers and lending the authors higher fan-community status. Worst of all, they might be leading traditional publishers to put out “reskinned” versions of AI-generated fics.
So it’s no surprise that spaces like AO3 are becoming infected with the same kind of commercial hustle culture that has led LinkedIn to introduce a “seems-like-AI-slop” report button. Media coverage can become a useful scapegoat for fans’ deeper fear that fandom will become permanently enshittified. But a bigger threat than press coverage is the twin intrusions of exploitation and toxic technology.
