Why Fandom Discourse Feels Extra Cringe Right Now

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In late November, Emily did something she hadn’t done in a very long time: She got back on Tumblr and started discussing fandom. Specifically, Heated Rivalry, the surprise Crave smash hit series about a love story between two closeted hockey players, based on a queer hockey romance series that itself started out, in part, as gay Marvel fanfiction.

In the early 2010s, Emily, who requested that only her first name be used due to fears over harassment, had been a huge Tumblr user. She went from Gossip Girl fandom to Glee fandom to Sherlock fandom to bandom (an umbrella term for fans of pop punk bands) to hockey. But by the end of the decade, she, like many other ardent users of peak Tumblr, had largely migrated to Twitter.

“I was in my early twenties, I was trying to move to a new city, I tried to be more of an adult about things,” Emily tells WIRED. She left fandom spaces. Then, Heated Rivalry happened, and Tumblr exploded.

“Old friends that I hadn’t spoken to in years started popping back online. Everybody’s like ‘Hey, have you guys seen this show?’” she says. “Tumblr has been, I would say, revitalized. I mean, it has really, truly healed the fandom spaces on Tumblr.”

For those who haven’t visited Tumblr since the 2010s (or ever), Emily’s description of Heated Rivalry camaraderie sounds like the polar opposite of discourse around the show on other platforms, especially X (formerly Twitter). A Vulture article that unpacked the series’ popularity among women, as well as the “fujoshi” culture of women pairing two male characters together in steamy fanfiction, prompted a backlash that seemingly pitted the anti-fandom culturati of coastal media outlets against women who appreciate the sex scenes and plot lines of Heated Rivalry.

But the way this discourse is playing out on X is bizarrely at odds with reality. Most culture reporters today are not prying into fandom to embarrass and scold women—a lot of them, myself included, started out as Tumblr fangirls to begin with. And although Vulture reporter E. Alex Jung wrote about whether fujoshi culture fetishizes gay men, he ultimately concluded that women writing fanfiction are exploring their own identities and desires more than actual gay men. Some of the fandom takes that followed were put on blast despite saying basically the same thing. And some of the fan backlash against Jung’s article fixated on him linking to a very popular Heated Rivalry fanfiction near the end of the piece, which was later removed.

Like Emily, over the course of the past decade, a lot of fandom adherents migrated from relatively insular fandom spaces like Tumblr to more mainstream social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and later TikTok. One of the reasons for Tumblr’s decline was the site’s controversial “porn ban.” In November 2018, Apple briefly pulled Tumblr from the App Store after finding child sexual abuse material on the platform. Soon after, Tumblr banned all adult content, which drove users interested in all kinds of erotic material—including fans—away. Tumblr has since softened on these rules, allowing nudity again, but pornographic content is still banned.

“It was something that seismically changed the internet,” says Amanda Brennan, a meme librarian and fandom expert who worked at Tumblr between 2013 and 2021. “Fandoms are very spread out. It’s just all these different worlds now that coexist, and they don’t bump into each other as much.”

Moderation and censorship of fandom spaces still plagues communities around the internet, and the rules aren’t enforced equally. Despite Grok’s creation of nonconsensual sexual images, including those of minors, earlier this year, X was never pulled from the App Store.

Now that fandom is having a big Heated Rivalry moment, a lot of the discourse around it is happening on X, a platform that has also become significantly more right-wing thanks to Elon Musk—which in turn has pushed some Heated Rivalry fans back to Tumblr, as well as a growing number of X alternatives, like Instagram’s Threads.

“We’re joking all the time on Tumblr, like maybe ‘Heated Rivalry’ will change the world,” Emily said. “I can’t even fathom some of the discourse happening on Twitter. Even the fandom spaces on Twitter that I see now are very reactionary.”

There’s still Heated Rivalry drama on the other platforms, too, but the specific culture of X has produced some of the most toxic intersections between the site’s dominant reactionary conservatism and viral fandom takes.

One X post responding to Vulture’s story, which has over half a million views according to X, replied, “Everyone is overthinking this, it’s just massively insecure women who want to see men being sexual but can’t handle seeing another woman on screen that they might start comparing themselves to.”

That post isn’t coming from someone who appears to be well versed in slash fandom. It’s coming from someone who paid for a blue verification checkmark, identifies as a “normie,” and in other recent posts warned men not to “marry up” and referred to African people as “third worlders.” Nonetheless, this post appeared on my X “For you” page, because a journalist I follow shared it as a “truth nuke.”

Fans say this kind of negativity has become pronounced on X beyond the typical fandom infighting, meaning those on the platform are likely seeing and participating in more of this antagonistic discourse, including ganging up on the author of one article that was actually largely sympathetic to their cause.

“I think X just sucks. Iit exists to make people angry, and the algorithm is designed to make you angry,” says Allegra Rosenberg, a writer with a forthcoming book on the history of Western fandom who defended the Vulture piece on her own Substack. “Fan culture being so entrenched on there means it’s never really gonna leave … and fans really love getting mad and getting mad as a group.”

From fan art being the subject of late night TV jokes to studios going after fan spaces for copyright offenses, Rosenberg says there are reasons why some fans feel particularly sensitive, likely contributing to the backlash to the Vulture piece.

“So all of these things are kind of in the psychic memory of fans, even if they weren’t around during those years. And a lot of them were,” Rosenberg tells WIRED. “But as a journalist, as someone with a foot in both worlds, I’m like ‘Guys, this Vulture writer is not the enemy.’”

Another reason why the response to the Vulture article—which was pay-walled—was so outsized and out of tune with the piece itself could be that many of the people commenting on it and getting mad about it weren’t reading it at all.

“I see that a lot in different fandoms, where people won’t click the link, they’ll just see what they see on social, they’ll see the headline, and not necessarily digest the entire story,” says Brennan. “It’s a common thread in a lot of media consumption right now.”

Emily has also found that a lot of the fans congregating around Heated Rivalry on Tumblr are older and more experienced with fandom, while a lot of younger fans who have only known fandom on algorithm-driven platforms that value engagement bait are on X. And then there’s a whole world of people experiencing fandom for the very first time through Heated Rivalry, which applies to Emily’s sister, who she said is in a Threads group for Heated Rivalry fans who are wives and mothers in their thirties.

“As you get older, you realize that liking to watch something because you find it hot, all it means is that you just think it’s hot, and that’s fine and it’s not a big deal,” Emily says. “But I just feel like Tumblr is more comfortable with digging into that stuff.”