Heated Rivalry Is Ushering In A New Era Of Fan Fiction

In January, Nikki, an author in her 40s, started running into people online she hadn’t seen in years. They were turning up on the fanworks site Archive of Our Own (AO3), under usernames she remembered from the early 2010s fan fiction trenches. “They’re all coming out of the woodwork,” she tells me over the phone. One was a writer she knew from the Inception fandom more than a decade ago. “It was like, ‘Oh, you’re back! I’m so glad to see you!’”

The occasion, of course, was Heated Rivalry, director Jacob Tierney’s TV adaptation of Rachel Reid’s hockey romance novels. The show was still airing when Nikki posted her first story about Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, Reid’s rivals turned lovers. “I was all in immediately,” she says. “I haven’t felt this kind of pull in a very long time.” Not since the SuperWhoLock years, when Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Sherlock inspired enormous, obsessive fandoms of their own. But those series had years’ worth of material for fans to pore over. Heated Rivalry had six episodes.

I first went looking for Heated Rivalry fan fiction six weeks before the TV premiere, which is to say I was afflicted early. There were only a few hundred stories on AO3 then, many picking up where Reid’s sequel, The Long Game, left off or imagining the years between books. Now there are more than 51,000. (Off Campus, another hockey-romance adaptation, lists 912.) To Lou, a writer in his late 20s, the flood of Heated Rivalry fic feels like a celebration: A sexually explicit queer romance with a happy ending is, at last, a mainstream hit. He came of age on slimmer pickings. “I was forced to watch Supernatural and Sherlock queerbait for, like, a decade,” he says.

Sherlock ignited Nikki’s interest in writing fan fiction. She wanted Sherlock and Watson to be in love; the BBC series would not oblige. “You adore these characters and want to understand them better and make them behave the way you want,” she says. Shane and Ilya require no such intervention. There’s no queer subtext to tease out, no sexual tension to imagine in lavish detail. It’s all right there, freeing writers to take the characters further afield. Why not make Shane a Mormon missionary trying to convert Ilya or the officer assigned to protect Ilya, the son of a Russian diplomat? Why not, as in Nikki’s work-in-progress, turn Ilya into a leshy, a forest spirit from Russian and Slavic folklore?

Gigi Nicholls, a writer in her 30s, assumed the fan fiction would be even hornier than the series. Some of it is. Many stories lean into Shane and Ilya’s existing dom/sub dynamic — around 300 are tagged “Consensual Non-Consent,” for instance. But just as many are interested in hockey, the fantasy of having a supportive family like Shane’s, or the loneliness of Ilya’s life as an immigrant. Hailey, who runs a popular fan account and averages three hours a day on AO3, likes those stories best. “I want the mundane stuff,” she says. “Show me what happens when they’re 55 and retired and have a bad knee.”

If, in other fandoms, fans imagine their favorite characters doing what network television would never show, Heated Rivalry is “almost the reverse,” says Nicholls. “We’ve all agreed that we enjoy watching them bang. Now, we can enjoy watching them do everything else.”

For every lapsed fic writer Heated Rivalry has coaxed out of retirement, there seems to be a reader discovering fan fiction for the first time. Kara Warner, an entertainment journalist who has covered fandoms from Harry Potter and Twilight to One Direction, has witnessed even the holdouts come around. “This show has broken containment like nothing I’ve ever seen,” she says.

For many of us, fan fiction was something we first encountered in secret, hunched over the family computer. “It felt more hush-hush,” Hailey says. “As in ‘we all do this, but we don’t talk about it.’” Now everyone talks about it. All the time. Friends swap recommendations in group chats. Screenshots of particularly filthy passages make their way around Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, Tumblr, and Threads. Nicholls thinks Heated Rivalry may have helped loosen some of the taboo around the practice. “If you’re able to put your hand up and say ‘Yeah, I watched the gay-sex show, and it was fantastic,’” she says, “then I think there’s less shame in admitting ‘Well, I also enjoy this other explicit thing.’”

In June, Lou wrote a story in which Shane becomes pen pals with an incarcerated Ilya. (He had been watching the reality show Love After Lockup.) The story took off on Twitter and Threads, where readers who work in prisons or have other ties to the justice system thanked Lou for humanizing incarcerated people and writing about the system’s failures. A fundraiser he started for the Innocence Project raised $1,000 in an hour. It has since raised more than $10,000.

Lou’s work is ambitious in other ways. He uses bits of code to build email threads and screen recordings into the story, so reading them sometimes feels like scrolling through someone else’s phone. (Fans have shared templates and tutorials for creating effects like this on AO3.) The format feels especially well-suited to Heated Rivalry. Shane and Ilya spend long stretches apart, communicating mostly by text between hookups, while the public scrutinizes them on social media.

Not that Heated Rivalry fans invented epistolary fic. Megan Vick, a journalist who has been reading and writing fan fiction for 25 years, tells me she’s seen similarly elaborate experiments in stories about BTS. “But I definitely think the Heated Rivalry fandom is taking it to new heights.” In my own browsing, I’ve seen scrollable text threads, interactive Instagram posts, and attachments you have to open to keep the story going. One fic locks you out of Ilya’s phone until you guess his passcode. (I still can’t.) In another, I answer Ilya’s DMs as Shane, choosing his replies and living with the consequences.

“Fan fiction has made me a much better writer,” Nikki tells me. She uses it as a creative exercise, trying out genres and techniques she might not otherwise attempt in her professional fiction and nonfiction. Her readers tell her when they saw a twist coming or when she “didn’t lay the crumbs well enough” — and they pipe up quickly. “You get so much feedback,” she says, “particularly in a fandom as active as Heated Rivalry.” Some have become her closest friends and most trusted beta readers. “We brainstorm together,” she says. “It’s the best part of my day.”

Nicholls’ last attempt at fiction had been in sixth grade, when she did a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. She started writing stories about Shane and Ilya 10 months ago, before she’d even read Reid’s books. The library wait was four months; she figured she might as well get started. By the time her copies came in, Nicholls had published 47,000 words. Lately, she’s been wondering if she might have some original fiction in her, too.

So it goes. After all, Twilight spawned Fifty Shades of Grey. Star Wars fan fiction gave us The Love Hypothesis. It may be only a matter of time before the Heated Rivalry fandom produces a phenomenon of its own. As Warner says, “In a couple years, I’ll open a book and say ‘This was about Shane and Ilya.’”