Everyone Hates Fangirls (Until They’re Right)
Slash fics, girl yearning, fangirl expertise, and all that we call culturally frivolous until it prints $125 million.
Fangirls have spent decades being told their tastes were cringe, their art was frivolous, their slash communities were embarrassing. Heated Rivalry is the latest, and potentially the most substantive proof that fangirls build billion-dollar markets while business leaders still relegate girl culture as trivial.
Let’s talk about it.
Within three weeks of its November 28th premiere, Heated Rivalry became Crave’s most-watched original series in the platform’s history. Viewership jumped 400%. Its fifth episode tied with Breaking Bad‘s “Ozymandias” as one of only two television episodes in history to receive a perfect 10/10 on IMDb. The series hit #2 most in-demand show globally, reaching 95 times the average series demand worldwide.
HBO Max acquired U.S. distribution rights nine days before premiere. Nine days. Zero traditional marketing. No press junkets. Two completely unknown leads. It still posted launch numbers comparable to The Pitt, their Emmy-winning flagship medical drama. The show is now projected to generate over $125 million in streaming revenue.
Critics called it a surprise hit. A breakout sensation! An unexpected phenomenon!
But anyone who was once a teenage girl or currently is one wasn’t surprised at all lol.
This is not an examination of Heated Rivalry so much as it is a reflection of all the fangirls I was before, having taken my fandoms incredibly seriously when they - the brands, the Hollywood execs, the media - would not take me and my fellow fangirls seriously at all for decades. They still don’t, really.
But, I think, culture is shifting to finally understand just how central girl culture is to both creative fandom and commercial viability.
My participation in fandom, like millions of other women’s, has always been cringe, gay, and filled with desire. That’s what they called it, anyway - the cringe as insult, the gay as slur, the desire pathologized as hormonal teenage hysteria.
The unbearable weight of yearning is how fangirls take over fandoms. And time and time again, it’s dismissed as hormonal teenage girl frivolity.
Until it’s not.
In June 2000, the first Drarry fic appeared on the internet. I was 10 years old. By 12, I’d found the community. Thousands of girls writing Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter into a love story that J.K. Rowling never imagined and wouldn’t have approved of it if she had.
Today, Drarry has over 60,000 published works on AO3, the largest fanfic site on the internet with 125 million page views a day. This doesn’t include the tens of thousands lost to LiveJournal, Tumblr, Fanfiction.net, and closed forums.
Early Drarry authors include Naomi Novik, co-founder of AO3 and author of the massively popular Temeraire series, who wrote Harry/Draco fanfiction under the username Astolat. Anecdotally, the Drarry community was and is largely made up of women and teenage girls.
Drarry was one of the earliest, scaled girl-led MM subcultures within a larger fandom that has since become a blueprint for modern fandom growth. Girls find a piece of media they vaguely like. They imagine, write, read, comment, and build community around ideas about male characters falling in love with each other. They move from passive fans to obsessive co-creators.
There are legitimate questions here: Are these stories written for queer people or about queer people as entertainment for straight audiences? Does removing women from romance create space to explore desire, or does it fetishize gay men? When the majority of traditionally published gay romances are written by straight women, whose voices are being centered and monetized?
They're uncomfortable, they don't have easy answers, and the fact that fangirl culture has commercial power doesn't resolve them. What I want to examine here is a different question: what does it cost us- commercially, culturally, creatively - to dismiss the patterns of girl culture entirely The most predictive, most engaged, most economically powerful force in entertainment.
The pattern repeats. Of the top 100 ships on AO3, 56 are M/M. AO3’s largest demographic is overwhelmingly women and girls.
Destiel (Dean Winchester and Castiel) made Supernatural an active, collaborative fandom for 15 years.
Larry Stylinson (Harry Styles and Louis Stylinson from 1D), unfortunately, dominated Twitter in the 2010s, a reminder that the line between fandom and invasion is real.
Stucky (Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes) became the most popular MCU ship despite the franchise’s relentless military-industrial masculinity.
And Rachel Reid, author of the Heated Rivalry books, started by writing Stucky fanfiction. And fans maintain that the first book in the series is a Stucky AU, despite her denial.
This is not a coincidence but the blueprint of fandoms that girls dominate.
For two decades, fangirls have done narrative R&D. For free. Mostly by writing M/M fan fiction. Millions of words testing emotional beats, refining dialogue cadences, figuring out how to make yearning devastate you, developing techniques for equal interiority that would later dominate BookTok and romantasy.
And entertainment execs (and brands and culture at large) either ignored that data or found it too cringey, opting instead to tell teenage girls what they should like.
For example, mid-2010s media was dominated by Hollywood execs trying to recapture Twilight, a fandom that so completely captured the imagination of girls and women that they were asking boys to bite them.
And thus, they threw $60 million at Beautiful Creatures because executives thought they knew what Twilight fans wanted. It broke even. Barely. They let Divergent collapse so spectacularly that the final film never even got made, leaving the franchise incomplete. Millions of dollars, A-list casts, major studio backing. All of it flopped because Hollywood was trying to manufacture what girls wanted instead of listening to what they were already building.
Meanwhile, what were fangirls actually building? Communities. Narrative techniques. Proof of concept. An entire economy of desire that would eventually break into the mainstream but only once the infrastructure allowed them to route around the gatekeepers.
Even now, mainstream media can't see what's right in front of them. SNL just parodied Heated Rivalry as Heated Wizardry - a fictional Ron/Harry ship. Drarry, the actual Draco/Harry ship that inspired this entire blueprint, remains one of the biggest subcultures in online fandoms. No one ships Ron and Harry. Most people who were once or are teenage girls at least know about Drarry. A microcosm of the larger issue that mainstream media and entertainment remains absolutely ignorant about girl culture (and queer culture).
Why did Hollywood ignore 20 years of perfectly good data?
Because executives, and culture at large, fundamentally don’t believe teenage girls are capable of sophisticated cultural production. To them, girls are passive consumers. Hormonal, irrational, trend-driven creatures who consume whatever media is fed to them and move on to the next shiny thing. The idea that teenage girls could be making something, could be developing narrative techniques that would predict market demand decades in advance?
They’re literally just girls, after all.
But fangirls aren’t consumers. They’re builders.
They take your IP and transform it into something more emotionally complex, more narratively sophisticated, more interesting than what you originally created. They don’t just watch your show. They collaborate with it, argue with it, fix its emotional gaps, fill in what you were too cowardly or unimaginative to explore.
The Supernatural queerbaiting era is perhaps the best anecdote of just how informed the media is about the power of fangirls but not enough to be taken seriously.
For 15 seasons, Supernatural’s predominantly female fanbase kept the show alive with their obsession over Destiel, a ship between Dean Winchester and the angel Castiel. The show’s creators knew. They teased it at conventions, dropped subtext in episodes, kept fans hooked with just enough plausible deniability. In Season 8, Cas tells Dean “I’d rather have you, cursed or not.“ The writers knew what they were doing.
Those fangirls showed up for 15 years. Wrote millions of words of fanfic. Packed Comic-Con panels. Drove ratings.
The CW monetized their devotion every single week. And two episodes before the finale, they delivered: a rushed confession followed immediately by Castiel's death. Textbook “bury your gays.” Execs were happy to extract engagement, ratings, free labor, but we weren’t willing to give fangirls what they actually wanted. They had 15 years of proof that fangirls wanted queer romance. They just never believed it was worth committing to.
Girls are good for metrics, but not good enough to take seriously.
Meanwhile, Rachel Reid was writing Stucky fic. Building an audience. Self-publishing Heated Rivalry. Proving commercial viability with actual dollars, not just engagement metrics.
She didn’t need to convince gatekeepers that fangirls were a real audience.
The infrastructure changed. The creator economy, self-publishing, AO3, social media meant creators could route around the people who dismissed them.
And when HBO acquired Heated Rivalry 9 days before premiere because of online social media buzz generated by the Game Changers fanbase it wasn’t a gamble. It was executives finally, finally looking at 20 years of data and believing it.
But why are millions of women obsessed with stories about men falling in love with each other? Why is it, seemingly, a defining part of girl fandoms? Why has it endured as a popular romantic exploration spanning across decades, genres, and fandoms?
The easy answer, the one that’s been written a thousand times, is that M/M romance removes gendered power dynamics. Without the baggage of sexual violence, male entitlement, and the degradation baked into how men often treat women under patriarchy, girls can finally explore desire without fear.
They’re using M/M as a laboratory to figure out what desire and romance could look like if we stripped out the specific dynamics that make het relationships feel stifling/unsafe/depressing under patriarchy, while keeping the elements they actually DO find compelling: intensity, stakes, masculine aesthetics, power play. Or they’re exploring their own queer identity.
And that’s all correct. But it’s also incomplete and a misunderstanding of fandom dynamics.
What most outsiders miss is the community of slash fandoms in particular being highly communal and participatory. Fandoms led by girls tend to be like this. They’re called transformative fandoms. Transformative fandoms care more about imagination. They interpret. They make. They play outside of the bounds of canon.
In contrast, are curative fandoms. Curative fandoms care about knowledge. What did Tolkien mean? How does the magic system in Sanderson’s works connect to each other? Why didn’t Will Byers feel pain when he broke Vecna’s leg? Fandoms that are male dominated tend to be curative.
It’s not to say that transformative fandoms don’t have male participants. Men cosplay, write fan fiction, and debate ideas in their fandom plenty. And it’s not to say curative fandoms don’t have women participants. Women care about canon and seek to understand lore. But it is to say that women and girls (and LGBTQ+ people and POC) so frequently find themselves in fictional universes that devalue them as much as the real world does and thus, fangirls reimagine works in an image that reflects their inner world. And within fandom spaces themselves, women of color, trans women, and other marginalized voices face additional layers of erasure and dismissal even within girl culture.
Girls are not just consuming a pre-made product but rather taking the source material and making it more than what the creators intended. That act of transformation, of insisting on a reading that the mainstream denies, is deeply powerful for teenage girls who are constantly told their interpretations don’t matter.
And then it’s no wonder why there’s a constant sneering dismissal from men in curative fandom spaces who see women and girls as bastardizing work. But the majority of the contemptuous reductiveness of things girls like usually comes from an unwillingness to take girls seriously at all rather than from honest debate.
And once they perfected that formula in M/M spaces, they exported it everywhere. That’s why BookTok romance now features male love interests who are emotionally devastated. That’s why dual POV became standard. That’s why Sarah J. Maas writes M/M-style yearning into her het romances and prints money. That’s why Rebecca Yarros does enemies-to-lovers with equal interiority and gets multi-million dollar deals.
Fangirls took the narrative techniques they perfected in M/M spaces and reimagined mainstream romance. Now it’s the best-selling genre in publishing.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is a tweet from rock critic Jessica Hopper in which she quipped “replace the word fangirl with expert”.
Whether I was privately reading Drarry fics in my bedroom in middle school or telling my exasperated brother about the merits of Stucky at age 30, I knew it was a losing battle to be treated as anything other than silly. Today, my FYP is filled with women and girls who are going to Heated Rivalry raves. Who are on their 4th rewatch. Who are reading the books in a book club. Who are going to the boy aquarium (girl for hockey game) for the first time and wondering if the players are in a situationship.
Fangirls (and gays and theys!) unabashedly expressing their love, their fandom, their joy at being part of a community that was once sneered at by the normies. And it seems the normies are now one of us.
So what did dismissing fangirls cost us?
Billions in revenue. Heated Rivalry will make $125 million from ONE BOOK by ONE AUTHOR who couldn’t get through traditional gatekeepers. AO3 has millions of stories. Do the math.
Between 2013-2016, Hollywood spent over $300 million on half-assed attempts to manufacture the next Twilight. That money could have funded ten Heated Rivalries.
Twenty years of stories. How many Rachel Reids didn’t get platformed because the infrastructure didn’t exist yet, particularly those writers who are women of color and are dismissed disproportionately more than their white counterparts? How many Heated Rivalries died in pitch meetings because executives didn’t believe the audience was real because it was just all so cringe?
Cultural representation. Queer audiences have been starved for authentic romance. Fangirls, many queer themselves, others writing from outside that experience - were proving the demand existed.
Heartstopper, Red White & Royal Blue, Heated Rivalry - every single mainstream M/M romance success in the past 5 years came from outside the traditional studio system. Every. Single. One.
Better stories, period. The narrative techniques fangirls developed, equal interiority, emotional vulnerability without emasculation, yearning as driving force, are now showing up in mainstream romance (Fourth Wing, ACOTAR, BookTok’s obsession with morally gray MMCs). Sarah J. Maas didn’t invent “morally gray MMC obsessed with FMC.” Fangirls did. Fourth Wing’s Xaden is emotionally devastated by Violet from his POV chapters. That’s not how Fabio covered bodice rippers worked but it is how tens of thousands of girl-published fanfics operate.
But imagine if we’d had 20 years of that in mainstream media instead of the same tired rom-com beats and closed-off love interests?
Heated Rivalry isn’t an anomaly. It’s the first major wave of fangirl-developed content finally breaking through now that the infrastructure allows it.
Right now, the top 10 most-kudoed fics on AO3 have a combined 2 million hits. Combined readership larger than most Netflix shows. Free. Built by girls you’re still not listening to.
The creator economy keeps growing. Self-publishing keeps improving. Social media keeps proving that fangirls can drive demand without traditional marketing.
The boring, out of touch executives will keep being surprised. The critics will keep “discovering” what girls knew years ago. And big brands and entertainment companies will keep flopping to flopsville.
Which is fine.
Fangirls will keep building the future of entertainment while everyone else scrambles to catch up.
Girl culture isn’t culturally frivolous. It’s the center of the cultural universe. We’ve been here the whole time. You just weren’t listening.
The question isn’t whether you should take fangirls seriously. The question is: how much longer can you afford not to?
Another MASTERPIECE!!! so good!!