Do Normies Have a Right to Read ‘Heated Rivalry’ Fanfic?
Last week, New York magazine published a cover story on Heated Rivalry and fujoshi, a Japanese term for women who love stories about sex and romance between men. The online discourse that the story inevitably inspired kept circling back to one specific detail. In his thorough and seemingly well-meaning story, the writer, E. Alex Jung, had linked directly to fanfiction on An Archive of Our Own (better known as “AO3”). Some people argued that this—directing a mainstream readership to pseudonymous fan writing that wasn’t intended for them—was unethical. The core question, as the literary agent Alyssa Morris wrote, was simple: What is a reasonable expectation of privacy for a community that publishes its work on the open Internet?
The debate touches on something fundamental about the experience of online spaces, and it has further-reaching implications than it might seem. The Internet has a geography; it is a place more than it is a communication tool. It has cities and towns and houses and rooms and rooms within rooms. Each region of the Internet has its own culture and dialect and etiquette. The Internet also has places that are public in the technical sense, but private in the social one. Yes, AO3 is a website anyone can visit, browse, sign up and make an account on. But many fans perceive it less like a public square and more like a communal living room.
Privacy online has never been about walls as much as norms. It is enforced socially rather than technically, in the same way that privacy in a city is enforced socially. You can follow a couple down the street to eavesdrop on an argument or go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting “just to check it out,” but you don’t do either of those things—or if you do, you don’t make it obvious, because that is understood to be an invasion of privacy. The space may be accessible, but it isn’t meant for you.
Online fandom was built on this kind of ambient, norms-based privacy. In the ’90s and early aughts, obscurity did much of that enforcement work. So few outsiders knew fandom spaces even existed, let alone how to navigate them, that the question of mainstream exposure barely arose. People wrote for each other, for free, for love of the source material, with the assumption that the audience was self-selecting. A journalist writing about your fandom was possible, but it was unlikely enough not to worry about. It could already be hard to get people within your fandom to engage with your content, forget outside of it.
But fandom isn’t obscure anymore, and it hasn’t been for a long time. “Normies”—and I use that word (for people who are not overly online) loosely, because I don’t believe such a thing exists in 2026—are sharing fan theories on their Instagram Stories. It’s not 2002. You almost certainly know someone who has, at some point, been active in online fandom spaces, consuming and sharing fan work. If it wasn’t you, it was your sister, your friend, maybe even your parents. The culture that fandom built won. It isn’t a dirty little secret; it’s the organizing logic of contemporary media consumption. You can’t be the bedrock of contemporary culture and also the invisible underdogs.
That said, it is still reasonable not to want thousands of strangers directed to your pseudonymous writing. Fans are genuinely upset at their work being spotlit. They’re also mourning a real loss, especially those, like me, in their 30s, who have been milling around these spaces since they were kids. The implied privacy that once let people be anonymously weird, horny, and experimental is evaporating, and with it goes a certain permission to be strange. The trolls have breached the perimeter.
