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.”
