To be a fan on the internet, apparently, means suffering from a remarkable number of conditions. We’re addicted to AO3 (Archive of Our Own, for those who may be new here, a nonprofit website where fans can share creative writing). We hyperfixate on television shows. Celebrities give us dopamine hits. Our relationships with creators are parasocial. We’re delusional about fictional couples and develop brain rot in response to fictional men.
Most of the time we’re joking in that particular “lol” language of the internet, where everything is exaggerated until it’s not. But reading The Cut‘s recent essay about becoming “addicted” to Heated Rivalry fanfiction made me wonder why the language we use to describe loving something intensely so often makes that love sound like a symptom.
“Fourteen million, give or take”: That’s roughly how many words of Heated Rivalry fanfiction the writer of The Cut’s story estimates she’s read this year. For nearly nine months, she wrote, she’s read fanfic every single day—before bed, first thing in the morning, walking to lunch, sitting in the passenger seat of a car, even while waiting at the hospital. The essay frames the habit as an addiction, or at least as something close to one; an obsession that had worked its way into nearly every spare moment of her life. To which I say: Who among us, longtime fanfic readers, hasn’t been there?
And judging by the reaction online, I wasn’t alone in that response. Across social media, fanfiction connoisseurs saw “14 million words” and recognised themselves in that number. That’s not to say 14 million words isn’t a lot of fanfiction—it is. Nor is it to say that someone’s relationship with fandom can’t become compulsive or interfere with the rest of their life. Of course it can. But the conversation made me think about my own relationship with fic.
I’ve stayed up too late because I wanted to finish a multi-chaptered saga. I’ve spent hours going through an author’s bookmarks. I’ve finished one fic and immediately opened another. I’ve opened AO3 first thing in the morning and read in bed at night. I’ve done all of those things with books too. I’ve spent entire weekends reading novels and stayed up until 2am because I needed to know how it all ended.
One behaviour makes me a voracious reader. The other, it seems, is something I’m supposed to be a little embarrassed about.
That’s the distinction I keep getting stuck on. We treat reading books as a worthwhile habit and reading fanfiction as a questionable behaviour. The difference isn’t necessarily how much time we spend doing either one, but how much cultural legitimacy we’ve assigned to it. Reading a 400-page novel in a weekend is the kind of thing people brag about. Reading 100,000 words of fanfiction in the same amount of time is “unhinged,” “brain rot,” or evidence that AO3 has taken over your life. One is intellectually respectable. The other is still, on some level, cringe.
Maybe that’s why the language of addiction fits fanfiction so comfortably. Calling something an addiction doesn’t just describe how much of it you’re consuming; it suggests that you shouldn’t be consuming that much of it in the first place. It turns pleasure into excess, and excess into something that needs an explanation.
To be fair, AO3 is designed for this kind of extensive consumption. Its elaborate taxonomy of tags can turn even the most specific emotional craving into a search query. You don’t just want 80,000 more words about Shane and Ilya; you want 80,000 words of Shane and Ilya being idiots in love, with mutual pining, hurt and comfort, a little angst, and a happy ending because you’ve had a long week. Somewhere, someone has probably written it. Of course you click. And then you click again. (The rise of generative AI has only exacerbated this phenomenon, as “authors” have controversially used ChatGPT to generate even more keyword-focused works.)
