Why Fandom Discourse Feels Extra Cringe Right Now

At the end of November, Emily did something she hadn’t done in a very long time: she came back to Tumblr and started discussing fandom. Specifically, Passionate rivalryCrave’s surprise hit series about a love story between two closeted hockey players, based on a queer hockey romance series that itself began, in part, as gay Marvel fanfiction.

In the early 2010s, Emily, who asked that only her first name be used for fear of harassment, was an avid Tumblr user. She left from Gossip Girl fandom to Joy fandom to Sherlock from fandom to bandom (a generic term for fans of pop punk bands) to hockey. But by the end of the decade, like many other ardent Peak Tumblr users, she had largely migrated to Twitter.

“I was in my early 20s, trying to move to a new city, trying to be more of an adult about things,” Emily tells WIRED. She left fandom spaces. SO, Passionate rivalry happened and Tumblr blew up.

“Old friends that I hadn’t spoken to in years started coming back online. Everyone’s like, ‘Hey, have you seen this show?'” she says. “Tumblr has been, I would say, revitalized. I mean, he really, truly healed the fandom spaces on Tumblr.”

For those who haven’t visited Tumblr since the 2010s (or ever), Emily’s description of Passionate rivalry the camaraderie sounds like the opposite of the discourse around the show on other platforms, notably X (formerly Twitter). A Vulture article that exposed the series’ popularity among women, as well as the “fujoshi” culture of women transporting two male characters together in raunchy fan fiction, provoked a backlash that seemingly pitted the anti-fandom culture of coastal media against women enjoying sex scenes. And intrigues of Passionate rivalry.

But the way this discourse plays out on X is strangely at odds with reality. Most of today’s cultural journalists don’t attack fandom to embarrass or scold women — many of them, myself included, started out as Tumblr fangirls. And although Vulture journalist E. Alex Jung wrote about whether fujoshi culture fetishizes gay men, he ultimately concluded that women who write fanfiction explore their own identities and desires more than real gay men do. Some of the fandom takes that followed aired when they basically said the same thing. And part of the fan backlash against Jung’s article focused on his link to a very popular article. Passionate rivalry fanfiction towards the end of the piece, which was later deleted.

Like Emily, over the past decade, many fandom followers have migrated from relatively insular fandom spaces like Tumblr to more traditional 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 removed Tumblr from the App Store after finding child sexual abuse material on the platform. Shortly after, Tumblr banned all adult content, which alienated users interested in all kinds of erotic content, including fans. Tumblr has since relaxed these rules, allowing nudity again, but pornographic content is still prohibited.

“It’s something that has radically changed the Internet,” says Amanda Brennan, a meme librarian and fandom expert who worked on Tumblr between 2013 and 2021. “Fandoms are very spread out, and it’s all these different worlds now that coexist and they don’t intersect as much.”