Numlock Sunday: Adam Bumas on fanfiction's ascent to mainstream

By Walt Hickey

This week, I spoke to Adam Bumas from one of my favorite news organizations and newsletters, Garbage Day. Adam is the mind behind the weekly Garbage Day Media Intelligence, which is an especially statty and deeply interetesting look into what’s moving digital media. Adam is recently out with a new article, 2026 was the year fanfic became big business, on AO3 statistics and the series that brought fandom to the mainstream, Heated Rivalry. Here is what I wrote about it:

Archive of our Own, the vast repository of fan works, has released the 2026 edition of the Ship Stats, which reveal the most popular romantic pairings in fan works. What makes this year particularly interesting is that it’s the year that the fan ships have finally entered the mainstream and the canon. Ordinarily, the most popular romantic pairings among fans don’t actually exist in canon; Kirk and Spock never actually paired up on screen, and most of the most popular ships exist only unofficially in the minds (and fics) of fans, if only eventually backing into official status down the line (see: Good Omens, Supernatural). This year is different though, as the most popular pairing on AO3, the ship that launched 39,022 new works over the period, is Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, the Heated Rivalry boys, a canonical pairing. It’s perhaps apt given the origin of the Heated Rivalry franchise itself, which started as a fan work, Game Changers initially published on AO3 as a Stucky (Captain America and the Winter Soldier) hockey AU.

Adam and I spoke about AO3, but also the literary tradition around fanfiction and online publishing transitioning to mainstream media. You can find Adam’s work at garbageday.email or on the Garbage Day podcast, Panic World.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Adam, thank you very much for coming back on.

Thank you for having me.

You are a longtime contributor to Garbage Day, one of my favorite newsletters, and you have been doing a lot of really fun stories about internet culture and fandom and all these various different ways that it manifests, whether it’s video games or the things on TV that are actually getting an audience online. I’ve just been really enjoying it, so I wanted to have you on.

Thank you for that. My job title is head of research, which is a bit of a joke because last week was the first time I’ve ever actually delegated any research to anyone.

We are actually working with an intern for the summer, and I’ve been talking with her about my process and how I can teach it. I asked her for a piece I wrote recently about Archive of Our Own to help me go down a list of ships and make a little spreadsheet to tell me if they were canon or not.

All right, so we’ve arrived at the matter that brings us together today, which is you wrote about the ship stats report. Before we talk about what you wrote about, I think that we need to take a solid beat to define some of the terms that we’re about to talk about, such as what is AO3, what is a ship, and what are the ship stats report?

Sure. AO3 is short for Archive of Our Own, and it’s the single largest and most popular and most visible place on the internet to write fanfic. You can also write original fiction there, and that’s become increasingly popular as it’s become more of a cultural center. But if you want to write fanfic, generally speaking, that’s where you go, at least Anglophone fanfic. There’s a lot of non-English fanfic there, too, but I digress.

A ship is a term that’s been around in the fanfic and fandom community for decades, and it means a pairing of two characters in a work of fiction, and it usually has the connotation of if I’m writing a fanfic about a ship, I’m writing about these two characters, and it’s gonna be erotic.

So you also referred to the canon nature of it. What is something that is canon versus not canon? And the preponderance is mostly non-canon, right?

Yeah. Because fanfic has to be something that isn’t in the original text. People don’t really need to write fanfic if they feel like they got everything they wanted. Fanfic about ships is usually about ships that aren’t canon, which is to say, ships that aren’t in the actual story. So for example, if you’re writing a fanfic about Iron Man and Pepper Potts, that is canon. And there was, in fact, a pretty sizable community doing that in about 2012, which I learned doing these stats. But if you’re writing a story about Iron Man and Captain America, and they’re getting it on, that is not canon.

Right, so essentially, to make up a hypothetical public domain example, there’s not a lot of interest in writing Romeo and Juliet fanfic, because that is represented in the text. There’s a ton of interest in Romeo and Tybalt fanfic, right?

I wouldn’t say a ton, but there are actually quite a few examples of both of those.

But yeah, that is generally how it goes. And you say Romeo and Tybalt, it does massively tend to overrepresent male-male pairings, and we’re starting to see the effects of that, which is part of what I was writing.

Yes, so now that we’ve discussed the baseline level of stuff that we need to understand, you wrote this really, really incisive, and, I thought, very fascinating piece, arguing that based on the ship stats from this year, that this was an inflection point for when AO3 went mainstream. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that?

By far the most popular ship this year, the pairing that most people wrote the most fanfic of on the entire website, was Heated Rivalry. It was Shane Hollander and Ilya Rosinov, the two hockey players. That not only was the most popular pairing on the whole website, but it was almost twice as popular as any previous thing in any previous year.

That’s extremely impressive. That’s very hard to do, I imagine, yes?

Yeah, even with more people online doing online things than ever, it is not really something you see anywhere on social media. Not only is this thing bigger than anything that came before, it’s twice as bigger.

So, this is also an important inflection point you wrote about for the platform, because this story itself was born on AO3, no?

There was actually some debate over that. It’s a whole series, and the first book in the series, which confusingly isn’t about Hollander and Rosinov, it’s about the other characters, Kip and Scott. That book was first released to the public as a fanfic on AO3, but the author gone on record as saying, “I didn’t conceive of this as a fanfic first, I conceived of this as an original story, and I thought to write on AO3, it had to be fanfic, so I just said, this character is Captain America, this character is the Winter Soldier, which was one of the most popular ships.” And they were hockey players, which was also very popular on AO3, separately, because there were a lot of fanfics about Alexei Ovechkin in the early-mid 2010s.

I found this very interesting in your work, particularly fascinating to follow, because it seems like the defining question of a lot of Garbage Day, and the work that you do, is how on earth do I possibly keep up with this? Ultimately, what is actually important here? This was truly one of the most sensational moments in media this year. The numbers that the show pulled, the numbers that the book sales pulled, this is as a mainstream success as possible, and it very much germinated online.

Well, the question of whether it germinated online, I think it got too big. The phenomenon of Heated Rivalry was online, but it’s true that Heated Rivalry was a big moment of this very online, very niche culture hitting the mainstream, and everyone discovering it to one extent or another.

Heated Rivalry, even if you discount the fact that it started out as Captain America fanfic, it follows in the AO3 literary tradition. And this is becoming much more popular in the literary industry as a whole, both in terms of people are optioning fanfic, they’re turning it into original novels, they’re becoming bestsellers. Separately, you get all these genres of erotic, romantic genre fiction, and all those genres are indebted to the fanfic form and style and expectations.

How’s that?

I would say that if you really take a step back, it makes a lot of sense. For basically two decades, even before AO3 — before AO3, the most popular fanfic website was just fanfiction.net, and that went back to basically the turn of the millennium, and so for 20 years plus — you had tens of thousands of people writing millions of stories and constantly reading them and getting feedback and responses. All these niches full of dedicated writers and readers were going like a thousand little dynamos, and we all collectively didn’t realize that it would affect literature as a cultural art form, and that shows you what we know.

Yeah, I do enjoy it, because again, I think that some of the most exciting things that have happened in culture in the past couple of years is that you’ve seen the established studios and the established publishers and the established players are not necessarily that proficient at generating innovative ideas internally. But because of internet use and the opportunity to mash up genres and formats, you’ve had an opportunity to see a lot of creative collisions that can be stress-tested and tested among large communities of people online.

Then eventually the large corporations that are designed to economically exploit these productions can then swoop in and then bring it out and use that matter of scale to push it outward. I’m always really tickled by that lately, and it seems like this story is just a very solid articulation of a lot of that.

Yeah, the generalized version is that making something on the internet has such a lower barrier to entry than making something in any kind of traditional mass media. That’s been the case for long enough that there’s basically an entire generation of creators who have been doing that. It’s mostly a function of how much, economically, it’s become impossible to make anything traditionally. We’re finally starting to see the more amateurish, less serious, less highly produced internet stuff get adapted into the mainstream, get directly translated and signal-boosted.

I’d love to talk a little bit about what has your attention. A lot of the stuff that, but also really keeping track of all that. I know that you are head of research, which involves pouring through heretofore uninvestigated parts of the internet. What are you looking at now? What’s got your attention this time of year?

I tend to keep an eye on a lot of communities and there’s not always something exciting going on there, but you know to keep one eye on them in case something blows up. There’s a lot I keep up with, I’m watching for it to break containment. And then usually I’m wrong, and something slightly different breaks containment. But by looking at the first thing, I have a sense of where it came from anyway. To be honest, for years, I thought I saw a Heated Rivalry coming, but I thought it was gonna be werewolves.

Expand on that.

Do you remember me talking to you about this?

I absolutely remember having this conversation with you, but I don’t think that we’ve had the luxury of putting it in print for an audience, so please.

Yeah, but yeah, I just wanted to double check with you that I remembered right.

Nope, you certainly did. This is a conversation that we’ve had, but I wish to immortalize this.

I had been anticipating for a while that there would be a gay romance that wasn’t just inspired by fanfic, but specifically came from the literary tradition of fanfic that would break into the mainstream and introduce millions of people who’ve never gone online with that intent to the idea that this was a story you could tell. I thought it would be werewolves and not hockey players because I think of that as an easier buy-in for a lot of people, frankly, to accept queer romance if there’s some supernatural stuff in there. But it turns out that people were more interested in it with sports, which is really interesting, especially in terms of the indoor kid versus outdoor kid spectrum.

Interesting, yeah. I think inherently it’s a lot easier to get Americans to care about a cryptozoological phenomenon than hockey. So that does clock with my experience as a hockey fan.

The counter example, of course, is that we finally got people to buy into Web3 and crypto and prediction markets and everything the Silicon Valley weirdos have been banging on about for 15 years by saying, “You can use this to make watching sports more exciting.”

And now we’ve found the thing that’s actually making sports more exciting to new audiences and it’s fanfiction about the boys kissing each other.

Exactly. Yeah, and I assume there are already bets on it. If Heated Rivalry was real, if that glorious moment after Scott Hunter won the Stanley Cup happened, you can bet there would be gay pools for every single player in the league.

You are very much anchoring a lot of the Friday edition of Garbage Day. I really, really dig that. It is for subscribers only, so I would definitely encourage folks to pick one of those up. It’s, I think, one of the best value for your buck newsletters out there.

But yeah, where can folks find you? Where can they find the work?

Yeah, you can find what I write at garbageday.email. I also do research for our podcast, Panic World. You know where to find podcasts. I am basically everywhere for work, but the only place I really post much is Blue Sky. I’m there, bumas.bluesky.social.

Well, thanks again for coming on.

Edited by Crystal Wang