Adaptation is everywhere! In the spring of 2026, MTC is running a new series called Adaptation Anxiety, where new and returning writers consider literary adaptations from the last few years. We ask not whether these adaptations are good or bad, faithful or unfaithful to the source, but bigger questions about the logic underlying contemporary works of adaptation and why audiences have such big feelings about seeing precious characters on screen. Why, in other words, are we so anxious about the move from book to screen, and what does all this angst about the adaptation as a form tell us about our present relationships to these mediums?
A specter is haunting modern media—the specter of the fangirl who’s managed to make a career, a name, and a sizeable profit for herself off of her fanfiction.
This winter, critics—of both the professional and armchair variety—have taken to the Internet in droves to ferret out traces of fannishness in prestige film adaptations and literary reworkings by young women of color and to fret over the desires of the “horny girls” purportedly driving the meteoric success of Heated Rivalry. From the sexist and racist critiques of Chloe Zhao’s Oscar-winning film Hamnet as glorified fanfic to sensationalized explainers of Heated Rivalry’s runaway success and the lusty fangirls propelling it, fandom looms large as the locus of critical anxiety.
Despite decades of fan studies scholarship dismantling the derided image of the fangirl and the fiction she pens, in the discourse du jour, “it’s just fanfic,” has served as a potent invective, those three words adjudicating everything from emotional heavy-handedness to derivative failures of imagination. Fans have long joked that when women narratively play with a source text, it’s fic; when men do it, it’s an artistic homage. Or, as an article from The Mary Sue about Lonely Christopher’s reworking of The Shining put it, “When men write fanfiction, it isn’t fanfiction because it’s ‘academic.’” In Christopher’s estimation, his novel There “isn’t ‘fan fiction’” because he believes it moves beyond Stephen King’s work to be in conversation with the likes of Stein and Beckett “aesthetically” and Baudrillard, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida “intellectually,” but, most importantly, the novel is not fanfic because “it’s not enjoyable.” Here, the conjoining of the intellectually and aesthetically ambitious and the decidedly unenjoyable demarcate the boundaries of the literary. Everything else is relegated to the amorphous world of fanfic, where pleasure reigns supreme.
As is so often the case when pleasure enters the scene, an anxious cultural paranoia has arisen around the possibility that certain successful adaptations are actually just fanfic—a charge that marks an improper relationship to the source text, a surfeit of self-indulgent narrative choices, and an explicit investment in women’s desires and pleasures (of both the erotic and political variety). Or, as a pair of Twitter users bluntly put it: fanfic is “shoddy, perverted wish-fulfillment” that is equal parts “depraved, degenerate, insane, [and] reprobate.” While I’m sure these guys had a lot of fun with their thesauruses, at heart, their language collapses into one real takeaway: fanfic is so perversely sexed-up it can only be aesthetically, intellectually, and morally bad.
Treated as a blight on the landscape of modern media, fanfic has become an easy scapegoat when the relationship between aesthetics, profit, and prestige falls out of alignment. From questions about what ails the publishing industry to concerns about the “bad” taste of everyday consumers, there’s one thing critics can agree on: somehow, somewhere, fandom is to blame. Such logic is on crystal clear display in Patrick Sproull’s review of Zhao’s Hamnet, which he deems both “artificial and manipulative” and a “shallow and undignified work of fan fiction.” Railing at the film’s “lowbrow, IP-dependent cringe,” Sproull’s critique builds to its most damning point: the film’s failures, all its heavy-handed “wink-wink allusions to Shakespeare…make sense when you realise that Zhao actually started her career penning fan fiction.” The damned spot staining Zhao’s CV is less the film on its own terms than her own self-admission to participating in fandom. Indeed, this artificially manufactured “gotcha” moment emblematizes a broader critique exceeding the specificities of this film or that director. In Sproull’s estimation, to admit to having written fanfic is to mark oneself and one’s work—permanently, apparently—as “lowbrow,” “cringe,” “shallow and undignified.”
The popularity of this mode of thinking helps to explain why some writers are so insistently scrubbing their hands of fanfic’s stain, albeit, to little avail. See, for instance, the nearly incessant discourse surrounding Jacob Tierney’s Heated Rivalry (Crave/HBO Max), a television adaptation of Rachel Reid’s “Game Changers” book series. From December 2025 onward, questions about the fannish origins of the show’s source material have been front and center among viewers. After all, before its 2018 publication, Game Changer was first available in 2016 on AO3 (Archive of Our Own, a popular fanfiction hosting site) as a James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers (“Stucky”) Captain America AU (alternate universe) fanfic, and rumors still circulate about the ice hockey RPF (real people fic) origins of Reid’s 2019 Heated Rivalry. Reid, despite being a semi-prolific Stucky fic writer during the heyday for the “ship” (romantic and/or sexual relationship), was quick to assert that the book series was absolutely not fanfic with its serial numbers filed off. Yes, the first novel in the series, which gave us the Scott/Kip storyline in the show, was first posted on AO3 as Stucky fic, but in Reid’s version of events, the story that became Game Changer started as a work of original fiction and was only ever transformed into Marvel Cinematic Universe fic and posted to AO3 in the serialized, weekly chapter update format typical of fic publishing to allow her access to instant, free feedback from the fandom’s massive reading community. Do I find this a particularly compelling narrative, given that Reid’s author’s note on Chapter 1 of “Game Changer” reads, “I’ve been writing this for awhile [sic] now, and it’s at about 19,000 words at the moment, with a few more chapters left to write,” but by the time she was posting the final chapter 15 weeks later, the fic clocked in at nearly 100,000 words? No. But I have no real desire to adjudicate Reid’s version of her writing history.
What I do care about is how Reid’s carefully publicized account indexes her desire to distance her novels (and their wildly successful television adaptation) from their AO3 origins. As she told Salon’s Angelina Mazza, “I desperately wish I’d never posted that fan fiction…I know it’s still circulating, and it’s bad. It’s so embarrassing.” This image of fanfic—as the purview of the young and immature, as inherently cringe and embarrassing—lingers in Reid’s insistent denials. While I doubt Reid would claim affiliation with Sproull and his Twitter supporters, or vice versa, their comments share an investment in cordoning off “real” art from the self-indulgent cringe that is fanfiction.
Yet Reid’s willingness to bolster a narrative deriding participation in fandom as the shameful pastime of the amateur—a narrative that for some critics irrevocably marks her past, present, and future writing with a scarlet F—has not spared her intellectual property from the disreputable specter of the horny woman with a keyboard. Critics may be content to parrot Reid’s account that her novels are not and never have been actual fanfiction, but only because the novels and show alike are already treated as essentially fanfic. One need look no further than New York Magazine’s recent front-page coverage of Heated Rivalry and its viewers to witness the elision of the show, its fans, and its own fannish, sensationalized origins. The magazine launched their “Fujoshi Studies” series on February 23, 2026, with a pair of articles from E. Alex Jung and Bethany Squires whose titillating titles, tag lines, and cover illustrations set the internet ablaze. There’s hardly a better illustration of the cultural conversation surrounding Heated Rivalry’s appeal than the photos accompanying Jung’s “Girls Who Love Boys Who Love Boys”: from the headless, thin, white woman gracing the cover, clutching two half-nude Ilya and Shane dolls between her painted nails and making them kiss, to the more NSFW progression in which the hockey jerseys have been discarded, and the naked, plastic boys have been carefully positioned in bed by this anonymous woman to do far more than kiss. Drawing on common descriptions of creating fan works—making your Barbies kiss and playing in someone else’s sandbox—these images echo and amplify the claim that the work’s success banks on women’s sexual attachment to slash (male/male) fandom. As Jung noted, “Regardless of its origins, the book series, particularly early on, reads like slash fiction. In Heated Rivalry alone, there are a dozen vividly imagined sex scenes that have a woman’s touch…and the prose favors maximal pleasure with minimal effort.” And that’s precisely the issue, the reason for all the anxious hand-wringing over these adaptations. These works, critics insist, are amateurish, tawdry, and indelibly feminine. Yet here they are, making headlines and millions of dollars. The audacity!
To put these works back in their place, they are stripped of the relatively accepted and acceptable designation of “adaptation” (contentious though it, too, can be) and deemed mere fanfic. Any successes are chalked up to the susceptibility of their feminized audiences who crave those fannish elements the educated critic knows better than to enjoy. Sproull does not weep at the “manipulative” Hamnet as other viewers do. The sex scenes in Reid’s Heated Rivalry serve not as an aphrodisiac, but as a “jump scare” to Jung. In their bodily non-responsiveness, they are deemed better arbiters of the works’ worth than the women in the throes of what Jung calls a “mass-psychosis event” that awoke in them a “libidinal desire” akin to “madness.” Ironically, in watching the much-hyped Heated Rivalry, I found myself, like Carol Sturka of Pluribus, the lone grumpy lesbian immune to a global phenomenon that promised limitless pleasure. Yet I resist the idea that my lack of libidinal investment makes me a better or more astute reader of the show, much like my lack of responsive tears should not be taken as proof of my appropriate critical distance from Zhao’s Hamnet.
If I might dip into the Western canon that critics fear is becoming little more than a “personal playground” for horny fanfic masquerading as adaptation: I would challenge these same critics to consider whether Herman Melville’s erotically-charged “ravishmen[t]” by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing ill-equipped him to review Mosses from an Old Manse? If Melville could fanboy out, ecstatically pondering “what infinite height of loving wonder and admiration [he] may yet be borne, when by repeatedly banquetting on these Mosses, [he] shall have thoroughly incorporated their whole stuff into [his] being,” perhaps we can allow that texts often compel us in unexpected directions. If Melville can wax poetic over Hawthorne’s “germinous seeds…shoot[ing] …into the hot soil of [his] Southern soul,” perhaps we too can allow that creativity need not be divorced from erotic investment. Melville might not have been making Young Goodman Brown and Faith dolls smooch under his desk, but less than a year after penning his glowing review, he did dedicate Moby-Dick to Hawthorne “[i]n token of my admiration for his genius.”
Even allowing for the fact that the heady mixture of desire and textual captivation are not guaranteed to lead to the next Moby-Dick (and god forbid a woman try her hand at gender- and race-bending the original), perhaps contemporary critics can move away from a critical posture that renders any trace of feminine pleasure or self-indulgence as suspect. Contra Sproull and the Twitter commentariat’s contention that the weaknesses and failings of contemporary adaptations and reworkings “all make sense” once the creator has been unmasked as a fangirl in disguise, the simpler truth may be that literary and media production exist within a larger creative community that includes fandom. Treating fannishness as a diagnosis for the sprawling category of “everything the critic doesn’t like” doesn’t lead to better or more incisive criticism; it shirks the demands of critical rigor and specificity in favor of a spicy headline that preserves the conflation of female desire, excess, and fandom.
Emily Coccia is the Robert A. Oden, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow for Innovation in the Liberal Arts at Carleton College. Focusing on nineteenth-century genres of working-class and mass-popular literature, her first book project considers how American working women’s fannish reception practices allowed them to envision queer futures and cultivate spaces for pleasure and intimacy. In her free time, she can be found walking her dog or searching for new TV shows featuring strong female leads and homoerotic subtext.
Series banner illustration by Carolyn Jao
Article photo: Cover of The Story of the Typewriter, 1873–1923 via Public Domain Review