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I have spent enough time in fandom spaces to understand why so many fans, including those of Heated Rivalry and The Pitt, are wary of journalists entering what they might consider sacred internet places right now. I've also been a journalist for enough years to know why fandom is so tempting to write about in the first place.
For many people, fandom has long functioned as a semiprivate space within the public internet. It's a place where you can express your creativity, put words to unnamed desires, explore parts of yourself you might not feel comfortable sharing elsewhere, and find real community among people who speak the same language of obsession.
Lately, though, it can feel like there’s a growing appetite to turn fandom itself into content: Actors are asked to react to ships in interviews, articles reveal fan fiction, and fan works are embedded in trend stories without permission. It can make the relative safety of fandom spaces feel a little more fragile, as though conversations that were once meant for other fans are now constantly at risk of breaching containment. In response, some fans have argued that journalists should just stop writing about fandom altogether.
I do not agree with that. Fandom deserves to be taken seriously. At this point, it has become central to how we experience culture, online and off. Everything is fandom: sports, politics, influencers, pop stars. I've written about K-pop fandom and the way it has influenced everything from Formula 1 to music streaming. Fandom increasingly plays a role in politics, too, with politicians being treated like celebrities, supporters organizing around memes and fan cams, and entire online identities built on loyalty to a public figure or movement. Fandom is not some niche internet subculture anymore; it's an important way people find connection and make sense of themselves.
That is exactly why it deserves serious coverage. But I do think journalists need to be more thoughtful about how they approach it.
In particular, I've been watching the coverage play out across The Pitt fandom over the course of its second season. As the show has exploded online, the boundary between observing its fandom and intruding on it has started to blur. Fan fiction, shipping discourse, and kink-coded jokes that once circulated mostly among fans are now being pulled into interviews, articles, and social videos aimed at a much broader audience.
Noah Wyle was recently shown romantic Robby/Whitaker fan art during a junket interview with BuzzFeed UK, even though the fan artist said they did not give permission for their work to be used that way. "The blurring lines between fandom and show is not great, and journalists should stop using us as a tool for clicks," the artist posted on March 31. In the aftermath, they briefly privated their account, before returning a few days later.
"I've been drawing and writing for fandoms for 12 years," the fan artist, who goes by Rex, tells Teen Vogue. "Whenever I create something, I usually expect it to stay within the fandom. This situation is the first time I've ever had something 'breach containment,' as people say."
Rex describes their work as something that is "first and foremost for myself, and then a gift to those in the fandom," adding that it's "never meant to be anything more than that."
They continue, "Fandoms have always been a place for people who may not fit in elsewhere," and point to how queer fans, in particular, have long used fan spaces to create art, community, and romance that may not otherwise exist. "For years, fandom has been mocked, belittled, called delusional, just for finding love in places that perhaps may not be canon."
As a result, Rex says, fandom has historically existed with "a fine line" between fans, creators, actors, and the media. "We created our own space, a place for community, and this sudden wave of journalism exploring fandom feels a little insincere," they explain. "While I don't believe it's all done with malice, it does occasionally feel like we're being put on blast just to be ridiculed."
At the same time, Rex stresses, the issue is not just about fans: "We have to think about the actors, too—it can be uncomfortable seeing a picture of you kissing your co-star," they say. "I think boundaries, all around, should be respected."
When asked during a red carpet interview with The Hollywood Reporter whether he pays attention to Whitaker fan edits on TikTok, actor Gerran Howell offered a thoughtful response: "It's all really beautiful—some of the art is so lovingly done. But I try to keep away from the stuff that is obviously for the fans to appreciate. And I'm sure some of them would be mortified if they knew the actors were seeing it. It's for them."
As the Gerran Howell Updates account on X put it, "Gerran leaves us the hell alone and rightfully so."
Even stories that are trying to be celebratory can reduce fandom to its most clickable elements. When Betches published a piece in its newsletter titled “There's No Fandom Hornier Than The Pitt," a number of fans said in the comments and on social media that they felt it collapsed the fandom into a punchline about thirst.
Still, the thing is, some fandom coverage can be thoughtful and worthwhile. New York magazine's long-form exploration of the Heated Rivalry fandom—a sweeping feature on the history of fujoshi culture that started in Japan and the broader embrace of male/male shipping among women—is genuinely smart, nuanced, and deeply reported. But even in that story, one choice stood out to fans: The piece linked directly to a fan-fiction writer's work without first asking for permission, according to the fic’s creator. The publication eventually removed the hyperlink from the digital story, but the title of the fic remains in print.
The fic writer, who goes by @subcorax online, tells Teen Vogue that he ultimately spoke privately with the author of the piece after the backlash and came away from the exchange with no hard feelings. He described the conversation as thoughtful and productive, emphasizing that he has "nothing but respect" for the writer and does not believe there was any malicious intent.
For him, the bigger concern was not one article or one hyperlink, but what that kind of exposure can do to a fandom space as a whole, especially for younger fans who may not yet understand what it means to suddenly have their work pushed far beyond the audience they wrote it for. Fan fiction can be deeply personal. A fic written for fun, shared among other fans, can feel very different when it is suddenly being cited by a major publication.
And that's really what's at the center of all of this: not whether fandom should be covered, but whether the people inside it are being treated with the same care as the culture they are helping create.
When I mentioned that detail to a friend who occasionally writes fan fiction, she immediately said she would be mortified if that happened to her, reinforcing Howell’s take that some things are simply "for the fans to appreciate." Why? Because she wrote that fic for the fandom, not for people outside her corner of the internet.
Fandom has always operated with a kind of informal etiquette. Traditionally, there has been an unspoken understanding that fandom exists slightly apart from the outside world; fans can write fic, make fan art, joke about ships, and experiment with desire or identity without expecting those creations to be shared with actors, creators, or a more general audience. Often, the prevailing approach has been to maintain distance. Fans know outsiders can find these spaces if they want to, but there has long been an expectation that what happens in fandom largely stays there.
As internet culture reporter Kat Tenbarge recently noted in a Teen Vogue piece about real-person fiction, or RPF, a professor who teaches classes on fan fiction told her that most fic writers are not interested in celebrities seeing their work at all. Real breaches often happen beyond the internet spaces where these writers do share their work, such as during press junkets, on red carpets, in listicles, and late-night interviews where fandom gets mined for engagement.
That gap is particularly important because fandom spaces have historically been populated by people who are not always taken seriously elsewhere: young women, queer people, trans people, people of color, neurodiverse individuals, and folks with disabilities. (Notably, though, fandom is not a purely utopian space; Black and brown fans, for example, have talked and written about the racism they’ve experienced as fans.) Fan fiction, especially, has long functioned as a place to test ideas about gender, sexuality, romance, and power in a relatively low-stakes creative environment.
More than 30 years ago, media scholar Joli Jensen wrote about “fandom as pathology,” or the idea that fans are often framed as irrational, hysterical, or excessive compared to "normal” consumers. That framing still lingers today. Sports fans are devoted, passionate. Pop culture fans are obsessive. But fandom spaces built by women and queer people are very likely to be treated as cringe, embarrassing, or inherently public property.
Other fan scholars have argued that fans are not passive consumers at all, but active participants in culture. University of Southern California professor Henry Jenkins, who has written or edited 20 books on media and pop culture, famously described fans as "textual poachers" who take existing media and remake it for themselves through fan fiction, fan art, memes, edits, and ships. In other words: Fandom is about creation, not just consumption.
That is part of why etiquette matters here. Fan works are often made within what scholars refer to as a "gift economy," a system where fans freely create work for one another, without requiring money or anything tangible in return. A fic writer posting to Archive of Our Own (AO3) or Tumblr may know, intellectually, that anyone can read their work; but there is still a difference between sharing something within a community and suddenly seeing it linked in a mainstream publication, or shown to the actors themselves.
In fandom studies, there is already an understanding that consent matters. The academic journal Transformative Works and Cultures strongly encourages scholars to ask permission before citing fan works. That standard feels worth considering for journalists too.
Part of the reason these tensions feel sharper now is that the internet has flattened the distance between everyone. Tumblr gave way to platforms like TikTok and X, where fan edits can rack up millions of views and anyone can stumble across these ships as they scroll. Fan fiction has been adapted into best-selling novels. Studios and brands openly court fandom, and sometimes fan labor even translates to paid work. Entire publicity campaigns are shaped by shipping culture and internet in-jokes.
In some ways this visibility has been validating. Fandom is no longer automatically treated as niche. But greater visibility does not necessarily mean fans want every part of fandom translated for people outside of it. There is a difference between covering fandom and exploiting it.
So, what would fandom etiquette for journalists actually look like?
At the very least, it means asking permission before embedding fan art or linking directly to fan fiction in coverage. It means thinking twice before asking actors or artists to react to ships or explicit fan creations. It means considering whether a fan reasonably expected their work to stay within the community it was made for. Most importantly, it means treating fandom spaces like real places inhabited by real people, many of whom seek out these spaces precisely because they offer a sense of belonging they may not find elsewhere.
Fandom does not need to remain in the margins to deserve respect. But if journalists are going to cover this subject, and we should, we have to be willing to approach these spaces with the same care, ethics, and nuance we would bring to any other community. Because behind every fic or piece of fan art is someone saying, "This mattered to me." Did it matter to you too?
