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.)
There’s something undeniably frictionless about it, like the literary equivalent of an endless scroll. Finish one story, and another is already waiting in one of the 37 tabs you have open. But “just one more” isn’t necessarily the same thing as “I can't stop.” Eventually, The Cut essay also arrives at this distinction. As the writer’s life becomes more manageable, she wonders whether her appetite for fanfiction will disappear along with the stress it had helped her escape. It doesn’t. She keeps reading, but now it’s because she wants to, not because she feels she has to.
By the end of the essay, she acknowledges that everyone deserves a little harmless fun, then wryly wonders whether she’s simply rationalising her habit as an addict would. It’s a fitting place to land because the essay never really has to decide whether the “addiction” is literal. The word can also communicate the sheer intensity of wanting something while making a joke out of wanting it that much. It feels like an almost irresistible metaphor for wanting something more than seems reasonable. So does “hyperfixation,” a trait linked to neurodivergence. Spend enough time in fandom online, and you start to sound like you're reading a passage from the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).
Of course, fandom didn’t invent this vocabulary. Therapy-speak has become one of the dominant ways we narrate our inner lives online. We set boundaries and identify our attachment styles. We name our triggers, process our trauma, protect our peace. As Katy Waldman wrote in The New Yorker in 2021, it’s as though “the haze of our inner lives” is increasingly being filtered through the language of the therapist’s office.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Having language for an experience can make it easier to understand, and easier to find other people who understand it too. The psychologists Waldman spoke to were notably wary of policing who gets to use that language; after generations of shame and silence around mental illness, greater fluency isn’t exactly a crisis.
But language doesn’t just describe how we feel; it can shape how we understand what we’re feeling. And when psychological vocabulary gets flattened into internet shorthand, nuance tends to be the first thing to go. Fandom makes this especially messy because fandom has always spoken in exaggeration. “I like Heated Rivalry” is a limp little sentence compared to “Heated Rivalry has rewired my brain chemistry.” Sometimes you need the drama. Sometimes “brain rot” really is the only phrase that adequately conveys the experience of thinking about the same fictional person while brushing your teeth, buying groceries and trying to answer an email that has absolutely nothing to do with them.
Most of us aren’t diagnosing ourselves when we talk this way. We’re playing with the language. But what happens when the joke and the diagnosis start borrowing each other’s clothes?
The word “parasocial” might be the clearest example of how easily that shift can happen. The term wasn’t coined to diagnose fans who care too much. At its most basic, a parasocial relationship describes a one-sided sense of intimacy with a media figure—someone you feel like you know even though they don’t know you. Researchers have pushed back against the popular assumption that these relationships are inherently unhealthy or pathological.
Online, though, parasocial often lands less like a description than an accusation. You care too much. You’re too invested. You know they don’t know you, right? Somewhere along the way, a term for describing a kind of relationship became a way of identifying when someone has crossed an invisible boundary between being a fan and being too much of one. Maybe that’s why I also keep getting stuck on the word “addiction.” I’m not particularly interested in deciding whether someone I’ve never met is genuinely addicted to fanfiction. I’m interested in why addiction feels like such a natural way to explain loving it this much.
Because underneath all of this language is an older, much less clinical feeling: embarrassment.
Fanfiction has become vastly more visible and culturally legitimate, but some of that old cringe still clings to it. There remains something faintly embarrassing about admitting not only that you care deeply about fictional people, but that you want more of them than the official story was willing to give you. That you wanted them to kiss differently, hurt differently, heal differently.
Maybe using the term “brain rot” gives us some distance from that earnestness. Maybe saying we’re “addicted” lets us confess just how much we want something while simultaneously rolling our eyes at ourselves for wanting it. None of this means intense fandom can’t become unhealthy. Of course it can. Anything that begins crowding out the rest of your life deserves scrutiny, and sometimes the things we love can take more from us than they give. But intensity alone isn’t pathology.
Fourteen million words can tell us how much someone read. It can’t tell us what they found there. Comfort, escape, pleasure, community, a version of a character they couldn’t stop thinking about, a version of a relationship they wished canon had given them. Or maybe just a really good story, and then another really good story after that.
Sometimes wanting more is just wanting more. It doesn’t always need a diagnosis.
This article first appeared on teenvogue.com
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