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Culture
Do Normies Have a Right to Read
The culture that fandom built won, writes Katherine Dee. But even as fandoms have become the organizing logic of contemporary media consumption, the privacy and community that made them possible is vanishing—and some fans are revolting.
By Katherine Dee
March 5, 2026
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Last week, New York magazine published a cover story on Heated Rivalry and fujoshi, a Japanese term for women who love stories about sex and romance between men. The online discourse that the story inevitably inspired kept circling back to one specific detail. In his thorough and seemingly well-meaning story, the writer, E. Alex Jung, had linked directly to fanfiction on An Archive of Our Own (better known as “AO3”). Some people argued that this—directing a mainstream readership to pseudonymous fan writing that wasn’t intended for them—was unethical. The core question, as the literary agent Alyssa Morris wrote, was simple: What is a reasonable expectation of privacy for a community that publishes its work on the open Internet?
The debate touches on something fundamental about the experience of online spaces, and it has further-reaching implications than it might seem. The Internet has a geography; it is a place more than it is a communication tool. It has cities and towns and houses and rooms and rooms within rooms. Each region of the Internet has its own culture and dialect and etiquette. The Internet also has places that are public in the technical sense, but private in the social one. Yes, AO3 is a website anyone can visit, browse, sign up and make an account on. But many fans perceive it less like a public square and more like a communal living room.
Privacy online has never been about walls as much as norms. It is enforced socially rather than technically, in the same way that privacy in a city is enforced socially. You can follow a couple down the street to eavesdrop on an argument or go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting “just to check it out,” but you don’t do either of those things—or if you do, you don’t make it obvious, because that is understood to be an invasion of privacy. The space may be accessible, but it isn’t meant for you.
Online fandom was built on this kind of ambient, norms-based privacy. In the ’90s and early aughts, obscurity did much of that enforcement work. So few outsiders knew fandom spaces even existed, let alone how to navigate them, that the question of mainstream exposure barely arose. People wrote for each other, for free, for love of the source material, with the assumption that the audience was self-selecting. A journalist writing about your fandom was possible, but it was unlikely enough not to worry about. It could already be hard to get people within your fandom to engage with your content, forget outside of it.
But fandom isn’t obscure anymore, and it hasn’t been for a long time. “Normies”—and I use that word (for people who are not overly online) loosely, because I don’t believe such a thing exists in 2026—are sharing fan theories on their Instagram Stories. It’s not 2002. You almost certainly know someone who has, at some point, been active in online fandom spaces, consuming and sharing fan work. If it wasn’t you, it was your sister, your friend, maybe even your parents. The culture that fandom built won. It isn’t a dirty little secret; it’s the organizing logic of contemporary media consumption. You can’t be the bedrock of contemporary culture and also the invisible underdogs.
That said, it is still reasonable not to want thousands of strangers directed to your pseudonymous writing. Fans are genuinely upset at their work being spotlit. They’re also mourning a real loss, especially those, like me, in their 30s, who have been milling around these spaces since they were kids. The implied privacy that once let people be anonymously weird, horny, and experimental is evaporating, and with it goes a certain permission to be strange. The trolls have breached the perimeter.
Monia Ali, a blogger who’s been active in fan spaces for decades and now blogs about fan dynamics on her Substack Fandom Exile, says that sharing and commenting on fanfic is akin to filming strangers in public without their permission. It’s “not appropriate. I don’t think people should be happy they’re being blasted,” she says.
I think Ali has the right analogy. You can easily take a video of someone eating lunch at a diner. If something genuinely newsworthy is happening, maybe you should. But walking into a restaurant, even a very strange or Instagrammable one, and pointing a camera at the regulars is not the same as merely reporting on the scene at the restaurant.
A Brony in his early 20s who asked to remain anonymous says this conversation reflects how some Zoomers think about socializing more broadly. When he first started posting in the My Little Pony fandom, he and others assumed that what you made was for fellow fans and would stay among fans. But he has little expectation of privacy—after all, the culture around in-person conventions has already died off, thanks to outsiders videoing and mocking fan communities. “Nobody wants to be put in a cringe compilation,” he says. But on the other hand, if so many of us now are “cringe,” maybe it’s time to let go of the fear of being identified that way.
The impulse to gatekeep AO3, to insist that journalists should honor community norms they never agreed to, is understandable, but it runs up against a hard reality. You can lock your AO3 account or post to invite-only spaces. But what people actually want is harder to guarantee: they want to publish openly but be read only by the right people. That was something both the Internet and our broader culture used to provide, briefly and accidentally, and most likely never will again. Obscurity worked when fandom was small. But it longer is, and no amount of gatekeeping will ever bring the halcyon days of the early 2000s back.
