Heated Rivalry fans save the day after massive fan-fiction shutdown

For those who love unauthorized, spicy fanfiction, this one’s gonna hurt.

The beloved fanfic hub Ao3 (An Archive of Our Own) has shut down for maintenance, and according to moderators, the site could be down for as long as a month. Yesterday, the Organization for Transformative Works, the nonprofit in charge of the site, told users the site would be down for maintenance expected to last 12 hours.

“First, no AO3 data has been deleted. All your works, bookmarks, kudos, etc., are safe,” site moderators explained. “Second, while we currently don’t believe that the user database was stolen, we are also unable to rule it out.”

Now, the timeline has changed, and readers in need of their yaoi fix are fiending like nobody’s business.

How about we take this to the next level?

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As you can imagine, queer people are taking the news especially hard.

“Four weeks?” one disbelieving commenter responded to the news on Reddit. “No nut November really enforced this year huh?”

Apparently so. The shutdown is a woeful sign, especially for Heated Rivalry fans, who could previously enjoy thousands of fan-fiction stories detailing the unauthorized adventures of Ilya, Shane, Kip, Scott, and others in Rachel Reid’s Game Changers extended universe.

Fortunately for readers enmeshed in that fandom, someone had the presence of mind to transfer Ao3’s Heated Rivalry writings into a downloadable Google Doc for the duration.

“They’re completely unorganized and I’m sure there’s a lot of duplicates, but hopefully some people here can find joy from me sharing this,” one anonymous hero poster shared on Facebook shortly after the shutdown.

Talk about a deus ex machina!

“I love this fandom,” one user commented on the thread. “You loons are amazing. The addiction is real as you all know. And at the end of KINKTOBER…”

If you doubted how serious the fanfic community is, the response to the shutdown should tell you everything you need to know about just how hard in the paint these readers go when it comes to their favorite characters getting down and dirty.

It’s not all about getting off, of course—even if that is the main point of the archive. For nearly two decades, the open source site was home to some of the raunchiest writing on the internet, along with writings that allowed fans to explore queer and trans headcanons of their favorite (straight) shows and books.

Many trans people found themselves in the archive, using familiar stories as jumping-off points for creating even queerer, more gender-diverse worlds. The site was especially vital for readers in the dark ages of 2009-2014, when mainstream queer representation was not a network priority.

Ao3 has also come under fire for its proudly LGBTQ+ content base. In 2023, the site was targeted by presumably Russian DDoS attacks and managed to come back swinging.

But this time, we might not be so lucky. “I’m so curious to see the postmortem on this,” one Site Reliability Engineer wrote on Reddit. “I can’t imagine what could possibly take 2-4 weeks to recover from.”

The problem might not be as dire as we think, however. Others pointed out that because Ao3 is volunteer-run, it might just be a question of workers finding enough time to cobble together a fix.

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