Thirty-nine thousand and twenty-two. That is how many new Heated Rivalry fanfic works tagged Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov landed on Archive of Our Own in a single year, and no pairing in the archive’s history has come close.
The count comes from the 2026 edition of AO3 Ship Stats, the long-running project from fan statistician centreoftheselights that ranks the fastest-growing relationship tags on the site. This year’s window ran from July 29, 2025, to July 26, 2026. The old single-year record was 20,298 works, set by Aziraphale and Crowley from Good Omens in the 2020 list. Shane and Ilya nearly doubled it, and their friendship tag charted separately at No. 14.
The Ship Stats Are a Better Hype Map Than Any Trending Tab
Streaming charts tell you what people pressed play on. AO3 tells you what they could not stop thinking about once the credits rolled, and writing a story costs hours that a stream or a like never does.
Read the 2026 top 25 that way and the year’s real obsessions jump out. Will Byers and Mike Wheeler from Stranger Things came in second with 25,492 new works as the <a href="https://comicvibe.com/apple-watch-series-12-and-ultra-4-adding-two-new-features-soon/” title=”Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 adding two new features soon”>series wrapped up. The Pitt put five different pairings in the top 100, led by Robby and Whitaker at No. 20. KPop Demon Hunters landed a polyamorous Mira/Rumi/Zoey tag at No. 17, and Project Hail Mary sent Ryland Grace and Rocky to No. 21 with 4,766 works for a movie that only opened in March. Formula 1 real-person fic had three pairings in the top 32.
None of those fandoms need a big Discord server or a viral TikTok to prove they exist. The work count is the proof, and it is a stubborn number to fake, which is more than you can say for most engagement metrics in 2026.
How a Six-Episode Canadian Show Took Over the Archive
Six weeks before Heated Rivalry premiered, AO3 held a few hundred stories set in its world. By early October that figure had passed 51,000 Prime Video’s Off Campus, another hockey romance adaptation, sat at 912 works in the same report, despite pulling the kind of audience we tracked when it drew 36 million viewers in 12 days. Big viewership and big Heated Rivalry fanfic output turned out to be two very different things
The origin story makes the gap funnier. Author Rachel Reid first posted an early version of Game Changer to AO3 in 2016 with Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes standing in for her original characters, because she assumed the site only took fanfic. “I desperately wish I’d never posted that fan fiction,” she told Salon, as Elite Daily reported. A decade later, Steve and Bucky sit at No. 84 on the same list her characters top.
My read on why it caught fire is structural. Jacob Tierney’s show plays like the fic its fans write, with a slow burn across years, a relationship carried by text messages and a lot of space between scenes for readers to fill. Six episodes left plenty of gaps, and fandom has always rushed to fill a gap.
The AI Fight Inside the Fandom
Growth that fast brought a fight with it. On June 29, an anonymous 25-page document circulated on X explaining how to spot fics pasted straight out of an AI chatbot by searching for leftover formatting code, Fansplaining reported. It named 38 works across several fandoms, two of them Heated Rivalry fanfic works, and the accusations that followed pushed several writers to pause or pull their work after harassment.
AO3 is not going to settle it. The Organization for Transformative Works has said a ban on AI-generated works “is not enforceable,” and the site’s “Created Using Generative AI” tag holds more than 10,000 works out of more than 17 million. Fans will keep arguing about whether AI belongs in fanfic at all. The practical problem is narrower, since a formatting trace is a clue rather than a verdict, and in a fandom this big a wrong accusation spreads as fast as a right one.
Discord Is Where Fans Talk, and It Just Added a Bouncer
AO3 is where the stories live. The conversation around them happens on Discord, which says it has more than 200 million monthly users, and on Sept. 23 the platform began sorting every account as adult, teen or unconfirmed using signals like account age and activity, TechCrunch reported. Teen accounts are now blocked from age-restricted servers and channels. Discord says more than 90% of users will never be asked to verify, and those who are can use a credit card or app store age data instead of an ID scan. The rollout was delayed in February after a privacy backlash, and a third-party vendor breach in 2025 had potentially exposed ID photos from about 70,000 users.
For Heated Rivalry fanfic readers, that matters more than it sounds. A fandom built around an explicit show runs a lot of age-restricted channels, and those channels just got a door that checks. Discord also filed confidentially for an IPO in January, Bloomberg reported, and a company headed toward public markets has every reason to tidy up the rooms it hosts.
The 2027 Ship Stats count is already running. Heated Rivalry Season 2 is expected in the spring, squarely inside the window, so the record Shane and Ilya just set may only last one year, and the most likely ship to break it is theirs.
