You know something wild (but nor really)? In every other fandom I’ve ever been part of, the biggest ships are always the guys. Doesn’t matter if they’re best friends, enemies, or barely speak to each other on screen. Female fans will look at two male characters and say “yeah, they’re in love” and write 50,000 words proving it.

Sherlock and John? Destiel? Sterek? These ships dominated their fandoms despite getting zero canonical support. It’s like fandom law: give women a story with interesting male characters, and they will ship them together. Period.

Except in romantasy. Specifically, in A Court of Thorns and Roses.

ACOTAR has everything you’d expect to create the internet’s next great gay ship. You’ve got Rhysand and Tamlin—two immortal High Lords with centuries of complicated history, betrayal, and unresolved tension. In any other universe, that would be catnip for shippers. Instead, the ACOTAR fandom is obsessively focused on the canonical straight couples while actively side-eyeing anyone who dares suggest that maybe, just maybe, Rhys and Tamlin have some chemistry worth exploring.

And here’s the thing that really gets me: this isn’t just a shift in shipping preferences. It’s symptomatic of something much more troubling happening in fandom culture and, honestly, in our culture at large.

Wait, But the Numbers Though

Let me paint you a picture of how weird this really is. On Archive of Our Own (basically fandom’s home base), 73% of the top 100 ships are male/male pairings. Seventy-three percent! This isn’t a new trend either, it’s been consistent for years.

But flip over to ACOTAR tags and it’s like you’ve entered an alternate dimension. The top four ships are all straight and all canon: Feyre/Rhysand, Cassian/Nesta, Lucien/Elain, Azriel/Elain. The few m/m ships that exist are what we call in the fandom trenches call “rare pairs”—tiny communities writing maybe a dozen fics while the canon ships get thousands.

To put this in perspective: Supernatural gave us 15 seasons of brothers hunting monsters, but the fandom spent most of its energy writing about Dean and an angel. Teen Wolf had a perfectly serviceable canonical romance between Scott and Allison, but everyone was obsessed with Stiles and Derek instead.

Those fandoms followed the rules. ACOTAR said “actually, no thanks” and completely broke the pattern.

The New Kids Don’t Know the Rules

Here’s my theory about what’s really happening: most ACOTAR fans have never been in a fandom before.

Think about it. BookTok exploded during the pandemic and brought millions of new readers to Sarah J. Maas. These aren’t people who grew up writing Harry Potter fanfiction or staying up until 3 AM reading Johnlock fics on LiveJournal. They downloaded TikTok, saw a video about a hot guy with wings, bought the books, and suddenly found themselves in fan spaces with zero context about how any of this traditionally works.

They didn’t learn that transforming source material is normal and valuable. They never absorbed the “ship and let ship” mentality that kept fandom communities from tearing each other apart. They don’t understand that queer shipping has been the backbone of female fan culture for literally decades.

Instead, they arrived with mainstream sensibilities about what fiction should be: you read what the author wrote, you enjoy the relationships they gave you, and deviating from that is somehow wrong or disrespectful.

It’s like if someone walked into a house party and started trying to enforce library rules. Technically they’re not wrong that libraries should be quiet, but they’re missing the entire point of why everyone else is there.

“That’s Gross” – When Fandom Gets Morality Police

And this brings me to the part that actually grinds my ever-loving gears.

This entire article/essay/thingy was inspired by a post made on the r/nontoxicACOTAR subreddit that posited that m/m ships were fetishizing queer people. The OP acted like the idea of shipping two male characters in a non-canon ship was morally reprehensible.

Let me be very clear: this is not normal fandom behavior. This is not how these communities have traditionally worked.

Fandom spaces were built by queer people and marginalized communities who needed somewhere to explore relationships and identities that mainstream media ignored. The whole point was that you could take a story about detective work or monster hunting and ask “what if these two guys fell in love?” without anyone telling you that was wrong or gross.

The “don’t like, don’t read” principle wasn’t just politeness, it was survival. These communities only worked because people agreed to let others ship what they wanted while focusing on their own preferences.

Now we have fans who think shipping non-canonical couples is somehow morally wrong, and they’re using the same rhetoric that conservatives use to justify banning LGBTQ+ books from schools. When you say m/m ships are “inappropriate” or “fetishizing,” you’re borrowing from the same playbook that wants to make queer people invisible everywhere else.

When the Author Won’t Leave the Room

Part of this mess comes from how involved Sarah J. Maas used to be with her fandom. And look, I get it. Social media makes it easier for authors to connect with readers, and that can be really cool. But there’s a difference between occasionally chatting with fans and actively shaping fandom discourse.

Maas regularly drops bonus content, engaged with fan theories, and makes it very clear which relationships she supports. When the author is actively promoting her canonical couples, it creates this weird dynamic where deviating from her vision feels like personal betrayal.

Traditional fandoms developed while creators were either distant or actively hostile to fan interpretations. J.K. Rowling was still writing Harry Potter when fans started shipping Draco and Harry, but she wasn’t on Twitter telling everyone why that was wrong. TV show writers might ignore fan ships, but they weren’t usually in the comments arguing about them.

That distance was actually healthy. It gave fans permission to take stories in their own direction without feeling like they were disrespecting the creator.

But when Sarah J. Maas posts about how perfect Feyre and Rhysand are, her fans treat that as gospel. Anyone suggesting alternative interpretations gets pushback not just from other fans, but from people who feel like they’re defending the author herself.

BookTok’s Algorithm Problem

Then there’s the platform issue. BookTok rewards quick, emotional content that gets immediate engagement. A video of someone crying over Rhysand’s wingspan is going to perform way better than thoughtful analysis of Tamlin and Rhysand’s complex history.

More importantly, TikTok’s algorithm creates these intense echo chambers. If you engage with Feyre/Rhysand content, that’s all you’ll see. If the biggest BookTok creators are focused on canonical couples, their content gets amplified to millions while alternative interpretations get buried.

This is completely different from how traditional fandoms developed on platforms like Tumblr or AO3, where you could easily find niche communities and rare pair content. BookTok’s algorithm actively suppresses anything that doesn’t match mainstream engagement patterns.

So queer ships can’t gain the same visibility or legitimacy, while canonical content dominates the conversation.

What We’re Actually Losing Here

Look, I’m not saying everyone has to ship m/m couples. If you love Feyre and Rhysand, genuinely, that’s great! Ship and let ship, right?

But what’s happening in ACOTAR fandom isn’t just people having different preferences. It’s the active policing of queer interpretations and the insistence that canonical heterosexual relationships are the only “correct” way to read these stories.

Traditional fandom gave marginalized fans space to explore relationships and identities that mainstream media ignored. Queer fans could see themselves in stories that weren’t written for them. Creative fans could ask “what if?” and explore possibilities the original author never considered.

When fandom becomes focused on celebrating canonical relationships rather than transforming them, we lose that creative spark. We lose the space for queer readings. We lose the communities that were built by and for people who needed somewhere to imagine better representation.

The irony is that new fans are occupying spaces built by the exact communities they’re now trying to police out of existence.

It’s Not Just About Ships

Here’s what really worries me: this feels like part of a much bigger cultural trend to push queer people back into the closet.

We’re living through a moment when LGBTQ+ books are being banned from libraries, when “don’t say gay” laws are spreading, when drag shows are being criminalized. The same energy driving moral panic about queer visibility in schools seems to be seeping into fandom too.

When ACOTAR fans call m/m ships “inappropriate” or “gross,” they’re using the exact same rhetoric that conservative groups use to justify removing queer content from public spaces. The message is identical: queer relationships are abnormal and should be hidden from view.

The insistence that canonical straight couples are the only “correct” interpretation mirrors broader cultural demands that queer people stay invisible and that LGBTQ+ stories don’t deserve the same legitimacy as straight ones.

Fandom used to be a refuge from this kind of thinking. For decades, fan communities provided space for queer readings in a world where mainstream media offered almost no representation.

Now those same spaces are being colonized by people who bring mainstream heteronormative values with them and use those values to police the very creativity that made fandom special in the first place.

It’s gentrification, for all intents and purposes. Spaces built by marginalized communities being taken over by mainstream audiences who don’t understand what made those spaces valuable and who are now actively working to sanitize them.

So What Now?

I don’t have easy answers here. You can’t force people to ship what they don’t want to ship, and you definitely can’t turn back the clock on BookTok’s influence.

But we can recognize what’s happening and push back against it. We can remind new fans that fandom traditionally valued creative transformation over canonical compliance. We can refuse to accept that queer interpretations are somehow less valid than straight ones.

Most importantly, we can remember that the spaces we’re fighting for were built by people who needed them. They weren’t created for mainstream consumption or commercial success. they were created because marginalized fans needed somewhere to exist and create and explore.

If we let those spaces get sanitized and policed back into mainstream acceptability, we lose something irreplaceable. And in a cultural moment when queer people are under attack everywhere else, we really can’t afford to lose the few places we still have.

The ACOTAR fandom’s hostility to queer shipping isn’t just about fictional relationships. It’s about whether fandom remains a space for creative exploration and marginalized voices, or becomes another arm of mainstream media consumption that reinforces existing power structures.

Right now, it’s looking like the latter. And that should worry all of us.

Writers statement: I am vehemently against AI writing. I am just a nerd who writes literary papers for fun who also happens to be having a love affair with the em dash.