From the Canadian shack to the Canadian cottage: Heated Rivalry as slash

Authors

  • Kristina Busse Independent Scholar

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2026.3237

Keywords:

MM romance, Pornography

Abstract

Slash fan fiction as a genre has traditionally been marked by its focus on explicit fantasies, professional equality, erotic intimacy, and meaningful nonverbal communication. Reading the TV show Heated Rivalry (2025–) through the stylistic and thematic lens of slash allows us to articulate and explain many of the more unusual aspects of the show, such as its odd pacing, lack of narrative action, extremely long sex scenes, and seemingly dated stories of the closet. The popularity of the show has catapulted into the open the particular appeal of slash fan fiction as it mainstreams a fannish mode of queering (and queered) interpretive readings.

Author Biography

Kristina Busse, Independent Scholar

Kristina Busse has a PhD in English from Tulane University and teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Alabama. She has published a variety of essays on fan fiction and fan culture.

In her early work, Busse argued that fan fiction functions as a form of literary analysis. Her subsequent work has focused on celebrity fan fiction, where she explores its postmodern aspects and reads fan fiction as a particular instantiation of celebrity studies.

Most recently, she is coeditor, with Karen Hellekson, of Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), to which she also contributed an essay in which she studies the personal interaction of fans in blogs, exploring the relationship between reality and fiction through the constructed narratives fans create of their lives. She has also written various shorter pieces on fan identity politics, queer and gender issues in slash fiction, and fan fiction and intertextuality.

Busse is currently coauthoring a book-length study on fan artifacts and new media with Louisa Stein contracted with McFarland.

She has been active in media fandom as a beta reader, a newsletter editor, and an archivist for close to a decade.

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Published

2026-09-14

Issue

Vol. 49 (2026): General

Section

Symposium

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Kristina Busse

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