Hello all! As per our annual tradition, we’re publishing a Year In Review newsletter this week instead of our typical rec lists, shouting out our fav media of 2025 (Heated Rivalry!!!) and calling back to some highlights from our fandom-related work.

Happy New Year in advance! — Gav

year in fandom: Gav

Heated Rivalry hit like a meteor this December, obliterating anything that might have happened over the previous 11 months. An exaggeration? Only slightly. I think for a lot of people this show arrived with perfect timing—the world is grim, the pre-holiday period is exhausting, we all need some joy in our lives, etc.—but that fact also kind of undersells the real qualities that make Heated Rivalry so compelling.

Recently I’ve spoken with a couple of friends (including Elizabeth) about why this show hit so hard with romance genre audiences—and, obviously, with the fanfic contingent that overlaps with professionally published m/m fiction. Like, this cast and creative team Get It to an extent that honestly feels unprecedented. Episode 5 made me feel like I could bite through concrete! I was shooting laser beams outta my eyes! And as a personal gift to me, this shit all revolves around HOCKEY (!!!), my beautiful problematic fav! Thank you to Rachel Reid, Jacob Tierney, Connor Storrie, and Hudson Williams for ending this year on such a blissfully high note. I’ll be sharing some more analytical thoughts on the next episode of Overinvested, coming in the first week of January.

Elsewhere in the fannish realm this year, I greatly enjoyed writing about Andor, Pluribus, and in a more critical sense Captain America: Brave New World, which to me felt like a belated death knell for the MCU’s role as a meaningful cultural entity. And film-wise, while I’m hotly anticipating recording Overinvested’s “best films of the year” podcast, the ACTUAL best film I watched was surely David Cronenberg’s Crash. Freak cinema forever baby!

Looking forward to joining you all for The Vampire Lestat in 2026!

xoxo Gavia

year in fandom: Elizabeth

Unlike Gav, I am not in the flush of a hot new fandom, gay hockey-related or otherwise (blessings be upon all of you). Still, I’ve had a great year in fandom all the same! Fic-wise, I lived the dream: finishing two lengthy WIPs, one of which had been languishing at the 45% mark for years, and publishing close to 200K words total. IRL-fandom-wise, I was lucky enough to see the IWTV panels at both San Diego and New York Comic-Cons, which was thrilling but did not leave me even remotely psychologically prepared for The Vampire Lestat in just a few months (!?!).

Book-wise, I finally read some Le Carré (legendary for a reason!) and became a deep devotee of German-language novelist Daniel Kehlmann via his latest, The Director. Film-wise, my favorites in 2025 were Conclave (a late 2024 release but I first saw it in theaters early this year), One Battle After Another, and Wake Up Dead Man. PTA bookended by two movies about priests; clearly I yearn for Clergy Cinema. (Speaking of the clergy…Flourish, my longtime podcast partner, is now, in fact, a priest, and if you enjoyed Wake Up Dead Man, you’ll want to keep an eye on Fansplaining’s feeds early next week…)

And speaking of Fansplaining more broadly…

Fansplaining listeners know that when the podcast went on hiatus with Flourish’s departure last year, I shifted to publishing longform writing about fandom while I decided whether to continue the podcast itself. This year, I continued that written format, publishing one article a month (including one by Gav!) which I rounded up today in one big post. I’m so grateful I could publish such fantastic reporting, criticism, and personal essays on deep-level fandom topics—especially considering the extra-bleak state of culture journalism right now, which Gav and I have a front-row seat for both as writers and as curators of this newsletter. In that vein, I’m going to have a big Fansplaining announcement coming in early January; if you’re a fan of great writing about fandom, get ready!! — Elizabeth

FINAL THOUGHT

We have received exactly two Yuletide recs so far, so there is A LOT of space for more in our start-of-January lists. :-D You can send them in via our one-off submissions form; as a reminder, please include “Yuletide 2025” in the tropes/themes field.

Though if perhaps you don’t know what Yuletide is! Here’s an article I wrote about the long-running rare-fandom fic exchange a few years back, and here’s this year’s Yuletide collection—over 1,500 stories in more than 1,000 fandoms! — Elizabeth