Welcome to Our World by Michaela Schwartz

On Sisterhood, Fandom, and Heated Rivalry

When my sister, Lily, and I were kids, we would spend hours upon hours in our basement playing with our “Set Ups”. A Set Up, in case you are uneducated in the precise language of the Bolotin-Schwartz household, is a massive world spread across every inch of a vast carpeted space. Set Ups are complex, interspecial, multicultural societies. The architecture is an intricate combination of mixed materials – Polly Pocket malls surrounded by Ello houses, the occasional Barbie airplane, Playmobil horse stables, and a whole bunch of random household objects and orphaned board game pieces. In a Set Up, Lego figurines cohabitate with Polly Pockets, Groovy Girls, felt dolls, you name it. Scale is not considered in a Set Up; the dogs are sometimes bigger than the cars, don’t worry about it. 

Set Ups were a feat of urban planning, multicultural engagement, and conflict resolution. While Lily and I would bicker constantly in the outside world, during Set Up time there was always a detente. We didn’t actually interact much during play time, but I don’t remember ever wanting to go down to the basement and play alone. Even though we weren’t playing with each other, set ups were firmly a two person activity – parallel play, as the experts call it. I had “my girls” and Lily had hers. I don’t remember many of the plot lines or characters I created down there. I don’t think we were too worried about continuity and canon. World building was the main event – where would my girls live, where did they spend their time? Did they have a pool at their house (yes, always with a pet dolphin), did they ride a horse or take a pink stretch limo to get around town (depends)? Did they have boyfriends (occasionally, but they didn’t speak much), kids (maybe), parents (never)? 

There would come a time when my parents decided it was time to clean a Set Up. Always devastating, Lily and I would put the wooden blocks into a neat stack, Polly Pockets and their chewy clothing back in their drawers, everything in its proper place. I definitely remember a few fights about cleaning up a Set Up: why couldn’t we have a sleepover in the living room instead of the basement? Why would a carpet need to be vacuumed? Who cares if Dad isn’t able to walk to his home office without getting a Lego embedded in the ball of his foot? Although I despised cleaning up a Set Up, I LOVED getting to start a new one. Finally, an opportunity to fix the world I had created last. Some new characters, some old. Same building blocks, different Set Up. 

I don’t remember exactly when we stopped playing with the Set Ups. I wish I had a chance to say goodbye to the girls - knowing that this would be the last time. I do know that it probably coincided with the procurement of my first laptop, purchased with my Bat Mitzvah gift money. 

Suddenly, the internet wasn’t just available in Dad’s office on his desktop computer. It was in my bedroom. I feel incredibly lucky to have grown up on the internet that I did. I had social media - I got a Facebook account immediately after I got my computer in 2009 and got to experience all of the fun of it before it went to hell, but Instagram and Snapchat (and their ability to make you feel immediately left out in real time) didn’t really take off until my later high school years. And the internet still had websites: Tumblr, the Impossible Quiz, Stumble Upon, My Life is Average, and fan sites. So many fan sites. 

I like to think that our Set Up energy just transferred to the digital realm. Instead of playing with toys next to each other, my sister and I were tucked in our neighboring bedrooms, and eventually college dorm rooms in different states, reading Fanfiction and watching fan edits and reblogging gif sets on Tumblr. We didn’t interact much online from what I can remember – I was busy reading webcomics where Buffy beats up Edward from Twilight and sending my friends Klaine (Kurt and Blaine from Glee) fanfics, while Lily was reading Sterek (Teen Wolf) fanfics and downloading Skam episodes from Google Drive. Online, we found our new Set Ups. Endless worlds and characters for us to love and play with and explore.

Any fandom my sister was a part of feels like a family friend to me. While I have never seen an episode of Teen Wolf, I feel a deep sense of kinship and nostalgia whenever a photo of Dylan O’Brien sneaks into my Twitter feed. Lily personally congratulated me when Darren Criss won a Tony and bought me Evan Ross Katz’s Buffy book for my birthday. Occasionally, we would overlap – Lily has since become a huge Buffy fan and we both would die for our Yellowjackets girls. 

When Heated Rivalry first hit HBO Max this past November, we both dove in headfirst. We surely have “the psychosis,” as fans on the internet put it. Neither of us have fangirled this hard in a minute and it is simply so much fun to be here together. Sending each other TikTok edits to our favorite songs, creating a Spotify playlist with songs that remind us of Shane and Ilya (and carefully putting the 100 songs in chronological order), texting during new episode drops and while we read (and re-read) the books. It’s been such a blast tapping back into that part of ourselves.

What has also been an unexpected delight has been seeing the rest of the internet discover this feeling for the first time. Of course, a large portion of the Heated Rivalry fanbase has been on Ao3 and fan Twitter forever – the first book in the series was not-so-secretly originally written as Marvel fanfiction. But another large portion of the fanbase is new here – baffled by their own obsession with these sad boys in love. Lily and I have been texting about how cool and strange it is to see the mainstream embrace smutty romance. Isn’t this the thing we were made fun of for? Kept private? Where was this enthusiasm in 2010 when it felt like my 2 friends and I were the only ones in the real world who liked this stuff?

I’m not trying to gatekeep, honestly. It feels so joyful and validating to have everyone here. I watch new episodes with my roommates and chat about Ilya and Shane at parties. What a delight. To all of the newcomers, I say: welcome to our world. I know it’s hard now that season 1 is over, just as it was devastating when Lily and I had to clean up our Set Ups as kids. But know that there is another world waiting for you just around the corner, you only have to show up and build it.