by Laura Nikolich. Last Updated 20 October 2025.
To be completely transparent with you it was my TikTok algorithm which originally introduced me to the fandom of Formula 1 drivers Charles Leclerc and Max Verstappen. I instantly had my suspicions as to why. I have researched Drarry (i.e. the pairing of Draco and Harry from the Harry Potter fandom extensively. Obsessively, some might say) and I still think they are the two men who work best as a metaphor for how wonderful life could be if the world’s most insufferable, egocentric, insecure (and unfortunately powerful) men had the decency Draco and Harry have within this ship to date each other and as a consequence, stop meddling with world history.
You can’t tell me the endless edits of Elon and Donald having “broken up” when Musk left the White House don’t have fandom written all over them. Musk’s famous tweet on June 11th 20205 has repeatedly been referred to as the ‘break up tweet’ – signalling romantic and sexual entanglement, rather than mere political nepotism. Of course it is metaphorical to some extend. It is metaphorical in the same way “My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love,” a graffiti painting by Dmitri Vrubel on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall, depicting Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker kissing, as a diplomatic gesture. Yet, it’s telling you something you already know deep down – something you usually find safely stored in AO3’s eternal data bank of truth – that metaphors are rhizomatic. They’re not clean, they know no professionalism, they’re not a good place to hide.
Now, with Charles and Max some things are different in some ways: unlike Harry and Draco they are real people, racing in real life. Formula 1, however, is not necessarily known for inclusivity (very much like you can’t just waltz into Hogwarts, one just doesn’t wake up one morning and make their way to Monaco onto the grit. It’s more like a dynasty. If your parents, or in Charles’ case, your godfather raced, you stand a chance.) However, much like Harry and Draco, Max and Charles are rivals and have been since they were kids.
Fanfiction, and everyone who has ever seriously engaged in this genre of literature knows the fanon functions a lot like a popcultural subconscious – everything that would not make it past the editorial office you find in the rhizome of fandom, especially in slash and explicit content. If you’re already writing risky things, you might as well go all in (no pun, again, cross my heart).
While you may look at “Rap God” by Eminem and “Rap Devil” by MGK and tell me this is peak rivalry, a small niche of dedicated fandom will possibly inform you, what you witnessed instead in 2018 was an ill-fated love affair. A call for attention. “Both of us single dads from the Midwest, we can talk about it” (MGK, 2018). What if they did talk about raising their kids together? They are half way there, anyways.
No one has to tell us that most Shakespeare sonnets are written by men for men or that Tenysson never had a hetero divorce in mind when he wrote it was “better to have love and lost than to never have loved at all” (1850), but that he was morning his beloved Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly in 1839. Men build phallic symbols like the Eiffel tower (ironically, and fandom will teach you, this, too, a sex position where two men have sex with a woman, who is on all fours, while one man penetrates her from behind and the other one receives oral sex…a structure build for men to look each other in the eyes during intercourse, without facing their homosexuality) and we tell ourselves it’s to reinstall patriarchal power but what if it was homoerotic worship of male anatomy instead?
To you the famous tent cuckolding scene in “Twilight” (Meyer, 2007), where Jacob has to warm up Bella, while Edward has to lie there, cold and brooding might look like a heterosexual practice but there is tons of fandom that will tell you, Bella, if anything, is the annoying succubus, not letting this modern Romeo and Juliet love affair happen (a vampire and a werewolf, imagine the scandal!).
Hermia, as we can see now, is not wrong in “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Shakespeare 2.2.145– 150), when she states that Lysander simply does not give two fucks about whether she’s unhappy or not, and the whole nightmarish function is one big struggle to bind the girls to the boys – something only made possible with the help of magic forces and little nature demons.
Or back to the roots: what if Ron hates Draco because he knows Harry secretly wants Draco and what you’re witnessing is Ron’s jealousy (eventually settling for the woman closest to Harry, i.e. Hermione)? “Harry, however, had never been less interested in Quidditch; he was rapidly becoming obsessed with Draco Malfoy” (383). Everything J.K. and her bigotry missed in her own writing, the eternal stream of consciousness within fandom, will find for her.
What if the incident, as it is known to the Lestappen slash community, where Max and Charles pushed each other during the WSK Euro Series (2012) and almost caused a crash, was really just an expression of nervous energy? The confusing longing for closeness of two teenage boys?
How many times have you heard a man say that they respect another man, despite something that would make it unlikely?
“Of course I [Charles] have a lot of respect for Max. He has done very well and I have a lot of respect for what he has achieved. When we drove in karts, we dreamed of Formula 1 together and here we are now! He has the title I won and I have a lot of respect for that” (Leclerc, 2024).
What I argue is that what we’re really seeing in m/m fanfiction is a utopian vision of a world, where powerful men actually, literally, made love not war. We’d even be happy for them. We might forgive them collectively for once having mistaken their obsession with each other for hatred. For causing wars and building dictatorships in the hopes of impressing each other. For misinterpreting their love as rivalry, for never getting over the other one not accepting their hand. For building penis statues and penis corporate buildings…For taking the dark mark instead of coming out of the broom closet. Stephanie Meyer must have been delusional when she said in 2015 that “[T]here’s a reason [her] books had a lot of innocence. That’s the sort of world [she] live[d] in”, only to then give us archetypical vampire soft porn inspo. Her books are as innocent as “Eat.Pray.Love” was spiritual (Now Gilbert FINALLY came out and told us about her hedonistic lesbian nightmare, that maybe would not have been one had she not forced heterosexuality onto herself and new age-y nonsense onto us readers in 2008). I believe there is a deeper truth to all of these texts and real world constellations and fanfiction is its exegesis; The world would be a better place if only we consulted it thoroughly.
Works Cited
Machine Gun Kelly. “Rap Devil.” Bad Boy / Interscope Records, 2018. Spotify, open.spotify.com/track/rapdevil. Accessed 18 June 2025.
Meyer, Stephenie. Eclipse. Little, Brown and Company, 2007, pp. 487–489.
Meyer, Stephenie. “‘There’s a reason my books have a lot of innocence. That’s the sort of world I live in.’” The Guardian, 11 Mar. 2013, www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/11/stephenie-meyertwilight-the-host. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
Musk, Elon [@elonmusk]. “I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far.”X (Twitter), 11 June 2025, www.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/[tweetID]. Accessed 18 June 2025.
“Leclerc Exclusive: I Have a Lot of Respect for What Verstappen Has Achieved.” RacingNews365, 2 May 2024, https://racingnews365.com/leclerc-exclusive-i-have-a-lot-of-respect-for-whatverstappen-has-achieved. Accessed 11 June 2025.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Half‑Blood Prince. London: Bloomsbury, 2005, p. 383.
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library, Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Tennyson, Alfred. “In Memoriam A.H.H.” London: Edward Moxon, 1850.