Heated Rivalry brings fan edits to a whole new level | Canada Voices

Within the Heated Rivalry fan community, the 40-second video montage has entered urban-legend territory. Originally posted on X by a user with the handle sosaneitsinsane, the fan edit is a compilation of the series’ hockey rivals-turned-lovers Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov’s steamiest moments: passionate makeouts, thrusting bare buttocks, other NSFW (or newsprint) scenes.

Known as the Big Ole Freak edit – after the Megan Thee Stallion song that soundtracks the video – the fan edit has since garnered millions of views across platforms and an endless stream of reaction videos. Stallion has confirmed she has seen the video. It’s been played at dance clubs around the world, from Istanbul to Vietnam to Australia, projected onto massive screens behind DJ booths.

“It’s crazy to me,” says Margaux Ladu, the Parisian creator behind the fan edit. “To see it transition from online to actual people in a club partying, that’s the type of thing that makes you want to keep doing it.”

By day, Ladu is a French teacher. But by night, they’re a prolific creator of fan edits, splicing and dicing clips from Heated Rivalry, finance drama Industry and their other favourite TV shows to share on social media.

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Fan edits are montages of clips from TV shows, movies, musicians or other bits of pop culture, cut and arranged together with music, lyrics and sometimes special effects, and shared on TikTok, Instagram, X and Reddit. They often possess a cinematic intensity that rivals any trailer from a Hollywood studio. In fact, some major film studios have even recruited fan editors to make trailers, recaps and other social-media content, a major reversal from a few years ago when these same studios would accuse them of copyright infringement.

While online fandoms have been known to devolve into toxic spaces, notoriously rife with in-fighting or borderline-obsessive parasocial relationships, the world of edits remains a pure pocket of internet fandom, a way to build fervor among the most devoted and lure new converts.

Ladu got their start in fan edits as a teenager on Tumblr in 2017, where they posted GIFs they made of Shameless’s fan favourite couple, Ian and Mickey, and visual interpretations of the novel The Song of Achilles, which retells the story of the Trojan War through the relationship of Achilles and Patroclus.

Ladu is into fujoshi, a Japanese word that translates to “rotten girl” and, in the world of anime and manga, refers to female fans who prefer stories featuring romantic relationships between men. Ladu devoured Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series and after seeing behind-the-scene rehearsal clips of Heated Rivalry actors Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, was certain the show would be their next obsession as a fan editor.

“Since I had already read the books, I knew there would be different types of scenes that would inspire different moods,” says Ladu. “When you edit, if the series or the show is too monotonous, you run out of things to do.”

Fan editors will tell you there’s a lot that goes into a good edit: the clips need to be high-quality, the transitions must be smooth, the dialogue intentional, the pacing must follow the beats of the music. “The music cannot be an abstraction for me. The songs and the lyrics have to really fit,” says Ladu. “I don’t just choose songs just because they’re trending.”

Lipe Faria, a 19-year-old fan editor based in Brazil, started making fan edits when he was a kid of the actress Kiernan Shipka from the Netflix show Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. In 2024, he started posting Sex and the City fan edits on TikTok under username bradshawquotes, and his videos of Carrie Bradshaw slinging back cosmos or Samantha Jones strutting down a Manhattan alley, set to Madonna or Charli XCX songs, began garnering millions of views.

For Faria, what started as a hobby has now grown into a career. He works with music labels to create edits for artists, including Gracie Abrams, Selena Gomez and Olivia Dean.

He credits fan edits of Heated Rivalry, which he also makes, as part of the reason the show has gone viral online.

“If you look at what Heated Rivalry became online, of course the show itself is great, but the edits played a huge role in its viral success,” says Lipe. “The combination of scenes and music people connected with emotionally helped push it everywhere – and that’s a big reason why it reached such a wide audience.”

In recent years, major studios, such as Lionsgate, have started hiring fan editors to create marketing material specifically for TikTok. Earlier this year, HBO hired the creator of a viral Heated Rivalry fan edit set to the song Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Eurythmics. The video is a hypnotizing remix of the first two episodes, chronicling Hollander and Rozanov’s burgeoning relationship from the ice to the gym to the bedroom.

The video’s comment section is filled with variations of “girl this is a job application,” “this is so trailer coded they need to hire you now,” and “this was a film you deserve an academy award.”

In the end, the commenters were prophetic: The 26-year-old creator, known as uhbucky on TikTok and Instagram, quit her financial consulting job in Boston and started at HBO last month, where she’s now editing trailers, promos and episodic recaps.

Ladu, the Paris-based editor, says they’re inherently a bit wary of big companies trying to profit off niche online subcultures. But they also think it’s a smart move for Hollywood and TV studios to tap the talent who are making these lucrative marketing assets.

“The trailers you see being released for big movies, they’re mostly focused on trying to help you understand the plot,” says Ladu. “Edits are not made for that. They’re made to deliver a feeling and make you more interested in the vibe, and I think that’s what people prefer.”