Love the One You're With

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Fanfiction
Title: Love the One You're With
Author(s): lemnlime
Date(s): December 3, 2023
Length: 516 words
Genre: Het, Canon Divergence
Fandom: Brokeback Mountain
External Links: AO3

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Love the One You're With is a het Brokeback Mountain fanfic posted on AO3 in December 2023. The author, lemnlime, states in the work's end notes that they "made this fic as a test of my theory that there are a large number of heterophobes on AO3."

Author's Summary

Fic summary as of December 2023:

I noticed there isn't a single fic in this fandom categorized as F/M without M/M. Since yaoi is so popular in almost every major fandom regardless of whether M/M ships are canonical in them, I decided to write this. I fully expect this fic will be unpopular simply because I wrote a straight fic in a yaoi fandom (AKA, doing the reverse of what's so popular on AO3).

Summary:

Jack and Ennis mutually decide to just stay friends and to work on patching up their relationship with their wives.[1]

The author later updated their summary to include a paragraph complaining that another fic of theirs was deleted by the "mods" and that they were suspended for a month. The user claims that "AO3 deletes fanworks even if they aren't in violation of their TOS."[2]

Fan Response

As of April 22, 2024, the fic on AO3 has 110 comments, 11 Kudos, 2 bookmarks, and 2,393 hits. Compared to other Brokeback Mountain fanworks on the archive, the fic has more comments and a higher hit count than average, but lower bookmarks and kudos: out of 887 fanworks, it's ranked 17 in comments, 170 in hits, 618 in bookmarks, and 773 in kudos.

The work seems to have gained more attention after a December 31 Tumblr post sharing the author's note started circulating. As of April 2024, the Tumblr post has 44,635 notes.[3]

Other Tumblr users discovered the work and dug up other posts by the author about free speech.[4] In September 2023, the user made several similar posts on Reddit.[5][6][7]

Fail_fandomanon also discovered the story in January 2024 and criticized the author's note for being homophobic:

References