Heat Waves

You may be looking for the Starsky & Hutch zine Heatwave or the Digimon doujinshi Heat Wave.
Heat Waves is a popular Minecraft YouTuber (MCYT) RPF fanfic by tbhyourelame. 
As of January 2021, it was a completed fic with 12 of 12 chapters posted. 
Despite being archive-locked, it was the most popular fanwork (by hit count, kudos, and bookmarks) in the Video Blogging RPF and Minecraft fandom tags on AO3. Also, despite first being posted in September 2020, the fic was (as of March 2021) the most bookmarked and second-most kudosed on AO3 (the first-most kudosed fic is a fic titled 'I Am Groot' which consists of 1308 words of that phrase repeated in various combinations). It also had the second most hits and the first of any English-language fanwork on AO3.Works search, 22 March 2021. As of January 2023, the fic has been hidden by its author in a collection titled 'deletedworks'.
Its popularity was great enough that the effects were felt on Google Trends. There was a large spike of searches for "heat waves" in the United States between 15 and 21st Nov 2020, roughly corresponding with when Dream mentioned that he and his friends had read the fic. Google Trends also lists the related topics for this search as "Glass Animals - Pop Band" (the artist who created the song that inspired the fic), "Lyrics - Topic", "Archive Of Our Own - Topic", "Fan Fiction - Topic" and "Wattpad - Website". The fourth and fifth related queries are "heat waves ao3" and "ao3".
Upon the 19th of January, alongside the publication of the final chapter, the author announced that the story will be continued with a sequel titled 'Helium', also named after a song upon the Glass Animals' album 'Dreamland'. The first chapter of ’Helium’ was posted on the 14th of March 2022, and currently 14 of the 17 planned chapters have been posted.
== Chapter 8 and hiatus ==
There was a hiatus between chapters seven and eight, due to readers of the fic sharing it outside of fannish circles, including with the people involved in the fic - George and Sapnap, the main love interest and a major side character in the fic, have both read Heat Waves, and Dream, the protagonist in the fic, at least knows it exists. In the notes of Chapter 8, tbhyourelame said she planned to "finish it, all of it, and then decide if [she] should keep uploading".
On November 20, 2020, someone donated on stream to Sapnap "explaining about Heat Waves". This event sparked discussion in the Dream Team fandom about boundaries between RPF and content creators:
On December 1, @dreamsspotify, a Twitter account which monitors Dream's public Spotify account, tweeted that Dream was listening to the song Heat Waves at what was 12.23 AM in his time zone.
== Chapter 10 and AO3 downtime ==
On January 4, AO3 went down briefly soon after a new chapter of Heat Waves was posted, and fans remarked on social media that the fic had singlehandedly taken down the site. The official AO3_Status twitter account said, "Please rest assured that no particular work update broke the site, although we agree that *would* be hilarious."
At 11.10 PM EST, tbhyourelame (@tbhyourelame1 on Twitter) posted on Twitter announcing the update. Four minutes later, at 11.14 PM EST, she tweeted "oh my god the website?", indicating that AO3 had crashed (or begun to crash) by this point. It can be inferred that AO3 was not down at the time the chapter was posted, given the issues caused difficulty with posting chapters and tbhyourelame did not mention any difficulty with posting.
By 2.42 AM EST on January 5, "Heatwaves" was a trending topic on Twitter in the United States, with a caption reading "Fans look at Chapter 10 of Heat Waves, a fanfiction about a relationship between content creators Dream and GeorgeNotFound". This attracted criticism from fans who believed that "trending" Heat Waves went against tbhyourelame's wishes.
On January 6, AO3's Tumblr account affirmed that Heat Waves was not the cause of AO3 going down. To support this, AO3 stated that they had had approximately 3 million page views more of traffic just three days prior. Despite this, AO3 subsequently experienced outages near immediately upon the release of the 11th and 12th chapters, casting extreme doubt about AO3's claims that Heat Waves was not responsible.
==Other references to Heat Waves by its subjects or related streamers==
===On-stream mention by Dream===
Dream mentioned Heat Waves on stream, telling George "I've read Heatwaves you're just cock sucking" during a game of Mad Verse City (a Jackbox Party Packs game that involves writing rap verses to diss the person you are paired with). Fans responded by pointing out that Heat Waves does not (as of January 9th/Chapter 10) include non-dream sequence sex scenes, memeing on Dream for assuming he "gets the guy" in the fanfiction.
===Dream's Response to the Creator===
According to a screenshot by tbhyourlame on Twitter, Dream sent a private message to her praising her work.
==Fan Response==
Heat Waves has garnered a large amount of fanart. The Heat Waves tag on Tumblr, since the fic's popularity, has become a fan art tag for the fanfic. tbhyourlame also retweets a lot of fanart on their Twitter.tbhyourlame, Twitter. (Accessed 5/9/2021) A myriad of fanfiction created after Heat Waves was released include similar plot lines and themes as Heat Waves, and some authors directly credit tbhyourelame's story in their summaries and author notes. Other fans have taken Heat Waves and translated it into other languages, but unlike the original story do not always archive lock the translated works. For example, the German translation by flyisfly is not archive locked.Heat Waves - Deutsch, Archive of Our Own. Feb 8, 2021 (Accessed 5/9/2021) YouTube videos about Heat Waves frequently utilize the song in some way, such as in animation memes.
Though tbhyourelame archive locked the fanfiction, some fans of the fanfic have attempted to make it into a publicly accessible podfic. For example, the fan CrocodileUnderscore posted a reading of chapter one on YouTube without the author's permission on Nov 24, 2020. CrocodileUnderscore edited the description to say that they were unsure if they would do chapter two as they were waiting for the author to give them permission.Heat Waves|Dreamnotfound Fanfiction reading | Chapter 1: Moon Jelly, YouTube. Nov 24, 2021 (Accessed 5/9/2021) As of May 2021, they have not posted another reading and the video remains up.
==Fanart==
===Gallery===
*comic by thesonofallthingsunnecessary
*unguarded / honest by li-wri
*So heat waves. by staridenn
===Fanfiction===
*HEAT WAVES
*heat waves- Spider-Man fanfic inspired by Heat Waves
*Something About Heat Waves
*fuck it. heat waves 2- a jokefic
*Heat waves and Heart-throbs
===Video===
*Heat Waves - DNFDreamNotFound Animation
*Heat Waves Animation (DNF)
*HEAT WAVES | Dreamnotfound Animation Meme? READ DESC
*heat waves PARALLELS in GeorgeNotFound's stream
*Heat Waves Lyrics (Dream and George Edition)
===Meta===
==Other Resources & Links==
*Fanfiction about real people is flourishing- Polygon article
*unfortunately annoyed- discussion of Heat Waves on the Glass Animals reddit
*Glass Animals’ Hottest 100 win: ‘Heat Waves’ and the power of online fandom
==References==
Category:Slash Fanfiction
Category:YouTube RPF
Category:2020 Fanfiction
Category:2021 Fanfiction
Category:MCYT Fanfiction