Why ‘Marvel Rivals’ Is a Hit With ‘Rule 34’ Porn Communities

Last December, Chinese-based publisher NetEase Games released Marvel Rivals, a multiplayer shooter featuring a huge roster of iconic (and some lesser-known) heroes from the comic monolith. Brilliantly, Rivals’ gameplay mimics a once-dominant, now-struggling hero shooter known as Overwatch, and the Marvel multiplayer game immediately shot to the top of Steam charts, becoming the most-played title on the platform barely a month after it launched. 

Rivals isn’t just snatching the hero-shooter crown from the embattled Blizzard game — it also appears to be coming for Overwatch’s fan porn dominance. 

Video game fandoms and 18+ content have long been intertwined, with titles like Overwatch, Fortnite, and Resident Evil spawning smutty art, sensual fan-fic, and impressively animated pornographic videos (often made in the free, open-source 3D animation software Blender). 

After its 2016 launch, Overwatch quickly became one of the most featured video games on sites like PornHub, thanks in large part to there being an abundance of models available in Blender for creators to, um, play with. There are currently at least 100 pages worth of Overwatch porn on PornHub, compared to around 32 pages under the Resident Evil category. 

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But lately, video game-inspired 18+ content has been focused on Marvel Rivals characters, from the Invisible Woman/Sue Storm to Psylocke to Squirrel Girl, with a little Venom thrown in there for good measure. Rivals content is steadily building a following on fan-fiction spaces like Archive of Our Own (known colloquially as AO3) and porn sites like PornHub, and several well-known content creators on X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit are producing sexy scenes of these iconic characters. 

Why is Marvel Rivals becoming the new favorite porn playground? And what is it about video game characters (and these characters specifically) that make them such fascinating fodder for adult content? Rolling Stone spoke to a professor of clinical psychology and Rivals content creators about the deluge of dirty art, videos, and more centered around the wildly popular game to better understand what’s driving it.

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Rules of engagement

When it comes to sexual content involving established characters (whether it’s in movies, video games, television, or elsewhere), it’s important to remember Rule 34, which is both the name of an erotica website and a now well-established cultural edict: “If it exists, there is porn of it.” 

For Dr. Eric Sprankle, professor of clinical psychology at Minnesota State University, Mankato, Rule 34 is a natural progression of fandom. “This is just taking things one step further, you know you’re attracted to this, so a natural curiosity would be ‘What would they look like naked? What would they look like engaging in sexual behavior?’” Dr. Sprankle says. 

This kind of content isn’t new, either; it’s just more easily created and disseminated in the age of widespread internet access. “This isn’t limited to gaming. Anything that’s popular is going to be sexualized.”

With such a storied history of beloved characters and a wildly popular cinematic universe, Marvel has always been a goldmine of fan fiction and smutty art. “[Marvel Rivals] porn is popular for those who are already drawn to the fantasy world, like the Marvel Universe, and it becomes even more of a fantasy now,” Dr. Sprankle explains.

And since Rivals takes dozens of these well-known characters and thrusts (pun intended) them into a 3D game world, it gives creators a somewhat frictionless path to creating highly detailed animated porn by grabbing in-game models straight from the game engine. A Reddit post from four months ago titled “The Marvel Rivals character models have been ripped from the game, it’s time boys,” is filled with tongue-in-cheek jokes about what those models will be used for.

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Game modder Jack Ceck tells Rolling Stone the ease at which creators can pull assets from games ”depends entirely on the game and the support and tools the surrounding community has for it.” Luckily, Unreal Engine, which powers Rivals, “happens to have a lot of that.”

Despite this, animating pornographic videos based on existing character models is a difficult and time-consuming process, with a 10-second animation loop sometimes taking weeks to render. That’s where the robust community comes into play.

“It’s a very welcoming and open community where people share knowledge and resources,” adult-content creator Slayeddotcoom, who makes Blender-animated pornographic videos of Overwatch and Rivals characters, tells Rolling Stone. “As artists, we lift each other up and give feedback on hard pieces so we can all work together to create.”

A cornucopia of porn

What are these enterprising individuals creating? A quick search of Marvel Rivals on BlueSky or PornHub might get you fired from your desk job, so proceed with caution, but it includes everything from sexy fanart of Magik in her underwear, Squirrel Girl doing yoga, a shirtless Punisher with his gun slung casually over his shoulder, and Sue Storm wearing nipple pasties. 

There are overtly sexy drawings alongside cutesy couplings, but almost all of it has a decidedly adult lean.

“Adult content and Marvel Rivals exist at a very interesting and unprecedented intersection of media changes and cross medium franchising,” a producer and voice actor known as Radiant G tells Rolling Stone. He references how popular multiplayer game League of Legends did not have an incredibly widespread porn community until the Netflix adaptation Arcane was released. 

Arcane offered a more detailed and character-focused art style that differed from the style of the game, whose characters are seen on a battlefield from above, thus inspiring fans to create fan fiction and sexy fan art for the show. (“The first thing I did was a picture set of Jinx from League of Legends,” Slayeddotcoom says of his journey into pornographic content.)

“Imagine that at the scale of the largest fictional fandom on the planet, and that’s Marvel Rivals,” Radiant explains. “There are over 600,000 Marvel fanfics on AO3, more than any other non-real person category. And you may say, ‘Well there have been other Marvel games before,’ but not at this scale, not at this level of success.”

Marvel Rivals’ dominance coupled with the cultural significance of Marvel characters has led to a boom in Rivals-related porn. A #MarvelRivals search on BlueSky consists of almost exclusively 18+ content, while the subreddit r/MarvelRivalsR34nsfw boasts 140,000 members.

“There’s been a shift now from people asking for Overwatch content to people looking for Marvel Rivals content — exponentially so,” Slayeddotcoom says. “I can tell you, assuredly, there’s a lot more hype for people wanting Marvel Rivals characters in their explicit videos than Overwatch.” 

Rivals’ fantastical world also opens up the door for a wider variety of porn. Though it’s important to note that almost all of its female characters are skinny, white-passing women, the game does have furry-coded characters like Squirrel Girl and big, muscular monsters like Venom. 

“What we know from little research that exists on animated porn, is that those who have fantasies involving animated characters tend to also have more fantastical fantasies,” Dr. Sprankle explains. 

Rivals supremacy 

Marvel Rivals exists at a crucial cultural crossroads for adult content creators. Not only does it seem to have unseated Overwatch as gamers’ preferred hero shooter, but it features both iconic and niche characters, who have, in many cases, already been “shipped” (internet slang for supporting romantic relationships between fictional characters) with each other.

“Suddenly, these characters Rivals is introducing may have been someone’s rare pair [a pairing of characters that is less common in a specific fandom culture] for 20, 30, 40 years,” Radiant explains excitedly. “Suddenly people are making all of this art for these characters they’ve loved. A lot of mainstream people didn’t know who Squirrel Girl was before this game. And now she’s here, she’s adorable, and she has thighs sculpted by the gods.”

Slayeddotcoom says some of the feedback he received when he revealed his next video would feature Venom and Sue Storm was frustration from fans who wanted to see sexual content feature Sue and her canonical husband, Mister Fantastic/Reed Richards. “They were like ‘Mister Fantastic can make his dick five blocks long,’” Slayed says, laughing. “But he’s too busy in his lab trying to figure out the solution to his current problem, he’s too busy … Venom is going to drop down, flex, pop out tentacles and just go to town.”

A quick clip Slayed shared with Rolling Stone offers a sneak peek of just that — in it, Venom has a massive penis and testicles that sway as he lets out a guttural roar, his muscles flexing so much they seem like they’ll burst out of his necrotic-looking skin. Though Slayed is far from finishing the video, he’s also shared other screenshots and clips of the duo on social media, including a few in which Venom’s massive hands are wrapped around Sue Storm’s entire head, a shocked look overtaking her face. 

There seems to be a widespread understanding of Rivals’ horniness, both from its creators and its fanbase. Though NetEase did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment, the studio has, in some ways, leaned into these characters’ innate sexiness with its 3D models and some of the game’s cosmetics. 

Content creator Aruuu revealed in December 2024 that her body had been used as a model for Psylocke, a character associated with the X-Men who has a famously skimpy costume. “YES! That is my ASS,” she wrote on X (formerly Twitter) alongside a video of a streamer gawking at the amount of buttocks shown in an in-game outfit modeled after Psylocke’s original comic costume. 

A month later, Aruuu said that the team had “recycled” her dimensions for the newly released Invisible Woman/Sue Storm. Not long after the character’s release, Rivals dropped an outfit in its in-game store known as the “Malice” skin, which takes the bubbly blonde character normally wearing a full coverage (but skin-tight) bodysuit and puts her in, essentially, a one-piece, high-cut bikini that reveals her butt cheeks. The costume is based on a dark comic book arc about, bizarrely enough, a lost pregnancy. 

There’s definitely a level of tongue-in-cheek sexuality and playfulness for Rivals that is unparalleled in other contemporary online games. 

But Dr. Sprankle insists that the uptick in Rivals-related pornographic content does not necessarily mean that “millions of people are now gooning to images of Susan Storm.”

Instead, he believes it says less about what turns people on and more about what people are drawn to on the internet. “I think, culturally, we’re changing our arousal patterns, but the point I’m making is that curiosity doesn’t always mean arousal, and it certainly doesn’t mean preferred arousal, where this is the type of porn that’s now going to be sought out for masturbation,” he says. He posits that the people who actually experience sexual arousal from Marvel Rivals porn (especially the more niche or kink-forward porn like Squirrel Girl furry content or Venom monster sex) are a “small minority of the population.” 

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“A researcher who was affiliated with the Kinsey Institute, Justin Lehmiller, found that just about 4 percent of people regularly fantasize about animated characters,” Dr. Sprankle points out. He’s referencing a study published in Psychology Today, in which Lehmiller polled over 4,000 Americans and their sexual fantasies for a book he wrote titled Tell Me What You Want. Lehmiller’s study found that “27 percent of participants” fantasized about cartoon or anime characters, leading him to conclude that “while a sizable number of people appear to have had hentai-related fantasies, it’s a relatively small number who fantasize about it frequently.”

“The proliferation of Marvel Rivals porn is more driven by people being curious, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re being aroused by what they’re seeing. And even if that’s the case, our fantasies can be transient. This may be something novel or even taboo that works for you for today, or maybe this week, but then you lose that novelty.”