While earlier, the book found almost unanimous acceptance – with hordes of young teenage girls gravitating towards the young teenage protagonist of the novel as a means of projecting their own identities onto her, as a means of finding an outlet for the dual sense of liminality and otherness they feel not just because of their gender (or very often, their non-heteronormative sexuality), but also their position within a subculture that has always been largely looked down upon – in recent times, it has completely faded into irrelevance.įangirl revolves around 18-year-old Cath Avery, who is an avid fan of a fictional book series called Simon Snow (modelled on the Harry Potter franchise), and writes fanfiction about the homoerotic romantic tension between the book series’ eponymous hero and his so-called ‘rival’ Baz Pitch. Fangirls are now no longer on the margins, are not starved of larger representation – though whether this is a good or bad thing, is a different conversation entirely.Įither way, with the shifting nature of perceptions around fandom, fan perceptions around Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, have witnessed an interesting shift too. In the early 2010s, fandoms were for ‘nerds’, for ‘weirdos’, but, with the proliferation of the Internet and the increasing corporatisation of media (especially that of Marvel, Harry Potter, K-pop etc), fandom slowly became cool, a source of cultural capital, even. Now, almost a decade since its release, conversations around fandom culture have become more prominent than they were ever before – with fandom culture gaining more mainstream visibility and even legitimacy, with creators of media often engaging directly with fans and fanworks, with fan studies becoming more and more prominent within academia.
It was possibly the first-ever mainstream novel that delved deep into fandom culture – choosing to centre its narrative around an actual fangirl (as the title suggests), someone who is not only intimately emotionally invested in a certain literary work, but writes queer fanfiction about it too – and as a result, countless fellow real-world fangirls across the world were endlessly mesmerised by it, feeling represented in a way they had never been before. When author Rainbow Rowell’s young adult novel Fangirl first hit the stands in 2013, it became an instant Internet phenomenon among fandom communities. “To really be a nerd, she’d decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one.” By Rohini Banerjee Categories Fandom and Sexuality Review November 1, 2021
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