reading: red, white & royal blue

[sword_logic]

i figured i should start writing about books i read, too, since i've been reading a lot this year!

red, white & royal blue is an adult romance by casey mcquiston, released july 2019. alex claremont-diaz, son of US president ellen claremont, causes an international incident at the british royal wedding by accidentally shoving the younger prince henry into the wedding cake, prompting the US and england to do damage control by making it look like alex and henry have been BFFs all along, rather than icy at best. cue Tropes(tm), cuteness, etc., etc.

i enjoyed it! it was sweet and funny, and the political aspect of it in particular was pretty cool to read; the author did a lot of work to make the alternative-near-history political landscape feel grounded and realistic.

that being said, i have a very odd criticism: it felt like i was reading fanfiction for a property i'm not familiar with.

i've had this on my mind since i finished reading the book. when you're reading fanfiction, the author assumes a level of investment that the reader's got; whether you're familiar with the original media or not, if you're reading fic, it's because you're invested in some way. when i was reading rwrb, i felt like i was supposed to already be invested.

there were moments when the characters felt almost shallow in the way that fic can be if you take a step back and force yourself to read it at surface-level or from an outsider's perspective. henry and alex were always nemeses and you're supposed to just know that, the same way that no matter what kind of wildly disconnected AU it is, you know that naruto and sasuke hate each other, day 1. a few minor characters ended up as a couple in the same way that a fic with Main Pairing A/B would have Minor Pairing X/Y as a throwaway line or a cheeky minor reveal. some of the political stuff especially felt like i was reading a modern AU of something, with all these little things layered onto a character: what if X was the prince of wales instead, what if i snuck in lines about dismantling imperialism, what if Y was the son of the president and defaced that door plaque to say "bitch mcconnell," so on and so forth.

there was nothing binding me to these characters. they... kind of didn't do anything to make me care about them as individuals. and that's strange to say, because i did enjoy it, and i didn't have this problem with the other books i've read recently. nothing else has had this weird gap for me (...yet).

i want to be clear that it wasn't bad. it wasn't unenjoyable. i did genuinely have a good time reading it, and i shed more than a few tears during the last chunk of the book. (i definitely ugly-laughed out loud at "bitch mcconnell.") it was just really, really weird to be constantly feeling like i'm missing something in precisely the way i know i'd be missing something if i read fic for a fandom i'm not in.

however, on the topic of books about fanfiction: fangirl and carry on.

fangirl is a young adult contemporary novel by rainbow rowell, released in 2013. cath is starting her first year of college, and the book follows her struggles with being away from home and her single father, her twin pushing her away, and all of the general stresses of college. cath is also a well-known fic writer in the online fan community for a series of books and movies called simon snow, which is Fake Harry Potter (boy finds out he's got magic, gets sent to a secret magical academy, ends up roommates with his evil nemesis, cue enemies-to-friends fandom). her writing and her connection to fandom are a major part of the book.

in my experience, professional media(tm) that talks about fandom and fanfiction always fucks it up. always. i cannot think of a single instance of "character writes fanfiction" that isn't played off as some kind of horribly shaming joke, or that's otherwise terrifically not representative of what it actually feels like to be in fandom and to read and write fic.

fangirl, though? fangirl nails it. i have never felt so thoroughly seen and understood and validated by a book before. i don't have words powerful enough to describe what it felt like to read about a character who experiences fandom the way that i do, and that my friends do. cath's experiences online and in real life in re: fanfiction resonated so much with me, and it was truly incredible to read something that i know must have come from the same place i come from. it's extremely realistic when she deals with people looking down on fanfiction, and the book sides with cath every time it happens. i'm pretty sure i finished the book and then just, like, sat there and cried for a bit. it was so powerful.

the chapters in fangirl are introduced with short snippets from the simon snow books, online articles, and fanfiction. this is where the "investment" thing comes back into play. when reading fangirl, you're clearly not expected to be familiar with Fake Harry Potter — or even real harry potter. you're invested because cath is invested. her love for this series shines through constantly.

carry on: the rise and fall of simon snow is a young adult fantasy novel by rainbow rowell, published in 2015. in fangirl, cath's major work – the big thing she's known for online – is a fic called carry on, which is cath's "reimagining" of what the seventh, final novel (as yet unreleased) would/should be like. this novel is cath's fic. (side note: you don't need to read fangirl to understand carry on; it stands on its own perfectly.)

when i started reading carry on, i thought it would be a kind of satirical snap back at the harry potter phenomenon in the vein of a lot of other "X is just fake Y" things. a lot of the little snippets and fragments in fangirl were on the cheekier side; e.g. simon snow meets penelope bunce at watford school of magicks when she corrects him on how to cast a spell. the big bad is called the insidious humdrum. so on, so forth. so going in, i thought it'd be a kind of humorous, fourth-wall-skirting rehash of the "magical school" genre.

it's not.

carry on is such a fucking powerful, good take on The Chosen One as a trope, on prophecies, on relationships, on growing up, and the magical world that rainbow rowell created for carry on feels so thoroughly complete and runs on such an interesting system that i found myself tossing out all harry potter comparisons after, like, 2 pages.

carry on was "supposed" to be fanfiction, and didn't feel that way at all. it is its own fully realized, fully matured story, and it stands so strongly on its own that i honestly have not read anything since that's stuck with me so thoroughly.

(did i mention it's queer? because it's queer. i shed tears over it. it felt so monumental. possibly because this was some of the first Actual Queer Fiction i've ever read and held in my hands.)

anyway, this is where the the contrast with rwrb comes in: rwrb feels like it's missing the tiniest handful of parts, like it's just, just a shade away from being its own thing. i don't know if the author is a fic writer, or has ever been active in fandom, and i don't want to make that assumption; i don't want to compare rwrb to fanfiction in a disparaging way, because... i mean, hell, i love fanfiction. i do this. this community is my home. but that slight disconnect between me and rwrb irked me so strongly because i know i've felt that same disconnect reading an AU that's, for me, too distanced from its source material (which is very ymmv, obviously). and another thing — i don't read much contemporary fiction, nor do i read much romance. maybe this kind of this is really common in romance; i don't know.

at the end of the day, i do recommend red, white & royal blue if you're looking for a really cute queer story that's got a happy ending and that involved supportive families — and i definitely recommend both fangirl and carry on just, like, broadly. please, do yourself a favor and read fangirl. please read carry on. and then talk to me about it because i could talk about these books for hours on end.