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Spoiler Alert by Olivia Dade
Spoiler Alert
4/5. Het fandom romance. Girl gets asked out by star of the TV show she writes fanfiction for after she is attacked on twitter for daring to be fat while cosplaying. Neither of them know – at least to start with – that they've been fandom friends for years.
Super cute and exasperating by turns. The author clearly knows and loves and has lived fandom; you can see this not only in the pitch-perfect AO3 headers inserted throughout, but also in her spot on, kind sendups. "Sad boner week," ahaha. If an outsider tried this, it would be offensive, but this is just so fond. The whole thing is a fannish story in shape and execution. There's an emotionally significant cosplay contest. Oh, and the sex scenes are 150% in fandom style not commercial romance style. You can tell by how they are actually good. And the fannish element lets her upend some of the usual celebrity/normal romance tropes – here, for most of the book the celebrity knows more about the normal than she knows about him, in a few very important ways, which is a fun take on this trope.
I also really appreciated the heroine's relationship with her fatness – she's done a huge amount of hard work, mostly pre-book, on fat acceptance and it has paid off. But doing that work and living in a world that doesn't love her body back has left marks, and she still has to negotiate that. It makes a lot of sense to me, and rings true to my secondhand experiences via fat friends.
On the exasperating: I could complain about the dialogue, which veers into no one sounds like that here and there, but honestly that's part of the fantasy. The witty woke emotional intelligence of these people is part of the fun.
My real problem is . . . why is this a straight romance? I can buy that they're het shippers exclusively (those people still do exist) though I sorta eyebrow that slash and RPF do not appear to exist at all in this fandom. Let alone the obvious incest triad set up in the fictional fannish property. It's more that . . . why is he a dude at all? The book lampshades the uncomfortableness of having a straight cis guy hanging out in these particular fannish spaces, and I just . . . why isn't this F/F? There is a lot of uncomfortable community boundary crossing in this book (more than one of the straight male actors writes fic, for one, and there's this whole thing with the writer of the books the fandom is based on that I won't get into) and a whole lot of it would have gone down better if this was F/F. Not to mention just being, you know, a fun and charming and emotionally satisfying queer romance.
IDK, we've got a pile of these fandom romances now, and I haven't read most of them, but I do notice them and I can't think of a single one that's queer. Which, speaking as someone who met her wife because of fandom, is weird.
4/5. Het fandom romance. Girl gets asked out by star of the TV show she writes fanfiction for after she is attacked on twitter for daring to be fat while cosplaying. Neither of them know – at least to start with – that they've been fandom friends for years.
Super cute and exasperating by turns. The author clearly knows and loves and has lived fandom; you can see this not only in the pitch-perfect AO3 headers inserted throughout, but also in her spot on, kind sendups. "Sad boner week," ahaha. If an outsider tried this, it would be offensive, but this is just so fond. The whole thing is a fannish story in shape and execution. There's an emotionally significant cosplay contest. Oh, and the sex scenes are 150% in fandom style not commercial romance style. You can tell by how they are actually good. And the fannish element lets her upend some of the usual celebrity/normal romance tropes – here, for most of the book the celebrity knows more about the normal than she knows about him, in a few very important ways, which is a fun take on this trope.
I also really appreciated the heroine's relationship with her fatness – she's done a huge amount of hard work, mostly pre-book, on fat acceptance and it has paid off. But doing that work and living in a world that doesn't love her body back has left marks, and she still has to negotiate that. It makes a lot of sense to me, and rings true to my secondhand experiences via fat friends.
On the exasperating: I could complain about the dialogue, which veers into no one sounds like that here and there, but honestly that's part of the fantasy. The witty woke emotional intelligence of these people is part of the fun.
My real problem is . . . why is this a straight romance? I can buy that they're het shippers exclusively (those people still do exist) though I sorta eyebrow that slash and RPF do not appear to exist at all in this fandom. Let alone the obvious incest triad set up in the fictional fannish property. It's more that . . . why is he a dude at all? The book lampshades the uncomfortableness of having a straight cis guy hanging out in these particular fannish spaces, and I just . . . why isn't this F/F? There is a lot of uncomfortable community boundary crossing in this book (more than one of the straight male actors writes fic, for one, and there's this whole thing with the writer of the books the fandom is based on that I won't get into) and a whole lot of it would have gone down better if this was F/F. Not to mention just being, you know, a fun and charming and emotionally satisfying queer romance.
IDK, we've got a pile of these fandom romances now, and I haven't read most of them, but I do notice them and I can't think of a single one that's queer. Which, speaking as someone who met her wife because of fandom, is weird.