Review by emergencily - Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It

3.5

a very loving study of online fandom & fangirls and their imprint on popular culture, from the mouth of a fangirl herself. a mix of pop culture journalism and personal anecdote with sprinklings of academic references, this is a book that gives fandom its flowers instead of condescending towards it, but also doesnt glorify and or breeze over its pitfalls (overidentification with consumerism, parasocial relationships, racism in fandom, etc.)
buttt was basically only about 1D fandom, with only brief attention paid to general fandom history (e.g. star trek fangirls pioneering fanfic & fanzines in the 60s, anne rice fanfic lawsuit debacle, censorship of nsfw content on various fan platforms, etc). and all those beats are so critically important to understanding fandom history and the internet today, so this feels incomplete. i kept waiting for when it would move past using one direction as an example, because the book's intro implied it would, and it never did
i prob wouldnt have minded that as much if i had been a 1D fan, and i never was LOL. this is probably more appreciated by someone who’s had a 1D phase