A review by mlcharacter
Fangasm: Supernatural Fangirls by Lynn S. Zubernis, Katherine Larsen

2.0

Okay, so the kindest thing I can say is that these authors wrote two books on fandom and I think I picked up the wrong one. I found it for $1 on the last day of the Organization of American Historians a few years ago, shortly after I needed a bibliography of academic thinking on fandom so I pulled this off the shelf and... this is not an academic book and has little to no thinking about fandom. They tricked me with the whole UP thing, but this is... a kinda cringey memoir of two older-than-teenage academics and how they clock their own senses of shame and pride, community and cattiness as dual identity slash fic authors and academics. But it isn't a searching self-evaluation, it's more like pages and pages of journalling about the cons they went to, places they caused tension with their fan friends, and blow by blows of interviews with creators and stars of the Supernatural series where they are brave enough to say over and over again that they think Jared Padalecky and Jenson Ackles are extremely physically attractive. (Honestly, I don't get that either, but I've only seen one episode of the series, so maybe they grow on you.) Apparently their other book is the theory book (they are an English prof and a psychology prof).

It kinda reminds me of how Bust magazine book reviews would often call out dry, difficult and/or academic text as a bad thing, and I would usually be like, oh so this book is shallow and useless. So, maybe someone else out there is looking for exactly this. It was not what I needed.