Georgina Brainerd
it started with the wrong number, it ended with heavy hearts
ft. phan and several ocs
(completed)
#amazingphil #boyxboy #danisnotonfire #kik #phanfic #phanfiction #phan #dil #youtube
Published on Wattpad within the months of January and March 2016, with 100 parts, 26K reads, and 2.6K votes, is the phanfiction, [attachment]. Its writer, me, under a username I stole from a bandcamp project I found on YouTube, was 14 years old and trapped at an all-girls boarding school, living primarily through my iPad and iPod and entering into sexually charged yet infantile intense lesbian friendships with people immediately around me and online. I have scant memory of this time in my life, which I attribute to some unprocessed grief that had me living a little on autopilot for most of my tweens and teens and to spending just so much time consuming media on the danisnotonfire and AmazingPhil corners of instagram, tumblr, kik, and a little on twitter.
[attachment] is told almost entirely through messages, probably on the messaging app that I was frequenting at the time, kik. Unlike some fanfic, this story doesn’t particularly revolve around fantasy or direct self-insertion in the form of a Y/N character; a lot of the chapters are short and mundane conversations between friends. Dan and Phil meet when Dan accidentally texts the wrong number thinking it is a girl he’d been flirting with. They seem to be in secondary school (mentions of homework abound), based in Manchester and London, respectively, but Phil also mentions being in his 20s and living alone in a flat. Phil is a famous YouTuber and is recovering from an abusive relationship with the owner of “an aesthetic kpop fan acc with over 10k followers.” Dan is a “fuckboy” who cares about school popularity, both comfortable and uncomfortable with his bisexual (or repressed gay?) identity. There are various OCs (Own Characters): Nick is Dan’s pansexual best friend; Loren is Phil’s inattentive friend who spends all her time with her asshole boyfriend, Kian; Nick has a crush on Pete (Wentz) whose boyfriend, Stephen, peer pressures them to do drugs; Dan, for a time, dates the most popular girl at school, Chloe, and cheats on her with Gabriella, who causes the final drama of the text; and, naturally, an agender character named Alex is mentioned for one chapter. Words—if you can call them words—that I seem to be obsessed with using are “gr8” and “m8,” “noice,” “fren,” “smol,” “lolzor,” “fuckboy,” and “meme” as a way to describe a person (as in: “he’s such a cute meme”).
As someone with unmediated internet access who had just watched Skins or perhaps was in the middle of watching Skins, I was preoccupied in [attachment] with themes of self-harm and suicide, violence and abuse, (gay) sex and sexting, (in)fidelity, gender identity, drugs, alcohol, peer pressure, popularity and bullying, homophobia, and suppressed homosexuality. These are ideas I was being exposed to but didn’t really have anyone to talk to about and didn’t really see happening around in my 14-year-old real life. I used the space that Wattpad offered allowed me to digest these issues, modelling realities through reframing the very people who were the protagonists in an internet addiction that was exposing me to them. Francesca Coppa discusses fanfiction in terms of speculative fiction, as it asks questions such as “What if Bruce Wayne had gone to boarding school with fellow genius-billionaire Tony Stark? Who might Harry Potter grow up to be, considering we leave him as an eighteen-year-old orphaned war veteran?” In [attachment], I am asking two levels of “What if?” What if Dan and Phil were school students in love (at this point the topic of their relationship was still entirely speculative)? But also: what if I went to a party and kissed someone or someone told me to do drugs?
This use of the fanfic genre for world-creation and self-creation would parallel Joanne Cooper’s assertion about diary writing as a feminine form: “many women have used diary writing to explore new possibilities, new ways of living…it fosters a transcendence that lifts the diarist beyond her personal crisis to a more constructive way of living.” Marlene Schiwy concurs—in diary writing, “we [as women/girls] create ourselves.”
My written understandings tend to be half-baked—I did not follow the mantra “write what you know.” My understanding of gay sex includes Phil saying he wants to fuck/dom Dan but also calling him “daddy.” My understanding of marijuana use is that it gives you a headache the next day. My understanding of train tickets from Manchester to London is that they are cheap and can be bought on a whim by a secondary school student. My understanding of bullying and abuse is just calling someone ugly and the f-slur. My understanding of “staying up all night” talking to someone means you still go to bed at 1 or 2 am. Also, pubs are open at 2 am. These inaccuracies show so clearly how I was imagining and creating adult or late-stage-teen girl life for myself, all through a narrative mode and way of living that was so familiar to me: messages online rather than real-life experience.
Like a pubescent, horrific form of girljazz, my writing style and structure were entirely improvised. I did not know where I was taking the story, the messages in my narrative were often written with the same immediacy and absentmindedness as real texts. My author’s notes (A/Ns) make this clear; at one point I ask my audience for help, “I'm planning drama for the future bc woo drama,, so which one of the 'minor' characters do you want to see more of?? (You can vote on more than one) … It's just bc I don't want this to turn into like a boring book that steals ideas from text posts (wow l've already done that) Thanks for the help bc I just kind of have writers block ???” After chapter 81, 81% through the narrative, I assert “I've actually kind of got an idea of what I want to do with this story now so yay me.” This immediacy of being written in real-time is, for Cooper, what sets the historically feminine genres (diaristic, epistolary, and, to a lesser extent, memoir) apart. The daily diary, which can be extended in this context to the ‘daily Wattpad update,’ written in media res, is “instructive because it is more like raw data than synthesized memory.” The absent-minded immediacy makes this story particularly revealing about the unfiltered psychology of the girl who wrote it.
There are two parallel stories happening in [attachment]: the main text—where Dan and Phil have it out with each other over text and I have it out in real-time with adolescence over Wattpad—and the second story being told by the A/Ns at the end of each chapter, signposted by a shift into bold text. Some are practical, about my rate of posting new chapters, “Also triple update bc WHY TF NOT I KEEP FORGETTING TO UPDATE,” and some react to the story, “Ayy new character” or “I’M SORRY” after the chapter where Phil tries to kill himself by jumping in front of a car. But more conspicuous for me are the A/Ns where I use the space to give details about my life outside of the story, where I am overtly diary writing. These conform to Valerie Raoul’s definition of diary writing, where “there are no rules … any event or non-event may be considered worthy of comment.” In chapter 40, I reveal that my iPod had been confiscated for 3 days, a mundane reminder of my status as a girl with no agency, at the whim of boarding house matrons. In 83, I come out to my audience as pansexual (sic). In 86, I detail my unrequited crush on another YouTuber, another relationship entirely mediated by the internet and my imagination: “The worst part about my life is that I’ve fallen in love with someone four years older than me on YouTube who will never know I exist BUT HE IS PERFECT AND I WISH I COULD JUST CUDDLE HIM FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.” In a series of A/Ns, I go into detail about my excitement over a new mobile game I downloaded, including screenshots. Perhaps the most revealing A/N is this long one, followed in subsequent chapters by smaller references to this ‘internet best friend.’
Lil rant bc I’m fucking mad~
SOME PEOPLE ARE SO FUCKING STUPID AND RUDE
MY INTERNET BEST FRIEND IS BEING A COMPLETE BITCH UGH
SHE LITERALLY TOLD ME SHE HAD NO FRIENDS I WAS LIKE *cough cough* AND SHE WAS LIKE GTG
ALSO SHE NEVER REPLIES TO ME UNLESS SHE WANTS TO TELL ME ABOUT HER NEW BF OR HOW SHE THINKS SHE IS NOW HETERO AFTER HAVING A GF FOR LIKE 6?? MONTHS?? (and dating me for OMG ONE WHOLE DAY and then breaking up w me bc she’s selfish and broke my heart ok yeah let’s not go into the details here)
LIKE WUT
ALSO SHE NEVER ASKS ME ABOUT MYSELF LIKE I’VE BEEN HAVING GENDER IDENTITY ISSUES AND I WAS POSTING ABOUT IT ON OUR SHARED ACC BUT NOO SHE DOESNT CARE
LIKE WTF
ok rant over sorry I just had to get that off my chest
By presenting the story to my audience of a handful of frequent commenters, I was essentially asking them: is this normal? Should my friend be treating me like this? Are these kinds of friendships recognisable, allowed? Is there anyone in the world I can talk to about this? Anyone who will give this/me any amount of attention? It is significant, also, that my original outlet for my ‘gender identity issues’ (truly the same kind of sidestepping formulation I would use now) was our shared phandom Instagram account. In a way, I was using the A/N in the way Jane DuPree Begos argues women have used diaries, “asserting the self in the face of chaos in the outside world, and a way of bringing some control into a situation where madness reigns.”
The truth is that I remember next to nothing about this time, and reading these A/Ns is a bizarre reminder that I was sentient and feeling things and processing things. I have no memory of the juicy heartbreak I reveal in the confessional parentheses, but I do have a memory of changing her ringtone in my phone to a more intense one so I would always pick up her calls because she was prone to the not-uncommon internet friend tendency to threaten suicide and then disappear for days. I also remember buying a binder from eBay to figure out the ‘gender identity issues’, maybe the only part of this A/N that is still present in my life.
[attachment] is a portal, a time capsule that freezes a very particular and peculiar period of girlhood in sans serif Wattpad updates, emojis, and textspeak. And it does so twofold, with the overt narrative and the appended narrative driven by the ‘I’ pronoun in authorial intrusions. Both, with differing levels of directness, share immediacy, self-creation, and grappling with control over my circumstances, attributes aligned with the historically feminine genre of the journal intime, or diary. Francesca Coppa makes a point of discussing fanfiction as a “female-dominated art form.” A fanfic, thus, can be a 2016 girl-diary, following these precedents—a record of the author’s girlhood, a letter to the audience and to herself. The fanfic is, perhaps, the daughter of the adolescent girl diaries of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Footnotes
Francesca Coppa, “Five Things that Fanfiction is, and One Thing it isn’t,” The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age, 2017, p. 13.
Joanne E. Cooper, “Shaping meaning: Women's diaries, journals, and letters—The old and the new,” Special Issue Personal Chronicles: Women's Autobiographical Writings, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 10, Iss. 1, 1987, p. 97.
Marlene A. Schiwy, “Taking Things Personally: Women, Journal Writing, and Self-Creation,” NWSA Journal, Summer, 1994, Vol. 6, No. 2, p. 234.
Joanne E. Cooper, “Shaping meaning: Women's diaries, journals, and letters—The old and the new,” p. 95. See also: Valerie Raoul, “Women and Diaries: Gender and Genre,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Summer 1989, Vol. 22, No. 3, p. 61.
Valerie Raoul, “Women and Diaries: Gender and Genre,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Summer 1989, Vol. 22, No. 3, p. 61.
Jane DuPree Begos, “The Diaries of Adolescent Girls,” Special Issue Personal Chronicles: Women's Autobiographical Writings, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 10, Iss. 1, 1987, p. 70.
Francesca Coppa, “Five Things that Fanfiction is, and One Thing it isn’t,” The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age, 2017, p. 11. See also: cupidsbow, Women/Writing 1: How Fanfiction Makes Us Poor, https://cupidsbow.livejournal.com/239587.html.