a love letter to being a fangirl

"we were just girls together"

It starts like this.

It’s a Saturday night in 2010 and like millions of other households across the UK, The X Factor is on my TV. I’m a 10 year old girl who loves to sing and answers ‘a famous popstar’ when adults ask what I want to be when I grow up, so it’s unsurprisingly my favourite show.

I have vague memories of Leona Lewis winning The X Factor in 2006, and slightly clearer ones of Alexandra Burke winning in 2008. If I roll back the tapes in my mind I can see my sister and I waving around paper signs adorned with ‘Alexandra to win!’ in messy childish scrawl, which we ‘laminated’ ourselves with strips of cellotape. Both of their albums were undoubtedly among the most played on my tiny pink mp3 player that I never left the house without.

Fast forward the tapes to 2 years later and I am sat in my living room, cross-legged on the couch watching the 7th series of The X Factor. During the course of the show, I watch the journey of 5 different boys, who are eliminated from the category they auditioned for and are then put together to form a new group. They quickly become my favourite act on the show, the performance I look forward to watching every Saturday night. Although they only finish in third place, that doesn’t matter; social media will soon propel them into stardom and make them one of the biggest boybands in history.

When I set up my first social media accounts, it didn’t take long to realise that this was the place where fans of this band congregated. My friends at school liked them, but they weren’t fans like myself and my childhood best friend were. We both knew that if you liked this boyband, being online was the place to be. Being online is where fangirls could truly thrive.

Joining an online fandom, especially creating fan accounts, is so much more than simply deifying a band or celebrity; it becomes a sacred space where you can bond over your shared interests and create friendships spanning across countries, cultures, and ages. I suppose a lot of us didn’t quite listen to the online safety lectures in school about stranger danger, but this particular corner of the internet felt innocent in a way that not much of the internet is.

Being a fangirl helped so many young girls, including myself, foster a sense of identity, to discover who we are by engaging with something we love. It’s a safe haven, a comfort blanket to wrap around yourself when life feels overwhelming and difficult. Fan accounts can also be a creative outlet: I know so many former fangirls who trace their love of writing back to fanfiction, or their passion for drawing or graphic design back to sharing fanart online.

Following my favourite boyband felt like a constant dopamine rush. The excitement of getting home from school to see what they were up to, scrolling through pictures and videos of them attending events, clips from their concerts, a constant stream of content to consume. It’s hard to put into words how fun it was being a fan of this band while they were actively releasing albums and touring. It truly was the epitome of ‘you just had to be there’.

It was a one of a kind experience that I look back on with a bittersweet taste in my mouth: fondness of the memories, sorrow that it will never be replicated again. Nostalgia is a knife.

Being a fangirl shaped my life so irrevocably. It seeped into almost everything I did, and has had a large impact on the adult I’m still becoming. It’s how I discovered many of my interests, made new life-long friends, identified the industry I wanted to pursue a career in. It was a topic I was so passionate about that I even wrote my dissertation on it. (In case you’re interested, it was titled ‘A Critical Discourse Analysis of Modern Media Representations of Female Boyband Fans in the British press’).

And creating and running a fan account isn’t just some frivolous endeavour - for me personally, it built the foundation of the social media literacy I would go on to develop in my career. My online fan pages allowed me to learn how social media works auto-didactically, leading me to eventually create my Bookstagram and Booktok accounts, organically building up an audience of over 100,000 followers across both platforms. I was able to leverage my social media experience and the subsequent skills I had honed to get jobs in the marketing industry. It allowed me to be here right now, writing this substack post.

Being a fangirl as a teenager caused a domino effect on the rest of my adulthood. It was a huge, integral part of who I was, and who I am now.

In the archives of my mind, I fast forward the tapes again.

It’s a Wednesday night in 2024 and I’m scrolling through TikTok comments when I see people talking about the death of a member of my favourite boyband. I type his name into Google and all the news articles appear in one long endless scroll, all published within the last 10 to 15 minutes. The next morning, his death is being discussed on every TV channel and all over the radio as I drive to the office. It’s the only topic on my social media feeds. One by one, each member of the band posts a tribute. My favourite boyband will never be the same again.

It ends like this.