The Perils Of Being A Fangirl

Here. This post is the raison d’être of my blog. This post is the one in which many of you will share a sense of camaraderie with me. This post will show you that YOU. ARE. NOT. ALONE.

And that it’s okay to be obsessed. You know, as long as it’s not drugs, or sex, or underground cults. 

(Note: Does anyone know the gender neutral term for FANGIRL? And please don’t tell me it’s FAN – as far as I am concerned, that word is an umbrella term, not a synonym. And I beg your pardon while I treat this post from the view point of fangirls specifically – it’s a shame I don’t know more fanboys personally.)

1. Risk of Degradation of 20/20 Vision

Due to –

(a) All that late-night reading under your blanket with a torch, because you don’t want your parents to catch you up past your bedtime and risk unleashing their wrath in the corporeal form of THAT’S IT NO MORE BOOKS

(b) TV show marathons as a reward for academic excellence (which is code for surviving through exams avoiding all your guilty pleasures)

(c) Excessive social networking – especially when the other fangirl you’re with over the miracle called the Internet, is in another time-zone, depriving you of sleep

2. Catching Up On Deprived Sleep During The Daytime Especially During Class HoursAnd Zombie-Walking Through The Rest

Due to the above mentioned.

3. Lack of Non-Fictional Romantic Life

Reading too many books starring heroes of the fantastically perfect variety, or watching too many TV shows with the same category of protagonists can affect the average reader to such a degree of romantic sterilization of the mundane sort by raising par of male excellence. (Or if you swing the other way, then female excellence.)

4. Managing All Your Social Network Accounts

I swear. This is a talent that is gifted to a fangirl, upon her baptism into this community. How else do you explain the superhuman memory and multitasking capabilities involved in remembering all your ten thousand usernames and passwords, who you last chatted or tweeted with, and maintaining an unbroken comment thread to avoid any non-civil interactions?

5. Empty Wallets

For those of you out there, whose financial aspects are still governed by a superior authority of the parental sort, then you have limitations (like me) on how much merchandise you can own. You resort to pinning wishlists and loaded virtual carts on your Pinterest boards and bookmarks bar, and just staring at what could have been on your laptop screen. When that happens, you turn to –

6. Your DIY Skills and Photoshop Expertise

However deplorable they may be, we have that shoddy wad of bookmarks made by hands smelling of Fevicol, t-shirts we spent that last batch of fabric paint on, and folders (both digitally and otherwise) filled with our own edits and sketches.

7. The Need to Celebrate Holidays Unknown to Mere Mortals/Mundanes/Muggles

We have reminders on our mobile phones and of course, in case they fail, we also have the ever-reliable power of the online fangirl-hood to remind us when to eat only blue food or randomly scream DEATH TO DEATHEATERS or whatever.

8. Research and Intellectual Debates

We are never happy knowing what we already know. We thirst to read up on all the different versions of backstories of the various characters, the author’s perspective on how (s)he chose all the proper nouns in the book, and then unwittingly become party to raging wars on whether or not a particular character is a hero or a villain or other civil debates. If you’re talking about a TV show, then it goes without saying that unless and until we’ve dug up bloopers and the actors’ Wikipedia pages, we’re never going to attain closure.

9. Shipping Through Choppy Seas

This is mostly self-explanatory. The FEELS fuelling our primal fangirl instincts to keep calm and continue shipping canon and headcanon ships in the face of tempests exacts a heavy toll on our head in the form of acute headaches that only tear-stained pillows can cure. Speaking of which – 

10. Tears Both Shed And Unshed

I have always maintained that a significant percentage of the average global tear-level has been contributed by the tear ducts of fangirls. To cry, clutching the damned book in your arms or after watching that tragic final episode of a Korean drama series, is an occupational hazard.

11. HANGOVERS, MAN. Hangovers.

It’s not enough that we’ve been cursed to harbouring eternal feels for a series (book or TV), but we’ve also been damned with being left to our own devices to deal with that inexplicable limbo stage of our life that follows after the final episode or chapter. We then face the big question – WHAT DO WE DO NOW?

We feel as if we’re trapped in a tunnel, the vision of closure mocking at us in the far-off distance. Comfort Food, Comfort Reading selected passages, and Comfort Replaying selected scenes becomes the norm for some days.

And I will thank Ron Weasley to define what being a fangirl truly means (courtesy of Tumblr) – 

Bookish Guilty Pleasures and Other Scandalous Secrets

Since the Lenten season has finally caught up with me (REPENT ALL YE SINNERS) I decided I might as well walk that extra mile and ‘fess up all my naughty bookworm sins.

*minor hyperventilation episode*

Alright, here goes:

(Although most probably, by this time tomorrow I will be regretting this post so bad I might bury myself alive and never type another letter into the blogosphere.)

AS I WAS SAYING.

1.  I USED TO BE A TWIHARD – up until the second book happened. That is not to say that I’d read Twilight and then waited a year to get New Moon and filled all my days in between fangirling excessively. It means that while I was reading Twilight, I shipped Bella and Edward so very physically, with my head intermittently spinning very ludicrous fantasies involving me kidnapping Edward for myself in his Aston Martin (WHAT A RIOT I CAN’T EVEN DRIVE A BIKE) and then when the second book happened (all the four books had already been published by then so there was no time spent hanging on a cliff) I hurt my head a lot because I was busy head-desk-ing. By the time I’d finished Breaking Dawn, I’d decided I was anti-Twilight and would spent the rest of my life spewing acid on the topic. As it so happens, that is not the confession – I was merely setting the scene. Remember when a partial draft of Midnight Sun leaked on the Internet and we all read it? Well, guess how many times this so-called anti-Twihard read it. No? OK, is SIX a decent number? Or how about how many times I wished the whole book would be published soon? Did you know that INFINITY could be a number?
2. Following up on #1, I HATED STEPHANIE MEYER. Please note that I was in the ninth grade when I was going through a phase called BOYS ARE SHIT AND ALL THINGS NOT NICE (I dunno why – no guy had ever done anything to me – I used to be a pretty extreme t(w)een). Then I saw the cover of The Host (ON SALE!!!!!!) and read the blurb and bought it and read it and read it and read it and read it … and kept the fact that I might no longer NOT HATE Meyer a secret till I realized I was being a two-faced bitch.
3. I used to pride myself in the knowledge that I DON’T READ CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE. As people ticked off books they had read, I would mentally scoff at them when I classified them as POOR READING CHOICES or NOT LITERARY ENOUGH. (How much do you already hate me?) Then I discovered The Mediator and Jinx and Airhead by Meg Cabot and attained enlightenment.
4.  I JUDGE BOOKS, THEIR AUTHORS AND THEIR FANBASE. (I wasn’t trumpeting that point; I’m stripping myself bare. Go on, judge me. I basically asked for it.)
5. Despite whatever I say and feel about how erotica is basically literary porn – I enjoy a good SPICY SCENE from time to time. (OH GOD.)
   
6. Hey, genuine doubt: Do you, at any point of time, while in the process of shipping your ship in your head after a good book or a Tumblr post or – y’know – randomly, (un)consciously replace the hero(ine) with yourself? (please say yes, please say yes)
7. … Maybe I should stop.