Sweeter Than Fanfiction
or: the unbearable uniqueness of Taylor Swift
Before we formally begin this essay, which is about Taylor Swift, popstars, narratives and interpretations, a quick word on Palestine. Our protest, support, and our cooperation of the BDS movement (the current list, you can find here) helps the Palestinian people immensely. This is not the time for despair and defeatist attitudes. It is the time stay informed, to learn of past instances of Israel’s ongoing genocidal efforts if some of us haven’t done so yet (an evergreen resource is this one), and amplify Palestinian voices wherever and whenever we’re able. From the river to the sea!
Many digital bytes are wasted on the question whether or not fanfiction is literature, whether or not the quality of prose is good enough to stand eye to eye with works like The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye, and whether or not authors that have fanfiction origins (Casey McQuisiton of Red, White, and Royal Blue fame, EL James, etc.) are “good enough”. Perhaps one can say that fanfiction is paraliterature, which, in Samuel R. Delany’s words, exists to define “literature” in the first place1. Not enough is wasted on the question what compels people to write derivative works in the first place. Is it because there is an implicit understanding the reasons to write are myriad, or is it because there is an implicit desire to make writing as obscure as possible, to make it an act that puts writers closer to God?
It’s not a suggestive question I’ve asked. I do believe the answer is somewhere in the middle, though perhaps closer to the former than it is to the latter. Keep in mind, though, that the question isn’t “what makes someone keep writing fanfiction”, in which a lack of self confidence may play a factor (I’m not good enough for original characters, so these stand-ins will do, etc.) What makes them begin — what makes someone want to write about Jimin and Jungkook in love? Is it their cool mutual? Is it because they saw something? Is it because they wondered the eternal writer’s question, “what if”? What if Jimin and Jungkook were in love? A permutation of these?
The first time I wrote fanfiction, it was an attempt at writing a Stella-centric Winx Club episode, because I was sick of Bloom. The first time I finished a piece of fanfiction, it was for Beyblade: Metal Fusion. I did it to answer a question: what happened to this arrogant character after he had a devastating loss? And the first time I wrote K-Pop fanfiction, it was because other people did it (this was what, 2016?) I’ve followed their trail. I’ve followed people that were more famous than I, talking to them, befriending them. You could say I was upward mobilizing in places where it didn’t matter. You learn something very quickly there: saying you’re writing and tossing around ideas via Tweets is worth almost as much as actually writing.
No, that’s not right. I wrote K-Pop fanfiction because I saw something. Other people finetuned my sense of sight: from a group to two people, to what they mean to one another. That they were soulmates2. Soulmates necessitates something romantic, so grandiose that souls, the shapeless thing all humans are made of, are bonded. How can anyone resist? You wish they weren’t bandmates. You wish they weren’t idols, meant to please their fans at points. You wish you applied what you saw, genuine moments of friendship between two people, to a place where it wasn’t an accidental sighting, but the center.
And what made me quit? Well, they weren’t my characters. They were people, whose private lives I would never have access to. And you can’t become a published author if your novel follows Jimin and Jungkook. Names have to be changed. Doing so seemed stupid to me. If they were original characters in the end, I could make them whatever I wanted. They could be women now. They could be Turks. The world was my oyster, but what I saw – the observation that two members are soulmates – I could still apply to two characters. For all writing hinges on three things: seeing something, interpreting it, and asking “what if”, whether that writing is an essay, fanfiction, or “real” literature.
Anyway, did you hear that Taylor Swift was hiding a child?
Taylor Swift was born December 13, 1989 in West Reading, Pennsylvania, and moved to Nashville at age 14. Her first album, self-titled, was released October 24, 2006 via Big Machine records. Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989, reputation, folklore, evermore and Midnights followed. Her first Album of the Year Grammy was for Fearless. Red has her first Billboard Hot 100 #1, the Max Martin-assisted cheerful breakup banger “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”. Since, she has won two more Album of the Year Grammys - 1989 and folklore — and nine more Billboard Hot 100 #1 hits, the latest for a four-year-old song, “Cruel Summer”. Her latest tour, The Eras tour, is estimated to gross 4.1 billion dollars; the corresponding concert film grossed 123 million dollars the opening weekend. The New York Times have compared her 2023 to a Michael Jackson’s and Madonna’s 1980s. Taylor Swift’s ten minute “vault” recording of “All Too Well” holds the record for the longest song to have hit #1 in the Billboard Hot 100, clocking at ten minutes and thirteen seconds.
These numbers are remarkable because they come from a female artist that has been active for almost two decades now. Her peers are either CEOs of clothing lines, or preparing for musicals, or have fallen from relevance. Not Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift makes music and sells it. That is her primary venue. She is so committed to it that her re-recordings – in part to get her masters back – come at a breakneck speed: 1989 (Taylor’s Version) came out just this Friday, following Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) earlier this year. She regularly breaks streaming records and album sales. It’s hilarious to think of Taylor Swift bringing her catalogue to streaming services on the day Katy Perry’s Witness dropped, just to spite her. (It’s even more hilarious to think Taylor Swift and Katy Perry fought over backup dancers at all. Katy Perry.) If one were to compare Taylor Swift with other artists, they would bring up with names like Drake, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Beyoncé. The fact that there was discourse online on Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour versus Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour in the first place clearly reveals her caliber.
But fact of the matter is that Taylor is unique among superstars.
In an era in which Spotify completely levels the ground and robs the 99% of every last penny, in which the monoculture is fractured to the point you cannot ever be known by everyone, an era in which blatant interpolation is asked for because of its familiarity, we know her name. Even if you don’t, you have heard at least one song of hers – be it on the radio or TikTok. But there’s more. You might know, for instance, that Taylor Swift has had a feud with Kanye West. While the 2016 snake era has been conveniently swept under the rug, critics still like to bring out the infamous “I’mma let you finish” moment as a sort of prophecy for Our Times Now (stupid then, stupider now). You might know that she is currently dating football player Travis Kelce. You might know at least one Taylor Swift ex.
You might know the Travis Kelce bit from Twitter or if you’re into Page Six. You might know the exes from Taylor Swift’s primary method of songwriting, which is autofiction. What this means is that you might know that “Dear John” is about John Mayer, “Style” about Harry Styles, “Innocent” about Kanye, and “Enchanted” about the “Fireflies” singer. You can peruse a(n updated!) list here. The songs that are not mentioned here are “Holy Ground” and “Wonderland”, which are about Dianna Agron, and “Right Where You Left Me”, which is about Karlie Kloss. Because the society we live in is a heterosexual one, the homosexual songs are in secret code, not mentioned upon. And “betty”, I mean, she sings from the perspective of James who was caught two-timing his lover Betty. What woman does that? Unless… read all about it on Lavender Haze! We have photo proof! And Karlie’s second child is not from one of these Kushners. “Give you my wild, give you my child” – it’s right there. It’s her baby!
Welcome to Gaylor (gay Taylor) world. Once you’re in, you can’t get out. That woman is a cunt-eating lesbian. Do you detect sarcasm in my voice? I would never. It’s strange that one way of interpreting songs – those about her male exes – is valid and the other one – clearly those about her female exes – is not. So the heterosexuals have the canon and the Gaylor fans live alternative universes? Is theirs fanfic? If it is reality, then a good amount of her male exes are PR stunts. This “1989 is about Dianna Agron” slide reads: “I’m almost certain Haylor [Harry Styles and Taylor Swift] was PR to cover for her relationship.” If you don’t like it, the author says, close the tab.
Let’s see if my earlier proposition holds up: that writing is a way of seeing and interpreting. One sees lyrics and her close female friendships and interprets it as lesbian activity, in the same way one would see her lyrics and her public male relationships and interpret it as her talking about them. In “State of Grace,” Taylor Swift speaks of twin fire signs – sure enough, Jake Gyllenhaal is a fire sign. Does it matter, therefore, if there really was or wasn’t a red scarf that Taylor Swift talks about in “All Too Well”? Jake Gyllenhaal’s posts have been commented en masse with red scarves regardless.3
Taylor Swift is a writer.4 Taylor Swift is a writer that writes to win an argument. Taylor Swift is a writer that tries to make sense of her past by writing about it, a means of expelling demons. Taylor Swift, like all writers, lies. This isn’t meant to be moralizing. While our memory isn’t great with details, writing is generally thought to be better if it is lived-in; that is to say, is being lived in by the reader upon the moment they read it (or the listener, the moment they hear it) as they read the text and hear the music. The fabric of the pillow, soft and ever so fuzzy. The faint smell of sweat as you hug the person you love most. A cloud of smoke as you enter a room, hovering in the middle, pungent and thick with tobacco.
Even if I was to just tell you that phones were hurled across the room and football helmets worn in protection, your brain would likely bring you an image of the phone hurled a specific way, the helmet having a specific color, sitting a certain way. For me, I can see the phone hurled in such a way that it hit to the left of the person opposite me. I can hear the crash, the telltale crack of glass breaking. This may have never happened. But I embellish. I lie, make up people that do not exist and have never existed, scenarios that only play out in your head (by reading it) and mine (by writing it) by mixing in parts of my own truth. I am a writer.
I write novels and short stories. My “job”, therefore, is to write paragraphs that you don’t gloss over. Taylor Swift is a songwriter. Her preferred genre is currently pop. Her job is to write a pop song, with a hook and verses that rhyme. So, in order to show her support for gay people, she could rhyme mad with GLAAD, for instance. (You’re Black, white, beige, Chola descent / You’re Lebanese, you’re Orient!) In such a short time – three minutes as opposed to the thirty one might take with my writing! – one has to come up with a compelling narrative. This takes skill and craft, which Taylor Swift has in spades. But it also means that one can’t go through every detail ever. One can’t fact-check, so to speak. It’s not meant to be that, anyway. Writers are not journalists, or stenographs.
When The Eras tour was in full swing, actor Joe Alwyn and Taylor Swift, who were dating for close to seven years now, broke up. Shortly after that happened, Taylor Swift started seeing Matty Healy, the 1975 frontman and general enfant terrible. In the New Jersey stop, Taylor Swift released a new edition of her newest album Midnights, on which a remix of the song “Karma” was included; a physical edition available only to the people that were in New Jersey would also get a song, called “You’re Losing Me”. The song is a break-up song in which the title is used to invoke heart failure. Immediately fans made the connection it’s about Joe Alwyn, and blamed him because lyrics like “Every mornin’, I glared at you with storms in my eyes / How can you say that you love someone you can’t tell is dyin’” imply that Alwyn let Taylor Swift go, and he’s an asshole that can’t read her cues. “Karma”, meanwhile, now featured a verse by Ice Spice… the woman who Matty Healy was making racist remarks about a few months prior on a podcast. Fans were, to say the least, not amused. Seemingly as a result, Taylor Swift broke up with him.
What came out of this white-hot wave of juicy celebrity gossip / tedious media cycle? 1989 (Taylor’s Version), featuring a terrible re-recording of “Style”, Walmart-tier synths for “Welcome to New York”, and “vault” songs, among which only the Diane Warren co-write “Say Don’t Go” sounds like it could be from the original 1989 and is therefore one of her best vault tracks. “Slut!” is the obvious shoe-in for the single of this album, a melancholy track that twinkles and uses strings in the chorus, reminiscent of folklore highlight “mirrorball” and “seven”. But like most of Midnights, its subdued nature is less vivid and more… fatigued. “Slut!” as a song is surprisingly easy to decode: it is about how others saw her in 2014, allegedly almost a contender to replace the infinitely superior “Blank Space”. For the other tracks, EW has you covered. tl;dr: it’s Harry Styles because that’s who she was seeing at the time.
Harry Styles was born February 1, 1994 in Redditch, United Kingdom. He debuted with One Direction in 2010 and made his solo debut in 2017, self-titled. He has an Album of the Year Grammy, for 2022’s Harry’s Home. He has starred in a number of movies, and has praised Don’t Worry Darling because it’s a movie that feels like a movie. Harry Styles hoists the LGBTQ flag up a lot at concerts, has mourned the “Baroness” Margaret Thatcher in a Tweet, and dresses funny. You could call it gender-bending, but for the most part it is unflattering and unclear what gender he is meant to bend. Most interviews he brings up questions of sexuality that nobody is curious about.5 This started in 2017 and culminated in a Rolling Stones interview last August in which he said that he has “never been publicly with anyone”, so how could he have ever come out as any one thing. After all, the pictures that others have taken of him were him in private.
Harry Styles is interesting insofar as he has been the first public “victim” of our current generation of real-person shipping; in his case, with 1D member Louis Tomlinson. Even though Tomlinson has spoken about how the shipping has destroyed their real-life friendship, Styles and Tomlinson have a child they hide from the world, according to their shippers. All female relationships are PR coverup. His lyrics could be about ex-girlfriend Olivia Wilde or they could be all about Tomlinson. Does this sound familiar to you?
Maybe the shippers are right. Maybe all of pop stardom is a world of conspiracy, of secret code. Maybe nobody says or does what they mean, and the fans are the ones that see through it. They see it a certain way, they interpret it through that lens, and they ask themselves, what if? That fantasy can become delusions one believes wholeheartedly is of no importance to me. It is a result of the platforms that are in use. We live in a world of disinformation that travels fast, is rewarded with more visibility, and with the birth of AI, it may only get worse. I’m curious about why people ship in the first place. What makes someone say that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are in love? What makes someone say Taylor Swift is a lesbian?
Let’s take a step back for a moment, return to the world of narrative that isn’t so deeply entwined with real life. Again, what made me begin fanfiction was because I couldn’t stand the protagonist of Winx Club, Bloom; and I finished my first piece of fanfiction because I wanted to write how the story ends for that Beyblade character. I did this because I knew the highly episodic narrative wouldn’t provide it for me. They have their protagonists, and thus their fixed viewpoint. It leaves certain side characters behind, or reduces them to a role in perpetuity. Put another way, for a story to be fertile ground of fanfiction, it can’t be airtight in its narrative. Specifically, it must have the broad strokes of a certain dynamic (two guys, a man and a woman, two women) that can be easily filled out. Episodic shows are an ideal vehicle; it is hardly a surprise the first fanfiction came of Star Trek.
Celebrity delineates public character and private person. Like a story that people write fanfic of, it is not an airtight narrative — cannot ever be — and the dynamics a celebrity might have with other people around them make for a compelling “what if” scenario. Jimin and Jungkook’s “rainy day fight” coupled with various fan-taken pictures of Jimin hugging Jungkook from the back is enough to craft a narrative on how these two might have found their way to love. Objectively, these are fragments of a complicated life, a complex dynamic — like all human lives, like all long-term dynamics one has with another person. But in writing, one can flatten. One can embellish. That’s the job.
We’ve seen, time and time again, the boyband shipping phenomenon. (Before Harry Styles even debuted, K-Pop boyband TVXQ had a cult following for people that shipped U-Know Yunho and Hero Jaejoong, aka “Yunjae”) Harry Styles, to this day, banks on these shippers’ time and money. But what is happening to Taylor Swift – a woman scrutinized for a long stretch of her career for a variety of reasons – that is wholly new. Here is a woman who is writing songs that circle largely about her (love) life, yes, but is not defined by it, who actually bristles at being seen that way. For years, she was criticized for it.
But in 2023, after folklore got her to write about fictional characters in a genre that was not capital-P pop, after a pandemic that only raised her profile, nobody would. She has won. She reigns supreme. Nobody would want to let Kanye West finish now, let alone hear him speak. Katy Perry is not a name. Scooter Braun has lost a good number of his talent earlier this year. Nobody would call Taylor Swift manipulative, scheming, or a slut now; they would not dare. Instead, what was likely a comment on media outlets at the time is now seen as a comment to her shipping fans. I leave it to them to deal with their feelings. She’s an ally to LGBT people, though. Why be mad when you could be GLAAD?
The woman that has broken up with a man her fans don’t like wouldn’t put them on blast months later. Oh no. Taylor Swift is going to continue writing songs in broad strokes with just enough detail that it could be about a private female or a public male lover. People will speculate. They will insert any number of people into any number of lyrics, be it Jimin and Jungkook or people in Taylor Swift’s own sphere6. It’s exactly like she says in the introduction for “All Too Well” in the Reputation tour: what was originally personal to her has now become a song for her fans. Because to care about what comes next – to make art of it, to write about it, to talk with others about it – you need to be engaged. The music? It’s good if it’s great, but to her fans, it only needs to be passable. After all, this isn’t about the music. It’s about fanfiction.
thank you to Addy, Jenni and Rin for reading through!
sampled from “Inside and Outside the Canon” as it appeared on About Writing
Strictly for the record, I didn’t think Jimin and Jungkook were soulmates.
While researching the source I came across German outlet Spiegel asking in the headline, “Taylor Swift and All Too Well: Where is her scarf” and, below, “— and why won’t Jake Gyllenhaal return it to her?” which made me laugh and I hope it makes you laugh, too.
First the fanfiction bit and now this — yes, I talked about this before, forgive the second repetition of this post.
I will never be able to untangle “This Love” (1989) with Rin and Haru of Free Iwatobi Swim Club because somebody thought it was their song.