Kaitlyn Tiffany

While this was an interesting book and cultural study, I was hoping for something more factual than this. It's a good perspective on the one direction culture, certainly, and it can tell you a lot about how fandom is run, but frankly, I reached a point where it was just a lot. There are entire chapters that revolve around something that happened in the one direction fandom, and this book is only 10 chapters long, might I add. If you are very interested in the fan perspective and aren't familiar with it, I think this would be a great read. As someone who is neither a one direction fan nor a total fandom outsider, I found myself getting bored as the chapters went on.

If you are looking for a book that talks about how fan communities helped create the internet with concrete examples and times, the first two chapters of this book give you about what you need. After that, it really becomes a 1D deep dive. It's not a bad book, but for me it wasn't a great book, either.… (meer)

So this was an absolutely fascinating cultural study for me as I don’t really know anything about the One Direction fandom or the band itself besides knowing it’s a huge category of RPF on AO3 that I’ve scrolled past (and for a few years there I got them confused with the band OneRepublic…).

I think the author definitely was trying to incorporate more fan history throughout, but it’s so spotty that it’s practically nonexistent; this really is all about One Direction and their fans. That seems to be a disservice to the vast quantity of other fandoms out there, but perhaps it’s only supposed to be focused on musical stars/bands (as there are brief mentions of the Beatles, other boy bands, Taylor Swift, and a few more).

I don’t know, but I guess it does help me understand that some things aren’t for me; I mean I loved the other recent fandom books I read about Buffy and Benedict Cumberbatch, but this one left me more meh. I think I’d love to understand the shelf life more considering this fandom is barely over a decade old (and only one of the guys has even cracked thirty); it would be amazing if it was revisited in another fifteen years to see where these fangirls stand.… (meer)