the 'hierarchy of cool'

on ACOTAR and being allowed to love what we love 𓆩♡𓆪

This edish of culture vulture was written by SYSCA bestie Sacha Judd. If you want to read more of her musings on fandom and the internet, subscribe to her newsletter here. If you want to pitch something for our culture vulture newsy, email me at luce@shityoushouldcareabout.com! xx

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Over the summer I finally succumbed to the endless booktok propaganda and jumped into Sarah J Maas’ ACOTAR series. I’ll confess I didn’t love the first one – it felt like Katniss Everdeen had found herself in The Captive Prince – but the world-building was interesting and I could see why people were into it. It was the perfect bean-bag read over the Christmas vacation, and I quickly whipped through the rest of the books in the series. 

I caught myself calling them the “stupid fairy books” all summer long.

“What are you reading?” “The stupid fairy books.”

“Has anyone seen my stupid fairy book?”

It was a way to denote that I knew the books were trashy and that I was somehow above them. Clearly ridiculous. I watched Love Island: All Stars – I’m obviously not above anything.

And the books aren’t stupid. Sure, we can wish Feyre stopped making vulgar gestures every other page, but the only reason we get far enough to be annoyed by writing tics is because the author created a world we’re invested in. It’s the same reason that, despite Stephenie Meyer dressing Bella in a long khaki skirt and having Edward think she looked indecent in it (?), I’ve managed to write tens of thousands of words of Twilight fanfic. She created a world I cared about – that I wanted to spend more time in.

Naturally, my phone became ambiently aware that I was reading the books, and my Tiktok fyp transformed into clips from people attending ACOTAR balls. A ‘book ball’ is not something I’d ever encountered before and I’ll be honest - at first I thought it was kind of exploitative. In the same way that we’ve talked about taybaiting, there seemed to be something sort of manipulative about a hot actor donning purple contact lenses and reading Rhysand’s dialogue as a way to garner followers. A kind of cosplay for clout. And I couldn’t help thinking it would be sort of cringe, wouldn’t it? Dressing up in a ball gown and donning elf ears to hang out with people acting like your favourite book characters?

But of course it isn’t cringe. It’s absolutely no different than the thousands of people who flock to London’s Secret Cinema - surrounding themselves in the worlds of Grease, James Bond, or Bridgerton. Or puzzle their way out of a Sherlock Holmes escape room. Or attend the more ‘erudite’ immersive theatre productions like Sleep No More or The Burnt City. They’re all events designed to transform us for a day into participants in fictional worlds, with all the fidelity of renaissance fairs or civil war reenactments.

I’ve talked about this imaginary “hierarchy of cool” before – the idea that liking the stupid fairy books ‘should’ be embarrassing but attending a Punchdrunk immersive performance is not. The thing is, we all know that’s rubbish. I love this scene from a movie I’ve never seen, where one character is trying to understand why the other likes reading Twilight:

While we keep adhering to this false hierarchy all we’re doing is creating a world in which people keep the things they care about to themselves. Apologising for enjoying popular entertainment. Feeling embarrassed about how we’re spending our spare time. That’s a lonely, ugly place. If we’re going to take these incredible fictional creations off the page, we should want to share them with the people around us. And have them share the things they’re excited about with us.

So dress up as a fairy. Dress up in your Eras Tour outfit. Race your Formula 1 car sim. Fight like a Jedi with your VR lightsaber. Love what you love. Plunge into the experiences created for you. Say it with your whole chest. And who knows, maybe along the way you find out you aren’t the only one who wants to go to the Starfall Ball.