For better or for worse, both readers and reviewers often describe the best-selling romance Red, white and royal blue if reading “like fanfiction.” Four years after its debut, the strange love story and political commentary of Casey McQuiston’s novel have a definitely a huge online fandom. Matthew López, director of Amazon Studios’ recently released film adaptation, described himself as a “rabid, passionate fanof the book itself.
There are plenty of reasons for the fanfiction comparison: Red, white and royal blue‘s central relationship, between the son of a US president and a British royal family, feels like a crossover story between outsized fan-favorite character types. It’s full of tropes like enemies-to-lovers and fake relationships. It also has its fair share of light smut. The characters are modern young adults who have become established in pop culture. It’s also a strange love story, a favorite theme in fanfiction.
But no matter how or why the descriptor is used, McQuiston is flattered.
“I think in the end it’s a compliment,” McQuiston tells Polygon. “Fanfiction is pure reading pleasure. It’s not like almost any other kind of reading. It’s here to be fun. It’s here to calm down, it’s here to transform something you love into something you could love in a different way. It’s just pure love.”
Photo: Jonathan Prime/Prime Video
Red, white and royal blue follows Alex Claremont-Diaz, the son of a fictional first female president of the United States, and his romance with Prince Henry, fourth in line to the British throne. The highly publicized lives of the protagonists add to the book’s tense political landscape, but the book also delves into broader politics. Alex’s mother, Ellen Claremont, was elected in 2016, when Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton faced off in the real world, and Ellen’s re-election campaign plays a major role in the novel.
Read about a reality where a woman won the 2016 election demonstrably cleansing for much of the book’s core audience. McQuiston started writing the novel before the results of the 2016 election came in, and their original version was more of a tongue-in-cheek satire along the lines of Veep. But after the elections, that tone was no longer correct.
“When the election came around, I literally put it aside for six months,” says McQuiston. “I was like, I don’t know how to write this anymore. It took me six months to get back to that and figure out what I wanted to do with it. It became a form of escapism for me. I lived in Deep South Louisiana in the red state at the time and felt really isolated and surrounded by what happened in 2016.
That sense of wish-fulfillment, the wide-eyed idealism about a different and more satisfying world, is another element that probably caused the comparison to fanfiction. McQuiston also thinks the specific fandom tropes fit in Red, white and royal blue could be a factor. After all, when searching for fictions, you often have to type your favorite ship and favorite tropes into a search engine. (“We do media studies here and play with fiction constructs that make stories what they are,” laughs McQuiston.)
One of the book’s most iconic elements is the inclusion of historical notes from actual queer people, which Alex and Henry begin to send each other via email. Lift quotes to bookend fics and caption art or edits is another big part of fandom and a favorite element for fanfiction. But there was a specific reason why McQuiston included these messages in their novel, and it had only a little to do with the fact that he was a history nerd who wanted the chance to look back Rictor Norton’s anthology of centuries of gay love letters.
Photo: Jonathan Prime/Prime Video
“I knew it was such a fantastic story,” says McQuiston. “There’s so much to it that it just inhabits hyperreality. It’s big and tropey, and it’s a rom-com, and it’s 80-foot screens. I wanted something to happen in the book that was grounding and contextualizing. This fantastic idea of two great men having this clandestine love for each other is something that is actually very much historical precedent whether anyone ever learns in a classroom or doesn’t put in a book.
McQuiston was inspired by a phrase that has received a lot of attention in recent times, as historians consider it gay erasure in the historical canon. “We love the phrase”They were good friends‘ says McQuiston. “I was just thinking so much about how these two characters would fit into history and why, and contextualized it within the history of the world that they, for lack of a better word, preside over.”
The movie version of Red, white and royal blue is out now on Amazon Video.