Casey McQuiston is flattered when people compare Red, White & Royal Blue to fanfiction
12.08.2023 - 19:57
/ polygon.com
/ Donald Trump
For better or worse, readers and reviewers alike often describe the bestselling romance Red, White & Royal Blue as reading “like fanfiction.” Four years after its debut, the queer love story and political commentary of Casey McQuiston’s novel have amassed a certifiably huge online fandom. Matthew López, director of Amazon Studios’ newly released movie adaptation, described himself as a “rabid, passionate fan” of the book himself.
There are plenty of reasons for the comparison to fanfiction: Red, White & Royal Blue’s central relationship, between a U.S. president’s son and a British royal, 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-day young adults, tapped into pop culture. It’s also a queer love story, a favorite theme in fanfiction.
But no matter how or why the descriptor is used, McQuiston is flattered.
“I think that ultimately, it’s a compliment,” McQuiston tells Polygon. “Fanfiction is pure pleasure reading. It’s not like almost any other kind of reading. It is here to be fun. It is here to pacify, it is here to transform something that you love into something that you could love in a different way. It’s just pure love.”
Red, White & 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 leads’ highly publicized lives contribute to the book’s tense political landscape, but the book digs into broader politics as well. Alex’s mother, Ellen Claremont, was elected in 2016, when Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were facing off in the real world, and Ellen’s reelection campaign plays a huge role in the novel.
Reading about a reality where a woman won the 2016 election has been demonstrably cathartic 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 draft was more of a tongue-in-cheek satire in the vein of Veep. But after the election, that tone didn’t make sense anymore.
“When the election happened, I literally just 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 come back to that and figure out what I wanted to do with it. It became a form of escapism for me. I was living in Deep South Louisiana, red-state territory at the time, and feeling really isolated, and really surrounded by what was happening in 2016. The book was really conceived for me as a very big wish-fulfillment place.”
That sense of wish fulfillment, the wide-eyed idealism