Megan Danvers

Hi there, readers! Today I thought I’d go over a confusing point for me regarding one of my favorite book series of all time, Tristan Strong by Kwame Mbalia. The first book in this trilogy, Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky was my first ever 5 star read—the first ever book to make me cry. It still stands as my favorite book of all time despite the number of books with 5 star ratings and moments of crying that followed that reading. When I finished it, I hopped on Tumblr to check out the fandom because surely a book that had been a New York Times Bestseller and had been promoted by uber-popular author Rick Riordan through his Rick Riordan Presents imprint would have as much of a fandom as the Percy Jackson books do. Right?

Wrong! I looked and found so few posts regarding the book even after the second book’s release that it was nowhere near triple digits and might not have even been more than a dozen or so. This baffled me and continues to baffle me to this day because Tristan Strong is a phenomenal series, weaving African American folklore and West African mythology into a story about grief and loss and trauma. So why doesn’t it have as much of a fandom as Percy Jackson?

Initially I was going to give the Tumblr community the benefit of the doubt and assume it was simply that the tagging system was faulty or that maybe Tumblr had simply not gotten around to the books or the fact there had been a lack of popular Booktubers talking meant there was a lack of online presence. But then another book series, outside of the Rick Riordan Presents imprint debuted in 2020 with as much praise by the New York Times Bestseller List and far more praise from popular Booktubers than Tristan Strong ever got… and it still didn’t get the fandom majority it deserved. At least not that I could see on Tumblr, having about as many posts even now as Tristan Strong has had total. Guess which book that was.

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn. And what do both books have in common besides being fantasies based in one myth or another? That’s right. The main character of both series is black. As soon as I saw the lack of fandom for Legendborn the same way I had seen with Tristan Strong, both books I gave 5 stars, I was infuriated. I was even more infuriated when Amari and the Night Brothers by BB Alston—another black fantasy series—was released earlier this year and received the same lackluster fandom praise.

These are outstanding books deserving of millions of fans writing fanfics and drawing fanart and everything else for these series. Yet seemingly the only explanation that can be found as to why they are not is that both series are focused on black characters, thus insinuating that fandom at large is white and prejudiced.

I’m not going to lie. I am white and I have not contributed much to these fandoms. However, I cannot draw and writing fanfic for novels feels inherently weird to me in a way that writing a TV fanfic doesn’t just by format alone. But other content creators in fandom do not have these issues. And trying to make posts discussing how much you love a series when there’s no one there to interact with and discuss the books with gives little encouragement to do anything within these tiny fandoms. So, my question is: how does this get resolved?

I would love to be able to geek out over these books immediately after reading them but when nobody is geeking with you, you start to lose enthusiasm to talk about it online even if you still adore the books and that leads to you dropping out of the fandom—or lack thereof—after awhile of no response to affirm that you are not the only one who loves these books. Do you keep talking and hope that one day someone will stumble upon the micro-fandom you’ve created and interact back and then you interact back just the same way until eventually more and more people have shown up to the party and gushed about the books too? Do you force your friends to read the books, hope they love them just as much, and then force them to become your own little fandom?

It’s so disheartening to see such great books go unrecognized in fandom, and even moreso when those books are by black authors about black main characters. It makes you question whether or not humanity truly is on the upswing as far as inclusivity and the upliftment of people of color and their work. It makes you doubt whether humanity or even the world is good when such inequality of praise exists. So, please, if you are someone who naturally acts as a content creator in book fandoms, whether you write or draw or whatever, next time you read a book by someone of color about someone of color that you adore, please, PLEASE consider doing your part to add to that book’s fandom. These books deserve love and recognition just as much as Percy Jackson. That’s all for now. Peace out, readers!