Dead and Gone: The Secret History of a Buried Social Network Fanfiction
When I recently posted a video essay on Casey McQuiston’s 2019 bestselling romance Red White and Royal Blue, the last thing I expected was a deluge of comments detailing a bizarre rumor: that the novel was allegedly based on McQuiston’s Social Network RPF from years earlier.
The more mentally sound, less terminally-online reader may have a few questions. RPF? Real Person Fiction. The fandom term for fanfiction based not on fictional characters but real people; typically celebrities, atheletes, influencers, or other such public figures. Social Network RPF? As in, RPF one shares on a social network? Good guess, but no. Social Network RPF as in RPF based on David Fincher’s critically acclaimed Facebook biopic The Social Network (2010).
Beyond the immediate pie-in-face jarringness of the subject, it also raises another important question: What does ‘RPF’ mean in relation to a biographical film like The Social Network? Isn’t any fanfiction concerning The Social Network technically Real Person Fiction? Yes and no. On the one hand, it’s true that the film depicts real life public figures like Facebook founders Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin. On the other, these are themselves fictionalizations. Most hardcore fans of the film maintain a certain separation between, say, Zuckerberg and Saverin, the real life corporeal beings, and Zuckerberg and Saverin, the ‘characters’ as portrayed by Fincher, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, and actors Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield, respectively.
All of this to say that the aforementioned rumors did not accuse author Casey McQuiston of writing fanfiction of Zuckerberg and Saverin. They accused McQuiston of writing fanfiction of Eisenberg and Garfield, the real life actors.
I hope that it goes without saying that I found these rumors instantly and utterly beguiling. I rarely can resist a good rabbithole, let alone one so multifaceted. This mystery involved the book community, the film industry, fan communities, and the early internet. I knew immediately that I would have no choice but to make a video.
By the time you’ll read this, the video in question will be out. This article serves as a companion piece of sorts, a dressed-up bibliography. Somewhere you can verify my sources and gain a little more insight into this journey. Because believe me, you don’t yet know the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of Social Network real person fanfiction.
The Evidence
Various posts, webpage excerpts, etc. that form the basis of these rumors.
A Reddit post from two years ago in r/Fauxmoi: “Any book-world/author tea?”
Comment from user u/Hftct22: “Casey Mcquiston (author of Red, White & Royal Blue) used to be a BNF [Big Name Fan] in various fandoms and had a popular Tumblr account. [They] wrote a ton of slash fic, so it’s pretty unsurprising [their] breakout novel is basically a glorified m/m fanfic.”
Reply from user u/iocheaira: “Isn’t Red, White and Royal Blue a reworking of their AU fanfic about Jesse Eisenberg & Andrew Garfield?”
Reply from user u/AntiquePearPainting: “Pretty sure carry it in my heart was the fic that it was based on. I vaguely remember someone on tumblr picking through CIIMY [sic] and RWARB and comparing similar lines since even though the fic was pulled to publish, downloads are still available online.” (Notable for being an early mention of the specific fanfiction in question, Carry It in My Heart by LiveJournal user robin-pulaski.)
The Fanlore page for RWRB includes a section titled “2. Original Work or Fanfiction?” with the subcategory 2.1 “Speculation”. Starts with some examples of users comparing it to fanfic. The ‘speculation’ section includes at least one reader noting similarities between RWRB and certain Merlin modern AU fic (The Student Prince, specifically).
A Tumblr post from user @satoshihiwatari comparing two somewhat similar passages from Red White and Royal Blue and The Student Prince.
A series of tweets from user @ardentlys affirming the rumors. Specifically mentions a '“royal au” Social Network fic that was “on ao3” at some point.
From the Fanlore page: “Still, most fans eventually agreed that if the book had been a fanfiction, no one had seen it published online, and it had been changed enough that the fandom was not recognizable.
Seemingly one of the first instances of a reader publicly commenting on similarities between Carry It in My Heart by robin-pulaski and RWRB:
A Tumblr post from user @queentrogdor (July 6th, 2020).
Kayleigh Donaldson, writing for Paste Magazine in August 2023, mentions the rumor but states outright that it’s false, however, they don’t cite a source for this claim:
“It was long rumored that the book was initially fanfic for The Social Network before McQuiston pulled a 50 Shades of Grey and filed off the serial numbers. That’s not true, but the book still feels very rooted in the styles and themes of fic that readers so thoroughly love.”
Strangely, Rolling Stone’s review of the film adaptation of RWRB includes this line:
“In a royal enemies-to-lovers plotline dragged straight out of The Social Network fan fiction, Alex and Henry must navigate an election year, coming out, and a clandestine relationship as two of the most highly scrutinized celebs in the world – all while having lots and lots of sex.”
Strange that the critic just drops this in here without any context or clarification of whether they mean like a SN fanfic or literally “dragged straight out” of a SN fanfic.
Peripheral:
Tiktok user @tcnysnark discusses similarities between Carry It in My Heart and RWRB.
Tumblr user @tibby details more about McQuiston’s Social Network fandom activity and answers an ask from someone claiming they’d heard McQuiston was in the One Direction Larry (Louis Tomlinson/Harry Styles) fandom. [Note: Some of the Tumblr blogs robin-pulaski links in the Carry It in My Heart masterpost are indeed quite dedicated 1D blogs. Not that that necessarily confirms anything.]
Tumblr user @axelaqua rebuts claims that RWRB was “originally the social network rpf”, instead avering that McQuiston wrote RWRB and Carry It in My Heart, two separate works.
Someone on Tumblr links this TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@saxamophone/video/7096568054347337002 but the account has gone private.
I was now fairly confident of three things. One: A Social Network RPF titled Carry It in My Heart was posted in March 2011 by LiveJournal user robin-pulaski. Two: Based on other internet users’ recollections, now-professional author Casey McQuiston was most likely behind the robin-pulaski account. Three: There may have been occasional similarities between Carry It in My Heart and Red White and Royal Blue, but RWRB was most likely not simply Carry It in My Heart with the serial numbers filed off.
However, one thing was still eating at me. What about those occasional claims from various internet users that there was at some point also a Social Network royalty-themed alternate universe fic written by McQuiston? Does such a fanfiction exist?
Findings
On Archive of Our Own:
One ‘politics AU’ Social Network fanfic by user Aramley, in which Andrew Garfield has been elected president of the United States, while Jesse Eisenberg is “his neurotic, but brilliant assistant/speech writer.” Obviously the subject matter is notable, but the prose itself is also a little McQuiston-esque. Mind you, I don’t actually believe they wrote this one. The style is pretty standard for decently-written fanfiction. But it is a funny coincidence!
One AU fanfic where Jesse Eisenberg is the SON OF THE PRESIDENT and Andrew Garfield is his secret service agent. Chapter 7 of ‘TSN Kink Meme Prompt Ficlets - RPF’ by user twilight_shades. Definitely not McQuiston, doesn’t sound much like their prose and dates from 2017, when they already would have been working on RWRB in its current form, but again, very funny in light of the present situation.
Besides that, not much. LiveJournal did not turn up much by way of archived webpages. At this point, it was beginning to seem clear that this ‘royal AU’ Social Network fanfiction most likely did not exist. Given the enduring popularity of Carry It in My Heart despite said fanfiction only having existed on the web for about a year (fans say robin-pulaski quietly deleted in 2012), I’m skeptical that this supposed royalty AU by the same author in the same fandom could have disappeared off of the internet without a trace. Surely if it had existed we would still be finding Tumblr posts gushing about it, saved PDF downloads, etc., as is the case with Carry It in My Heart.
What’s more, though CIIMH has thankfully lived on in various readers’ downloads of the entire work, any attempts to recover the long-deleted robin-pulaski account on either LiveJournal or Tumblr proved unsuccessful. Or so I thought.
A New Lead
August 27th, 2023. At this point, I had finished reading Carry It in My Heart. You actually read it? The whole thing? Please. I value academic honesty. In attempting to solve the mystery of whether Red White and Royal Blue was in any way adapted from Carry It in My Heart, I knew early on that I would have to read the fanfiction in its entirety in order to compare the two texts. To take other scholars at their word without conducting my own research would be a betrayal of my personal code of ethics. If that meant having to read a few pages of Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield getting it on (and a great many more pages of Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield developing tender feelings for each other at a snail’s pace), so be it. I’m a big girl.
As I reached the end of the fanfic review section of my video script, I decided to double check one element of a point I was trying to make. There’s no easy way to say this, but Carry It in My Heart has a rather strange attitude toward the fact that both of its protagonists are Jewish. It’s mild, and perhaps a matter of taste, but at times borders on fetishistic. In pointing this out, I wanted to give a little fandom context: You see, back in the day, the ship name for this particular Eisen-Field pairing was ‘Jewnicorn’. Admittedly, I don’t know the full context of how this came to be, but that’s what it was. Now that we’ve gotten that out in the open, we can all try to move on and forget.
Anyhow, I wanted to make sure this was the case. I ended up finding an Urban Dictionary entry for the term, dated November 16th, 2010. This entry defines “jewnicorn” as follows: “a word used by the incredibly quality faction of The Social Network fandom on tumblr to describe Andrew Garfield and Jesse Eisenberg, as both of them are Jews who were clearly raised by unicorns in a magical forest somewhere”. Below the definition, a neon rectangle beckons: “Get the jewnicorn mug.” Thank you Urban Dictionary, but I don’t think I will.
The notable part of this entry was the author of the definition: user robin-sparkles. At first glance, this was just a coincidence. ‘Robin Sparkles’ is a reference to a gag on How I Met Your Mother. Surely robin-pulaski is referencing something entirely different. But a small, desperate part of me had another thought: Maybe we ought to check. Just in case.
A quick search for “robin-sparkles carry it in my heart” indeed yielded a few relevant Tumblr posts:
From user @aconstipatedmeerkat, May 22nd, 2011: “Robin deleted the Yo-Eisenberg blog?! But… Where do I go to mourn Carry it in my Heart now?!” (tagged #robin-sparkles)
Another from @aconstipatedmeerkat, July 8th, 2011: “Wait, has Robin deleted?” (tagged #robin-sparkles, #carry it in my heart)
From user @areyougonnabe, November 24th, 2019: “carry it in my heart aka the epic andrew garfield/jesse eisenberg slow burn RPF fanfic that dominated my dashboard circa mid 2011 written by romcom goddess of our times robin-sparkles now a bestselling author”
From user @lissa, April 22nd, 2022: “…I assume this is referring to carry it in my heart by robin-sparkles aka robin-pulaski aka casey mcquiston author of red white and royal blue.”
Oho. So that was the reason my earlier searches for robin-pulaski’s archived presence on Tumblr yielded no results. They hadn’t gone by robin-pulaski on Tumblr. They had gone by robin-sparkles.
This new thread ultimately led me to the original archived masterpost for Carry It in My Heart, although I soon realized this had always been available, I was just bad at using the internet. That didn’t stop it from having an indescribable emotional effect on me. More on that in the video.
More notably, something I didn’t mention in the video, I actually did manage to find robin-sparkles’s archived Tumblr. Its presence was interesting. It had been archived in April 2010, July 2011, and August 2012, before the Tumblr was seemingly deactivated and the URL was taken by another user some time between 2012 and 2015. The snapshots from 2011 lead to an empty blog page with the heading VICTORYJOBS. I’m in a little over my head here— VICTORYJOBS is clickable, but only directs back to the same blog page, so is it the title of the blog? Maybe the URL Robin moved to? Snapshots of victoryjobs.tumblr.com lead to a mostly-blank Tumblr page with a broken ask link. Either way, there is no longer any content on the robin-sparkles blog by 2011.
Stranger still, and more poetic, the snapshots from 2012 have a similar heading, only this time, it reads DEAD AND GONE. A once-loved blog seems to whisper from the past, keep moving, that’s over now.
But there is a portion of the blog that’s still accessible. April 2010. Finally, a real page. Hot pink and white letters scream, “LET’S GO TO THE MALL!” Smaller yellow letters: “HIMYM, TO, OCD, ADHD, GAD, LOL, HP, LOTR, AND OTHER ASSORTED ACRONYMS.” Oh, Robin. Although I myself would not be on Tumblr until a few years later, I recognize this person. I knew these people. I had these friends. I was this friend.
The page is almost exclusively Destiel (Dean/Castiel, prevailing ship from CW’s Supernatural) content. Gifs, incorrect quotes, the usual. The latest post, from “3 HOURS AGO”, like we’ve traveled in time:
“Robin Sparkles’s Top 10 Favorite Love Stories. not necessarily the couples I ship the most prominently or love stories that I consider to be the greatest of all time, but the ones that have hit me the hardest personally throughout my life. (yes it will feature Dean/Cas what the fuck kind of question is that you dumb whore)
Like with the masterpost, I’m feeling those indescribable feelings again. The charm and innocence of a truly authentic early-2010s Tumblr blog may be lost on most people, but not me. This is such an ephemeral snapshot. It’s seemingly the only bit of archived material from this Tumblr account. Clicking on the 'older posts’ link only brings you back to the Internet Archive; “The Wayback Machine has not archived that URL.” This one page of Destiel musings is all we have. And it’s beautiful. It’s theirs. Is this Casey’s blog? We really can’t be sure. But like the Twilight: New Moon soundtrack crooned to us so many years ago, earlier even than robin-sparkles reblogged these posts, “There’s a possibility.”
Once again, Jesse Eisenberg, you’re a fascinating anomaly.
Reports as to why both Carry It in My Heart and Robin’s entire online presence were scrubbed from the internet so early vary. According to Fanlore, as well as a few Tumblr users, some negative reception to the fanfiction may have played a part, supposedly causing Robin to delete the work and cancel their planned sequel. This seems strange to me. Online hate can obviously be very disheartening, but the only surviving reactions to CIIMH are overwhelmingly positive. Even if there was the occasional critical comment mixed in, would that really have been enough to negate all of the praise in Robin’s eyes? Maybe. But it’s strange, and more than a little sad. I wish there were more traces of this historical moment left behind. I suppose we’re lucky to have as much as we do.
As stated in my video, this leaves us with a few conclusions. 1. Red White and Royal Blue was almost certainly NOT a Social Network fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off. 2. Casey McQuiston almost certainly WAS (allegedly) indeed robin-pulaski, author of Carry It in My Heart. 3. Carry It in My Heart was, for all intents and purposes, NOT a precursor to Red White and Royal Blue. And finally, 4. It does not, or at least should not, matter very much whether or not Casey McQuiston was a prolific author of Social Network RPF. Regardless of one’s feelings on the ethics of fanfiction concerning real people, it’s safe to say that a fanfic past doesn’t necessarily affect one’s published future. Assuming (god willing) neither Jesse Eisenberg or Andrew Garfield, the real life men, have ever stumbled on the fanfic in question, no harm no foul.
Perhaps knowing about the author’s alleged fanfiction ties will put off some readers. Perhaps some readers were never interested in the author’s style at all and now have a legitimate-feeling excuse to write them off. But perhaps ultra-discerning readers can, at the very least, find a little compassion in their hearts for the bright-eyed young readers and writer of this 2011 fanfic. Can look back at all of this from the heart-softening distance of time and say things like well done and how about that!
For now, cherish this online moment. Soon enough, it will be—
Further Reading
The Agony and the Ecstasy of the Social Network Press Tour by Frankie Thomas. A fascinating look back at the Jesse/Andrew shipping phenomenon that proved very helpful in my research.
Carry It in My Heart by robin-pulaski.