Too Girly for Dragons: Confessions of a Closet Fantasy Nerd

Written by Gabi Mitchell

I can tell you the full lineage of House Targaryen. I know the secrets of The Red Keep and what started the Blackfyre rebellion. I have opinions, strong ones, about many fantasy books and series. I’m also a bleach blonde sorority girl that planned my high school prom. 

These two facts about me have never fully made sense together (at least in society’s eyes), and for a long time, I kept them in separate rooms, ensuring they would never meet.

Growing up, fantasy media was essential. My dad and I had a tradition, still do, where we watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy together. Not just passively, like when you have a movie on in the background. I mean really watch it. It started when I was little and never stopped. I fell in love  with the vastness of it, the maps and the histories and the sense that the world on screen had been lived in long before the camera ever showed up. I didn’t have a reason for why I loved it so much, I just knew I did. I felt the same feeling whenever I watched girly childhood shows with my sister, like My Little Pony and Monster/Ever After High. I needed to know the lore of it all.

By the time I got to high school, I had discovered Game of Thrones, or really, A Song of Ice and Fire (because once I watched the show I immediately needed more and fell headfirst into the books). I became the kind of fan that is hard to explain to a casual viewer. I wasn’t just watching: I was reading wikis at midnight, binging every timeline/deepdive video I could find, getting genuinely emotional thinking about how the series might never be completed (George, girl, it’s been 15 years. Get it together diva). Nobody at school really knew. It wasn’t that I was ashamed exactly—it was more that I couldn’t figure out how to explain my obsession,  and was worried nobody would understand. So, I just kept it quiet. 

Something I have always been interested in trying is Dungeons and Dragons. The collaborative storytelling, the world-building, the fact that you can just make things up together: it sounds exactly like what I’ve been doing alone in my head for most of my life. But, I’ve never tried it. Every time I get close, I stop myself, because I can feel the gap between the type of person I look like, my other interests, and who sits around that table, and I don’t know how to cross that bridge. This phenomenon is its own kind of embarrassing thing to admit—that I am afraid of being judged by a community built around imagination and acceptance. But, here we are. 

I have noticed that, even when women do speak up about loving fantasy, it often isn’t enough just to love it. You have to prove it. There is an unspoken audition that happens in these spaces, where a woman’s knowledge and even appearance gets tested before it gets respected. You have to demonstrate that you’re a serious fan, which in practice usually means performing a very specific kind of seriousness, one that demonstrates an apathy towards things like fashion, makeup, and other stereotypically“ girly” things. To be worthy enough to step foot into those discourses is to be“ masculine”. 

“even when women do speak up about loving fantasy, it often isn’t enough just to love it. You have to prove it. There is an unspoken audition that happens in these spaces, where a woman’s knowledge and even appearance gets tested before it gets respected. You have to demonstrate that you’re a serious fan, which in practice usually means performing a very specific kind of seriousness, one that demonstrates an apathy towards things like fashion, makeup, and other stereotypically “girly” things.”

The flip side of that is even uglier. The fantasy that girls were actually given, the stories marketed to us when we were young, get treated like they don’t matter at all. Twilight is laughed out of the room while properties with equally thin plots get shelved next to the classics. The Chronicles of Narnia is beloved, but anything with a romantic subplot aimed at teenage girls gets filed under childish embarrassing trash at best. The message is clear: the things young girls love are not serious, and if you want to be taken seriously, you’d better love something else. It made me realize how many women who don’t“ seem” like fantasy fans actually are fantasy fans because ,wouldn’t you believe it, women are complicated and multi-faceted! Since it is unfathomable that we can be interested in a multitude of different things, we are often reduced to a single identity the moment we start school. This is the reason why I, and so many other women, got stuck in the nerd-closet, unable to find others like me. 

Perhaps that’s the saddest part of all of it. Not that the closet exists, but how many of us are in it, completely unaware of each other. How many girls sat in classrooms next to someone who also had genuine anxiety over an author not finishing their favorite series, also stayed up too late reading about royal family lineages and mythical creatures, also felt that specific and indescribable feeling of a story cracking something open inside them, and never said a word, because neither of them looked the part?

“How many girls sat in classrooms next to someone who also had genuine anxiety over an author not finishing their favorite series, also stayed up too late reading about royal family lineages and mythical creatures, also felt that specific and indescribable feeling of a story cracking something open inside them, and never said a word, because neither of them looked the part?”

I’m a film student now, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. The reason I want to tell stories for a living traces directly back to those nights on the couch watching the Shire appear on screen with my dad, and to every fantasy world that taught me that fiction isn’t just an escape from real life: it’s one of the most honest ways we have of talking about our lives and identities. It’s why I felt so connected to Daenerys Targareyn, a sparkly pretty princess who also rides dragons and commands armies. She is proof that you can be both. 

Luckily, more and more women are feeling comfortable (and bold) enough to express their nerdiness femininity (lots of this is thanks to the“ whimsy aesthetic”). We’re healing our broken girlhoods by reading more, watching more movies, having fairy tea parties and reminiscing on fantastical childhood media. So if anyone wants to start a D&D campaign for the girls with pink dice, for the girls who want to drink cosmos while we play…we should link!