being autistic in the year of the "teen girls in their twenties"

or rather - how I've found myself back on Tumblr and AO3 in 2023.

2023 has been proclaimed the year for “teen girls in their twenties”, and it’s easy to see why. The return of The Hunger Games with it’s new prequel film and renaissance of the original trilogy, as well as Speak Now and 1989 (taylor’s versions) are two of the examples that jump to mind - and for the nerdier amongst us, the unexpected return of Dan Howell and Phil Lester’s gaming channel after a five year hiatus has topped it all off.

Now, I’m non-binary, so don’t get it twisted - the teen girl in their twenties is definitely a state of being, rather than a gender, for me, though there is certainly so much to be said for how girls grew up in fandoms in the 2010s. It’s fascinating to watch the return of these same forms of media and beloved people in new, more mature formats, particularly with the increase of video content seen through TikTok and Reels.

At the turn of the year I did not anticipate my TikTok feed being full of fan edits of Josh Hutcherson and Sam Claflin in Catching Fire, and I certainly didn’t expect to be seeing clips of Dan and Phil from ten years ago all across my feeds alongside new content.

This sudden return of our teenage interests in renewed or more mature formats has many of us what is often described in fandom terms as “feral” - but let’s break it down further as to why this phenomenon could be occurring.

The “pandemic skip”

The “pandemic skip” - or the loss of three years of average development and life - has meant many have moved into a whole new phase of life without Actually getting to do the things you might have done otherwise in that time; moving out, moving on in your career, even having kids or getting married. For many of us “teen girls in our twenties”, we quite literally did go from teens to almost mid-twenties in this time period - and though when we say teen girls in this phrase we mean earlier in the 2010s (2014 was arguably the peak of teen girl fandom culture), this is a major period of change and transitions that looked utterly different to expectation.

Perhaps, for many of us, this means we are more likely to want to engage in nostalgia, and will find ourselves heavily desiring it. New content but of something that we used to love is easier to consume than something completely new, and it is comforting to find yourself back immersed in those same worlds and in social media commentary that suddenly everyone is engaged in all at once.

Ageing, trauma, joy, & “adult money”

If you told Charli of 2013 that their 23 year old self just watched a brand new Hunger Games film in the cinema twice, is back watching Dan and Phil Games on the regular, and the side characters from their favourite book (Alice Oseman’s Solitaire) now have a webcomic-turned-graphic-novel-and-hit-TV-show… I think they’d be utterly floored.

It’s been a year of celebrating not only the person I once was and getting to engage in what I once loved, but as a completely new person who finally knows who they are. A person who isn’t in the crisis and traumatic environments they were for so long when they were originally engaging with these types of media and fandoms, and I don’t think we can underestimate the healing that this provides.

If we take Dan and Phil - we grew up with them. I grew up with them for nearly ten years before I stopped following them quite so closely for a couple of years. And, they, like us, have been on their own journey. They’ve both come out and have worked on other projects, and Dan has been extremely open about his mental health struggles. Their new content, whilst nostalgic and as fun as it ever was, has caught up with where many of us are - it’s more mature, it’s more relaxed, and it’s more open.

Our ageing also comes with our independence, time and our own funds - or as some on TikTok have said, getting to re-engage in our teen hobbies but with adult money, where we couldn’t necessarily spend money on such things ten years ago, it’s easier to do so now. Maybe I don’t want to walk around in a Dan and Phil t-shirt and a Mockingjay pin anymore (or do I?) but I can take myself to the cinema, and I can choose to have multiple streaming platforms and spend my time watching whatever I want.

How is being autistic a part of this?

The way that people see us as an “old soul” autistic child to “childish” autistic adult pipeline is so. very. real. I was always seen as beyond my years (that’s partly the trauma) and way in front of my peers, until I became an adult and suddenly it became clear that my support needs were going to remain, if not increase. One of the aspects that affects the way I was viewed was in that I hit what is often called skill regression - I’d prefer a more neurodiversity-affirming term for this, because this occurs for many reasons and can be a product of unmasking, of trauma, of being compared directly to allistic peers.

But beyond my skills, my interests remained similar. Many of my special interests are long-term and I don’t see them as childish or immature, I just see them as a part of me. For many autistic people, TV shows and movies and the fandoms that accompany them are familiar, comforting, and easy to process because we know them well. Sometimes something may fade and then come back. We are ultimately more likely to get heavily engaged in fandom, because of the depth of autistic special interests and autistic joy.

The diagnostic criteria calls our interests restricted, but for me they are expansive - maybe they remain centred on something or someone, but they widen my world to more joy, more knowledge, more creativity, more spark, more life.

And so, it follows that many of those of us who are falling into this category of “teen girls in our twenties” are autistic. There is suddenly content to engage with that is new, but familiar, all at once; there are people online enthusing about what we love again. It is socially acceptable to be into these things again because everyone is.

But it’s not just nostalgic content…

Of course, a huge chunk of this concept is around old content coming back - my favourite Letterboxd review of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes said “everyone who was annoying on tumblr in 2013… we’re so back” - and god knows I was extremely annoying - but that’s not the be all and end all of what we’re enjoying.

For example, the summer was for Red, White and Royal Blue - a rom-com about the First Son of the United States falling in love with the Prince of England, based on the book by Casey McQuiston. I read the book back in 2019 and enjoyed it plenty, but didn’t expect to love the film the way I did. It’s extremely well put together; for a rom-com, a huge amount of effort was put into representation, intimacy, and cinematography in a way I’ve not seen before, and both Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine were perfectly cast.

It got a reaction that I’ve not seen for a long time in terms of how it’s captured people and fandom response - and let me tell you, finding myself back on AO3 and Tumblr in our year 2023 was not something I anticipated after a couple of years of not really having pieces of media that I was so utterly consumed by.

But ultimately… I think I’ll always find myself back in fandom spaces, no matter how old I am or what I might be enjoying. There is such a specific joy in being around people who love something just as intensely as you do, who are putting their time into creating content or art or writing; dissecting scenes in ways you’d never think of and constantly rewatching a film the way you are to spot the tiny details and to be doused in familiarity and comfort.

For me, being autistic is intrinsically linked to the way I enjoy and consume media, and the way I am so embedded in fandom culture. It is autistic joy and special interests, pattern recognition and a distaste for social norms.

The year of the teen girls in their twenties has also been a year for the autistics - and I wonder how close the venn diagram is to a circle.