Happy Thursday!

I have a fabulous Lore Drop for you today from one of our greatest Zillennial culture writers. They join the ranks of the fellow legends who have given us a peek at their formative media habits.

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CT Jones is a culture writer at Rolling Stone and a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient. They have covered internet culture, entertainment, and books for outlets like MEL Magazine, CBS News, Vox, Vulture, and more. If you’ve ever been curious about how they got their pen so sharp, read on to see the media that made them.

There is no way to excavate the person I am and the public writer I have become without giving substantial emotional credit to the pop culture musical parody scene on 2012 YouTube. As a Zillennial of the highest order, I, like many of my peers, was exposed to pop culture when I was given a first generation iPad from Apple. Sure the touch screen was magical and the ability to play Angry Birds on a screen made me so happy that I ignored the permanent burn-in of those bright red avians tattooed on the retinas. But the greatest gift of the first gen iPad was a YouTube app free of age restrictions on videos. I opened the app — purposefully designed to look like an old-timey television set — and was immediately introduced to my longest lasting memories of early internet lore: pop culture musical parodies. 

There were so many pop culture parodies at the time that it’s honestly easier to classify them by genres — there was the off-Broadway verve of Very Potter Musical, slightly problematic ghetto retranslations of Todrick Hall’s Beauty and the Beat, or the straightforward SNL-wannabe style of Epic Rap Battles of History and Paint’s After Ever After. Each of these videos took the typical route of a parody, seizing on the most important and rote parts of a story and twisting them to poke fun at their naivety, or in many cases, sheer ridiculousness. For some reason, this meant many hours of imagining Disney Princesses’ being forced to contend with the historical realities of their settings, truly the lowest hanging narrative fruit. To this day, if you get me drunk enough, I will still drunk-rant about the fact that the Colors of the Wind scene in Pocahontas could not have happened because there were no mountains, cliffs, or waterfalls where the Native-American princess lived. (I know, because her home was also my hometown: the 757 area of Virginia. Pocahontas’ real name was Matoaka, the name of the street I lived on for most of my life. And she and her people lived in what is now called Poquoson, Virginia, a name derived from the Algonquin description of the geographical makeup of the area: a low, flat, marsh. NO WATERFALLS. Anyway.) 

But while the draw was apparent, taking classic pop culture and giving it the obnoxious scene of self-produced YouTube videos, these online musical parodies were most impactful for me when taken out of their context and reperformed in the real world. Pickup time at my Christian middle school was the absolute best time to prove to people that I was well versed in digital pop-culture, mainly by reciting many of these videos from memory — tone and all. (The children did — and still do — yearn for the patter song.) Unbeknownst to me, this was the very start of my education with cultural criticism. The very nature of these songs meant that I was priming myself to pick apart the things that I watched and identify what made sense, what was fun, and what could make it better. By learning these songs, usually started by printing out entire pamphlets from Lyrics.com, I was able to pick my favorites — and not just perform them while waiting for my mother’s grey beat-up Toyota Sienna minivan to enter the parking lot but defend their skill to my friends. Even now, when I’m on YouTube trawling through IP slop for work, or scrolling through ASMR videos to go to sleep, a stray parody lingers on the edge of my computer screen, tempting me to jump in one more time.

Before Jeff Bezos fulfilled his big box store bully dreams through Amazon, successfully putting local and mid-tier chain bookstores out of business, one of the most thriving places of community and discovery was a national chain of Christian bookstores called LifeWay. This is where I spent many days in my childhood, wandering the shelves while my parents stocked up on bible studies, guides to pop culture, and individual communion cups with the wafers included. Each Christian bookstore had its own set up — some prioritized Christian rock with a big listening station, while some were mainly places to get greeting cards with specific digs against gay marriage. But there was always at least a small section of  a shelf dedicated entirely to fiction. It was here where I found one of the greatest loopholes of my sheltered religious childhood: Amish romances. 

As a kid, my parents were incredibly strict about what content I was allowed to consume. We couldn’t watch Wizards of Waverly Place, discussing Harry Potter was absolutely banned, and our good run of iCarly as an approved series was cut short when my mother walked in on the episode where Sam and Freddie have a chaste, PG, and incredibly awkward first kiss. My mom even did quick scans of my library books, just to confirm that there wasn’t any sexual or promiscuous material,  a routine that lasted well though my senior year of college. By 12, I was a budding romance aficionado, but all of the romances I had been able to get my hands on were either so YA they didn’t count or closed door, a romance term where all of the action happens in between the pages. But in LifeWay, only Christian material was allowed through the doors, which meant my mom didn’t check what books I was buying. And this is where I got my first taste of bodice-ripping romances. 

Like the name implies, Amish romances mainly centered around Pennsylvania Dutch characters, taking specific pleasure in their eschewal of modern technology. But because there has to be a happy ending that is also Biblical, many of these books went so far in praise of a Christian, God-fearing marriage that they also praised the sex the happy couple had after they said I-do. And boy was there a lot of sex. It was my first experience with romances that went into detail about what happened after people fell in love. Were they ridiculous? Absolutely. Did most of them completely ignore the female orgasm? For sure. But they were so steamy that all references to Christ, leaving the world behind to raise a dozen children, or the literal churning of butter could immediately be ignored for the dozens of pages of marital bliss.

If Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger never shared a loving glance or a tender kiss in your version of Harry Potter, you absolutely missed out. With my whole previously mentioned Christian upbringing, I wasn’t allowed to read Harry Potter during the height of the series’ popularity. In order to finish them I had a friend sneak me each book in elementary school, which I would then wrap in a sweater, hide in my roller bookbag, and read with a flashlight once my parents had gone to sleep. But after running through all seven books in about two weeks, I was left with a hollow feeling that I didn’t expect. This was supposed to be one of the greatest book series in the entire world. And it kind of sucked? 

Sure Harry was fine, Neville was brave, and as a child with clear lesbian tendencies, I was obsessed with the idea of a single woman teacher who could turn into a cat but mostly wanted to be bitchy. But I couldn’t get over just how frustrated I was with the books’ treatment of Hermione. One third of the golden trio, Hermione was also getting the boys out of scrapes, solving riddles that saved their lives, and being incredibly helpful — but at every turn she was virtually booed out of rooms because her hair was frizzy and people didn’t like the sound of her voice? Where was her epic story? I found the answer, and the next 10 years of my reading habits on fanfiction.net. While I originally searched for a fic where Harry would see that Hermione was the love of his life — or even fuckable honestly — I was quickly swept away by a new idea. One where Hermione’s nemesis Draco saw her potential when the rest of the world didn’t. 

I immediately devoured fic after fic where the two had secret relationships during school, complete re-writes where Draco’s prejudice was a front to keep his family safe during the wizard’s Nazi-esque war, and futuresque offerings where the two fall in love later in life after years of growth and therapy. To this day, one of the best books I have ever read is an unpublished Draco/Hermione fanfiction called The Commoners Guide to Bedding a Royal  — a Slytherin-specific modern AU where Draco is the prince of England and Hermione is an American exchange student that may or may not bear striking resemblance to Meghan Markle. (As of November 2025, the full version of this fic remains in a place of honor on my Kindle.) 

The appeal for Dramione is similar to some of the most popular YA-rewrites — it’s all about Hermione getting her lick back in public as many times as possible. Think Princess Diaries makeover with a slight wizard twist. People also tend to hate her pairing with Ron, and word vomit their feelings on that by making him ugly, balding, divorced and alone while Hermione swans about with the blonde-haired love of her life. And there’s also a whole subset of Dramione fans obsessed with leaning into Draco’s dark side, which is why some of the biggest fics on fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.com remain stories about Hermione being sold to Draco in sexual slavery. 

If you’re a romance reader and this sounds familiar, it’s because 2025 was the year some of the biggest Dramione fics of all time were scrubbed for IP, repackaged, and sold as traditional romance books. Alchemised by SenLinYu, Rose in Chains by Julie Soto, and The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley were all originally Dramione fanfiction accessible for free online. While no one is free from the draw of monetization, especially writers who have basically finished books ready to be sold to the highest bidder, there’s something about Dramione being popular and sellable now  — especially in light of JK Rowling’s continued transphobia — that feels a bit like older writers trying to cash in on a trend that should have been left in their high school years. You know those seniors who hang out in the high school parking lot and attend football games long after the rest of their school peers are picking out Roth IRAs? It's like, they’re not hurting anyone, but it’s still sad to watch. 

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