For decades, „fangirl“ was an insult. It conjured something frivolous and hysterical: teenage girls screaming at concerts, papering their walls with posters, loving things too loudly to be taken seriously. The culture rolled its eyes. Then Brittany Broski built an empire on it. The 29-year-old creator, comedian, and self-appointed Fearless Leader of Broski Nation has […]
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For decades, „fangirl“ was an insult. It conjured something frivolous and hysterical: teenage girls screaming at concerts, papering their walls with posters, loving things too loudly to be taken seriously. The culture rolled its eyes. Then Brittany Broski built an empire on it. The 29-year-old creator, comedian, and self-appointed Fearless Leader of Broski Nation has spent the last few years proving the fangirl was never frivolous at all—she was simply paying closer attention than anyone else in the room.
Call it fangirl intellectualism: the idea that loving something with your whole chest is its own kind of expertise. And Broski is its reigning monarch. But she’s far from its only subject. Look closely and a whole class comes into focus—fashion scholars, beauty moguls, viral comedians, and pop stars—who share Broski’s single, radical trait: they refuse to love quietly, and let that devotion carry them somewhere no one expected.
Fangirl intellectualism, it turns out, is less a personality than a movement—and Broski is the one who made it look like a blueprint. So before we meet the rest of the class, here’s the story of how the queen got there: on wit, will, and unabashed yearning.
The Broski Report: Where Obsession Meets Intellect
Every empire has an origin, and Broski’s runs through a microphone. Since launching The Broski Report in May 2023—its debut instantly rocketing to one of Spotify’s most-streamed podcast episodes in the country—she has addressed her audience less like a host than a head of state, opening each dispatch with a briefing for „Broski Nation.“ What keeps them coming back isn’t only the wit, though there’s plenty of it. It’s the way she thinks out loud: unfiltered, self-aware, and startlingly smart.
True intellect isn’t just knowing things; it’s the ability to reach into another mind, gather the loose ends of a thought, and hand it back tied in a bow—something to keep unraveling long after the episode ends. Broski does this weekly, disguising real cultural criticism as a chaotic hang. You come for the bit; you leave with a thesis.
The Fangirl’s Full Circle
Broski has never pretended to be above her obsessions—she credits them. „I’ve never liked something a normal amount,“ she has said. „I have to obsess over it.“ Long before the fame, she was a Tumblr girl in Dallas, up all night writing fan fiction about the very men she would one day interview. That same fixation is exactly what opened the doors. She has said her fangirl upbringing taught her „how to ask the right questions“—and it shows.
Her guest list doubles as a confession of crushes: Harry Styles, the object of her teenage One Direction devotion; Paul Mescal, long her self-declared dream guest; Aaron Taylor-Johnson; and Cole Sprouse—all men she’d openly swooned over on her podcast before they all knelt before her throne. When Styles finally turned up, she reportedly cried afterward, undone by the full-circle of it. The girl who once wrote about these men from her bedroom now sits across from them. If that isn’t manifestation, nothing is.
Meet the Faculty
Here’s the thing about a movement, though—it’s never just one person. Broski may be its loudest voice, but she is far from its only one. Across the internet, a whole class of creators has quietly proved her thesis: that obsession, worn openly, is its own kind of genius. They come from different corners—fashion YouTube, beauty boardrooms, Vine, TikTok—but they share a single origin story. Each one loved something out loud, refused to be embarrassed by it, and let that devotion carry them somewhere no one saw coming. Meet the rest of the faculty.
Hailey Bieber
Then there’s the fangirl who turned devotion into an empire. Internet lore has it—allegedly—that Hailey Bieber loved Justin long before she ever met him, childhood photos and manifestation theories included. But where a lesser story might have ended at „married her teenage crush,“ Bieber wrote a far more interesting sequel.
In 2022 she launched Rhode, the pared-back beauty brand that turned a glazed-donut aesthetic and a now-ubiquitous phone case into a genuine cultural phenomenon—sold-out drops, a waitlist economy, and $212 million in net sales in a single fiscal year. In 2025, she sold it to e.l.f. Beauty for as much as $1 billion, staying on as chief creative officer. She didn’t live off the fandom she was born into; she out-earned it, building one of the most successful beauty businesses in the game on her own terms. Manifestation, meet monetization.
Mina Le
If Broski is the movement’s reigning royal, Mina Le is its scholar-in-residence. Raised in Maryland by a Vietnamese immigrant mother who sewed and ran a consignment store, Le grew up fluent in the language of clothes long before she made a career of it. She worked as a fashion intern and a documentary assistant, and then, when the 2020 lockdown emptied the calendar, she turned a private obsession into a public syllabus—posting her first video essay, a deep dive on Atonement‚s costume design, in May of that year.
What followed was a genre unto itself: long-form, exhaustively researched essays that thread costume history, film theory, and internet culture into arguments most magazines wouldn’t attempt, delivered from a composed talking-head shot with the patience of a lecturer. Nearly two million subscribers later, she has made the case that loving fashion loudly and thinking about it rigorously were never at odds—they were always the same act. She didn’t dumb fashion history down. She simply trusted the internet to keep up, and it did.
Quen Blackwell
Quen Blackwell has been chronically online since before it was a personality trait. She went viral on Vine at 14, back in 2015, and when the app died—taking most of its stars with it—she simply refused to disappear, carrying her bubbly, room-lighting energy from one platform to the next until she had amassed more than 19 million followers and, somewhere along the way, walked straight into the rooms she’d once watched from her bedroom.
Today she hosts Feeding Starving Celebrities, a YouTube series in which she interviews the famous over a shared meal, and the appeal is exactly its looseness—it feels less like a press junket than like eavesdropping on two friends. She has danced in music videos, modeled for Stella McCartney and Off-White, landed beauty deals with the likes of Valentino and ILIA, and signed with CAA in 2024. Blackwell turned being a fan into being a friend—and then turned that friendship into a front-row seat and a paycheck.
Jake Shane
Jake Shane is living proof the fangirl can be a guy, too. Growing up in the New York suburbs, he dreamed of acting—rehearsing scenes, taking stand-up classes at Gotham Comedy Club—before fear and, later, an OCD diagnosis convinced him the dream had passed. It hadn’t. He started online in 2021 as an earnest octopus reviewer under the handle @octopusslover8 (the eight, naturally, for the tentacles), then, in early 2023, posted a single prompt—“What do you want me to act out?“—and became an overnight sensation, gleefully reenacting everything from the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal to pop-culture minutiae for millions.
That chronically online charm, paired with a genuinely disarming warmth, has since built Therapuss, his therapy-couch podcast that pulls exactly the caliber of guest Broski commands: Selena Gomez, Bowen Yang, and Paul Rudd have all taken a seat. From octopus hobbyist to a Streamy nomination, a national tour, and a role on HBO’s Hacks, Shane is the clearest evidence yet that if you love culture loudly enough, culture eventually loves you back.
Addison Rae
And then there’s Addison Rae, the ultimate proof of concept. She began as a Lafayette, Louisiana dance kid who joined TikTok on a whim while babysitting, went viral almost instantly, and left Louisiana State University to chase the moment to Los Angeles, where she became a founding member of the Hype House. For a while, she was the internet’s favorite punchline—the TikTok girl who wanted to be a pop star, earnest to the point of embarrassment. And then the earnestness won.
With the platinum single „Diet Pepsi,“ a critically adored debut album, and a real, respected pop career, the girl who loved the spotlight too openly has hardened into one of the most talked-about new stars in music. It turns out wanting it that badly was never the cringe part. It was the whole strategy.
Fangirl Intellectualism 101
What unites them—Broski, Le, Bieber, Blackwell, Shane, and Rae—isn’t fame or follower counts. It’s that not one of them chose to love quietly. Put it all together and fangirl intellectualism starts to look less like a personality quirk than a genuine discipline—one with Broski as its professor and a faculty of the internet’s most devoted minds.
The curriculum has little to do with celebrity and everything to do with permission: the radical decision that you belong in the same rooms as the people you idolize, and the discipline to earn your place in them. Loving something, the syllabus insists, is only the prerequisite.
The credit comes from studying it, interrogating it, and building yourself up until you can meet your heroes as a peer rather than a spectator—whether that looks like a video essay, a beauty empire, a podcast, or a platinum single. At the center of it all sits a refusal to ever stop learning, and a refusal to ever love quietly.
Because that’s the real lesson, from Broski on down: give yourself the credit you’re owed, do the work, and the very thing the world told you to outgrow becomes the thing that gets you through the door. Class dismissed—long may they all rule.
