Online Trolling and Offline Friendships in ‘Fugly’

Fugly, by Claire Waller,  is the story of teen girl who’s bullied, insulted and ignored offline, until she becomes an online troll. Harassing those stupid, pretty attention-seekers online gives Beth some calmness and relief from her struggles.  At times, she’s almost an avenging warrior, taking online revenge on people who’ve wronged her or her friends. She’s not unsympathetic, either, there’s a believable shift from wanting to hate-follow pretty people, to leaving a snarky comment, to harassing them into closing their accounts, to… much darker targeted harassment.

in Fugly, Beth has basically three lives: Dealing with family problems at home, being totally ignored at school, and then wreaking vengeance on the pretty people online.  She begins two friendships in this book, one with a perky, adorable lil fairy of a classmate, and one with an online friend who knows even darker, crueler, and more effective ways to ruin someone’s life. This isn’t really a thriller, but there’s a twisted friendship propelling a lot of the story. There’s a real question of who Beth is going to be, which is at the heart of the most successful coming-of-age stories. With manic pixie Amy on one side and internet troll Tori on the other, Beth has the chance to remake herself in multiple new ways.

I picked Fugly up after DNFing another suggestion for my social media fiction roundup, called Killer Content. I had to put that one down because I found every character so teehee!!! quirky!!! that I just couldn’t take it seriously, so I was really ready to understand Beth’s frustration and annoyance. That’s part of works so well in this novel… First, readers are led to understand Beth’s feelings when she does some pretty horrible things, and then the story goes right in to exactly how horrible her actions are.

We’ve seen this movement in internet culture in general, this shift between heated arguing to doxxing and telling strangers to kill themselves. This Atlantic article from a few months ago, Trolls Aren’t Like the Rest of Us, kind of hits what I think. For trolls, being aggressive and unpleasant is the goal. This isn’t arguing online in hopes of changing someone’s mind, or expressing your own thoughts. The meanness is the whole point.

Obviously, in a novel about trolling, there’s some offline fallout to Beth’s online harassment campaigns, but I didn’t feel like I was reading a morality play about the tragic consequences of bullying. That’s the genius of Fugly, the beautiful people Beth sees are both frustratingly perfect, and developed enough for empathy.