The Best Time I Wrote Orlando Bloom Fan Fiction

by Scaachi Koul

One of the most significant romantic relationships in my life started when I was 11. It was the halcyon days of 2002, the same year I became the primary user of my family’s Dell desktop computer, and I was in love with an adult man. He was 5’11 and born on January 13th, 1977. His first car was a VW Golf. His favorite ice cream flavor was mint chocolate chip. He quit smoking a year earlier, presumably, to make room for me in his life, because I was vehemently anti-smoking at the time. (I had yet to actually try cigarettes, which, surprise surprise, are delicious.) His movies were terrible, but I was yet too young to understand that. He wore a leather cuff. There wasn’t too much I knew for sure, but I did know that we were destined to meet and fall in love.

Those weird stats I just prattled off about a total stranger? I still remember them by heart. I didn’t have to consult the handbook I wrote or the fan-club guide I kept or the old diaries I filled in a two-year stretch or the pink-and-purple suitcase in my former bedroom filled to the brim with photos of him. (I actually drained two of my dad’s ink cartridges printing off bookmarks with his face on them. He found out when trying to use the printer for the first time to print off his updated will.)

There are corners of my mind, dark, mud-like corners where all the synapses are dead from firing off so much Orlando Bloom trivia. He has a sister, Samantha. His first job was at a shooting range when he was 13. His body is home to some truly stupid tattoos. But really, who knows if any of this is accurate: the Orlando Bloom Fan Guide I wrote at 12 on three-hole punch lined paper fastened together with yellow and pink pipe-cleaners says that he has a “.400 batting average.”

Maybe he does. I really can’t be sure.

For years, I’d Google his name every day after to school just to make sure things were going okay for him. I made my mom buy me a boxed set of the Lord of the Rings books and actually read them, highlighting every time elven weenie Legolas was mentioned. I covered both sides of my bedroom door with his blank, dead-eyed stare. My parents hated me, and rightfully so.

While most girls started gaining interest in — or at least acknowledging the presence of — real, live boys, my parents pulled my leash even tighter. They emigrated to Canada two decades earlier, but that didn’t mean they were comfortable with common Western traditions like dating and public hand-holding. I only had a few close-knit friends, all of whom were starting to have their first kisses and whose moms would drive them to their dates at the mall. My dad once caught me sharing a bag of sour-soothers with a boy and on the car ride home, told me not to do it again because, “Boys have all kinds of communicable diseases.” So I retreated. I retreated into Pirates of the fucking Caribbean.

This was also the dawn of the Internet era. My parents put a computer in my room because really, what’s the worst that could happen if you give a pre-pubescent kid a portal to the rest of the world? I would come home from school at 4:30 and have uninterrupted Internet time until I was forced into bed at 9:30. And while no one at my junior high appreciated my particular affinity for this C-grade actor, there were people on the Internet who did.

The good people of BloominHot.cjb.net and OrlandoIsADoll.net and Full-Bloom.net and TheOrlandoBloomfiles.net and GorgeousGeekyGuys.com/Orlando all understood me. We created a community away from the rest, where we shared photos, bookmarks, press clippings. One girl from England would send me scanned images of Orlando in The Daily Mail; I would send her the ads for the Lord of the Rings I tore from The Calgary Herald. We were possessive of him, sure, but willing to share. I started using the word “bloke” a lot.

Within these online walls, we all claimed to be between 17 and 20, but judging by our appreciation of relationships and sex, we were all underdeveloped 12-year-olds. Orlando-based fan fictions were a big part of all the sites I browsed, and were sorely lacking in any real conviction. They all read like we had learned what a penis does on the back of a shampoo bottle and were trying to replicate whatever we were supposed to like about it. The intent was two-fold: one, to connect with this total stranger, and two, to feel around aimlessly in the dark until we figured out how love and doin’ it worked.

The first one I wrote was pretty simple, about a girl who runs into Orlando at a quiet Irish pub in the English countryside (nd assumed Irish pubs were just English pubs but more casual.) It was titled, rather simply, “His Brown Eyes.” Because Orlando Bloom has brown eyes. Do you get it? It’s about his eyes. His eyes that are brown. I just want to make sure that you get it.

“They locked eyes at the Irish pub, his puppy dog eyes suddenly full of passion. Oh my god,” she thought. That’s Orlando Bloom! HIS CHEEKBONES! OMG they are so perfect, they make me MELT!” This is how relationships started, I figured: with an immediate and sudden obsession rather than you being introduced to some guy at a party who you grow smitten with when he buys you a soggy Mr. Sub at 2:30 in the morning without trying any funny business. “OMG and his chest!!! Mmmm… so muscular…so yummy. He smiled at her and laughed. It’s perfect. It’s like this uber-cute hearty chuckle flirty kind of laugh.” Had I never heard anyone laugh before?

The second — “Forbidden” — was darker. It was around the time Orlando was linked to a series of famous women, each as devastating for me as the next. In my version, however, Orlando was a famous actor and the female lead (always a placeholder for yours truly, a quiet brunette with a heart of gold and an affinity for SEX) was his new makeup artist. Orlando was having trouble in his home-life. His actress girlfriend, Janessa, didn’t appreciate him. She was always jet-setting around the world, neglecting his needs, and getting caught-up in the life of a Hollywood star. Orlando just wanted some simplicity! HE WANTED AMBER. “’I just miss a woman’s touch,’ Orlando told Amber, rubbing the back of her leg. She shivered. “I can’t do this,” she said. “It’s wrong. You can’t do this to Janessa.” Orlando then rises from the makeup chair, pulling her in closer. “I know,” he said. “But I just don’t love her like I love you.”

Aside from this being pretty textbook workplace harassment, most of my fan-fictions suffered from weak-willed long-suffering women finally getting attention from a couple of cheekbones.

Worse, though, were the depictions of actual sex. If the courting process always put the woman in the submissive, always waiting for Orlando to come around, to notice her, sex was a clumsy mess of euphemisms and all the sexual slang I could glean without turning my browser history into Danielle Steel novel.

“When I Lost You,” the sequel to “Forbidden,” took the couple from their taboo beginnings to a year later, when Orlando is almost killed while shooting a stunt for the follow-up to Black Hawk Down. (Did you know that Orlando Bloom was in Black Hawk Down? He falls from a helicopter and that’s about it. He has a shaved head and I still find the scene very erotic.) Amber stays by his side while he’s in the hospitals, trying to rouse him from his coma by reading him his favorite book — Catcher in the Rye, WHICH WAS ALSO MY FAVORITE BOOK — and staring at him with all the love she could muster. “Even though he hadn’t moved in months, he still looked so strong. His lips were still perfect. And she knew that if she loved him enough, he would wake up soon.”

While I wrote this, my mother was downstairs, folding laundry in the living room, blaring Days of Our Lives. At the time, Marlena was possessed by Stefano all over again.

Eventually, Orlando wakes from his slumber but is paralyzed from the neck down, of course, and she must help him get on his feet. The doctors don’t have a lot of hope for him since his bones are completely shattered, and the medications don’t working. Do you know what will work, though? The human vagina.

“Orlando gazed at her with passion. She knew what he wanted, but felt sad because she knew he couldn’t move the way he wanted to. Suddenly, he sat up. “Orlando!” Amber said. “You can move!” He bit his lower lip and got off the bed. He grabbed her arms and pushed her against the wall. “Yeah,” he said. “And I haven’t stopped thinking about you since our last night together in Paris.”

He threw her down on the bed and mounted [word I learned from other fan fictions] her. He thrust [another fan fiction word; was not sure what it meant] from his fingers into her wet mound [I think I am talking about a vagina here, but who knows]. She moaned and threw her head back. “Orli,” she yelped. “I’ve missed you.” “I love you so much, Amber,” Orlando said, kissing her like it was the first time.”

“When I Lost You” is about five pages long, but it’s mostly comprised of moaning and crying out in fits of poorly-described passion. Learning how sex works from other Internet tweens is not a great idea. For example: this particular sex scene ends with, “Orlando finished in her mouth. Finally, they were together.” I thought that “finishing” was some odd euphemism for “kissing” and not, say, “ejaculating.”

I was 11. I did not know fluids were part of the deal.

I wrote these fan fictions for months, developing the storylines from coy flirting to hardcore fucking. By 12, my plot devices had improved but I still didn’t know the mechanics. “Working Overtime,” for example, turned Orlando from an actor into your average office employee, who had a big boner for his boss’s daughter, Alexis. “Orlando ran his fingers through Alexis’s hair while he kissed her. “I’ve waited so long for this,” he said. He helped her get ontop [sic] of the fax machine [I had never seen a fax machine and assumed they looked like big photocopiers] and unbuckled his pants. She riped [sic] her shirt open. “Take me,” she said.” Take you where? And don’t you worry — Janessa gets her revenge in “The Case of the Ex,” named after the Mya song, naturally.

By 13, however, I understood enough to write passages like “Orliander,’ she said, twirling her hair. “Come to bed. I have a surprise for you,’” and then actually be able to identify what the surprise was.

But that was also the year he started dating Kate Bosworth.

I couldn’t do any homework that night. A friend had sent me a link to the story, showing the two of them hand-in-hand. It was a gut-punch of reality, that no, I did not know this stranger, and he was dating the total opposite of me: a twiggy blond with a phonetic name. I wept all night, slowly taking down the photos of my one true love that I plastered on my door. I folded them and tucked them away in that very same pink-and-purple suitcase. Four of my friends called that night to “see if you are doing okay with all of this.”

The fan fictions weren’t fun anymore. He was a real person now, and I was too old for such a fantasy life. I met a real boy at school — Grant — and instead started planning our life together. Grant had red hair, and I wrote diary entry after diary entry about what his red hair would look like on our olive-skinned children. (“I know that if he notices me, we’ll be happy.”) I invited Grant to my 14th birthday, and he sat next to me while we watched Queen of the Damned in my living room. He got me a Treble Charger CD as a present. He was the first boy I ever introduced to my dad.

I was making life happen, goddamnit.

A few months ago, when news broke that Orlando Bloom got in a fist-fight with Canadian cold sore Justin Bieber over Miranda Kerr, my heart winced. Not because I wanted more for him, or because I was embarrassed about our past, but rather because he was fighting for another woman. We shared so much, I felt, but we were still worlds apart. It was like watching your ex-boyfriend get protective over some other girl: you’re not into him anymore, but you don’t really want to see him love someone else either.

But perhaps I should take a cue from one of the last fan fictions I wrote with Orlando and Amber, a story that ends with his death at the hand of incurable “vein cancer.” On his deathbed, Orlando says goodbye to his one true love.

“’I may die, Amber, but our love never can.” Orlando held her hand while she cried, tears messing up her makeup. Even thought her mascara was all over the place, she still looked beautiful with her blue eyes and dimple in her left cheek. ‘No matter where you are,’ he said. ‘I’ll be with you. And when the wind blows, it’ll whisper, Orlando.’“

Alright, well, I just straight-up stole that one from The Simpsons.

Scaachi Koul is an assistant editor at Hazlitt magazine. Are you trying to sound out her name right now? You probably are. You can find her on Twitter at @Scaachi.