Happy 4/20 to all my Columbiner girlies!

"I care more about Eric and Dylan than I do about 90% of the people around me," a seventeen year-old girl known as "reb420angel" posts on Tumblr. She's talking about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two teenage boys who ushered in our current era of American mass gun violence when they massacred thirteen people at Columbine High School in Colorado. It happened in 1999, the same year she was born.

Reb420angel is part of a controversial fandom community of women—some of whom describe themselves as "Columbiners"—who have connected with one another based on their shared interest in the details of the crime, and especially in Dylan and Eric. They range in age from their early teens to late twenties, and blog about the shooting from all over the world.

Dave Cullen, the author of Columbine, considered to be the definitive work on the subject, believes that Eric was likely sociopathic. Nevertheless, he was charming and well liked by many at Columbine. Cullen describes Eric as a brain, but a cool brain. He smoked, he drank, he dated. He got invited to parties. He got high. He worked his look hard: military chic hair - short and spiked with plenty of product - black shirts and baggy cargo pants. He blasted hardcore German industrial rock from his Honda. He broke the rules, tagged himself with the nickname Reb, but did his homework and earned himself As."

Whereas, Dylan, Cullen argues, was just a very lonely, depressed, and meek boy who actually wanted to do things like go to prom and college. Throughout the ten years Cullen spent writing and researching Columbine, he too found wellspring of sympathy for Dylan. In reviewing the boys' journals, Cullen writes:

Eric began his journal as a killer. He already knew where it would end. Every page pointed in the same direction. His purpose was not self-discovery but self-lionization. Dylan was just trying to grapple with existence. He had no idea where he was headed.

Columbiners have fashioned themselves as the true experts on the massacre (many deride Cullen as a competitor), pouring over the boys' journals, notebooks, and the infamous "basement tapes." Some are budding psychologists and criminologists, whose interest is primarily a forensic one—they see the shootings as a puzzle or mystery to be solved, complete with unanswered questions that verge on the conspiratorial. But others express an intense "connection" to Dylan and Eric, which range from a shared emotional experience of bullying, loneliness, and depression to a professed physical and romantic attraction. "I'm in love with a dead school shooter," posts Ada, a twenty-two year old, "what the heck did 2015 do to me."

On Tumblr, Ada and young women like her circulate photos, gifs, and drawings of Dylan and Eric, using nicknames and inside jokes, the way teenagers passing notes in class might have done before the advent of texting.

"I want to see that smile everyday," one girl writes, under an old school photo of Eric.

"Can you imagine how cute Dylan would have been on a date, like seriously I bet he would have tried really hard and got flowers and everything, the cutie," another one ponders.

They share gun pictures with captions like "ugh I want."