Fanthropology - The Study of Fandom

(Note – No Star Trek-related refs this week, I’m seeing it this evening and I don’t want to spoil myself!)

Regarding the finale of The Office, Los Angeles Times’s Robert Lloyd wrote Endings are hard, especially in a series whose very subject is that things go on much the same year after year. […] But we also crave official, canonical assurance that everything will be OK for the characters after we part. We can't just leave it to the fan fiction.

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Meredith Blake reported that Tony Goldwyn and Amy Schumer recently teamed up for a dramatic performance of some "Scandal" fan fiction they found on the internet, for “Watch What Happens Live.”

In “Embracing the culture of fanfiction” for DNA India, Neharika Nair wrote Anybody who has ever read or watched something has noticed that there are always a few questions left unanswered, or a few bits that they would change. And that is why fanfiction exists.

( LPers, True Blood, Vampire Diaries, S.H.I.E.L.D., Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, magicians in New JerseyCollapse )

( Game of Thrones, Matthew Barney, Potted Potter, Angelina JolieCollapse )

MIT’s The Tech’s Deena Wang interviewed Flourish Klink, who said I think there’s a lot of things that have changed since fandom moved off of LiveJournal and on to Tumblr. For about 10 years, fandom was really centered about LiveJournal. Moving to Tumblr has made a lot of changes in terms of how you get involved in fandoms, and how you can build communities or not. I think that fandom has become a lot more decentralized and there’s less of an emphasis on fanfiction now than there ever has been, and more of an emphasis on GIFs, on a lot more visual stuff. GIFs get a lot more traction because you’ve got a way to propagate images a lot more easily.

Finally, in a review of Christie Golden’s StarCraft II: Flashpoint for Forbes (FORBES??), Jen Bosier wrote The world of expanded universes is that of a mixed bag — so much of its legacy is owed to internet boards and forums, spawning from the dark art that is fan fiction. As an active writer and follower of fanfic, I would never naysay the art (and it is an art in its own right), but I’m not necessarily a fan of published fanfic. These offerings do firmly belong on the internet, and it’s always a disappointment to me when an game’s official EU is relegated to glammed up fanfic.

The ref of the week comes from TIME, which included Archive of Our Own among the “50 Best Websites 2013”. Lev Grossman wrote Fan fiction is one of the great unsung popular literary movements of the past 50 years, but finding what you’re looking for online can involve sorting through mountains of inadequately tagged and frequently dodgy text. Archive of Our Own makes it easy: it’s the most carefully curated, sanely organized, easily browsable and searchable nonprofit collection of fan fiction on the Web, and it serves all fandoms equally, from The A-Team to Zachary Quinto and beyond. Observed Daily Dot’s Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, Fifty Shades of Grey may be the mainstream face of fanfiction, but it hasn’t done much to dispel the image of fanfic as being “mommy porn”, or just poorly-written in general. Which isn’t to say that lots of fanfiction isn’t erotica -- just that you could easily do a lot better than the strangely banal antics of Anastasia Steele and her amoral sugar-daddy. And that’s where Archive of our Own comes in. (Thanks go to tehomet for first giving me the initial heads-up!)

Dr. Brooke Magnanti, writing on women and erotica for The Telegraph: Who writes the slashfic (slash fiction) and fanfic (fan fiction) online that takes sexually fantasising about well-known television and film characters to a whole new level? Women do. Early studies even suggested as many as 90 per cent of fanfic writers were female.

In the Orlando Sentinel, Patrick C. Fleming, who teaches composition at Rollins College, observed that today’s Frosh haven't gone to book-release parties, or written fan fiction, or had Wizard-themed birthday parties. They are quite ready to abandon their attachment to Rowling's books, unwilling to follow that attachment into new arenas.

( True Blood, Lawrence Leung, Iron Man 3, Kirk/Spock, BuffyCollapse )

On The Atlantic Wire, Richard Lawson wrote TNT has just ordered to series a Bay-produced action drama show called The Last Ship. It's about the Internet collectively deciding to no longer write slash fiction. No, no, of course not. Would that it were. Well, hrumph.

On Huffington Post, Faith Erin Hicks wrote I was a pretty repressed geek during my younger years. I probably would have been a full blown Star Trek: The Next Generation obsessed, X-Files fanfic writing, comic consuming geek if I'd actually felt like that was something appropriate to be, but I was kind of snobby as a teenager, viewing myself as someone who read Serious Books and had Serious Thoughts, when I secretly just wanted to moon over Data on TNG.

( Harry Potter, audio erotica, Glee, Marvel, Calgary politics, Bronies, Community, Julian SandsCollapse )

Author Ridley Pearson told St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Jane Henderson I post chapters and plot outlines on kingdomkeepersinsider.com and they vote on things and send fan fiction. I might ask, “In this scene do you want it to be this Kingdom Keeper or that one?”

Gothamist’s Jen Chung wrote Last year, former City Council member Melinda Katz announced that she was marrying Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa. She also added that he was the sperm donor for her two sons. While some felt it was like "nyc fan fiction," Sliwa's second ex-wife thought otherwise and is now suing Sliwa and Katz for $1.4 million, claiming that the couple scammed her out of $400,000.

Finally, writing in Salon, Aja Romano presented a run-down of Orson Scott Card’s views on fanfic (and other topics – oh, OSC, why are you so difficult?) and in honor of Card’s recent asserting that “Every piece of fan fiction is an ad for my book. What kind of idiot would I be to want that to disappear?”, invited readers to Enjoy the gay, gay [Ender’s Game] slash fanfiction—or write some of your own.

In a Telegraph piece on the continued popularity of Enid Blyton, Nicolette Jones wrote Blogs and websites now teem with collectors’ comments, enthusiasm from young readers, and fan fiction, including, for instance, only this month: “The Famous Five go to Hogwarts”.

Joe Hill told Vulture’s Zach Dionne Michael Chabon says all fiction is fan fiction — that every writer, when they set out to write a book, sort of has these other books in their head that they adore, and they want their book to make people feel that way.

NPR’s Lydia Zuraw wrote Apparently, fan fiction and fan art aren't the only options for expressing your love of Sherlock, Doctor Who and The Hunger Games. There's also tea. If you visit the online tea store of Adagio Teas, you'll find a collection of "Fandom Blends." They're the teas that customers have mixed and named after characters in favorite TV shows, books, movies and comics.

( Porn in India, JJ Abrams, 50 Shades fanfic, Anne RiceCollapse )

In a humorous piece for Stamford Advocate, Kevin McKeever wrote that, when the babysitter’s in charge, one kid hides upstairs writing One Direction fan fiction in her diary while the other hides in the basement creating Minecraft robots that look like SpongeBob SquarePants.

In Boise Weekly, Harrison Berry noted that William Norrett’s The Vanilla Gigolo Prescription is a novel with a title that sounds like Jason Bourne slash fiction. And the book's plot gives the title a run for its money.

( Resident Evil 6, Benedict Cumberbatch, bright young things, LL Cool J, 50 Shades! The Musical, Dallas, Anne FrankCollapse )

Your Ottawa Region’s Page Taylor wrote that According to the internet, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are dating. The pairing, called a “ship”, which originated from the word “relationship”, is a fan creation that exists in fan fiction, fan art and many a Tumblr post. The proverbial battle cry to defend these alternate pairings ring out on YouTube and many a fan website: “This ship is unsinkable!”

Digital Spy shared 9 of the weirdest [Star Trek] fanfiction stories.

Finally, here’s a sentence and a half, courtesy of Laurie Penny in New Statesman: Big business finally woke up to fan fiction with Fifty Shades of Grey - but only in the most superficial of fashions, failing to really plumb the murky depths of Harry Potter porn forums and alternate-universe co-writing kink projects, where suspicious lumps of sexual and literary innovation float to the surface of an endless well of pixellated filth.

In the Los Angeles Times, Steven Zeitchik reported on the process surrounding the creation of “Tricked”, a new Dutch film by director Paul Verhoeven. The Dutch-born filmmaker wanted fans in his native Holland to contribute chapters to a script for a short feature. Then he would fashion a movie out of the results. It was fan fiction that could be transformed, with a little help from the experts, into pro fiction.

It didn't exactly work out as he expected. […]Instead, what they received was a hodgepodge. New stories veered sharply from what came before. The tone was off. Genres landed further afield than a Mark Sanchez pass. Verhoeven quickly realized he had little to play with. […]When the suggestions poured in and they again found themselves with a mess (one writer might drop in aliens, another would dial in characters more at home in “50 Shades of Gray"), Verhoeven kept fiddling, working on the episode for several weeks, shooting it and repeating the process.

Entertainment Weekly PopWatch’s Geoff Boucher spoke with Rod Roddenberry (son of Gene) about Trek Initiative: “There’s tons of information out there. We don’t need to provide content, we just need to unite them. Whether it’s fan films, fan fiction, just people connecting to talk about the future … we wanted to provide a place where people from all walks of life can connect over a passion for Star Trek or a passion for the future.”

( Gamers are awesome, St. Albert has its own writer-in-residence?, Sydney sounds awesome tooCollapse )

( A bunch of authors mention fic: Hugh Howey, Rainbow Rowell, Beverly Nickelson, Dana FredstiCollapse )

On Comic Book Resources, Anna Pinkert explained Why Embracing Slash 
is Good for Everybody.

( Doctor Who, The Good Wife, fandom, NYUCollapse )

msilverstar alerted me to a Anna von Veh piece in Publishing Persectives, What Can Trade Publishers Learn from Fanfiction?

And, finally, (Nottingham) Impact’s Sarah Dear wrote, of fanfic, you either love it, or you just don’t get it.

The multiply-pseudonymed Jessica Clare told USA Today’s Pamela Clare that, from writing fanfic, she learned to take certain elements that make me crazy with love and apply them to my own books. Not that I'm lifting straight from authors I love, but it's more along the lines of a thought process. Like, self, why do you love X so much? It turns out that it's not because of how my favorite author wrote it (because there are always things I would change), but more along the lines of what it represents. So then I twist it and manipulate it until it's my own, if that makes sense.

Writing for Marketing Pilgrim, Cynthia Boris described the new SyFy series (or maybe ‘experience’ is a better term) Defiance as like legal fan fiction world.

In The Collegian (Kansas State University), Patrick White wrote While most fan fiction only rises to a mediocre level, there are a rare few that are actually quite good. I know, with friends like these…. But he goes on to talk about abridged series, which I’d never heard of but which sound pretty nifty.

In the Toronto Star, Heather Mallick proclaimed that The most boring subjects extant are golf, fan fiction and cars.

( My Little Pony, FanFiction Comedy, Janoskianators, kids today, Emily Dickinson, Mortal Instruments, Before Midnight, CommunityCollapse )

The Week’s Scott Meslow, referencing this Darla Murray piece on Vulture, shared that Mark Ruffalo is cool with your homoerotic Iron Man/Incredible Hulk fan fiction. Yipee!

On Wired’s Underwire, Angela Watercutter versilated We’d seen Holmes be portrayed by many Britons sharply dressed, / but this chap who played the hero quite engaged our interest. / (We mean that non-erotically, in case you’re in a pique. / But if that’s your cup of slashfic, then enjoy yourself, you freak.)

And finally, the Rock Hill Herald shared that the local library will host Fan Fiction & Art Cafe, 6-7:30 p.m. Tuesday for teens to share their works of art with others.

It looks like some Utah authors are trying to grow themselves a fandom, writing shared-world novellas that others can produce fic for, reported Desert News’s Christine Rappleye. Fan fiction is technically illegal if it uses copyrighted or licensed characters and ideas. With the license those with the Massive Fiction project are planning to use, the ideas, characters, setting and stories will be open for anyone to use, [contributing author Marion] Jensen wrote. “The setting, plot, and characters are already there (in fan fiction), and students can focus on smaller tasks such as dialogue or character arc,” Jensen wrote.

In Salon, Tracy Clark-Flory wrote Since [the 90s] we’ve seen the growth of explicit fan fiction — and with it, a greater cultural awareness of female desire for sexual explicitness — which has culminated in the global “Fifty Shades of Grey” phenomenon.

( Game of Thrones, The Mindy Project, Indiana Jones 4, more 50 ShadesCollapse )

( Pride and Prejudice and Kitties, Harry Potter & Doctor Who, Laura Kaye, Kevin BridgesCollapse )

Christian Today’s Bridget Brenton is distressed that This is the new generation that we’re moulding with porn, 50 Shades of Grey and “lemon” fanfiction.

On Fast Company, Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield wrote when fan-fiction writer E.L. James grafted pornography onto the romance novel and came up with the Fifty Shades trilogy, she not only created a new genre but put the publishing industry on steroids.

In a USA Today overview of recent Doctor Who-related books, Whitney Matheson wrote Doctor Who is no different from most wildly popular sci-fi properties in that it has spawned its own merchandise, conventions, fan fiction, you name it.

Finally, on Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch, Darren Franich shared that Late-blooming fan-fiction auteur Sylvester Stallone, on the verge of finishing his latest mash-up crossovers Tango & Terminator and Rocky vs. Raging Bull, is finally getting back to his crossover mega-franchise The Expendables (which is itself sort of the Crisis on Infinite Earths of old things).

I don’t have the guts to click through to the actual clip, but Entertainment Weekly’s Mandi Bierly, and other sources, report that On Sunday’s episode of CBS’ The Good Wife, Diane (Christine Baranski) asked the firm’s investigator Kalinda (Archie Panjabi) to run a background check on her so she’d know where she’d be vulnerable if Peter Florrick (Chris Noth) is elected governor and nominates her for the vacant seat on the Illinois Supreme Court, as planned. The first thing Kalinda turned up: Vampire Diaries fan fiction originating from Diane’s home IP address and email. Dudes, birds do it, bees do it, MIT PhDs do it – stop using my favorite hobby as a punchline!

William and Mary News’s Jim Ducibella wrote a piece about London Review of Books’ publication of student Katherine Arcement’s fan fiction essay.

Irsh Independent’s Alison Walsh is quite put-out that now you can hardly set foot outside the door without tripping over someone finishing a novel or publishing a poem, or uploading their fan-fiction on to a website.

Bowdoin College requires freshmen to enroll in a seminar course, picked from an interesting-looking list; among the choices is "Fan Fiction and Cult Classics," which has Washington Examiner’s Linda Chavez in a bit of a tizzy. (I suspect she tizzies easily.)

In Berkeley Beacon, Jason Madanjian wrote that a character in a student-written play takes guilty pleasure in writing romantic fan fiction about real life historical figures.

( Beautiful Stranger, The Host, Game of Thrones, Nicki Minaj, bronies, Tantra, a.m. infotainment, LovecraftCollapse )

Finally, Linda Jaivin shared her thoughts on the cheap thrills of fan fiction with readers of The Monthly.

Lots of Game of Thrones this week! On Huffington Post, Daniel D’Addario shared Nine over-the-top pieces of “Game of Thrones” fan fiction; in The Guardian, Graeme Virtue wrote, Whenever the Hound edged towards heroism – like saving young Sansa Stark from sexual assault – it sparked off a new round of breathless fan fiction; and, on Wired’s Underwire, Angela Watercutter suggested the reader take advantage of Game of Thrones action figures to prepare to get busted Lord-Helmet-in-Spaceballs-style while reenacting some fanfic.

The Host also prompted several refs. In Tulsa World, Michael Smith wrote that "The Host" is a science-fiction film based on Stephenie (sic) Meyer's follow-up to her "Twilight" series of books, and yes, there is a love triangle, plenty of handsome young men and a plot that plays like something out of a 13-year-old's frivolous fan fiction. And, for USA Today’s Happy Ever After, Justine Browning presented interviews with Stephanie Meyer and the cast of the film [in which they] discuss strong female characters, fan fiction and why the aliens in The Host are unlike any other extraterrestrials.

In the University of Toronto The Varsity, Alex Ross wrote about Fan Fiction and its vibrant community.

( Steampunks, JRRT, The Walking Dead, Harry Potter, God of WarCollapse )

On Den of Geek, Rachel Bowles interviewed Jonathan Creek star Alan Davies, who said I don’t know if it still happens as much now, but certainly in the nineties, fan fiction was a big thing. What, there was fanfic before Twilight and Harry Potter?

Finally, in New Indian Express, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy wrote This summer, if reading a lot of books seems too passive for you, how about writing a book? Or at least a short story? If that sounds exciting, but you’re not sure you can come up with enough ideas to base your story on, a great way get started is by writing fan fiction.

This is a bit confusing: Huffington Post featured a piece on Fan Fiction Turned Book Deals: Four Teen Authors Who Got Their Big Break Online. But the first author mentioned, Beth Reeks, doesn’t actually seem to have written fanfic. (Since corrected, but it's taken me two days to get this out, so, well, there you have it.)

On Vulture, Margaret Lyons wrote, regarding Girls, My solution: I root for Marnie and Hannah. Not to hook up, though I assume there is some slash-fiction that covers this base, but to be real friends again. And, on Papermag, Abby Schreiber and Elizabeth Thompson indulged in some Girls fan fiction of their own.

In the (wrong) Medford Mail Tribune, John Darling, in a piece about the evolving roll of libraries, interviewed Oregan State Librarian MaryKay Dahlgreen: "The big push is from collections to creations," she said, with less emphasis on "things from authors and artists." The new and imaginative growth areas are fan fiction and "maker spaces," she said. Fan fiction is creative writing in response to novels, in the style of "Fifty Shades of Grey," she explained, while maker spaces bring people together in libraries for arts, literature and crafts events.

( Copyright, The Hobbit, Aaron Carter, Bates Motel, New GirlCollapse )

Us Magazine’s Allison Takeda wrote Coolest wedding ever? In a scenario almost straight out of X-Men fan fiction, Magneto will marry his old friend/foe Professor X -- to the latter's fiancee, that is. Professor X portrayer Sir Patrick Stewart is set to tie the knot with Sunny Ozell, a New York-based jazz singer he's been dating since 2009 -- and when he does, the person who pronounces them husband and wife will be none other than the actor's X-Men costar Sir Ian McKellen, a.k.a. Magneto.

( Hogwarts houses, zine history, Stephanie Meyer, CommunityCollapse )

Finally, The Park Record’s Scott Iwasaki profiled local author James Wymore: "You can see that with big publishers who crank out these genre fictions that are almost carbon-copies of each other," Wymore said. "They feed an audience that is buying these books, and I understand that. But the more I work with independent books, the more I find that there are gems out there that offer world-changing writing. However, those books don't get the attention they deserve because of these mass-produced genre stories." The genre stories such as paranormal romance and young wizards, grow out of what Wymore calls "fan-fiction desire," where people read something they like and want to write their own similar story that features the same characters.

In the Los Angeles Times, in a piece on the upcoming Veronica Mars movie, Robert Lloyd wrote There is a sense of communal ownership when it comes to television, a kind of silent partnership forged over time. You see it expressed in the fan fiction that extends the life of a series beyond its cancellation and in YouTube videos where kids stage their own supplementary "Doctor Who" adventures. For the true believers, too much is never enough, and the only time to cancel a beloved series is never.

In a story for The Atlantic about Stephanie Meyer’s terming herself a feminist, and the surrounding skepticism, Noah Berlatsky wrote Twilight and The Host are pretty much entirely devoted to exploring women's feelings and women's relationships in the context of genres—romance, soap opera, fan fic—overwhelmingly associated with and consumed by women.

Huffington Post’s John Kinnear has a two-year-old daughter. So, before she starts quoting Faulkner and writes a fan-fiction sequel to The Sound and the Fury, I decided now would be a good time to write down some of the toddlerisms that are slowly fading away from her mind.

( Marissa Meyer, Jon Cozart (Disney Princesses), Harry Potter, Mass Effect 3, Tara Sue Me (more Twilight-inspired BDSM), Robert JeffressCollapse )

In a kind-of-right, kind-of-wrong summary of who hangs out where on the interwebz, Herald Sun’s Alice Clarke wrote Lovers of fanfiction live on LiveJournal (when it's not being hit by denial of service attacks by the Russians) and DreamWidth.

Finally, Smash, the makers of a Fifty Shades porn ‘parody,’ and Universal, have settled; in case you weren’t paying attention, Smash had argued that Fifty Shades of Grey was in the "public domain" because the author originally published it online on fan fiction websites (Eriq Gardner,The Hollywood Reporter).