Fanthropology - The Study of Fandom

Not exhaustive, but it's been that kind of summer...

HBO’s upcoming Confederate generated some recent refs. For The New York Times, Roxane Gay wrote I Don’t Want to Watch Slavery Fan Fiction. Emily Yahr wrote in The Washington Post that The backlash about the idea of “slavery fan fiction” was immediate, and many wondered what HBO was thinking — particularly because “Game of Thrones” has come under fire for its portrayals of race and violence. And, For Chicago Tribune, Nina Metz noted There are a number of reasons — thoughtful, well-researched reasons — why people are objecting to a premise that sounds like slavery fan fiction.

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In 'What would happen if Hamlet were a girl in the Internet age?' for The Washington Post, Celia Wren wrote that The Elsinore-prowling man in black becomes Elsie, an Internet-roaming teenage girl in black, in "To Tell My Story: A Hamlet Fan¬fic," an ingenious, if sometimes strenuously jokey, new play by Alexandra Petri. (Petri is a writer for the paper who’s produced more than her share of fanfic fanfic refs over the years.)

In a New Yorker review of Ben Blatt’s Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing, Dan Piepenbring wrote American writers of Harry Potter fan fiction are actually more liable to use “brilliant” than their British counterparts, who employ the word with native agility.

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Cosmoploitan’s Lilian Min wrote that This Jeopardy Love Story Is The Stuff of Fan Fiction.

From Ashley Eady for The Wrap: Bruce Willis ‘Death Wish’ Trailer Blasted as ‘Alt-Right Fan Fiction’.

Finally, The Macalope produced Wishful thinking: Alexa fan fiction for Macworld.

According to Katharine Trendacosta on io9, Fan Fiction Is a Bad Television Show's Best Friend (thanks, msilverstar!).

Caroline Knorr took a look Inside the racy, nerdy world of fanfiction (CNN).

A recent episode of NPR’s Ask Me Another featured Fans, Fiction, And Fan Fiction (guest: Chris Colfer).

Breitbart’s Adam Shaw wrote that Newsweek Dabbles in ‘President Hillary’ Fan Fiction.

This story was amusing; as summarized by Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent, Man reading 'Harry Potter' realises he's actually bought adult fan fiction - except I’m pretty sure he just found it online. For New York Post, Hannah-Rose Yee wrote This guy mistook X-rated ‘Harry Potter’ fan fiction for the real deal. And, from Katie O’Malley on ELLE: Man Hilariously Mistakes Adult Fan Fiction For Harry Potter And It's Heartbreaking.

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Times-Dispatch’s Rachel Marsden wrote After months of gossip, speculation and fan fiction, U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin finally met in person for the first time at last week’s G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.

For The Brag, Nathan Jolly wrote that Joel McHale from Community, The Soup (and your fan fiction) is coming to Sydney

In ‘Much loved misfits’ in The Hans India: It is an easy task for writers to be fan fiction writers as there is no need to start from the ground up, people just borrow established characters and stories and add their own take and thoughts to it.

From Star Weekly: Julie Dollery used to juggle a job at IBM while writing fan fiction online. When she was made redundant, the 50-year-old Sanctuary Lakes resident used it as an opportunity to focus on her writing. She tells Charlene Macaulay about completing her first book, and her love of Wyndham.

CBS Miami reported that Fan Fiction App Has Users ‘Hooked’ Through Text-Style Stories.

Finally, from a Wicked Local Malden piece about a visit from author Cammie McGovern: Malden Reads will collaborate with the literacy coaches and educators in the Malden Public Schools to share the students’ fan fiction with McGovern.

Google News changes have limited the number of stories I can figure out how to access; so, this is less exhaustive than usual. Also, this summer is a beast, so I’ll be doing updates when I can, but probably not weekly (though I’ll try to still cover as much as I can see).

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Harry Potter’s legacy will continue in the fan fiction culture it inspired - Julia Alexander, Polygon. From Mashable: These 6 Harry Potter fan fiction trends always make us LOL. In New Statesman, Stephen Bush shared some Potter fic he wrote in the early 00’s. And, from Eleanor Margolis in New Statesman: At the age of 13, I’d never read any erotica – until I discovered Hermione/Ginny fan fiction.

For the Edmonton Examiner, Doug Johnson described local author Tim Bowling’s The Heavy Bear as [a] work of creative non-fiction [which] takes the character through a car chase and the theft of a monkey, a kind of self fan-fiction using fantastic elements to explore Bowling, the writer’s, areas of research.

GQ’s Alex Siquig opined that Most ancient Greeks didn’t have the spare time to LARP their fan-fic fantasies, but [Steve] Bannon certainly is picking up their slack.

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Finally, according to Heather Weaver for Vanity Fair, Leighton Meester and Adam Brody Do Not Have Time for Your Crossover Fan Fiction. Fair enough, as I really don’t have time for them, whoever they are.

The New York Times published Amanda Hess’s 'When Fan Fiction and Reality Collide,' about “FANtasies,” a new anthology web series where fan fiction about internet stars is “brought to life.” As someone who writes YouTuber rpf/rps, I am… really uneasy about this.

For Comicsverse, Colleen Etman compiled A History of Slashfiction.

From Ed Mazza in Huffington Post: Creationist Fan Fiction Features Noah Fighting Giants And Dinosaurs.

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For USA Today, Christian Schneider wrote It's not as if gerrymandering is a new practice; according to some accounts, it predated even the American Revolution. Partisan apportionment was known to the nation's founding fathers — it is rumored that Patrick Henry actually attempted, unsuccessfully, to gerrymander James Madison out of the First Congress. (Which, in my fan fiction describing the event, ended with an old-style caning to settle the dispute.)

Los Angeles Times’s Yvonne Villarreal wrote In our own [This Is Us] fan fiction, we imagine [Ron] Howard enlisting Kevin as a last-minute addition to the Han Solo production. Hartley, though, is just crossing his fingers that more Howard cameos are in his future.

From Nuria Perea on BuzzFeed News: How Indie Movies And Fanfic Helped Me Learn How To Be A Lesbian.

Finally, in a review of an art exhibition, The Boston Globe’s Cate McQuaid wrote Yuan Runhe’s wily painted fan, “A Surface of Obtained Flaws,” depicts an envelope and a thank-you note, which says that, in gratitude, the writer is sending a painting of a fan. Is it the object itself? Perhaps, but Yuan also paints a piece of a painting of a fan. Call it fan fiction.

Instinct Magazine carried Sam Claflin On Finding The Right Gay Role & 'Hunger Games' Gay Fan Fiction.

There was plenty of fanfic talk in Kaitlyn Tiffany’s THE FOUNDER OF PINBOARD ON WHY UNDERSTANDING FANDOM IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS for The Verge.

GQ’s Jay Willis wrote that, following James Comey’s recent testimony, The left began writing its impeachment fanfiction at a more furious rate than ever.

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A Margaret Smith piece in Wicked Local Chelmsford about encounters with Adam West mentioned Batman fanfic.

Andy Greene described Nirvana’s “Floyd the Barber” as essentially an ultra-violent piece of Andy Griffith fan fiction for Rolling Stone.

In ‘The Refreshing Queer Sensibility of American Gods’ for The Atlantic, Manuel Betancourt wrote [showrunner Bryan] Fuller’s trademark style enwrapped NBC’s horror-thriller drama Hannibal, where he turned a notorious cannibal and his FBI profiler into a homoerotic pairing that inspired a fan-fiction genre called Hannigram.

For America Magazine, Rob Weinert-Kendt wrote that Lucas Hnath’s "A Doll’s House, Part 2,” may come off a bit like fan fiction as written by Tom Stoppard.

You won’t believe what kids are writing about celebs, book characters and other pop culture stars (Caroline Knorr, republished on Salon).

Finally, in ‘How Women Are Changing Geek Culture,’ republished on Forbes, Cecilia Tan, in answering ‘What kinds of roles do women play, in nerd culture in 2017?,’ wrote: People put their energies where they get the best encouragement and positive feedback. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the fandom and nerd culture arenas where women don't just participate but dominate tend to be non-commercial: fan fiction, fan art, cosplay, book blogging and book-tubing. But there are also women making video games, creating comics, hitting the bestseller lists, and winning Hugo and Nebula Awards. There's no space or role that I see in nerd culture that is exclusively a male domain.

From Kaitlyn Tiffany on The Verge: Crowdsourced definitions of ‘fan fiction’ hint at a sprawling, formless genre.

In a Newsweek piece about The Babadook as gay icon, Claire Shaffer wrote It’s no wonder, then, that the internet is quick to pounce on anything that might even remotely resemble queer representation. It’s part of why “slash fiction” is so popular on Tumblr, and why the 2015 period piece Carol still has a sizable internet following two years later.

There was a bit of chatter in parts of the media I don’t usually include here about [a] Harry Potter Fan Film [which] Explores Voldemort’s Origins (Ana Dumaraog, Screen Rants).

Regarding the 1956 meeting Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash, Elgin Courier-News’s Annie Alleman wrote It's a story that sounds like a music historian's fan fiction, but it actually happened one night in Memphis.

From a piece about China’s Generation Z by Qi Xijia for Global Times: Ling Ling, a graduate student from Shanghai University, said for a time she craved to be a voice actor because she had a crush on some Japanese anime characters, but now this idea has been replaced by her new interest in writing fanfiction for characters of the Marvel comic book universe.

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In a New York Magazine piece about exploration via Tinder, Breena Kerr wrote if you aren’t attracted to someone, for instance, who cares if you are both into the same fan fiction?

Forbes’s Hayley C. Cuccinello explored How Christina Lauren Went From [Twilight] Fanfiction Fame To 14 Bestsellers.

In a Globe and Mail review of Andrew Pyper’s The Only Child, Spencer Gordon wrote Today’s horror fans are trained to read, and watch, historically. From the grimiest of B-movie remakes to the cheek and transgression of fan-fic, horror exists on a knowing continuum, a tangled cobweb of tribute and rip-off.

In a piece for Asian Age about why no Indian shows or films produce as much fan output as Game of Thrones, Suridhi Sharma quoted author Anand Neelkanthan: “Perhaps all the Puranas were written as fan fiction. There are so many versions of Hindu mythology like Ramayana and Mahabharata that I think we have passed the stage of exploring fan fiction in itself,” he laughs, adding, “There are around 300 versions of Ramayana, so all this could be fan fiction. There are around 80 or 90 versions of Mahabharata. Each Purana has so many versions. There is fan fiction on Shiva and Vishnu. No stories have been as impactful for Indians as mythology, which is also why a lot of mythology-based fiction is selling so well now. Hanuman is our own Superman,” he quips.

Finally, msilverstar pointed me to an interesting Boing Boing piece by Racheline about bringing a fanfic sensibility to Tremontaine, concluding If you write stories – in your sandbox or anyone else’s -- the truth is that you’ve already met the wizard, because that’s what all of us that tell stories are.

For a review of Zoe Fraade-Blanar and Aaron M Glazer’s Super Fandom: How Our Obsessions are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are for The Hindu, Sravanthi Challapalli wrote Did you know the Bible had its own fan fiction dating back to the 15th century, attributed to Margery Kempe who could neither read nor write?

From CBC Radio: Scholastic pulls fan-fiction Minecraft book that compares Indian name to a fart.

Claire Fallon presented Diving Deep Into The Erotic World Of ‘Harry Potter’ Fan Fiction for Huffington Post.

In ‘Did Prince Harry hit up Obama for advice on Meghan Markle?’ for The Mercury News, Martha Ross wrote the fact that the two have obviously hit it off and might share similar global and philanthropic concerns, as well as a fun-loving sense of humor, can lead to some serious fan fiction-type speculation.

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In a piece about today’s crossword for The New York Times’s Wordplay, Deb Amlen wrote CANON is the story as written by an original author, and fan fiction is a homage of sorts that branches out from or changes things about the CANON.

From Gavia Baker-Whitelaw on The Daily Dot: Pinboard just bought Delicious, which brings a wild story full circle.

Finally, for Daily Mail Australia, Alex Michael wrote Perhaps fearing [Orange is the New Black] and [</i>Wentworth</i>] will never crossover, some devout fans have even been driven to produce fan fiction to fill the void.

From Todd Spangler in Variety: YouTube Stars, Wattpad Stories Tapped for Fullscreen’s Fan-Fiction Anthology Series. Yikes.

In 'Girl power: How the fans whose tastes we’ve been most dismissive of may prove the most resilient,' National Post's Sadaf Ahsan wrote Their taste is – more often than not – dismissed as hysterical. They populate Twitter, blogs and online forums. They hit up Ticketmaster on the dot. They write fan-fiction pairing their favourite singers together. They form fanclubs and fansites. And they scream louder than just about anyone else. They are young girls, and as such, the things that they love are open to ridicule, merely because they love them so boldly and with such eager abandon.

For the Duluth News Tribune, Christa Lawler wrote, of the Franconia Sculpture Park, The horizon is a post-apocalyptic fan-fiction fodder: a collection of wooden houses — one sunken, one seemingly airborne, one roofless, one dog-shaped — all alongside animals taken out of context, LEGO-like structures, geometrics, human figures and singled-out body parts.

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For The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer noted Trump’s budget remains a kind of fiduciary fan fiction for Freedom Caucus conservatives, who can fantasize about a skinnier government without ever living with the political consequences. So even if it never come to pass, it’s worth noting: This is what they want.

In an interesting New York Times piece on censorship, Balli Kaur Jaswal admitted there was a lot of “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” fan fiction in my early career.

In a NewStatesman review of the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, Pauline Bock wrote It is a story of sons and daughters – Turner’s son Henry is following in the family tradition, trying to save his father from a curse – usually the sign that a series is dangerously lurking into fan fiction (here's looking at you, Harry Potter’s Cursed Child).

For New Republic, Jeet Heer wrote [Louise] Mensch often veers into surrealistic fan fiction, saying she believes Russian President Vladimir Putin “murdered” Andrew Breitbart in 2012, “funded riots in Ferguson” against police violence, and entrapped Anthony Weiner in a sexting scandal with a 15-year-old girl.

Finally, for Shepherd Express, Russ Bickerstaff wrote Robots and burlesque go together like...robots and burlesque. And really, what could possibly be more sexy than a Dalek? The first weekend of June finds Dainty Rogues asking that very question as the locally-based group presents an all-original Dr. Who fan fiction for the stage.

The Washington Post’s Matt O'Brien observed that Trump doesn't show any […] ability to distinguish fact from fan fiction when it comes to his policies.

In 'Is burlesque sex work?' for Colorado Springs Independent, Alissa Smith wrote that one performer she intereviewed brings up "nerdlesque" a subset of burlesque that is based in pop culture, a kind of "live fanfiction."

In an Orlando Sentinel review, Dewayne Bevil wrote This is not your father, son or holy ghost’s Bible story. In “Biblical Fan Fiction,” a four-member cast puts a spins on the scriptures.

From BuzzFeed contributor Arianna Rebolini: I Found My Voice As A Writer In Justin Timberlake Fan Fiction.

A Straits Times profile of Ning Cai by John Lui mentioned that, a voracious reader as a child, she became a prolific writer of fan fiction as a teenager on Web forums dedicated to the cult fantasy television series, Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001).

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From a promotional blurb on Broadway World for Joy Butler’s The Permission Seekers Guide Through the Legal Jungle Second Edition: [The book] is the resource for anyone clearing rights with new and expanded information on fan fiction, protectable art, writers, filmmaker, musicians, website developers, political and cause marketing, and wiretapping.

According to Michael Harthorne on Newser, some folks are composing fan fiction about Moon's bodyguard, describing him as a "square-jawed serious romantic lead," according to the New York Post.

In 'Al Green Becomes First Congressman to Call for Trump's Impeachment,' Houston Press’s Dianna Wray wrote While Green isn't the first Democrat to talk impeachment — it's been a popular bit of Democrat congressional fan fiction ever since Trump won the election — he was the first to actually call for it on the House floor.

Marissa Meyer told Los Angeles Times’s Tracy Brown I was obsessed with [Sailor Moon] as a teenager, especially the romance between Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask, for whom I wrote a ton of fan fiction.

In a Guardian review of Andrew Wilson’s A Talent for Murder, Ian Sansom wrote You may perhaps have read those books in which Jane Austen is a detective, or the Brontës come back as ghosts: fan fiction in which a writer’s enthusiasm for their literary hero leads them towards a reimagining of the hero’s life.

Finally, for ThisWeek Community News, Margaret Towery wrote This joyful, engaging kind of reading often leads to greenbelt writing. Informal, ungraded, whimsical entries in a notebook or digital environment are the kinds of scribblings students and adults fill with humor and voice.

For The New Indian Express, Vidya Vijay and Astha Narang noted Bengaluru is one of the many Indian cities riding the the Hallyu Wave. There are online communities promoting this culture -- hosting discussions on Korean pop music and dramas -- and people learning the language and greeting friends with a ‘Anyeounghoseyo’. There are meetups organised at Korean restaurants, groups that follow the fashion of Korean idols and readers who track fan fiction religiously.

For Publishers Weekly, Sue Corbett quoted St. Martin’s Press editor Sylvan Creekmore: Part of fandom and fan fiction and fan culture is taking something from a story that spoke to you and making it your own, and that’s incredibly potent in communities that feel underrepresented in popular culture.”

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The Washington Post’s Rachel Podnar asked Who’s here for Justin Trudeau/Emmanuel Macron fan fiction?

Author Adam Silvera told MTV’s Marisa Kanter I was writing Harry Potter fan fiction and Charmed fan fiction and Supernatural fan fiction as a kid. I mean, those were the stories that I was obsessed with.

For reasons I couldn’t be bothered to figure out, CNET’s Ben Fox Rubin wondered Can the US Army's sci-fi fan fic save us from a dark future?

Finally, for NewStatesman, Eleanor Margolis mused are we so hungry for lesbian visibility that we’re looking to K-pop fanfiction to tide us over until the new season of Orange Is the New Black is released?