• Writing about fandom in the Phillipines, Business World Weekender focused on its monetary value. "Foreign pop idols’ 'fan meets' are a fairly recent trend in the country. While 'fans’ days' are regularly held by local artists, only lately did foreign stars hit our shores to conduct their own 'fan service'." The article concluded "In the Philippines, fanaticism may still be a luxury. But whatever the reason -- awesome talent, psychological gratification, fulfillment of an inexplicable fantasy -- there are avid buyers. Like an expensive watch or a designer bag, the urge to spend is often irresistible -- irresistibility that will cause the fandom phenomenon to flourish."
• Roddenberry heir, Rod, has finalized a new documentary on Star Trek fandom. Discussing Paramount's approach, he said "I feel that the powers-that-be have really lost that opportunity. I think they’ve gotten better in recent years, but I’d say for decades...they were sending cease-and-desist orders to fan websites that had photos of actors and Star Trek logos on them. That’s someone who is looking at the here-and-now and not thinking about the future. And those sorts of things went on for years and really upset me...I found boxes and boxes of personal correspondence from my father...[w]here he responded personally to fans who were sending in questions about the show. And that’s what strengthened the Roddenberry connection with them. In that we genuinely care. And the studio at that time, and not so long ago, really didn’t seem to."
• The University of Wisconsin, Madison wrote about student Ashley Hinck's PhD research on fan activism in Harry Potter fandom. "In doing this research, I'm working against the idea that super fans are weird, crazy loners. For these fans, it is very serious and it has really important implications for who they are as political subjects, as citizens...People have always been fans of things, but organized fandom ... it's easier to hook up with other fans, too, because of the Internet. Fandom is just really motivating because it gives you a reason to connect to something, and then you can use that connection as a vehicle to get to other places...That deep connection is powerful."
• Author J.M. Frey spoke about fandom from the inside and why it is important. "You build communities like those Archive of Our Own and Fanfiction.net, Tumblr and Deviant Art. You do good deeds in the name of the writers, actors, and shows that you love...You parlay your love into degrees, courses, conferences, academic readers, and text books. You call out work that is problematic and encourage creators to grow, to learn, to take an interest, to get better. You find things in my work that I might not have realized I put there and you play with them. It’s incredible."

What stories do you have about why fandom is important? Write about them in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

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• Morgan Davies wrote about the stages of becoming a Teen Wolf fan. "I used to creep downstairs after my parents had gone to sleep to plug my laptop into the dial-up cable in our family room and load all seventeen chapters of a story in different windows before scurrying back upstairs and reading them all in bed until three in the morning, always ready to snap the computer closed and pretend to be asleep in case anybody came looking. Some years later...I started telling myself that at some point I would outgrow fanfiction, and fandom in general...I kept telling myself this until I was around twenty, or twenty-one, and then I decided that persistent self-delusion wasn’t cute."
• Being a fan is increasingly being seen as someone who is a producer themselves. Den of Geek collected examples of fan creations memorializing Doctor Who's 50th anniversary. The variety of ways to be creative and share with others keeps expanding.
• Diana Uy wrote in Manila Standard Today about How to be a Kpop Fangirl, interviewing Gigi Melodias. "Melodias discovered some of her longtime friends through fangirl forums and concerts. In 2009, She collaborated with some of these friends to start FangirlAsia.com, the first online store of Kpop merchandise with its own domain in the Philippines. Today, FangirlAsia.com is owned by Melodias, her husband, and sister. With some extra help, this small band of Kpop fans also organizes artist events and gatherings for loyal Kpop fans."
• At least in sports fandom howerver, the collecting aspect is a predominant form of fandom activity. Thom Lovero wrote about jerseys as a symbol of fandom. "The jersey has become the flag of sports -- the most powerful symbol of the connection between fans and their teams. 'You can’t do any more than wear a player’s number on your back to show that connection,' said Merrill Melnick, a retired sports sociologist at SUNY Brockport who specialized in studying fan behavior." But when things go sour, the jersey takes the brunt of fan anger. "'When the athlete does something to let them down, they can’t take them to court, so symbolically they burn a jersey,' Wann said. 'It’s like someone throwing a ring back in the face, as publicly as they could possibly cut off the ties to the athlete.'"

What fan history stories do you know of? Write about them in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

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• Microsoft has been in the news for its copyright decisions in the past few months. Shogun Gamer had a discussion about Microsoft's retraction of a DRM decision that would have limited game buyers' rights to share games and would have required people to be connected online daily, which also restricted who could use the content. Perhaps the earlier controversy informed their second decision to open up the X-box to development. "[T]he company is doing away with its unpopular publishing restrictions, opening the door for independent developers to create and release their own games on Xbox One without enlisting the aid of a publishing partner. That essentially turns every Xbox One owner -- from well known developers to your average Joe -- into a potential Xbox One game maker."
• At PBS' Mediashift, Patricia Aufderheide discussed the case of a music copyright incident and its troubling outcome. "Baio warns fellow remixers everywhere that “fair use will not save you,” and “nothing you have ever made is fair use.” Whoa. Neither of these statements is true. Fair use is riding high in the courts. The fair uses of "Jersey Boys," who used clips from "The Ed Sullivan Show," were forcefully vindicated just a few weeks ago, and the litigious rightsholders were ordered to pay the defendants’ costs and fees. Georgia State University successfully defended a copyright lawsuit brought by greedy publishers, and got a court order for the publishers to pay over $3 million in attorneys’ fees and costs."
• It's easy, however, to find cases of companies taking questionable actions, such as the movie subtitle fansite undertexter.se being raided by the police. The site contained user-submitted translations of movie dialog. "The copyright industry in Sweden has previously asserted threateningly that the dialog of a movie would be covered by the copyright monopoly, and that any fan translation – even for free – would be a violation of that monopoly." However, a similar case took place in Poland where "the charges were dropped and the expert opinion was that translating from hearing and sharing for free is not infringing the copyright monopoly. This is relevant as any EU court sets precedent all over the EU."

What legal and technology stories have you seen that impact fan activities? Write about them in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

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• Journalists and bloggers who have come across only a few works about fandom have a tendency to make broad claims about those documents. Case in point, Irish Times writer Brian Boyd who says that the new fandom documentary Springsteen and I is "the first feature of its type to de-stigmatise fandom and celebrate it as a meaningful and healthy form of behaviour." However, fandom studies are going on continuously, as Canada's Metro notes in a recent feature on a graduate student who is researching female fans of Saskatchewan Roughriders. Not all examinations of fandom need to be a form of defense, either, since negative behavior can itself be informative to either fans or their culture at large.
• For example, The Daily Dot put a spotlight on anti-fandom spaces: "The Tumblr Your Fave is Problematic (YFIP) has one purpose: making sure you have a list of all the uncool things—read: racist, homophobic, sexist, ableist, sizeist, transphobic—your favorite celebrity has allegedly done or said. Normally it flies under the fandom radar, serving its intended purpose as a resource for people looking for the other side of the endless waves of praise that fandom can bestow on its chosen heroes." The purposes behind it are varied. "[I]n an increasingly diverse, increasingly mainstreamed fandom, the number of cultural and political clashes is increasing all the time" and "The distinction between fan and critic, advocate and antagonist is widening but blurring with every baited reblog. And as anti-fandoms continue to grow along with fandom itself, it seems to be a divide that won’t be shrinking any time soon."
• The Washington Post used sports fandom to discuss fans' monetary tributes to their favorite fannish objects. "[P]rompted by a question from his own fiancee — he’s actually thought a lot about why he felt so compelled to buy the quarterback an inexpensive gift from his registry, even though he still hasn’t bought wedding gifts for some of his closest personal friends." The fan replied that “'It’s no one else’s decision whether I buy a cake pan for a guy I’m never going to meet. And so what if he’s got 15 of them? I’m now a part of his cabinet. A little piece of me is part of that cake pan in his cabinet. It’s less about Robert than it is about the fans. We want to be a part of his life, just the same way he’s a part of ours.'”
• On the other end of the scale Seoul Beats wrote about how some fans are deliberately disconnected from the sources of their fandom and points of fan congregation. "There does indeed seem to be a very large disconnect between the purported global aims of Hallyu, the Korean Wave, and the way that international K-pop fans are treated within K-pop fandoms. Specifically, despite the fact that K-pop companies are (and for the past few years, have been) essentially falling all over themselves to attract more interest from the farthest corners of the globe, when it comes to official K-pop fandom, international fans are, for the most part, just plain unwelcome and need not apply." The article examines discrimination in fan club memberships which affect the experiences fans can have as well as how the visibility of non-Korean fans can be limited.

What interesting examinations of fandom have you come across? Write about it in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.