• In The birth of a fanboy, writer Larry Sukernik talks about the rationalization people use for their investments in something, as the seed that shifts them from consumer to fan. "[Once] you buy your first iPhone...you’re invested in Apple. Apple’s success is now your success, Apple’s failure is your failure. But why?" The reason is the continuation of the fandom product, because its loss will negatively impact your investment in it. "Not only does that leave you with an abandoned phone, but it also means that you made the incorrect phone choice. You made a bad decision, and you were wrong. Nobody wants to be wrong."
• A look at Girls' Generation fandom also discussed financial investment in a fandom. The group is "enjoyed by people of all walks of life. But within that is where we start to see sharp differences in fans: not in their love, but in their wealth. While there are individuals with high-paying jobs and disposable income, there are also students with nothing but a meager allowance attempting to import relatively expensive albums from halfway across the world. It’s situations like this that make us ask, 'Does merchandise and money spent on the group measure a person’s dedication?'"
• While the creation of fanworks has its costs, these days it increasingly has its rewards as well. Fanfiction contests are fairly common but one held by the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Library has a focus on fan crafts as well. "The contest was started seven years ago by an anime club that met at the library and has grown to more than 100 entries in the two categories" with fan art comprising any non-text entry. "[L]ibrarian John Hilbert said. 'Someone baked a cake in the shape of a cat. We had a tree skirt that ended up winning. It can be any medium as long as it can fit through the door.'"
• Of course these days a fanwork might make money for someone other than the creator. A review of Spank: The Musical, a parody of Fifty Shades of Grey, "pokes fun at James’ writing process and her roots in fan fiction. The musical centers on a woman named E.B. Janet (Suzanne Sole), who spends a weekend penning a steamy love story." The play caters to its "audience of mostly women" with fanservice, even if they don't know the term. "When Hugh performed a Batman-themed strip tease, and E.B. describes him as having the jaw line of, 'a pre-weight gain Val Kilmer,' the audience squawked and squealed. In another scene, Hugh and Tasha play out a 'Home Improvement' skit that E.B. writes as part of the show’s fan fiction while taking a break from her book."

What fanworks, financial issues and fan practices have caught your attention? Tell us 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.

Here's a roundup of legal and technology stories that might be of interest to fans:

• A steady stream of announcements show that quite a few companies are chasing the fan market. For example Chatwing.com sent out a press release to announce the Chatwing chat box for anime fan fiction writers. The Nico Nico Seiga image sharing website announced they would start hosting "user-submitted manga along with officially-serialized titles." Unfortunately some companies are not getting on the bandwagon. The Escapist reported that Lord of the Rings fans were starting petitions to save a game mod. "'[The Middle-Earth Roleplaying Project] is a Lord of the Rings total conversion for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim made, non for profit, by volunteers in their spare time,' the petition reads. 'We, the undersigned, call upon Warner Bros. Entertainment to lift the cease and desist from MERP and allow the developers to continue as they were with no hindrance.'"
• Various countries have been instituting or proposing restrictive laws on what can be posted online. Malaysia's Evidence Act, known as Section 114A prompted protests among Malaysian sites "similiar to the way hundreds of American sites and countless users protested the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP Acts (SOPA and PIPA) in January." The concern was because "'if allegedly defamatory content is traced back to your username, electronic device, and/or WiFi network, Section 114A presumes you are guilty of publishing illicit content on the Internet.'" The Phillipines' Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 has extended their libel law to forestall cybersex. "'It does outlaw porn online,' Raissa Robles, the South China Morning Post’s Manila correspondent, told the Daily Dot via Twitter. 'Some netizens here r[sic] concerned even sending each other explicit pics could violate law.'"
• Commercial interests are an additional problem for digital goods users or creators. Market Watch talked about the uncertain rights of survivors to their loved ones' digital media collections. Meanwhile NPR reported on efforts to extend Rights Of Publicity. "[T]he very first case where the right of publicity was recognized even for the living was not until the 1950s. Up until then, there was a right of privacy. There was an ability to prevent...the use of your name or image in advertising during your life against your wishes. But once you had given up your right of privacy, there was nothing that allowed you to market your name or image." But it's often not the celebrities who are asking for more rights. "[W]e have an expansion of this right of publicity, and it's really being driven...by corporations that have acquired the interests of dead people."

If you're an anime fan, a fan of dead people, or have something to say about user rights online, tell it to Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup. 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

Here's a roundup of stories on explaining fandom that might be of interest to fans:

• A recent article about the Anime Boston con attempted to explain it to non-anime fans by utilizing sports fandom. Contrasting how "you dress up like your favorites", "Your passion infiltrates your “real life” in little ways", "You become (perhaps overly) invested in the outcomes", "It's all escapism", it concludes "It's about community...Boston is a diverse city, full of all kinds of people from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds, education levels, and socioeconomic statuses, but the city’s teams have a quasi-magical way of creating a certain camaraderie among us all, no matter how little we seem to have in common at first." The moral being "Pushing one highly enthusiastic, occasionally very public fandom to the fringe and treating it as a strange obsession while celebrating another is just silly. Otakus are just like everyone else."
• OTW Board member Francesca Coppa took part in a CNN interview explaining fan fiction in connection with the fan fiction origins of Fifty Shades of Grey. The novel might have made history by including a disclaimer about its start online except that it never mentions the words "fan fiction." A divide thus continues in terms of discussions about published erotica versus fan fiction as these two articles by Publishers Weekly and The Frisky indicate, even though both posts are dedicated to connecting Fifty Shades readers with similar content.
• As various recent events attest, fan fiction is moving from text to performance art, introducing it to still more audiences. FanFiction Comedy, a product of the New Zealand comedy scene, consists of the troupe reading fan fiction they have written on stage, and has received a fair amount of press attention. Lawrence Leung's take on it is instead from the POV of someone who has had fanfic written about him. And as this article about an open mic night suggests, fanfic writers everywhere may soon be taking to the stage to share their work. Still others may be sharing their work in ways they wouldn't prefer, as is the case with Mark Watches who is offering to do readings of "bad fic" as a fundraiser.

If you are an anime fan or a fanfic writer, why not discuss it in Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. 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.

Here's a roundup of stories on what fans want that might be of interest to fans:

• The Anime News Network recently posted a multi-part series looking at the anime economy. "Anime has always appealed to the nerdy, the intellectually curious, and the technically savvy, and from the earliest days of American anime fandom we've used the internet to congregate, to exchange information, and as soon as the technology allowed, trade anime. It's only in the last few years that the industry has caught up, competing with fansubs and largely meeting the fans where they're at, and going to quite some expense to do so." Focusing on the changing delivery and monetization system for anime, the article concludes that "if the internet and the impact of piracy has taught us anything over the last few years, it's that consumers have choices, and don't need DVDs or legal websites to watch the shows they want. Not everyone will want to contribute to the shows they love, but many people have that sense of goodwill. . . The future of the anime market, and the entertainment market in general, is in building a relationship with fans, an emotional connection that they get something out of."
• While it's common to find fans upset about the ending to storylines in their fandoms, "an unsatisfying ending to Mass Effect 3" has caused a particularly notable reaction, in which ME3 fans are "going a step further, actively demanding that BioWare change the ending as it's currently constructed." The post at Ars Technica cites a campaign for change on Facebook and Twitter and a plan to protest at a upcoming con game panel. "For many, the lack of direct player control over some rather massive story threads seems to be the main sticking point. After investing dozens of hours into a story where every decision seems to matter, Mass Effect 3 players 'reach the ending of ME3 and realize that everything you have done means nothing,' as the Facebook protest group puts it." The poster has some sympathy for the complaint, noting that "it's as if the creators at Bioware have let players build an elaborate, twisting ant colony over a span of years, then came along and blasted that colony away with a leaf blower at the last second just to prove that they could (and to make a point about how the universe works)." The fan reaction prompted Bioware co-founder Ray Muzyka to release a statement on the matter, which said "that the power of our medium flows from our audience, who are deeply involved in how the story unfolds, and who have the uncontested right to provide constructive criticism" and that the team was reviewing feedback from numerous online sites to see how they could address player concerns.
• The Christian Science Monitor also wonders, "Is TV Paying Too Much Attention to Fans?" but decides that a viewer's role is ultimately limited. As "Chuck" writer/producer Phil Klemmer explains, "'I don't think there's room for fans' voices in a writers' room. There [are] already so many voices trying to reach a consensus, inviting the whole world into a writers' room is more chaos than it can bear.' Klemmer also points out a more pragmatic reason that fans can't influence plot and character to any great extent – the lag between when a show is written and when it airs." However, as the article's author concludes, "In the future, the line between commercial production and fan-created content may blur, especially for a show like 'My Little Pony,' where the production tools, such as Adobe Flash, are readily available. ['My Little Pony' supervising director Jayson] Thiessen says that he has seen fan-created content that approaches the level of quality seen in the show, and is intrigued by the idea of shows crowdsourcing part of their production. 'It's so new that it's kind of unprecedented. So who knows?'"

If you are a gamer, anime, or TV show fan, why not write about it in Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. 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.