• All sorts of works inspire the desire for more. Anthony Tommasini writes in The New York Times about the future lives of opera characters. "There is a lively realm of fan fiction focused on movie and television characters, in which viewers share ideas on how some breakup or betrayal might turn out. Opera fans, by contrast, are fixated on characters who have been around for generations, even centuries...Yet we, too, like to speculate on what happens after the final curtain falls. Several recent books grapple with Puccini’s 'Madama Butterfly,' imagining what happens to the 3-year-old boy, nicknamed Trouble, born to the caddish Lieutenant Pinkerton and Cio-Cio San, the geisha who commits suicide. Online, opera lovers are pretty playful about their fantasies of what might happen in favorite works, especially Wagner’s epic 'Ring.' One wag envisions a fifth installment to the cycle in which the Rhinemaidens, fed up after years of devotion and celibacy, open a classy brothel where clients must pay for services in gold."
• Meanwhile Washington Post writer Alexandra Petrin complains about a new authorized Jeeves and Wooster novel. "I am trying to imagine a reader who wants to read this book. The only one I can conjure up is someone who actually has read all the existing Jeeves and Wooster tales and is baying desperately after more. And this isn’t that. This is caffeine when what you want is cocaine. I think? I am not very up on my drugs. Look, this is fanfiction. I am not an expert except in the sense that all former nerdy 14-year-old girls are experts. And fanfiction is not what they wrote. It is what you remember. It is what you loved, what spoke to you. It is what Faulks describes in the introduction. There is much good fan work out there, approved and un-. But as an introduction to the work in question, I cannot recommend it."
• Salon posted a discussion of Jane Austen related works. "If 'Longbourn' is the porridge that coldly chastises Austen and 'Sense & Sensibility' is too warmly attached to its predecessor to breathe, then 'The Lizzy Bennet Diaries' (followed by 'Emma, Approved,' still ongoing) is just right." This is because "the best part of the series may be what it leaves to the audience. Costumed reenactments of off-screen scenes, alternate video diaries filmed by other characters, as well as tweets and Tumblrs posted in tandem with the videos, turn the viewing experience into a 'reading' experience, with fans asked to go back and forth between different media and draw inferences and make judgments on their own. It’s enough intertextuality to make even the most academic Janeite geek out."
• While Amazon's Kindle Worlds has added a comics universe for its pay-to-play fanfiction program, the real buzz has been about a Batman fancomic posted freely online. "There is a lot of backlash at Hollywood with all the remakes and stuff, but if you look at the state of comics, I think it’s far worse; nothing ever changes. I don’t like that. Of course there is always great stuff out there, but what I mean is, when Stan Lee created all those wonderful marvel characters in the 60′s, he was coming up with them on a monthly basis, we forget that it was once all NEW stuff. I would love to read what the amazing writers of both Marvel and DC would come up with if they could do anything they wanted with the characters."

What stories have you most wanted to see more of? Write about their fanworks on 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.

• PC Mag ran several articles on minorities in fandom from a panel at New York Comic Con. "Representations of Muslims in media have improved as well. Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, who created the sci-fi compilation A Mosque Among the Stars, said that in the past decade 'Muslims in comics were the quintessential other.' But this has changed with a French Batman who is an Algerian Muslim, a Green Lantern who is a Lebanese Muslim from Detroit, and other re-imagined characters."
• Such panels at major fan cons are seen as critical for raising awareness of troubling issues in fandom. "Jay Justice said, 'the media doesn’t promote us, so we have to promote ourselves.' Taking onto Tysk’s comments she pointed out that up to a certain age society seems to have no problem with children dressing up in costumes outside of their race. It’s something we often see, for instance, in elementary school Halloween celebrations. Yet at some point we start facing the 'why are you, as a non-white person, trying to portray that white character' questions. Justice asked, 'at what age are we supposed to start telling children that they can’t play certain characters?'"
• India.com announced the arrival of a new Indian superhero, Chakra on November 30. His move is the result of a partnership between Cartoon Network, Graphic India and POW! Entertainment. "'Chakra: The Invincible' was also selected as part of a handful of third-party content partners soon to be featured on Rovio Entertainment's new ToonsTV platform - one of the largest global digital platforms for kids in the world with over a billion views already since its launch."
• Disputes in media fandoms tend to lean to verbal harassment rather than physically violent extremes. But the problems generally emerge from a failure to understand the other side's concerns. This can erode formerly good relations between fans and creators, or fans and other fans. "Teen Wolf released a video of actor Dylan O’Brien asking for fans to vote for Teen Wolf in a TV Guide poll... O’Brien joked that if people didn’t vote, they’d kill off the show’s lone surviving gay character, Danny...The joke didn’t seem very funny, particularly when the survival rate for side characters in Teen Wolf is notoriously low for anyone who isn’t a straight, white man."

What troubling issues have you seen in fandoms? Write about it on 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.

• In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, producer Jeff Eastin discussed fanfiction ships and their influence on his work. "White Collar still wins in terms of fan fiction, but I've seen quite a bit of fan fiction directed at Graceland. The Mike-Charlie 'ship seems to be very popular and after that it shifted pretty quickly to Mike and Paige, which was nice to see...I had heard of fan fiction but I never saw the extent that people went to. (Laughs.) Somebody on Twitter sent me a link to some of the better White Collar fan fiction, and once in a while, I'll check it out and see what people are saying. It's really fascinating to me and it's an interesting subculture that arises on a lot of these shows. In my opinion, if you have people who are [taking part], you've made it."
• Britt Julious of WBEZ wrote about engaging in Scandal fandom through Twitter. "According to a 2009 study from the Pew Research Center’s Pew Internet and American Life Project, Twitter users are more likely to be African-American women. As well, according to a report from the New York Times of Nielsen ratings, 'Scandal is the highest rated scripted drama among African-Americans, with 10.1 percent of black households, or an average of 1.8 million viewers, tuning in during the first half of the season.'" Thus while the fandom can be seen among different generations in a household "My timeline explodes with chatter about the show, its characters, the clothing, and the music as it airs."
• Julious also mentions Sleepy Hollow, whose fandom is growing quickly. "For a show that has only been on the air for four weeks—the fifth episode airs tonight—Sleepy Hollow's fan base is loud. That's, at least, what you would assume from the decibel level during the show's New York Comic Con panel." Actor Orlando Jones has been particularly engaged with the fandom, saying during the panel "'Fan art rocks! Who ships Ichabbie?' to rich crowd approval...The importance of shipping to the fan base was confirmed further when the next question came from someone who began, 'So if you’ve been paying attention at all to the Tumblr phenomenon of Sleepy Hollow, Icabbie is a huge deal.'"
• Meanwhile the Harry Potter fandom continues to make news with its lobbying of Warner Brothers. Bustle wrote about the chocolate campaign. "There's always been an oft-spoken of symbiotic relationship between fans and the studios responsible for creating the work those fans love. There's also been an underlying tension. They create the work (or at least bring it to us), yes; but they're also the ones responsible for messing them up. And there are many scenarios that can carry the weight of this tension: The blundering of a book's canon, the mistreatment of a character, the failure of a studio to fully grasp the thematic elements that first made the source material so special, the list goes on and on. Each error can isolate the fan communities huddled around these works, particularly when that bungling of philosophy extends past the films themselves and into the marketing products sold and used in the real world."

What examples have you seen of fandoms making themselves heard? Write about it on 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.

• Communities of fanfic writers took their writing group practices online decades ago. On the Media reported on a commercial copy of these spaces, dubbing it "virtual workshopping. A website from Penguin Publishing, Book Country, enables thousands of writers to exchange manuscripts and notes and self-publish their work. A few have even gotten traditional publishing deals through the site." Other than the book deals, the mechanisms sound familiar. "[I]f a writer has written something that is just awful, not very many people will comment on it or they will comment briefly and respectfully but not say very much; there's a sort of graceful fade away. And the second thing that can happen is a manuscript that might seem terrible to one reader seems fantastic to another, because they are the right audience for it. You can find sub-categories and niche audiences that you wouldn't otherwise access."
• While not commercial, Caroline Siede wrote in A.V. Club about a fandom practice that has been automated, making gifs. "Gifs have long been the bread and butter of Tumblr—the perfect way to capture every moment of Dean/Castiel sexual tension, every David Tennant eyebrow raise, and, apparently, every moment of Omar Little badassery...Either to mock these fans or to help them celebrate their beloved Wire by capturing even more moments from the show, programmer Darius Kazemi has created a robot that posts a random gif and an accompanying line of dialogue from The Wire every hour."
• At SB Nation an "experiment" in writing fanfiction to accompany a photo turned into dueling fics when "my effort at fulfilling this assignment struck my esteemed girlfriend as so gross that she would not let it stand but composed her own rival fan fiction Friday to bring the touch of urbanity to the proceedings."
• Hero Complex interviewed Eric Moro, Wikia’s director of entertainment programming and asked "Why a collaborative effort between professionals and an online fan community?" to which he replied "[O]ur various anime and manga communities draw incredibly large audiences from all over the world. So hosting a project in this space allowed us to play at a global level. Second...it’s more about the creator that’s involved than it is about the character(s). Third, comic book, movie and TV characters are all tied up in complicated rights issues/licenses. And while we’re just starting to see networks work in this space (“The Vampire Diaries” fan fiction through Amazon’s Kindle Worlds, for example), it’s still not an idea the industry has fully embraced."

What "ripped from fandom" stories have you seen? Write about them on 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.