Planning to see the new Veronica Mars movie? You may also want to check out the new issue of Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC)!

TWC has released No. 15, Fandom and/as Labor, guest edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, both of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The issue's seven articles, two Symposium pieces, roundtable, and three book reviews all relate to topics such as fan labor, gift culture, community, and work. A variety of fandoms get a turn in the spotlight.

In a roundtable, scholars and an industry insider, Bertha Chin, Bethan Jones, Myles McNutt, and Luke Pebler, discuss the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign and its relationship to fans. TWC’s Symposium section features shorter, often personal essays that address particularly fannish connections. In the two essays that comprise this section, Tisha Turk argues that fandom’s gift economy should be understood as involving a wide variety of gifts, a complex system of reciprocation, and the use of gifts as a sign of their reception; and Joly MacFie remembers his time creating badges and zines during the punk era in the UK.

Several peer-reviewed essays discuss specific media properties in relationship to fans and labor.

• Bethan Jones discusses Fifty Shades of Grey, noting that pulling a piece of fan fiction off the Internet to publish it professionally means that the fan labor performed as the text was created and disseminated remains unacknowledged.
• Christina Savage analyzes the TV show Chuck’s “save our show” campaign, placing it in the context of other such campaigns to show how fan labor is used strategically, in this case by ensuring the visibility of their campaign by engaging with sponsors and using hash tags.
• Rose Helens-Hart, in an analysis of Tosh.0, analyzes how the show’s Web site encourages fans to use personal networks to spread the brand.
• Matthias Stork analyzes the Glee fan-insider divide as fans were recruited to do work and promised access, only to later have this denied by the producers.
• Bertha Chin’s analysis also deals with Web sites, fan-created ones; she analyzes Sherlockology and Galactica.tv in terms of gifting versus exploitation.
• Giacomo Poderi and David James Hakken analyze modding a video game, using online posts made by users to illustrate how fan labor works.
• Robert Moses Peaslee, Jessica El-Khoury, and Ashley Liles move out of the realm of the virtual and into the physical, as they analyze the motivations and work of fan volunteers at media festivals.

Three reviews appear in this issue. Stephanie Anne Brown reviews Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, edited by Trebor Scholz (Routledge, 2013); Simone D. Becque reviews Cognitive Capitalism, Education, and Digital Labor, edited by Michael A. Peters and Ergin Bulut (Peter Lang, 2011); and Anne Kustritz reviews Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, by J. Jack Halberstam (Beacon, 2012).

The next issue of TWC, No. 16, will appear in June 2014. Bob Rehak will present a guest-edited issue on the topic of Materiality and Object-Oriented Fandom. TWC No. 17 (September 2014) will be an open, unthemed issue. Although it is too late to submit to that particular issue, we always welcome general submissions; in addition, two other special issues (European Fans and European Fan Objects and The Classical Canon and/as Transformational Work) are in the works and are still open for submissions. We particularly encourage fans to submit Symposium essays. Read the submission guidelines for details!

• Even while fanfic writer Bianca Bernardino is seeing her work turned into film, another author is turning to fanfic of her own work. As L.J. Smith explained last year, "[E]ven though I have written the entire series, I don’t own anything about The Vampire Diaries. And from now on, the books will be written by an anonymous ghostwriter, just as Stefan’s Diaries are. It will say 'Created by L. J. Smith' on the cover, but I am not allowed even to change a word in the ghostwriter’s book." Instead, Smith has released the first of a series through Amazon's Kindle Worlds.
• J.K. Rowling's changing views on relationships in Harry Potter led to articles across the Internet, from The Washington Post to The Wire recording fan reaction. But blogger Lucy Softich reminded readers that "it doesn't change anything." "It was also really interesting when she told us Dumbledore was gay, but it didn’t really affect the story. It didn’t add subtext that wasn’t already there, or validate any arguments. Authors decide how to write their books, yes, but once they’re published, they can’t change anything...Fanfiction, on the other hand, can do anything. It can take the smallest interaction between characters, and turn it into a shipping war. It can take the merest hints, and create new and unexpected plot-twists. It can highlight things everyone else overlooked. And unlike books, its not permanent."
• While more people trying out fanfiction are pleasantly surprised by the experience, Emma Cueto at Bustle suggests that the real problem is that too many people don't understand what it is. "Look at the book (and movie) The Hours, which was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Isn’t it just meta-fanfic where the book that inspired the fan fiction is also part of the story?...It just happens to be very well done and rooted in a literary great, so no one bothered to notice. Then there are shows like Once Upon a Time that put a new spin on fairy tales, or Sleepy Hollow and Dracula that grew out of classic novels...Don’t tell me that isn’t just fan fiction with a budget."
• Kendra Mack at Open Source focused on the importance of participation in fanwork communities. "But female fans have long participated in (and led) fan communities before this RW shift, remixing and making new meanings from fictional texts. Henry Jenkins has written about the influence of television fan fiction writers in the 1980s, many of whom were women...This practice of fan refocalization continues today with shows like Adventure Time, a (personal favorite) cartoon with two male character leads that has many fans creating derivative fiction and art focused on the secondary female characters. The show also received positive fan reaction and high ratings after airing an episode in which the gender of all the characters are reversed, not to mention a slew of fan art and fiction involving the gender-swapped heroines."

What fanwork transitions do you think should be remembered? Write about them 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.

• The Manila Standard Today featured some articles on fanfiction, dubbing them "The other side of the fandom." The features explain types of fanfic and their locations online, concluding "Writers are not paid when they write fanfics. They all do it for the fandom, for their readers, and for themselves. Thus for consolation, reading the comments of their reader, knowing someone appreciates their work and waits patiently for the new chapter are enough for them to keep on writing."
• A spate of stories on Sherlock fanfiction writing in China show a certain surprise about slash but there is also a focus on the significance of it within Chinese culture. "The other part of that equation is that the cultural landscape has shifted, attitudes about gay men, gender roles, and sex have shifted and women have seen this...In a country where gay men are in marriages they don't want to be in, where people are told to act straight, and where gay men and lesbians are even entering fake marriages to get people off their backs and live their lives, the Fu Nv represent an improvement in the country's attitudes toward the LGBT community, even if it is by way of raunchy Curly Fu-Peanut fan fiction."
• In France some have decided to crowdfund a Sherlock fanfic adaptation of a young Sherlock and John meeting. Asked about the motivation for the project, director Naomi Javor replied "To quote the author. “You don’t need to be gay to like someone the same sex as you. [You must be] In love.” This is the message that spoke to me and inspired me...[I] want the viewers to feel like it gives [sexual] minorities an opportunity to be represented as well. It differs from mainstream media because I don’t need to worry that my network will shut me down."
• The Fandom Post looked back at 2013 to pick out The (Lighter Side of the) Year in Anime. "Before the first month of the new year is over, we’d like to make some additions to The Year in Anime Awards, which we presented a short while ago. It’s not all just about serious awards for worthy shows. No, the review staff of The Fandom Post also knows when it’s time to kick back and take a less reverent look at the year just passed. Here, our staff members present some individual or specialized 'awards' for outstanding…something or other."

What fanworks have you seen crossing boundaries? 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.

• King's College London will be offering a new undergraduate degree in Digital Culture which includes sessions on transformative and fan culture as part of its modules. Admissions have opened for the degree program which will launch in 2015.
• Den of Geek wrote about Holmesians as the template for modern fandom. "The kind of hype surrounding Sherlock today very much resembles the hysteria around the time the stories were originally published; in fact, Sherlock Holmes is arguably responsible for much of fandom as we know it today. Long before the possibilities of today’s mediated world, he was one of the first characters to massively, irrevocably, step off the page and into the world, and refuse to get back on the page...It’s a fascinating history about what it means to love a story, to let it have power, and to be a fan (or a geek)."
• While the Holmes fandom is certainly a very long running one, sites as varied as The Asheboro Courier-Tribune and Huffington Post have been looking at Beatles fandom, which is reaching an important U.S. milestone. One fan in particular is part of a nightly remembrance. "When Paul performs a song 'All My Loving'...he picked one girl to be behind him in the Jumbotron showing the days from 1964. There is Irene--she travels the world with Paul." Irene added, "The first time I saw it was just totally amazing to me. I had no idea it was coming up, and all of a sudden you see my face jumping from screen to screen to screen, ending up on the Jumbotron. And then I did scream, because I was completely freaked out."
• The demographics of fandom is something that NPR's discussion of Supernatural failed to examine, only mentioning how slash is "usually written by women." But it focused on the effect of fandom on a show's success and even storylines, asking "Fan engagement gives color and volume to dry data, such as ratings, but the question remains, how do you quantify depth of feeling? Writing a story takes longer and means more than hitting a 'like' button or re-blogging a picture. How do you measure a kind of success that, by its very nature, is completely resistant to metrics?"

What closer looks at fandom have you come across? 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.