• Given media representations apparently a lot of people continue to think that female fandom projects are rare, although this may have to do with how gender segregated fandom projects often are. In a feature on the "Hello Sweetie" podcast, its founder discusses why it came into being. "She and others were listening...to 'Geek Show Podcast,' the popular online show started by X96’s 'Radio From Hell' host Kerry Jackson, local movie critics Jeff Vice and Jimmy Martin, and Tribune TV critic Scott D. Pierce. "'They never have any female panelists, rarely had female guests, and a lot of people were complaining about that,'"...On one episode of 'Geek Show Podcast,' one of the hosts said, 'If you [women] want to have a podcast, you should start one.'"
• One reason for the separation may have to do with how female characters in fandoms are frequently depicted. One of the latest fans to address that issue uses cosplaying girls to create artwork depicting superheroes as they might really be. "It's not only combatting the myth that girls don't read or care about comics, but it’s showing that girls, too, can play the male superheroes that so often overshadow their female counterparts. And it's also proving just how easy it is to upend the sexist conventions that keep the women of comics in scantily clad, unrealistic uniforms for the purpose of sexually objectifying them."
• The site Machinima.com pitches itself as equivalent with the fanwork in the tagline "a programming movement that captures the hard-to-reach 18 to 34-year-old male demographic." They have decided to try crowdsourcing video production on its Happy Hour Tales series. “Fans are invited to submit ideas for what happens in the second part of Trial of the Songbird…I wonder if there’s some branded intentions here; after all, inviting viewers to write about a brand new video game is a good way to get them to play that game. Happy Hour Tales is the overarching name of the series, which suggests that we will get crowdsourced stories set in other video game worlds before long.” Since fans have little need for an invitation to create new fannish content, the plan seems more in line with further commercializing fannish creativity rather than encouraging its independent development.
• Another fannish site that's looking for fannish contributions has a long history of female participation, though Aja Romano wonders if the creative team is taking that into account. For one thing the fandom already has major fandom wiki projects, although they don't "emphasize fan creations and fanworks the way that Roddenberry's Trek Initiative does." But "it seems odd that Roddenberry has gone the traditional route of archives, wikis, and fan forums, rather than the more web 2.0 route emphasizing social media, media sharing, and interactive media. It's possible he hasn't registered just how big Star Trek is on Tumblr, where the new reboot reigns supreme among millions of fans, mostly women."

Do the fandom sites you visit seem to target one gender over another? 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.

• College newspapers are a constant source of stories on fanfiction, but The Varsity tried to take a more comprehensive look at the practice, noting that "fan fiction predates the Internet. In fact, amateur press associations, which first flourished in the early decades of the 20th century, provided a way for aspiring writers to put together and share their own magazines and works of fiction. A distribution manager or official editor would collect the magazines and letter publications and send them to other members of the association. In the 1930s, fans of science fiction magazines printed their own mimeographed or hectographed works which contained their own reviews, printed fiction, and even art."
• Meanwhile The Londonist decided to write fanfiction as a review of a play that was itself RPF. The play takes the real-life inspirations for Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan and has them meet "at a bookshop in the 1930s...An American playwright, John Logan, takes this meeting as his inspiration; the ensuing 90-minutes muse on the nature of childhood, the draw of fantasy, memory, loss, celebrity and several other things besides." The review is in the style of J.M. Barrie writing to Arthur Llewelyn Davies about the play he's just seen.
• Speaking of RPF, it isn't just AUs and canon fiction rewrites that are getting published these days. In an interview about her book, Tell Me You Want Me, writer Amelia James is open about her inspiration for the novel. "I had lots of downtime to daydream with Eliot in the center of all my fantasies. I had to know more about him, so I read Christian Kane's bio and dusted off my Angel DVDs...I started a short story about a cocky college quarterback with a smile like an angel and deep blue eyes that promised sin: Austin Sinclair. But long hair just didn't work on him. I couldn't picture it, so I gave him a best friend, Jack Wheeler. Jack became everything I'd imagined about Eliot — a tormented past, a wounded heart and long dark hair a woman could get tangled up in."
• Unfortunately all the coverage of a fanfiction reference on The Good Wife seemed to play into the show's framing of fanfiction writing as something unusual and unknown. Instead it's something that shows up in the general media all the time, and is connected to just about anything.

If you have your own take on all the places fanfiction can be found, write an entry 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 Japan Times talked about the anime industry catching up to the online revolution. "Today the despised former pirates at Crunchyroll.com — a now-legal multilingual Web portal for non-Japanese anime fans — are leading an industry revolution in content delivery and distribution, and Japanese producers are following their lead. Heavyweight veterans such as Toei, Bandai, Sunrise and others are scrambling to preview and offer their titles internationally via streaming sites like YouTube, Hulu, Niconico and Netflix. A new producer-collaborative streaming anime site, Daisuki, sponsored in part by one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, Dentsu, goes live in April. And a Japan-based site for videos about Japanese pop culture called Waoryu debuted last month."
• Stephanie Mlot claimed in PC Magazine that 2013 Is the Best Time To Be a Fangirl. Discussing the record breaking fundraising success for a Veronica Mars movie, Mlot discussed statistics. "This month's SXSW boasted 31 Kickstarter-backed movies, and Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler said this week that 10 percent of the films that debuted at Sundance raised money on the site...The letter-writing campaigns of yore have given way to Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Kickstarter movements, taking 'power to the people' to a more sophisticated, and often more effective level. Still, it's unlikely that crowd-funded entertainment will become the new normal. Hollywood can't, and won't, subside on scraps from even the wealthiest of adoring fans," in part because the costs for the typical film or television series are so high.
• Her Universe, a creator of fannish women's apparel, has begun a Year of the Fangirl promotion, featuring women telling their fannish stories after being nominated by other fans. One of them, Tricia Barr, advised fans to find their voices. "I always believed women would come into our own in fandom. Powered by a surge of female fans coming to the fore, a female-led action movie ruled at the box office and the range of stories with strong female characters is becoming almost limitless in books, comics, movies, and television. Doors are opening for women specifically because they are fangirls...Voice your opinions, hopes, or desires about the stories that you feel passionate about. Respect that every other fan – including the ones creating those stories – brings their own unique perspective."

If you have your own fannish history to share, 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.

• A thesis written about the AO3's tagging system "attempts to begin exploring the question of what kind of environment the site's particular blend of open social tagging and some behind-the-scenes vocabulary control, plus hierarchical linking, creates for the users who search through it for fiction." The study, conducted in 2012, had a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods and the survey was completed by 116 people. "The current online information glut calls for some sort of subject labeling to facilitate efficiency in searching, but the volume of information is well beyond a size that could ever be dealt with by information professionals. “Social tagging” is an approach to this problem that lets non-professionals attempt to organize online information via tagging, for their own and one another's use. But social tagging is a new and rapidly evolving field, and so no consensus has yet been reached on its overall usefulness, or on what best practices might be."
• Two rather different stories about fan video game makers were in the news recently. TechDirt summed things up in its post title: "Makers Of Firefly 'Fan-game' Abuse DMCA To Try To Silence Critic". "While I think that these kinds of games should be allowed...it appears that DarkCryo -- a company that is really skirting a pretty fine line concerning copyright -- decided to abuse the DMCA and file a takedown notice on [a critic's] posting of a DarkCryo logo image."
• The other story was a little more typical, discussing how "Hasbro halts production of unauthorized "My Little Pony" video game". "This isn't the first time Hasbro has issued successful takedown notices for clearly illegal uses of its product, or even the first time it's taken down an MLP-inspired game. Previous instances where Hasbro has stepped in include the illegal download website Ponyarchive and the popular, though short-lived,multiplayer game MLP Online. Hasbro also took down the abridged series Friendship is Witchcraft, which should have been protected under under the Fair Use copyright clause afforded to transformative works within the U.S. However, issues of copyright and trademark are separate concerns with separate legal justifications. While Hasbro has so far been tolerant of copyright-protected fanwork such as fanart and fanfiction, it seems to have a rigid policy forbidding reuse of its official images and trademarks."
• Some authors decided to challenge the claims of long dead creators' estates and, as the New York Times pointed out, highlighted a schism in the Sherlock Holmes fandom. "The suit, which stems from the estate’s efforts to collect a licensing fee for a planned collection of new Holmes-related stories by Sara Paretsky, Michael Connelly and other contemporary writers, makes a seemingly simple argument. Of the 60 Conan Doyle stories and novels...only the 10 stories first published in the United States after 1923 remain under copyright. Therefore, the suit asserts, many fees paid to the estate for the use of the character have been unnecessary. But it’s also shaping up to be something of what one blogger called 'a Sherlockian Civil War.'" The battle was laid out as being between the old guard (and, until recently, male only) Baker Street Irregulars versus the Baker Street Babes, "a group of young female Sherlockians who host a regular podcast."

What legal and technology fan stories do you have an interest in? Add them to 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.