• 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 post on The MarySue took a more psychological look at the "Fake Geek Girl" syndrome. "The theory of microaggressions was developed back in the 70′s to denote racial stereotyping, but was expanded by psychologist Derald Wing Sue, Ph.D. in 2007 to encompass a wide variety and classifications of these subtle and seemingly harmless expressions that communicate 'hostile, derogatory, or negative slights and insults' toward people who aren’t members of the ingroup. These outgroup members might include women, racial/ethnic minorities, LBGT members, and others historically marginalized in our community." Author Dr. Andrea Letamendi explained the anger such behavior can engender. "The feelings of being threatened, invalidated, and overlooked can happen to any one of us in this community–some psychologists argue that when the threats are ambiguous or subtle (like microaggressions), they can be more damaging because there is no certainty and the assault is denied or ignored."
• More complaints about sexism arose in response to a documentary on Bronie fandom. "What do you get when fans decide to make a documentary about their own fandom? In the case of the Bronies—fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic—the answer seems to be erasure and exclusion. So say some fandom critics of the recently released documentary Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony. Not everyone in the Brony fandom is happy about the newly launched documentary. Female fans are already planning their own documentary in response, to give a more inclusive portrayal of fans—particularly the female sector of the Brony population, which many fans claim was virtually ignored."
• Another fan documentary fundraising on Kickstarter will be focusing on the makers of fan films. In a chat with OTW staff, co-producer Joey Rassool discussed the project's focus. "We hope to show several things: 1) Why fan films tend to be more accurate to the source material than their hollywood equivalents, 2) Why even greatly funded fan films still end up with problems, 3) What these creators, especially the ones working out of their own pockets, have to sacrifice to bring their art to life, and 4) What kind of person is willing and capable of making those sacrifices." Asked how he thought a view of fan film makers might map onto the work that other fans do in other mediums, he replied "I find that film is a shockingly tricky art form for fan made content because of the amount of time, energy, people, and finances that have to go into it to generate a final product. But I hope that our film can show everyone that creates fan based content that any amount of effort is worth it for the final result." They also plan to focus on how fans "manage the aspects of filmmaking. Most fan films are made by crews and directors with little to no big budget experience, and the introduction of crowd funding can put a lot of money into some fairly unseasoned hands. This means that things can go wrong at almost any turn."

What examinations of My Little Pony, fangirls or fandoms 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.

Those who enjoy fanzines, or who were part of Star Trek fandom in its early years, may enjoy the following story, and even want to lend a hand!

Steven H. Wilson is an author and has worked for DC Comics and Starlog Magazine. He's also the founder of the Farpoint convention, and his award-winning audio science fiction series, The Arbiter Chronicles, can be heard on his weekly podcast. In a recent post he discussed his early days in fandom, and how important a particular Trek fanzine was in his life.

Contact was founded by two sisters in 1975. Bev Volker and Nancy Kippax were active members of the Trek fandom, running conventions and editing various zines. Stephen discusses how he met both of them, and what followed from there, both personally and professionally. He also issues an invitation to others who remember the two sisters and their work, both of whom passed away in the past decade:

"So I've finally brought ContactZine.com to life this week. Right now it's just a few blog entries and a couple of scans of the first issue of their zine. It's a work in progress. As the weeks go by, I want to add more scans, to get the stories formatted so they can be read in HTML and put into true eBook formats, and to add the memories of all of those who still remember Bev, Nancy, Contact, and those times gone by.

Check it out, if you're interested, and, if you feel moved to help, let me know! I could sure use someone to help me edit. None of these zines were produced using computers. The stories exist now only as xerox copies or typewritten drafts. They must be scanned and OCR'd, and that means the electronic versions are pretty error-ridden and need to be proofed and corrected prior to re-publication.

Above all, if you were part of Contact, as a writer, artist, friend or reader, I hope you'll post some memories at ContactZine.com"

Here's a roundup of stories about documenting your sources that might be of interest to fans:

• An article about fanfic history published in The Guardian raised a lot of commentary from readers and writers across the blogosphere. Making Light took issue with the "section on fanfic in early SF fandom" calling it "full of nonsense, so much so as to call the rest of the article into question." Oddly, nowhere in Morrison's lengthy piece covering hundreds of years of history, as well as obscure terminology and ad-hoc psychological assertions about the writers' motives, were any sources for the article cited. Also omitted was any discussion of who was doing much of the writing -- something rectified by Foz Meadow's article at the Huffington Post. "Not long ago, I wrote a piece on why YA sex scenes matter -- in a nutshell, because they're pretty much the only form of sex-positive, female-centric sexiness on the market. In that context, then, the fact that the vast majority of fan fic writers are understood not only to be women, but young women -- something Morrison utterly fails to mention -- cannot help but be intensely relevant to any discussion of sex in fan fic. Culturally, we've spent thousands of years either denying, curbing or vilifying the female sex drive, to the point that even now, the idea of pornography geared towards a female audience is still fundamentally radical." Such gender erasure also explains why female centered fan gatherings remain vitally important for fandom as a whole.
• Certainly writer Jonah Lehre probably wishes fans weren't so concerned about documentation. As discussed by The Learned Fangirl, "Michael Moynihan, a huge Bob Dylan fan, asked the questions that we should all ask about where information comes from, and thereby caused the end (or at least the extreme shaming) of the career of a well-regarded writer." Yet the media hasn't learned much of a lesson from the incident. "But for all of the talk about how bloggers and tweeters aren’t 'real journalists', traditional journalists are on the hook for not appropriately citing to their sources. In a random sample, taken from Google news of highly cited and 'top news' stories on this situation, less than a quarter included a link to the Tablet story that broke this. Shameful!"
• The Tor Publishing website recently gave a boost to a vid celebrating decades of fandom, though its fannishness was perhaps most clear in the meticulous tracking of its content. "Questions were crowd-sourced, moments were captured, and a lot of love ended up on the screen. They even have an incredible spreadsheet breakdown of exactly what went into the where, and why." Though the vid centered only on western visual media fandom, one would have to concur with "[w]hat better way to chronicle decades of geeky dedication than through a song chronicling decades of history?"

If you want to contribute to the fannish culture of documentation, don't forget about 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.