• The Koalition discussed how sexism is hurting gaming. "Community is a very loaded word. While it lets us gamers come together under a shared passion, it also allows us to exclude those we do not feel meet our standards of membership...one group is conspicuously left out of the conversation: the female gamer. While a female gamer could be part of some or none of these schools of thought, they are both minimized and criticized when voicing opinions. Whatever a gamer may be, one thing most can agree on is that being a girl isn’t part of it."
• Comics writer Liz Argall suggests women should embrace being seen as a menace to fandom. "I don’t like it when incredible people I know are misrepresented, under represented, and sometimes you just have to celebrate your awesome-sauce. Cheryl Morgan was called a menace to fandom because she created the fanzine Emerald City (1995-2006), which existed in digital and well as print. How dare a science fiction fanzine use something as science fictional as the internet? It just wasn’t fair! Cheryl designed badge ribbons in emerald and gold that proudly proclaimed menace to fandom. Recent controversies have made quite a few of us want to wear a menace to fandom ribbon, given menace reflects people, issues and activism that make our communities of practice a better place to be."
• While celebrating fangirls at San Diego Comic Con, Fangirl the blog quoted a Grantland piece that recounted how patience could be short when it came to women's voices. "I confirmed with several people sitting in the immediate vicinity that it was a young man shouting 'Women who talk too much!' after the loudspeaker asked attendees to voice their appreciation for the participants in the 'Women Who Kick Ass' panel. It’s an ugly moment, an unfortunate capper to a great session, to be followed by many of the guys sitting around me offering up tired lines like 'I hope they feel empowered now!' and several recitations of the Twilight mantra about ruining the Con. To be sure, most people in the room were respectful. But at a certain point, there needs to be an accounting for the fact that there is an ugliness that burbles beneath the surface of too many Comic-Con events."
• By comparison, Julia Errens at The Mary Sue talked about her experience at a Harry Potter con to discuss how cons can indeed be empowering. "This vocal questioning of societal norms was endemic for LeakyCon. All discussions I partook in or witnessed across the weekend eventually touched upon gender roles within the patriarchy. Clearly there was a keen need to talk. This slice of HP fandom seems to have created a safe space to not only get creatively involved and build media criticism skills, but also explore important facets of their own personhood. Anybody who finds that chucklesome needs to sort out their priorities."

What stories about female fans and fandoms do you know of? Write about them in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

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• SB Nation published a somewhat bemused summary of a day at MLB Fanfest but concluded that "The Real Baseball Thing has something to do with the act of playing baseball and something to do with the cumulative experience of watching it over a lifetime, and it's easy to sense its presence and see its effect. It manifests as a slow, blissed-out trancefulness, and it -- and not the sepia tones or the synergy -- is what still fills stadiums and domes. The chance to commune with it is what led volunteers to spend day-long shifts feeding pitching machines and encouraging strangers. It was the only reason anyone was at the Javits Center in the first place, and why the game -- alternately shrunken and puffed-up as it can seem -- can still fill six blocks with excited people."
• Henshin Justice wrote about the growth of Tokusatsu fandom as seen at Anime Expo. "Power Morphicon is still in its infancy and focused on tokusatsu’s American counterpart; and G-Fest, the largest Godzilla / Japanese monster convention, is far away in the Midwest. Therefore, as the largest North American convention geared specifically toward Japanese animation and entertainment, Anime Expo becomes the big summer convention for most West Coast-based toku fans to meet and geek." This can be a mixed experience since no fandom is completely harmonious. "[T]okusatsu cosplayers aren’t exempt from harsh, unnecessary criticisms. John noted other toku fans who approached him and questioned his cosplay and criticized him for even liking anything related to the Kamen Rider Hibiki series."
• Fan conventions are also the subject of documentaries, such as Fantasm, a horror convention documentary that "explores the bonds formed by the close-knit community of fans who attend horror conventions."
• Get-togethers don't always have to be on such a large scale though, and animator Leigh Lahav created the short video "Fangirls" as a gentle poke at the trials and tribulations of female fandoms.

What fan convention stories do you have? 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.

• Longtime fans are fairly familiar with the variety of judgments they're subject to for their hobbies, but these don't only come from outside their fandoms. A recent post on Hypable discussed congoing and how it seems a step too far for some. "All this time, I thought the people who went to Harry Potter conventions were weirdos or nerds who didn’t have much else to occupy themselves with. After the trip to the TVD Con in Chicago though, I’m almost in mourning that I missed out on all the early HP conventions. I’ve learned that at these events, you can be a giant nerd if you want to...I’m jealous that I missed the opportunity to go to some of the first conventions, or that I didn’t go to the midnight book release parties, even if I would have been the oldest person there."
• Unleash the Fanboy hosted a post criticizing anger at casting choices. "Predictably, even the hint of casting against type has lead to the repetition of a depressingly familiar conversation, the conversation that happens any time there is a chance of changing a character’s race or gender or sexual orientation or whatever...The more I hear people make this criticism, the more difficult it becomes for me to pretend as if there is anything to it besides an open sewer of raw bigotry." This is because the "characters we love are not solid objects: they are constellations of ideas."
• Of course sometimes assumptions do come from outside fandoms. The UK's Daily Mail discussed another study on gamer demographics which came to the unsurprising conclusion that women spend as much time on games as men, and that gamers are generally older, married, have children, and are socially engaged with others when they game. "A spokesman for Pixwoo.com added: 'This snapshot into the lives of ordinary gamers disputes many myths about the pastime, showing how integrated gaming is into our daily routine.'"
• Writing for Den of Geek Laura Akers examines an episode of Castle to highlight the media's changing approach to geeky pastimes. "Ironically, it is the actors, those who have traditionally profited from but sometimes cruelly patronized geek fans, who are portrayed [in the episode] as dysfunctional (and morally ugly)." She concludes that the Castle writers recognize that "geeks are no longer a marginal group who can be used and then mocked or dismissed. While Fillion is a bonafide geek, he and those like him are simply smart. They recognize that we are now legion—there are enough of us to build a substantial career on."

What points of dispute have you come across in fandom? 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.

• 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.