• 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.

• One of the most discussed problems in fandom recently has been the "fake nerd girl" meme and it's not just women who are getting fed up about it. In the past month a number of male columnists have taken to task fellow fans about their negative behavior, whether through outright condemnation, by teaching-through-sarcasm, or simply trying to change the options a woman has. In a recent post one columnist noted "My sister and I, despite both being very geeky, are very different in how we approach it. Both of us love Horror, Disney, and roleplaying. However she is not a comic book fan and I am not into fanfiction...Now a gatekeeper is going to say that she is wrong. She needs to appreciate the Avengers for its appeal to the comic fans and that legacy and enjoying stories about Tony and Steve adopting Peter Parker is wrong and should be shunned." He closes with a particularly incisive reminder about how this behavior is fostered by the very industries people are fans of, by featuring a copy of a prominent ad in a Batman issue which depicted a female fan as one of the "Greatest Villains of Nerd Culture."
• At SB Nation Cliff Corcoran wrote about a different way in which being too close to the industry of one's fandom can be a negative thing. "Along the way...[m]y Yankee fandom began to fade. The reasons for this were diverse...but they include [f]amiliarity breeds contempt...They say if you love something set it free. I went the opposite route and smothered it until it stopped breathing." In addition, "Would I feel different if the move to the new stadium hadn't cost me my bleacher ticket package? Would I feel different if I had been shown more respect by the team in my capacity as a blogger? Would I feel different if I hadn't heard horror stories from peers who worked for the team in non-media capacities? It's hard to say, but those things certainly helped to tip the balance."
• Gatekeeping behavior isn't just performed by the industry or copied from it however. While politics can be the playground for some people's fandom, in The Daily Dot, Aja Romano wrote about how "[t]he touchiest subject in fandom isn’t about creepy pairings, odd kinks, or terribly written erotica. It’s politics." She cited several points of contention beginning with "a LiveJournal community called Wizards for Bush. The community, which is still active, had only a small number of supporters, but even so, some members of fandom, astonished to find members of their communities joining the group, unleashed anger and mockery upon those who did so. “For those Americans in fandom who follow a different political leaning than liberal-democratic,” wrote sidewinder in a post about the incident on Fanhistory, “Fandom can become a rather unfriendly place for the months leading up to the actual election, as the common assumption seems to become ‘you’re either with us politically, or you’re not one of us at all.’”

If you have stories about gatekeeping in fandom, why not share 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.

• Fan films tend to be a particularly difficult and time consuming type of fanwork given their collaborative nature, whether they are animated or live action. At least for some gamers though, the best sort of fanwork is that which creates new games, though having projects shut down after so much time and effort are always a concern. Perhaps this was why the site EuroGamer had to clarify an earlier story that suggested Microsoft was barring fanworks from utilizing Halo content. "The majority of everything the community makes currently is fine, as long as they are not basically running a big Halo-based business or using Halo as if the IP was its own property. That isn't a change to our policy, simply a clarification and update of the dry legal language, and as we've mentioned, even that 'new' language was actually updated months ago. We don't have squads of lawyers waiting in the wings to go after folks making machinima, or showing off their skills in Halo."
• Discussions such as these, which focus on content owner permission, tend to crop up with other fanworks as well, such as this take on a brand designer's house sigils for Game of Thrones. "Crescenzi's finished product, which comprises some 42 crests on a poster, is undeniably beautiful. However, he is selling them as prints, which somewhat alters the project from being a labor of love to a vehicle for profit. That makes us very curious to see GoT author Martin's take on them, as he is famously prickly about fan fiction, particularly where it concerns profit."
• Yet fans, too, can be concerned about focusing on creators, even when discussing other fanworks, such as this one on podfic vs. written fanfiction. As one fan quoted by the Daily Dot stated "'I wonder how the fic author feels about the fact that the podfic is apparently oh so special and famous (with the fic itself being apparently unimportant compared to the reader's performance)'.” Meanwhile, "Fans of podfic, feeling battered by arguments likening them to unoriginal plagiarists and bad cover artists, rallied with a podfic appreciation meme, where appreciative readers and other podficcers could praise podficcers in comments. "
• Another often unappreciated fan creation, albeit usually outside of fandom, is slash. At least one site though, After Elton, decided that it should be celebrated. "We were blown away by the internet explosion that was the Ultimate Slash Madness Tourney, and it occurred to us that a regular weekly column on the subject of slash might be a great fit for AfterElton. The name for such a column was easy: The Shipping News. The only catch was who to write it?...Even after reluctantly eliminating a dozen impressive submissions, we we're [sic] still left with five great people we wanted to work with. The happy solution we came up with was a weekly column penned by a rotating roster of slash experts." And the appreciation wasn't only by the AE site. As one of their contributors noted in the inaugural column, "Can we just take a moment to appreciate how many celebrities pimped their show's fave pairings in the AfterElton Ultimate Slash Madness Tourney? In addition to Misha Collins, Colton Haynes and the rest, we had John Barrowman and David Hewlett urging their fanbases to vote. Gone are the days when fans were on one side of canon and creators, producers, and actors were on the other."
• At least one fanwork that definitely got a place of honor recently was the AO3, which has had its kudos icon memorialized on a user's skin. Consider us chuffed!

If you're a slash lover, a fan film maker, a gamer, or have your own OTW-related tattoos, why not put together an entry 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.

• The media has apparently decided that there are women in fandom -- a lot of them even! One of the latest features to announce this information appeared in Time Magazine, which unfortunately focused more on how their presence is controversial rather than how their contributions are awesome. But it did counter the idea that female fandom is a novel occurrence. "Karen Healey suggests that “many fandoms have been primarily female (often white, middle-class, straight, cisgendered women — but again, not exclusively) spaces for a very long time, often co-existing beside primary male fandoms for the exact same media. Women in the ’80s were trading stories and arguing about the plot arcs of Star Trek and Dr. Who, much as they do now.” That’s a point that writer and editor Rachel Edidin agrees with. “Modern fan culture has always been female-driven,” she says. “The ferocity with which people engage and identify with fictional media and build subcultures around it seems to develop in inverse proportion to their social power. There’s a case to be made for the intensity of women and girls’ engagement in fandom — especially narrative and/or direct-engagement fandom like fan fiction or cosplay — as a cultural underclass co-opting a dominant narrative in which they’re overwhelmingly underrepresented as both creators and characters.”
• Features about female majority fandoms do seem to be multiplying. Writing for Grantland, reporter Sam Lansky discussed his experiences with K-Pop fandom. "The term “idol” correlates with the tendency toward celebrity apotheosis worldwide, but in the States, it’s rare to find anyone other than Ryan Seacrest use it to describe a pop star, since I don’t know that American fans care as much about idolatry so much as they care about themselves. Consider the instances of stalking, hacking, and B&Es targeting celebrities in the Western world...All of these aims are ultimately selfish ones, crassly commercial or materialistic. For the sasaeng fans, the business of deifying K-pop stars serves no indirect function: The lawless obsession isn’t a means to an end, it’s an end itself."
• Meanwhile at The Awl, Rachel Monroe takes a look from the inside rather than the outside at celebrity fandoms. "The crush was a private thing that happened in my room, but it was also a shared activity between friends...Our crushes weren't about anything as simple as attainability, or kissing. You couldn't take Paul McCartney to the homecoming dance; the very idea was absurd, because the homecoming dance was an absurd nothing, especially when compared with the immensity and violence of our feelings. My mom should've understood. At the Beatles' 1966 concert in Chicago, she'd had to slap my Aunt Martha hard to get her to stop from screaming herself into a faint. From the teenyboppers to the Beliebers, teenage girls have been mocked for their crushes, but that scorn is just a shoddy mask for the anxiety these crushes inspire."
• In writing about the strategy of promoting fantasy sports to its fans, FOXSports writer Reid Forgrave suggests women respond to fandoms differently. "The NFL knows what it’s doing here. Its embrace of fantasy football...gives fans a sense of control over this sport where many of us are priced out of attending more than a game or two a year." And “[o]nce you were able to create a competition within a competition, you brought those niche audiences to your television to watch your product,” said Ryan Fowler, the FOXSports.com fantasy editor. “That’s where it changed, where you were able to get women to see what the guys liked about it.”"
• Women are also making gains in being recognized on the professional side. The Mary Sue noticed that half the Hugo Award winners were women this past year, including the winners for best fan artist and best fancast.

If you have things to say about female fandom, why not write something for 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.