Here's a roundup of issues in fandoms that might be of interest to fans:

• One persistent problem fans have experienced revolves around their representation -- either in media stories on fans, or within the canons that they're fans of. Alyssa Rosenberg wrote about the latter, saying Hollywood decision makers think "it’s easier to sell white men as brawling gods than black men as hugely technologically advanced leaders of foreign nations", which leads some stories to cross media formats while others don't. In the meantime William Shatner hopes to defend fan practices to the media with his new documentary. "'These people who come to Comic-Con and dress up - all across the country, the rest of the population who doesn't understand are scoffing at them.'" But fans have their reasons. "'For a kid who is pathologically shy, dressing a cat up in a uniform -- [suddenly] he could speak. 'Captain Dave,' who is dying from Lou Gehrig's disease, lives through 'Star Trek.''" The media, or at least Variety continues to beg to differ.
• When it comes to the press though, fans now have their own forums for speaking out about the slant given to press coverage. Indeed problems may arise when fans are also members of the press, as is the case for a CultureMob reporter who talks about making decisions on what to attend at ComicCon and for what purposes.
• The fandom/media divide has been a topic at other sites, with some acknowleding the greater depth of fan knowledge while critiquing its objectivity. On gaming site GamaSutra this personal slant is blamed for blocking creativity among content producers. The respondents to the column were having none of it, with a rather good discussion ensuing about how the role of commercial interests were being ignored in the post.
• Such a discussion would also have been welcome on the article of OTW staffer Aja Romano at The Daily Dot when she discusses the persistent problem of female erasure from fandom. Noting how rarely women are included in fan convention panels, or condescended when they are, she also explored other ways in which their participation is ignored in male dominated fandom spaces. "Take Kate Leth, author of popular webcomic Kate or Die. When a father told his daughter in her comic store, right in front of her, that there was 'nothing for her' in the store, she tweeted angrily, 'you bet yr ass I gave her a free comic.' Leth added, 'what am I, chopped liver?'"

If you've got your own fandom issues to share, why not explore them on Fanlore? Additions 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 at transformativeworks.org. 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.

Here's a roundup of fanworks making the news stories that might be of interest to fans:

• While there are still plenty of stories in the media that take the "weirdness" angle to discussing fanworks, as fan creativity become more and more visible online there are an increasing number of stories that take a more admiring approach. For example, Visual News looks at fan movie remixes, and Comics Alliance looks at the artistic range of Emily Partridge's fan art, while io9 focuses on the Sew Nerdy gallery show.
• Then there are the posts that take a second look past first impressions. In The London Evening Standard, a piece on fanfic takes a rather lazy look at fandom categories on Fanfiction.net but concludes, "On my visit, I found nothing that risked brilliance, even basic competence. As a glimpse into the recesses of the human imagination, however, it is awe-inspiring, like The Library of Babel in Borges’s story, which contains every single book imaginable...Suddenly, anything seems possible in publishing."
• Indeed some writers go farther in noticing the important sort of commentary that can be found in fanworks which is too often overlooked. This may range from simply highighting a fannish remix to taking to task its detractors, as blogger s.e. smith does in "What’s With the Fanfic to Book Hate?". "Many people involved in the discussion swirling around books like these seem unaware of the cultural and social attitudes underlying the way they frame these works. This refusal to interrogate the source of their attitudes means that they miss out on a much deeper conversation; if everyone’s fixated on the ‘ew, gross, trashy, for women’ factor, they can’t have an honest discussion about the actual content of the books. Refusing to acknowledge that fanfiction does have a place in the literary canon, and that it is creative, means missing out on a huge and fascinating community...Many of these critics haven’t read a single word of fanfic, and they’re letting the male literary establishment tell them how to react to it?"

If you're into fanworks for criticism to squee or anything in between, why not write about it in Fanlore? Additions 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 at transformativeworks.org. 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.

Here's a roundup of stories on fanfic in the spotlight that might be of interest to fans:

While newspapers across the globe have featured stories over the past decade on local authors with fanfiction pasts (or presents), the case of former Twilight fanfic, Fifty Shades of Grey has sparked considerable media coverage over the past month, prompting discussion in a variety of areas and hundreds of news stories and blog posts.

• Some of the early discussion focused on the apparently surprising idea that women like to read erotica, which sent at least one journalist into a panic. Fortunately, the stories prompted some people not surprised by this amazing news to discuss the business of erotica publishing and promote the genre, or "debunk sexist stereotypes about women and technology" by noting how "the removal of the gatekeepers of publishing has huge implications for publishing; but it also has huge implications for gender equality. The women in Twilight fandom who formed their own publishing houses followed in the footsteps of pioneering female-run digital publishers like Samhain, Ellora’s Cave, and Torquere Press, who founded their businesses as romance writers and fans. The success of each of these digital publishers proves that women can not only be their own gatekeepers, but that they have the technical skills to thrive in the process."
• Other takes suggested that "what’s really groundbreaking about this book and future film – [is] the mainstreaming of fetish. The popularity of this novel has made it okay to talk about erotica as a real literary genre and admit to our own desire to see more than just two types of sex- the vanilla and the grotesque." Others counter that the book's real appeal is that it's a Cinderella story in a cynical age. In Fanfic as Iconography, a romance blogger looks not at the genre but the archetypes in the book and finds herself "[t]hinking about how this giant hit might offer a different model for alpha heroes, I wondered what else romance writers, agents and publishers might learn from it."
• Paid Content's question about how the novel's success "raises interesting questions about crowdsourcing and copyright" suggested that fan fiction's often collaborative, communal process is in contrast to the single author model of professional remuneration. Author Jami Gold, a former fanfic writer herself, echoed this ethical rather than legal concern. "Without its association with Twilight, the story wouldn’t have received 20,000 reviews (on fanfiction.net) and gained those fans to begin with...She then had her fans, from back when the story was free, buy up copies...and post hundreds of reviews all over the internet. Boom. Instant best-seller...And all she had to do was use someone else’s characters and fanatical fandom ties to get there." This discussion was further explored in a series of posts on Dear Author, including one featuring Rebecca Tushnet from OTW's Legal Committee. Some authors, such as Jim Butcher (who cites Mercedes Lackey's earlier action) has decided "fanfiction is to be licensed as derivative, noncommercial fiction under the Creative Commons (CC) umbrella" with the intention being that "You can’t make money from fanfic based on Jim’s work" and requesting that fans utilize a CC disclaimer on their work.
• Other stories focused on changes in the publishing industry, both the ones leading up to Grey's marketing success, and what will likely follow given the visible successes of self-published authors. "Ethical objections of fan fiction aficionados over James’s alleged appropriation of copyrighted material, and her breach of fan fiction writers’ most sacred tenet — Thou Shalt Not Publish For Profit — have been drowned out in the rush to find the next “mommy porn” contender in online media outlets once considered outlaw territory and beneath contempt by legit publishers." A recent post at publisher Tor asked if "America may be ready for traditionally published works of fan fiction?" but this is clearly an international matter. "“With the smallest of publishers able to release an e-book to a worldwide audience, hits hit bigger, faster, and simultaneously around the world.”
• Finally, some articles sought to trace the origins of the book's success, which has moved from a publishing coup to a film sale, with coverage of the book appearing as an alternate cover story to The Hunger Games. While one might question "why fan fiction’s stigma persists" given its ubiquity, perhaps fittingly, the latest news is that Grey will soon have its own derivative works: a parody derived from tweets will be making its way into print soon. And at least one online site has offered recipes tied to the book.

If you are a Twilight fan or create fan works why not write about it in Fanlore? Additions 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 — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. 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.

Here's a roundup of stories on sports fandom that might be of interest to fans:

• Jane Dough cited a study on football viewership that revealed "Women, actually, love watching football. More than they like Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, and American Idol. So pipe down, imaginary husbands and whiny beer commercials. Sunday Night Football is the third most popular primetime show among adult women." These current numbers demonstrate a continuity from the fandom's early days discussed in Football Girl. "Similar to the matinee girl, the football girl was a common subject of male journalistic curiosity. That someone of the "fairer sex" (gender stereotypes of women as emotional, overly-sensitive, and nurturing were alive and well in the 1900s) would be interested in watching a competitive match involving "brute" physical force was both titillating and confounding for many male writers."
• Sadly not much has changed in sports media depictions. Baseball Nation took the show MLB Fan Cave to task on its treatment of women. "In the last few years, many media outlets have reported that women now comprise 45-47 percent of all baseball fans, making it the most gender-balanced of the four main professional sports." Yet the women who do appear on the show are there primarily for gratuitous appeal to male viewers. "The 2011 version of the Fan Cave offered nothing for the score-keeping, numbers-crunching, roster-watching woman fan. Well, if you don't count insults to her baseball intelligence."
• The Baltimore Sports Report wrote about the personal connections in sports merchandise. "This holiday season, I am sure anyone reading this will probably wind up getting a sports-related gift of some kind, but I encourage you to consider it more than an overpriced logo or even a way to show off your team. It is a reflection of where you are in life, what you care about, and what you value. I was a UVa fan because of what I thought they represented (way in the past now, mind you), and my Dad went nuts for that jersey not just because he loved the Ravens but because he felt a meaningful and permanent connection with the city of Baltimore."
• Meanwhile, the Baltimore Sun reported on baseball fan get-togethers which included everything from conversation and trivia games to guest lecturers. "He and his fellow conversationalists are looking forward to the next "Talkin' Baseball" on Jan. 14, when Maryland author Bob Luke is scheduled to discuss his latest book, "The Most Famous Woman in Baseball: Effa Manley and the Negro Leagues."" Manley is "the first (and still only) woman admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006. Her story is one of a million threads in the fabric of baseball, which people such as Paulson see as a game but always, in addition, something bigger. "You never run out of things to talk about," he says."

If you take part in a sports fandom, why not contribute to Fanlore? Additions 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 — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. 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.