It’s that time again, folks.
Fandom news hour here at Fangirls in the Mist.
I’ve got a varied and (I hope) interesting set of links this time around, so here you go.
- First up, it’s the OTW’s March Drive. If you’re not familiar with the OTW (that’s Organization for Transformative Works), they’re the fabulous people who, among many other things, took one fan’s cry, ‘I want us to own the goddamn servers‘ (that would be Cesperanza, btw) and turned it into a reality with the dedicated, fan-owned, not-for-profit Archive of Our Own stash for stories. The OTW, whose mission statement is as follows:
The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. We believe that fanworks are transformative and that transformative works are legitimate.
also runs a number of other fannish projects, all dedicated to preserving and promoting fanwork. They do Transformative Works and Cultures, an academic, peer-reviewed journal all about fandom (stay tuned to that channel if you’re a Supernatural fan… they’ve got a special issue dedicated to the show and its fannish participation coming out this Spring. ETA: Here’s the link to it). They do Open Doors, which attempts to give an online home to all those pre-online or dead-link bits of fannish history that we don’t want to lose. They do all kinds of cool stuff, basically, and they’re very much a ‘by the fen, for the fen’ organization. So I hereby encourage anyone reading this to check out all the work they do for fandom, and think about donating time or skills or money to their effort in some way.
Right… moving on from the OTW into other FitN bits and bobs.
- The University of South Carolina’s student newspaper, the Daily Gamecock, has a feature online about fanfiction. They highlight fanfiction.net, which honestly isn’t a place I choose to spend much (if any) of my fannish time, but they give fair shakes to fanfiction as a genre and there are some interesting historical facts in there, too.
- Also in scholastic fic coverage, University College Dublin’s University Observer has a good, fan-friendly article about fanfiction that gets at some of the reasons why we love it so.
- 1up.com has a long, in-depth piece about fanfiction as the first in a series they’re running about game fan culture. It is also hysterically headed by this high class manip:
I chuckled. And the article itself starts off thusly:
When the gaming community talks fanfiction, it always seems to revolve around anecdotes of petty rages between nutty authors, atrocious grammar, substandard characterization, and any number of kinky tales that mate Pokémon trainers with seemingly every species of Pokémon available.
But fanfiction, often abbreviated as “fanfic,” isn’t exclusively the pastime of drama-loving hacks. Though fanfic garners enough bad press to fill a library basement, it can also encourage young writers to find their voice, re-ignite an old fan’s love for a fandom — never a bad thing to happen for the creators — and help established writers wind down after toiling over their own characters and worlds.
I was amused and pleased to read through the rest and suggest you might want to do the same.
Finally, I’ve got two fannish discussions to link to that I think are worthy of note.
- First is the really interesting and very multifaceted one at podficmeta that came out of my last post about podfic. I linked to it in the comments to that entry, but it went on from there, and I found it very enlightening, so here it is for you again.
- Second is fannish musings about what draws us in to new fandoms. It’s over here at the journal of Gloria Mundi, a longtime fan who I’ve followed through a number of fandoms over the years, and who always has some interesting insights and questions.
And that’s what I’ve got for you in this edition of Fandom in the News. More to come in future as I find interesting tidbits. Feel free to send things my way if you run across something you think is worth featuring.
