I’ve made passing reference before to fanfiction referenced in mainstream news sources, and I’ve collected a few more recent examples of that over the past few weeks.
So I thought, what the hell, I’ll make a semi-regular column out of it for the blog.
So, not to be confused with FitM (Fangirls in the Mist, the title of this here online endeavour), here is the first installment of FitN (Fandom in the News).
- First up, we have CNN.com’s article about Avatar fandom (Avatards as a term makes me scratch my head a little, but what can you do) and how–surprise, surprise–internet access allows for much wider and larger-scale fan participation in pop culture. The author also goes on to discuss the Twihard phenomenon, pointing out that there are over 128,000 Twilight stories listed at Fanfiction.net (personally I don’t go in for Twilight and I like to think that the much smaller 67 entries in that fandom at the AO3 indicate a more discerning crew of fen than FF.net’s legions of followers and hit-or-miss quality… I’m a snob like that) and the ways fandom is becoming more public and perhaps more acceptable.
- Next is a BoingBoing article that’ll amuse anyone who’s ever listened to NPR’s fabulous news quiz comedy show Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me. It links to a hysterical story at the AO3 called Wait Wait Don’t Eat Me that answers the question I’m sure you’ve all been asking right along with me: what would Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me sound like in the event of a zombie apocalypse? The story’s funny, and I’m sure BoingBoing picking it up had quite a bit to do with the fact that the story’s got over 19,000 hits at this point.
- And finally, there’s a Mental Floss article that gives a pretty good general primer on fandom overall, with nods to the history and origins of fan communities, various authors’ opinions about fanworks based on their original material, fan films, pro fic, as well as the excellent fan-friendly passage:
For the record, fanfic isn’t just pale teenagers whiling away their waking hours hunched over the computer and tapping out torrid Harry/Draco romance stories or unauthorized future installments of the Twilight saga … Nowadays, it’s kind of cool to admit you write fan fiction.
So there you have it. I’ll keep posting Fandom in the News stories periodically, so if you come across one, feel free to send the link my way or leave a comment on the blog.
