DAUGHTERS OF THE DIGITAL: A PORTRAIT OF FANDOM WOMEN IN THE

CONTEMPORARY INTERNET AGE

______

A Thesis

Presented to

The Honors Tutorial College

Ohio University

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In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of

Science in Journalism

______by

Delaney P. Murray

April 2020

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This thesis has been approved by

The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of Journalism

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Dr. Eve Ng,

Associate Professor, Media Arts & Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Thesis Adviser

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Dr. Bernhard Debatin

Director of Studies, Journalism

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Dr. Donal Skinner

Dean, Honors Tutorial College

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Abstract

Media fandom — defined here by the curation of fiction, art, “zines”

(independently printed magazines) and other forms of media created by fans of various pop culture franchises — is a rich subculture mainly led by women and other marginalized groups that has attracted mainstream media attention in the past decade.

However, journalistic coverage of media fandom can be misinformed and include condescending framing. In order to remedy negatively biased framing seen in journalistic reporting on fandom, I wrote my own long form feature showing the modern state of fandom based on the generation of late millennial women who engaged in fandom between the early age of the Internet and today. This piece is mainly focused on the modern experiences of women in fandom spaces and how they balance a lifelong connection to fandom, professional and personal connections, and ongoing issues they experience within fandom. My study is also contextualized by my studies in the contemporary history of media fan culture in the Internet age, beginning in the 1990’s and to the present day. In both my academic and professional projects, I also examine how other journalists should best write about fandom spaces and other Internet communities populated by marginalized people.

Intro

What is fandom?

Since stories have been invented, there have been people who have loved them.

And as long as people have loved stories, they have wanted to talk about them with

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others. This basic concept — whether it occurs around a campfire, across a dining table, or on the Internet — is the very basis of fandom.

Fandom, in its most basic form, is a group of people who share a common interest. The interest can revolve around just about anything, but whether it is television, sports, or a band that fans gravitate towards, fans of all kinds may experience a community that is equal parts thrilling, comforting, and frustrating, but ultimately, impactful in a number of ways.

One of the largest forms of modern fandom is that of media fandom, which covers films, television shows, video games, books, music, and any other form of storytelling media. Media fandom has existed as long as art has been readily available to the masses, and alongside this increase in mainstream media came a movement of fans creating their own communities around things they loved. Today, these communities have become international and ubiquitous in just about every corner of the internet. Fans write original stories based on the media they love, dress in costumes, praise things they enjoy and critique what falls short of their own enjoyment, connect with other fans, break records, and then do it all over again. They have become a powerful force in the modern media landscape, and yet fans as a whole remain largely misunderstood and stigmatized.

Within both greater society and the news media, fans have often been portrayed as immature, unstable, or simply unworthy of greater importance or attention. Yet fandom has long been a safe haven for marginalized people — especially women and queer people — who have found passion and community in fandom that they could not find anywhere else. Fandom is also bursting with great creative potential, and a large part of the next emerging generation of writers, artists and scholars have received their

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preliminary training from inside the safety of fandom. Yet many of these narratives are pushed aside by the news media in favor of narratives that continue to mock and pathologize fans. This oversight in news about fandom cannot be overlooked, and it is vital for journalists to examine why fandom is important, how the media has fallen short when writing about fandom in the past, and how reporters can improve their fandom coverage in the future.

Why is fandom important?

Fandom, upon first glance, may seem like a trivial issue. Obsession and eager interest in media have long been stigmatized and undervalued (Duffet, 2013). But this undervaluing follows a deeper trend of undervaluing women and their interests. Fandom has a long, rich history of female engagement and creativity, to the point that media fandom in the modern day is more associated with women than it is with men (Bacon-

Smith, 1992). And yet, longevity or ongoing popularity is not enough to validate it in the public eye as an interesting or valuable use of time. The media often mirrors the large societal perspective and ignores, discounts, or mocks the interests of women, and this in itself is a larger issue (Corse & Hartless, 2015).

As a whole, I believe the treatment of fandom in the media is indicative of larger issues for how much of mainstream society views women and their voices. By ignoring or mocking the interests of millions of women, no matter how odd or superficial they may appear on the surface, journalists make a dangerous mistake of ignoring potential eye-opening stories and perspectives. As a whole, the news media has a responsibility to cover marginalized groups in a responsible way, and to avoid negative and potentially

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violent and harmful stereotypes. But journalists also have a responsibility to cover “out of the box” stories responsibly, and not quickly discount any story simply because it appears unusual on the outside. Fandom is a perfect example of a topic that seems unorthodox but as a domain that inspires sustained passion amongst so many, journalists should give the topic a serious and nuanced examination.

Why are women’s voices important?

Core staples of modern fandom culture — whether it is conventions, fiction tropes, or character types and dynamics that have captured audience imagination again and again — have emerged from the minds and hearts of women (Bacon-Smith,1992).

Several original organized fandom groups were started by women (Bacon-Smith, 1992), and since then, amateur writers and artists have created entire careers out of a part-time hobby (Busse, 2015). Fan clubs and zines evolved into blogs, archives, and chatrooms

(Hellekson & Busse, 2006), which in turn transformed into a type of fandom that focuses on microblogging and reacting on social media in live time.

Fandom is populated with creative, unique, and often puzzling tropes as well as complicated and nuanced social codes that make it both a response and a mirror of the world outside of fandom; in other words, fandom is both a safe haven from the “real world” and a connection to its most personal and complicated tenets (Bacon-Smith,

1992).

However, fandom activities and communities that are mainly led and consumed by women typically differ from other creative circles that are dominated by men. Male and female fandom and art are both distinctive in their practice, but also in their

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reception. Male fans often gravitate towards collectibles, filmmaking, and merchandise that celebrates the original canon materials and are typically encouraged by the producers of the original media in question (Booth, 2015). Female fans, by contrast, usually participate in “transformative” fandom that seeks to play with canon materials and reshape the characters and world to their own liking — often through fan fiction but also through fan art, zines, and online discussion boards (Booth, 2015). This type of fandom is usually less celebrated by producers and often stigmatized by those outside of fandom and other fans due to its deviation from the accepted canon (Booth, 2015).

Fan fiction, art, and fan organizations as a whole tend not to be taken seriously by the “mainstream” — that is, producers of media, the news media, and any person outside the community of fandom. While media producers have begun to embrace fandom activities — whether it is through interactions on Twitter, fan art competitions, or direct conversations at conventions, some aspects of fandom receive attention and validation from producers, others do not (Busse, 2015). The female-adored practice of fan fiction is a prime example of this divide. Fan fiction has often been labelled as insincere, plagiarism, purely pornographic, and otherwise a waste of time that provides nothing of value (Busse, 2015). Professional publishers rarely take fan fiction authors seriously unless their work can be sold to a niche erotica market (Busse, 2015). There is nothing inherently wrong with that option, but it greatly decreases an author’s potential to grow their brand and also underestimates the overall talent and diversity of fandom creators.

In a female-centered space, one has to wonder if this contempt has something to do with the gender of the participants. Going into this study, one of my main points of

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curiosity was trying to discover why fan-created works were not taken seriously, and how this reception related to the gender of female fans.

What did I cover?

Fan culture is a rich, complicated network of creativity, communication, and sexuality, and women continue to create an invaluable community for young women to nurture both their sexuality and their creativity. However, with all of the positive aspects of fandom — a female-led space that provides space for sexual and personal discovery and feminine passion, to name just a few — I also see the drawbacks to it. My interview subjects spoke about fandom racism and internalized misogyny running alongside increasingly painful generational divides and growing mainstream attention that seems to please and pain fandom in turn. It is a space that is far more complicated than most news coverage has addressed, and yet from my perspective, the complicated parts of fandom are where the most compelling stories come to light.

Going into this project, I believed that these communities and their innovations are mainly not taken seriously because they have been historically headed by women, and that the lack of profit in fan-created media added to this stigma within a hyper-capitalistic system. While I still hold this position, I now acknowledge there is greater nuance to the issue of why fandom is not taken seriously both in the media and by the general public.

My interview subjects spoke equally about how fandom can facilitate friendship, passion, and creativity while also being full of bullying, infighting, racism, colorism, internalized homophobia and transphobia, just to scratch the surface. Fandom can indeed be a safe

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space from the judgement of the offline world, but it can also reflect the ugliest parts of a world many fans try to escape for a little while through the things they love.

It is this complicated narrative that I most wanted to explore in a way I had seen few other journalists attempt to delve into when covering fandom. I wanted to bring personal narratives to the forefront in order to share a more personal viewpoint of fandom, as told by fans themselves, while still contextualizing these experiences and emphasizing their importance for an outside audience.

Literature Review

What is fandom?

It is difficult to define fandom simply because it is ever-evolving. This challenge is further complicated by the fact that different groups define fandom in contrasting ways.

While media producers often define fandom as a dedicated source of buying power

(Busse, 2015), news media usually tends to stigmatize fans as overly emotional and deranged in order to publish intriguing stories (Duffet, 2013). The common denominator in all of these cases is that historically, actual fan voices are usually left out of industry and media narratives (Harris, 1998). Thus, it can be challenging to find a definition of fandom that comes straight from the perspective and experience of actual fans.

It can also be difficult to determine whether there is a connecting thread among

“fandom” — which, in actuality, is not a monolithic practice but rather many communities that cover thousands of cultures, properties, and interests. Indeed, within any one fandom there can be any number of unique language quirks, moral beliefs, and ongoing conflicts that may completely differ from another fandom.

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However, there are a few core ideas among fans of exactly what fandom is and what it means. One is that within fandom, there is no one proper, acceptable reading within media. Any fan can pull out their own interpretations of a text, and the validity of these meanings is fluid among other fans (Jenkins, 1992). Fans find pleasure in discovering new meanings within texts, finding connections between multiple texts, and enjoying group fandom culture with other fans (Jenkins, 1992). But they find equal pleasure in critiquing the media they love, and even editing or reimagining parts of this media that displease them (Jenkins, 1992).

Fandom also follows a long-existing literary tradition of “derivative” or

“appropriative” literature, which is made up of retellings and critiques of existing canonical works. Derivative and appropriative literature is a genre historically led by marginalized groups, such as women, racial minorities, and queer people, to combat the existence of colonialism, sexism, and heterosexism within both widely consumed literature and greater society (Derecho, 2006). Fandom follows the tradition of derivative practice created by marginalized people, but now in a contemporary setting. Fandom creators not only rebel against oppression within society, but also against the legal and creative authority of large creative studios who control the majority of modern storytelling (Derecho, 2006). For this reason, fandom is a modernized form of derivative storytelling based firmly in the perspectives of marginalized people.

Then there is the question of whether fandom transcends a mere hobby, or if it offers potential for professional and monetized endeavors. Many fans organize large events and conventions, create their own websites, and facilitate editing and writing forums similar to those found in professional settings (Karpovich, 2006). However, these

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practices only occasionally result in a monetary benefit for fans. Typically, these practices are led mainly by personal passion, connection with other fans, and a desire to create art.

Finally, for many fans, fandom is ultimately about friendship and social connection. Personal relationships are often what motivates fans to expand fandom and dedicate themselves to the large commitment of time, energy, and resources that long- term fandom can require (Bacon-Smith, 1992). While fandom archiving and socializing was an active practice in the pre-social media era, contemporary Internet fandom has greatly increased such practices and made it much easier for fans to find each other

(Jamison, 2013). This has allowed fandom to be a source of cultural, social, and personal value for a new generation of fans.

Ultimately, my research into exactly how to define fandom has led me to a relatively streamlined idea of the practice. From my own viewpoint, fandom is a personal passion for media, and is equally defined by the adoration of text and desire to edit or change these stories in some way. Fandom is also based in community, and has long been strengthened by the social relationships of marginalized people, specifically women of many ages, races, sexualities, and economic and social backgrounds. Fandom can also range widely in terms of commitment, from a casual part time hobby to professionalism that can become a full-time career. This is the general idea of fandom I am working with

— a group of diverse people whose personal and professional lives vary, but whose commitment to media binds them together.

Contemporary Fandom History

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As a concept, fandom has been in existence for about as long as media entertainment has been available to the masses. Specifically, there was a significant boom in fandom in the 19th century, when there was an increased emphasis on individual celebrities and the star system to market films (Duffet, 2013) . This phenomenon spread and increased in fervor in the early 20th century (Duffet, 2013). Early male-dominated science fiction fandom dating back to the 1930’s often prepared hopeful authors for professional development by offering them both writing practice and publishing opportunities (Jenkins, 1992).

By the 1940’s, music celebrity fan culture became a marker of youth culture, specifically for young women and girls. This shift of fandom from a masculine professional tool to feminine youth culture continued into the 1960’s. While music fandom continued with phenomena such as The Beatles, one of the most notable turns in fandom came with the rise of Star Trek in this decade, which led to increased interest in science fiction among women and more fandom activities like fan fiction, zines, and conventions being produced and led by women (Bacon-Smith, 1992).

In the 1970s, there was an increase in fan fiction, zines, graphic novels, and fan- produced content for texts like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, as well as mainstream staples such as the Star Wars films (Duffet, 2013). This era also increasingly saw zines and science fiction writing moving from a predominantly for-profit male practice to a non-monetary hobby mainly populated by women (Bacon-Smith, 1992).

New technology brought many notable changes to fandom in the latter part of the century. In the 1980’s there was an increase in video fandom and “vidding,” or video editing – mostly among young men. Then in the 1990’s, the rise of Internet accessibility

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inspired new uses of technology to continue long-standing fan activities such as fic writing, as well as new mediums like blogs, web pages, and online chats. The Internet also made differing fandom demographics more visible — while Star Trek fandom was still mainly populated by women, The X Files had a mixed presence of men and women, and the Xena: Warrior Princess fandom mainly consisted of queer women (Jones, 2014).

Fandom’s use of the Internet would gain steam in the early 2000’s and into today, and has ultimately resulted in fandom becoming more visible to other fans and those outside fandom entirely (Duffet, 2013). Additionally, as the Internet became increasingly accessible, more children and teenagers began to actively engage in online fandom. For example, in early Harry Potter fandom in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, several major fan sites and archives — such as the online school newspaper-style blog The Daily

Prophet (Jenkins, 2006) and Fiction Alley (Jamison, 2013) were started and maintained by children and young adults.

Fandom practices have steadily evolved for nearly a century, and new technology and cultural shifts have allowed fans to explore multiple types of fan activities and to connect in new ways, while still celebrating old favorite properties. In the modern era, long time fandoms such as Star Trek (Duffet, 2013) and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

(Lookadoo & Dickinson, 2015) continue to thrive and attract new fans alongside newly blossoming fandoms for modern movies, TV shows, and musicians. Regardless of the texts that fans celebrate, fandom has the potential to become a long-lasting entity that far outlives the lifespan of its own canon material. This shows that fandom is not a passing fancy of youth or a short-lived trend, but rather a lasting pillar of cultural community.

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Women in fandom

Female-led fandom spaces have existed for decades, a trend that continues to today in increasing strength. The development of mid-20th century fandom brought forth an increase of women in fandom as a whole, as well as women creating their own niche communities within larger male-dominated fandoms, such as science fiction communities

(Bacon-Smith, 1992). As individual fandoms grew, women became vital in starting and expanding practices such as zines and fan fiction (Bacon-Smith, 1992). On a larger scale, female fans’ enthusiasm led to overall rising interest and production in media trends, such as science fiction as a genre, and narratives that emphasized male friendships and relationships (Hellekson & Busse 2006).

Within fandom communities themselves, many female science fiction fans of the mid-20th century emphasized fandom connection and were eager to welcome and orientate new fans to fandom spaces (Bacon-Smith, 1992). The welcoming of new women in Star Trek fandom in particular became so widespread that several Star Trek and science fiction fans recounted that they first became cognizant of fan zines and fan fiction before even accessing the canon materials, suggesting that the fandom community can be equally if not more important in fandom than the media texts that interest fans

(Bacon-Smith, 1992). Now with the abundance of fan fiction, fan art, and fandom activity available both online and off in the contemporary era, discovering fandom materials before even accessing the media text in question is easier than ever.

For many women, fandom is a life-long interest, and fan activities can become vital parts of the childhood and adolescence of many young girls. Fandom and media interest often takes root amongst young teenagers, most of them girls (Kapurch, 2015).

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Fandom can provide creative alternative outlets for girls to process their own feelings and identities, and possibly redefine their own ideas of femininity and girlhood (Kapurch,

2015). In the midst of difficult adolescent development, young girls in online fandom communities often find a significant measure of freedom to develop their own voices, tell stories, and blur the lines between fiction and reality, all within the safety of a passionate and like-minded community of their peers (Karlsson & Olin-Scheller, 2015).

Despite the large presence of female fans on fandom as a whole, the gender of fans has major impacts on their fandom experiences, and not all of them are positive.

Female fans in male-coded fandoms, particularly science fiction fandoms, are often excluded or harassed for their interest and involvement (Duffet, 2013). This pattern of discrimination against female fans in particular was seen in early Star Trek fandom

(Bacon-Smith, 1992). While there was some equal gender representation in early Star

Trek fan activities such as cosplay and zines, many female fans in the mid-20th century remained excluded if they did not have male fandom connections or could not prove themselves intellectually against male fans. This exclusion could often escalate to verbal or even sexually targeted harassment (Bacon-Smith, 1992). This prejudice also continued in the Internet age. In early Internet fandom, most forums and email lists that focused on female fans were prone to mockery from other fans (MacDonald, 1998). This often resulted in female-centric forums being operated in secrecy and frequently changing their names to avoid attacks (MacDonald, 1998).

Harassment of female fans additionally plays into an ongoing pattern of cultural sexism, which is often encouraged by a media industry that has appealed primarily to the gaze and desires of a heterosexual male audience (Trier-Bieniek, 2015). While the

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beginning of the 21st century has seen more diversity within popular media in terms of giving more voice to female characters, characters of colors, and queer characters, many early fandom women still had to engage in creative play within a patriarchal industry that devalued women’s input, sexuality and personal authority (Trier-Bieniek, 2015). Due to this already hostile environment, any assertion of female fandom in large fandom spaces can agitate the ongoing pattern of harassment as well as a need to assert rules for “real fandom” and “true” masculinity among male fans (Trier-Bieniek, 2015). These attitudes can result in a rejection of any female-gendered fan practices, such as fan fiction. Instead fan approaches that honor the full canon text — a stance typically taken by male fans — are considered favorable both by fans and producers as opposed to taking pieces from canon and creating original content — which is often favored by female fans (Bacon-

Smith, 1992).

While women are often ignored and disrespected in male-centered fandom, they can also experience negative judgments for their participation in female-dominated fan spaces as well. Aside from interpersonal issues that may populate such spaces, the outside perception of female-led fandom is primarily a negative one. This can be seen particularly clearly in the contemporary fandom around Twilight in the early 2000’s

(Corse & Hartless, 2015). At the peak of Twilight’s popularity, the majority of Twilight fans were teenage girls or older women (many of them dubbed “TwiMoms”), and the most common characterization of Twilight fans in mainstream media was that they were crazy, vapid and not interested in anything culturally valuable (Jamison, 2013).

Specifically, when it came to older fans, media sources continually covered “TwiMoms” as if they were too old to have so much investment in media. This media coverage of

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Twilight fans both reflected and contributed to the overall backlash against young women in fandom at the end of the 2000’s and beginning of the 2010’s (Jamison, 2013).

In turn, many female fans, both within Twilight fandom and outside of it, exhibited mixed feelings towards fans that become very emotional towards the objects of their affection (Jamison, 2013). While some fandom women understand this highly emotional behavior, others continually assert that they do not want their own fandom associated with the expression of other fans (Jamison, 2013). Both the reactions of media producers and other fans to Twilight fan prominently reflected an ongoing societal fear of emotional and sexually charged women (Jamison, 2013).

Rejecting emotional “fan girl” labels is just one way that sexist and misogynistic views can still exist within female fandom. For example, many female fans fall into a cycle of constantly becoming unsatisfied by their own character models in fic, partially because they are unsatisfied with their own limited roles as women in real life (Bacon-

Smith, 1992). When it comes to canon materials, women struggle with the female character representation given to them. Fans can become conflicted between two ideas for female characters – whether they should always be perfect and strong or whether women should be fully fleshed out and greatly flawed, which can potentially lead to further dissatisfaction from female fans who became invested in these characters’ stories

(Bury, 2005).

The struggle female fans have with female characters can most be seen in fandom reactions to popular fan fiction tropes, such as the highly gendered attitudes towards

Mary Sue characters. “Mary Sue” is a term for an original female character in fan fiction that either the author or audience understands as a reflection of the author, or a character

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that can serve as a form of wish fulfillment for the author and reader (Bacon-Smith,

1992). Harsh criticism of the Mary Sue genre has led to a systemic rejection of such stories in fan spaces. Similarly, another popular genre among fandom women in the late twentieth century was the “lay” story – often touted as a “matured” version of Mary Sue

– in which original female characters were paired with canon male characters (Bacon-

Smith, 1992). But while many lay story writers portrayed female characters in passive roles in overwhelming heterosexual and monogamous narratives, they were also able to write intelligent commentary on the behavior of women in abusive relationships and asserted the importance of their own sexual desires and narratives through their writing

(Corse & Hartless, 2015).

Indeed, sexually explicit content is an important characteristic of many female- created fan texts that has been met with mixed feedback both in and out of fandom.

While there are also men who read and write fan fiction, it is a genre most prominently grounded in giving voice to female fantasies and embracing feminine authorship and desire (Bacon-Smith, 1992). The contemporary trend of fan fiction is another version of early romance literature, aided by the wide-spread circulation of zines and later, the

Internet, to help women spread their work and connect with each other. But because of its popularity among young women, fan fiction has also garnered the worst stereotypes of both feminized romance and masculinized pornography. Fans, outsiders, and producers alike may claim that fan fiction is perverted, frivolous, and ultimately pointless (Jamison,

2013). Many fans enjoy erotica in their private time but insist that fan fiction is “more than just porn” to outsiders (Jamison, 2013).

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But sexually explicit fan fiction still has a purpose. Fan fiction can be a way to recognize the inner self of female authors, or it can become an escape from the confines of real family, romance, and work. Fan fiction can allow women to take a break from their normal identities and responsibilities to instead assume a separate, anonymous identity that allows them to freely express themselves, explore fantasy, and connect with other women within a space of their own making (Bacon-Smith, 1992).

Fandom and the Mainstream

Although fandom has long served as an alternative to mainstream media consumption, over time fandom has caught the attention of a larger audience. The mainstream reaction to fandom has been mixed; at times fandom has been met with shame and disgust, while at other times it has received quick interest with a focus on profit.

Fans have always had the ability to play with source material in order to either subvert or mirror canon expectations. This means that fans are, by necessity, tied to the producers and canon material. While fans can create their own canon (sometimes called

“fanon”), their transformative work still requires knowledge of the original, producer- created content. Even though fan writers typically credit the original producers of the canon material and do not claim to own the characters in their stories, they still strive to change the canon narratives in meaningful ways (Jenkins, 1992). Fandom is both deeply engaged in mainstream consumer culture while also changing it, and most importantly, is always negotiating its relationship with industry in new ways (Booth, 2015).

For these reasons, fans have traditionally been regarded as a “powerless elite” – in other words, they are not in control of canon texts and do not make up the entire audience

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for any particular text, but they do have immense investment and knowledge of the source material (Booth, 2015). Producers can either cater to or shun these “powerless elites,” but in either outcome the fans do not gain any concrete power in the development of the canon text (Booth, 2015). Instead, fans have “cultural authority” (Booth, 2015) – they have enough knowledge to critique, but not enough power to actually influence the source material.

Fans’ complicated relationship with producers is partially driven by the fact that fans have often been portrayed by media producers as disturbed, predatory, or driven by a hidden or repressed sexual desire (Duffet, 2013). Negative depictions of fandom can also reflect societal anxieties related to media and contemporary life, including the increasing power of celebrity, the loss of privacy, or the perceived danger of human obsession and emotion (Duffet, 2013). These anxieties are also heavily gendered. Male fans are often either shown as having weakened masculinity or as being outright violent and angry

(Duffet, 2013). Meanwhile, female fans are often portrayed as what society deems to be the worst of female stereotypes; either unattractive, old, single and undesirable, or manic, obsessive and hypersexual (Jenkins, 1992). In reality, none of these stereotypes are entirely accurate, and often overlook the creativity and complexity of fandom identity

(Duffet, 2013).

Mainstream perceptions of media fans have evolved somewhat in recent years.

Even while fandom is still often pushed to the margins, it is far less common in the modern era for audiences and studios to openly mock fandom. Indeed, fandom is seen by many creators as a prized audience (Busse, 2015). However, producers’ recent shift to embrace fandom activities is often commercially motivated (Busse, 2015). Studios and

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corporations will often ignore or discourage independent fan activities and instead encourage corporate-centered experiences, such as official theme parks, tours, or merchandise (Jenkins, 2006). These corporate-approved messages usually place an emphasis on consumption and on what the producer has deemed important, rather than fan-favored subcultural practices and content (Jenkins, 2006). Producers may also target and discourage fan readings of characters and relationships that the producers do not approve of (Duffet, 2013). While some producers do acknowledge dedicated cult fandom

— such as Star Wars directors and writers celebrating heavily interested fans in special features on the film DVDs (Jenkins, 2006) — much of this interest pertains to fandom history rather than contemporary fandom, and also ignores past or current fandom interest and nuance. Ultimately, this selective focus on certain types of fandom is meant to encourage fans as passive consumers and to buoy a certain type of participation, rather than allowing fans to engage organically with the source material (Booth, 2015).

There are many notable past instances of producers attempting to regulate fan activities. For example, Lucasfilm’s copyright policies-controlled Star Wars fans in the early 2000’s by only allowing “celebration” and not “appropriation,” along with strict guidelines on which copyrighted materials fans could use, and the rating of the fans’ creations (Jenkins, 2006). While Star Wars producers were interested in reaping the free promotion and attention that fan-made products bring to them, there was still a high amount of censorship for the fans actually involved in this production and labor (Jenkins,

2006).

Even sites run by young children are vulnerable to attacks by producers. In particular, Warner Brothers threatened to take down fan-run sites after they acquired film

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rights to Harry Potter. This often resulted in legal threats from large corporations against young children who did not have substantial income or legal counsel, and thus were often forced to shut down their fan sites (Jenkins, 2006). Meanwhile, Warner Brothers still tried to encourage their own versions of “approved” fan activities — such as Harry

Potter branded games and merchandise — often with mixed results compared to the earlier and more authentic practices of Internet fan communities (Jenkins, 2006).

As Internet fandom became more prevalent and moved towards more multi- fandom sites with massive staffs, both legal protections but also general rules of fandom websites increased, many of which favored producers. The creator of the massive fandom website FanFiction.net reached out for legal assistance for FanFiction.net early in the site’s founding (Li, 2000), but the site’s staff frequently chose to outright ban content that authors, producers, and celebrities were unhappy with — which has included everything from sexually explicit material to celebrity-oriented fiction — rather than legally defending fans’ rights to post this content (FanFiction.net, 2020).

In recent years, the Organization of Transformative Works (OTW) has taken steps to avoid legal trouble for fans who use their sites, including the fiction hosting site

Archive of Our Own (AO3). The OTW includes legal advocacy for fans as one of their core organizational projects. The organization employs professional lawyers who can offer legal counsel to individual fans who receive legal threats for their fan works, submits copyright policy letters to governments all over the world, and files Amicus

Curiae briefs in the United States regarding copyright and publicity law (OTW, 2020).

However, even the extensive legal assistance that the OTW has employed does not mean that legal trouble cannot still plague fans. In March 2020, the Chinese government

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elected to place a national ban on AO3, which allegedly started when a Chinese actor filed a government complaint against fan fiction being written about himself on AO3

(Romano, 2020). The issue remains unresolved, although the OTW issued a statement via

Twitter that they are working to resolve the problem (AO3 Status, 2020).

This pattern of legal challenges not only greatly underestimates fans’ personal value, but also dangerously discounts the efforts that female fans in particular have contributed to their communities. Commercially celebrated fandom ignores the “gift economy” of fandom – the idea of free entertainment and goods based solely in personal friendship and passion (Busse, 2015). These were traditions mainly started and still facilitated by female fans (Busse, 2015). However, now corporations mainly value fandom for its enthusiastic free promotion and for its purchasing power of materials and merchandise. This viewpoint is certainly a far cry from the early mockery of fandom from those in power, but it is still a shallow celebration of fandom which all but ignores traditions started by female fans (Busse, 2015).

In particular, fan fiction is one area where fan exploitation and outside profits is an increasingly prevalent issue in contemporary fandom. Fan fiction has become so popular and widespread that in the contemporary Internet age, there can be many forms of profit in fan fiction writing and publishing, but these profits will not necessarily go to the fans themselves. Several large for-profit fan fiction sites such as Wattpad, FanLib, and Kindle World allow their owners to profit directly from the site’s usage without providing payment to the authors who post to the site (Jamison, 2013). Other non-profit, fan-run sites, such as AO3, only benefit those who provide servers, and neither the owners of the site nor the users make profits (Jamison, 2013).

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After the enormous monetary success of Fifty Shades of Grey, the record-breaking erotic novel series which originally started as a Twilight fan fiction published on Fan

Fiction Net, there was a rush to publish fan fiction as original fiction, both among authors and publishing houses (Jamison, 2013). This led to some controversy within many fandoms, and particularly the Twilight fandom where the trend began. Some went as far to see publishing as a betrayal of the fandom in favor of profit (Jamison, 2013). Further, many of these same fans saw fic writing merely as a “practice ground” for writers looking for publication, and that fan fiction should not be considered for professional publication (Jamison, 2013). Others asserted the professional standard of fan fiction and also acknowledged that some fandom women need to make a living off their fic and should have the right to do so (Jamison, 2013). These two mindsets remain in conflict as more fan creators continue to seek professional publishing options for their work

(Jamison, 2013).

This complicated relationship with non-fandom spaces also translates to journalism. In her early studies, Bacon-Smith pointed to academic studies creating a rather distorted image of fandom due to researchers only focusing on certain aspects of fandom— such as fans’ focus on homoerotic texts or the grandeur of fan costuming — without placing these singular practices into a greater cultural context. There is also a sense of self-preservation within fandom itself. Many fans want to protect themselves from perceived outsiders, including academics and reporters who want to observe and write about fandom (Bacon-Smith, 1992). While fans may interact with these outsiders, they are not likely to share their full interests and involvement with those outside of the fan space (Bacon-Smith, 1992).

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When fandom is accessed and covered by outside sources, the results can be enlightening, detrimental, or generally misguided. While this mixed bag outcome is not uncommon when a journalist is covering any particular topic they are unfamiliar with, the results of inaccurately covering a community can be increasingly problematic when the group is largely made up of marginalized people who are already harshly judged in both the media and everyday life. Fandom is no different, and thus it is vital to examine how journalists handle covering fandom communities in the modern age, and where they are possibly falling short in their coverage.

Outsider Reporting

My project is far from the first time a journalist has shared fandom with the general public. There is no shortage of fandom-centric pieces available, from short news stories to long winding features, and every one seems to have a different angle. But I have also noticed that journalism about fandom falls into two general categories —

“outside” of fandom perspectives, and “inside” of fandom perspectives. I will discuss

“outside” of fandom perspectives in this section, and then “inside” fandom perspectives in a separate section.

For clarity, I am defining “outside” perspectives as pieces written by authors who are not self-identified fans or who do not cover fandom as a regular beat, and also pieces written for publications that are not fandom or pop culture-centric, meaning they are most likely targeting a more general, novice audience with their fandom coverage.

Many features on fan fiction and fandom written by authors outside the fandom circle choose to focus on a historical perspective and track the origins of fandom

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practices. This is often done by drawing on loose parallels from past instances of appropriative culture and writing; examples such as Homeric epics and Shakespeare are common when referring to these early origins (Reich, 2015). Journalists also often touch on how early 20th century science fiction communities gave way to more mainstream publishing practices later in the century (Miller, 2015). Typically, these contemporary histories are capped off by discussing monetized examples of fan fiction, from corporate endeavors like Kindle Words to success stories like E.L. James and Fifty Shades of Grey

(Reich, 2015).

Some of these historical articles tackle one particular fandom, like a recent article on Jane Austen fandom, “The Pride and Prejudice of Online Fan Culture,” in which author Virginia Heffernan writes about how she views Jane Austen fans as one of the first large scale, female-celebrating fandoms that was in practice long before the rise of Star

Trek and other female-led fandoms (Heffernan, 2019). The piece also touches on the beginning of gendered issues in fandom, such as disagreements between male and female

Austen fans and also the idea of humanities and media receiving less attention and respect in greater society than science-based fields (Heffernan, 2019).

Other authors focus on more contemporary history, such as when Mark Hill showcased the history of Internet fandom in Vice by highlighting popular fan sites in late

1990’s and early 2000’s and detailing how the Internet spread the access and influence of fandom (Hill, 2016). This piece also included a perspective on fandom gradually skewing younger as more children and teenagers became inducted into fandom spaces, something

Hill describes as “either wonderful or horrifying, depending on your perspective” (Hill,

2016).

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Many publications are also drawn to large-scale fandom success stories or the financial and behavioral benefits of fandom. The mainstream success of both fans themselves and fan-favorite media has made fandom a popular topic among many business-focused publications. A recent piece in PR Newswire called “The State of

Fandom Report” addressed the importance of a “fan-first” global platform, which directly sells fandom information to marketers. This piece addresses how fans can benefit producers and how to utilize this power. This includes focusing on franchises in order to hold onto existing fans and to draw in new ones who will then stay for a long time, as well as “guiding” fan initiation and emotional investment, which are typically organic, fan-led experiences. The piece also uses data on fandom interest and loyalty, citing the length of typical fandom interest (nine years) and which types of fans are more common, casual or dedicated fans (dedicated) (Fandom, 2019). This data and framing ultimately offered a clear goal: to sell fans to producers as a mechanism for current and future profit

(Fandom, 2019).

In addition to focusing on profits and commercial success, authors also often point out that fandom is a rich source of education and community, primarily for young women. Interestingly in a piece in Technology Review, Cecilia Aragon suggested that educators could use fan fiction in a moderated classroom setting to “fix the 73% lack of writing proficiency in teenagers” due to both the popularity of fan fiction among teenagers and the potential for professional writing practice in fic writing (Aragon, 2019, para. 25).

The ongoing fascination with Fifty Shades of Grey has resulted in no small number of articles trying to get to the bottom of its appeal and origins, and what its

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success means for both fan fiction and mainstream publishing as a whole. It has gotten to the point that Forbes, one of the largest finance-focused publications in the world, ran a feature on fan fiction in 2017 focusing on E.L. James and how she republished her

Twilight fan fiction as an original work to create a multi-million dollar empire from her books (Cuccinello, 2017). But this piece does not simply frame fan fiction as a never- ending publishing cash cow; writer Hayley Cuccinello acknowledges the trickiness and nuance of the topic as well. She addresses the importance of fan fiction as a “gift culture” and how often fans see fellow fans publishing as “selling out” (Cuccinello, 2017, para.

30). Additionally, she delves into the complications that come when fan authors become professional authors, especially after many professional authors have tried to serve lawsuits against fan authors in the past, creating rockiness and distrust between fandom and professionally published authors (Cuccinello, 2017).

Cuccinello also acknowledges the stigma of female-led genres as a whole, from fan fiction to romance (Cuccinello, 2017). She says that while some authors embrace their fic roots, others, like Sarah Rees Brennan, have said their fan fiction past has turned out to severely compromise their career and reputation because of the negative reputation that fandom has garnered over the years (Cuccinello, 2017). And even though it is one of the most profitable genres, bringing in over a billion dollars in the US alone in 2013, romance as a whole is also often undermined and mocked by both the media and everyday people (Cuccinello, 2017). Fan fiction and romance have two major things in common — despite being hugely popular, both are largely doused in shame, and women are the majority of fan fiction and romance readers (Cuccinello, 2017). But despite this ongoing stigma against fan fiction and mainstream romance as a whole, big successes

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like Fifty Shades have led to mainstream acceptance of both romance and fan fiction and have solidified it as a profitable and popular market that cannot be ignored (Cuccinello,

2017).

However, one does not have to look long to find articles that seem to judge and question fandom. Guardian writer Ewan Morrison took on fandom issues and ended up at a doom and gloom conclusion, writing “the rise of fanfic is ‘the end of the world’”

(Morrison, 2012, para. 1). He rattles off just a few of the negative descriptors that have been slung at fandom and fan fiction over the years; “it's crass, sycophantic, celebrity- obsessed, naive, badly written, derivative, consumerist, unoriginal – anti-original”

(Morrison, 2012, para. 1) His piece also covers bigger conflicts over fan fiction, from authors like Anne Rice trying to outlaw fan fiction entirely to mainstream ire against feminized fandoms like Twilight and Fifty Shades (Morrison, 2012). But the piece ultimately ends with Morrison predicting his own idea of fan fiction as “the end of the world” by stating that fan fiction and fiction in general has reached such a point of saturation that there is only potential for eternal remix over original content (Morrison,

2012, para. 29).

On a similarly negative note, one recent article in the New York Times piece mused on the idea that “nobodies” now have loyal fan bases, and what that means for entertainment as a whole (Keilies, 2019, para. 1). Reporter Jamie Lauren Keilies mainly focused on fan bases around newly popular media such as podcasts, but also touches on other niche fandom interests such as meme pages or indie music artists (Keilies, 2019).

Keilies contrasts older fandom such as Star Trek fandom to today, saying that while face- to-face fandom of the pre-Internet age had a core structure, modern fandom is “a stateless

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nation” (Keilies, 2019, para. 10). She notes a few other shifting trends in fandom, such as an increase in monetary exchange between fans and creators and fandom discourse that primarily revolves around criticism rather than celebratory discussions of media (Keilies,

2019). However, while Keilies believes these changes to fandom are negative, she does not offer any reasons for why modern fandom is so much worse than the older forms of fandom that she admires.

Fandom is also a ripe subject for parody. Parody writer Michelle Spies wrote a piece titled “I made the Internet vote to determine the worst fan base. Here’s what I learned” for Vulture last year, in which she, as the title implies, pitted various fandoms against each other to see who had irritated the Internet as a whole the most that year

(Spies, 2019). As Spies piece goes on, she addresses a number of fandoms with highly harsh language — “annoying” (Spies, 2019, para. 9), “obsessive” (Spies, 2019, para. 24), and “nerds” (Spies, 2019, para. 40) come up a number of times, along with more colorful and memorable jabs such as “junior-high bullies” (describing the Nicki Minaj fandom)

(Spies, 2019, para. 46) and “infantile freaks” (in reference to Disney fans) (Spies, 2019, para. 31). Of course, this is a parody piece that paints fandom with a broad brush. But deeper meaning can be gleaned from a piece like this, such as questions about what makes fandom “bad” to an outside audience, what happens when fans latch onto a subject others might find morally wrong or at the very least strange, and what it means when fandom behavior can be easily accessed by a mainstream audience and judged outside of fandom space.

But while many pieces have either a positive or negative slant to them, others take more of a mixed bag approach. While some of these pieces result in nuanced, multi-

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faceted coverage, others fall short on creating a clear point or narrative at all. Take, for instance, a Vulture piece from 2015. This feature focuses on the oddness of fandom, from using words like “bizarre,” to zeroing in on “weird” yet popular fan fiction tropes like male pregnancy, and using words like “stealing” and “reworking” interchangeably when referring to fan fiction (Miller, 2015, para. 3).

The piece summarizes and simplifies many aspects of fandom history. The rise of female fandom is reduced to women running from the “mostly male nerds who ran things” (Miller, 2015, para. 3). E.L. James becomes the savior of fan fiction who brought it into the spotlight, and yet Miller acknowledges that James’ popularity and success has forced many fans to defend their interests in a way they have never had to do before

(Miller, 2015).

Miller’s tone seems to swing between fascinated, judgmental, and patronizing throughout the article. Miler does touch on positive aspects of fandom — namely, the rampant creativity and enthusiasm of fandom, but her observations always seem to vary with no real conclusion. She says that the assumption that fan fiction is “an ocean of bad writing” is justified, but then quickly says fic is a promising resource for hopeful writers and the publishing industry (Miller, 2015, para. 7). She says that fandom is “not all pornographic content,” and then puts a large focus on fandom erotica (Miller, 2015). She points out how fandom is a female space, but spends most of the article focusing on the interest in male slash (same sex) ships and male characters rather than female relationships inside fandom (Miller, 2015).

Other writers offer a mixed perspective on fandom history, like a recent feature in

Paper Magazine on the highs and lows of Tumblr, the microblogging platform that

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served as a fandom haven for the majority of the 2010’s. Writer Marianne Eloise credits the site’s initial success to young users and the decline in popularity of MySpace in the late 2000’s (Eloise, 2019) and credits the site’s lasting popularity to active user base full of niche humor, social justice, and fandom bloggers that populated the site at the peak of

Tumblr’s popularity (Eloise, 2019). The article concludes with the widespread news of

Tumblr banning adult content at the end of 2018, which Eloise — and many others — identify as leading to a large decrease in people’s interest in Tumblr (Eloise, 2019). She paints the site as “a ghost, a porn-free puppet of its former self” that is rapidly losing users (Eloise, 2019). Eloise ends her deep dive by stating that Tumblr is “one last bastion of user experience over profit” when compared to other sites like Facebook and

Instagram, but that its failure to listen to users not only threatens the site itself, but the future freedom and existence of online subcultures entirely (Eloise, 2019, para. 9).

Many pieces outside of fandom try to balance a large focus on the “weird” aspects of fandom with the positive personal impact that fan communities can have. This approach appears in Rebecca Liu’s piece for Vice “The Subversive Sexual Power Found in Erotic Fandom Forums,” where she reflects on Harry Potter slash fiction and the odd tropes within, while also acknowledging the importance of online fandom to challenging the creativity and viewpoints of young women. Liu writes “for young women on Tumblr, these freedoms to profess their attractions and explore their desires through fictions, fan art, and parody are precious opportunities to be agents of their own sexual journeys. In the public realm, after all, nothing is more terrifying than a young woman in the unabashed and unapologetic throes of unconventional sexual desire” (Liu, 2018, para. 9).

She also acknowledges the tropes found in fan fiction are “sometimes serious, sometimes

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tongue-in-cheek” (Liu, 2018, para. 7), and most often are by-products of a space that had often been intended for fans’ eyes only, a nuance that many other journalists do not touch upon.

Mixed-perspective pieces can offer interesting nuance, especially when they push against other popular narratives about fandom. In a piece for How to Get to Next, Alice

Bell offered expert rebuttals to the idea that mainstream appropriative literature is exactly the same as fan fiction posted online every day, which is often seen in other history- focused pieces (Bell, 2015). Instead of following this popular narrative, Bell uses the writings of fan scholar Kristina Busse to suggest that sometimes, the definition of “fan fiction” is stretched too far to include literature that has almost nothing in common with the contents and context of modern fandom (Bell, 2015). Bell also offers opposing, fan- based perspectives on popular narratives on mainstream publication and other success stories. While most publications view multi-million-dollar book deals born out of fandom as a purely positive thing, Bell makes different observations, such as how authors lose the support and community of their fandom when they move their fan work to professional publication (Bell, 2015).

While some writers seem to wholeheartedly embrace the idea of fandom as a strange, otherworldly practice, others full-heartedly believe that mainstream attention and a few notable success stories have stripped any type of stigma from fandom in the modern era (Burt, 2017). In cultural tomes like The New Yorker, fandom is defined as an oasis of groundbreaking, educated culture scholars (Burt, 2017). Writer Stephanie Burt evaluates the quality of fan fiction with special precision by examining the benefits of female sexuality, professional writing practice, community, and non-capitalistic spaces

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alongside the standing belief that fan fiction is a firmly amateur practice that is nonetheless populated by talent and potential (Burt, 2017).

There also seems to be a budding trend of looking for deeper meaning in fandom and finding unusual takes on the matter. Recently, a piece in the New York Times called

“Can fan fiction bridge the partisan divide?” compared fandom to patriotism and suggested that fan fiction and fandom focusing on politicians can offer a more personal approach to politics that make partisan lines blurrier and offer more power to voters

(Goldberry, 2019). But this piece was largely criticized, including by one of the interviewees featured in the piece, who stated on Twitter that the author took their words out of context and ignored their criticism for the overall focus of the piece (Klink, 2019).

Sometimes, a story will impact fandom deeply through a mix of misguided judgement and framing. Last year, a piece by Michael Schulman (2019) for The New

Yorker called “Superfans: A Love Story,” upset many prominent voices in the fandom community. The piece is fairly simplistic and covers a variety of topics covered in many other mainstream publications on fandom. It opens with a story about Nicki Minaj fans harassing a journalist and carries into how producers and celebrities view fans. It then touches on larger modern issues, like harassment, sexism, racism, and ongoing politics within fandom. Schulman provides a fairly in-depth history of fandom with stories from the 1970s through the 1990s, and heavily quotes from both scholarship and personal interviews with fan scholar Henry Jenkins. But current fandom seems to be glossed over.

While Schulman visits Comic Con and makes surface level observations, he stops short of diving into contemporary fandom and the full impact of social media. He brings up fan harassment but merely acknowledges its existence and not its effects. He closes with an

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anecdote about Games of Thrones fans at Comic Con, but the end of the piece seems more focused on the actors, writers, and producers of the show than the fans themselves.

This piece caused backlash throughout the fan community, especially by other journalists who were also fans. This article was discussed, along with other journalistic articles, in the fandom podcast Fansplaining in November 2019, as an example of out-of- touch fandom reporting (Klink & Minkel, 2019). The article was also cited specifically in my personal interview with Kaila Hale-Stern, the editor of the feminist fandom publication The Mary Sue, who took issue with the way the author framed fandom in an outdated way and did not consult any female fan scholars on the topic (K. Hale-Stern, personal communication, November 1, 2019).

The situation echoes the one when Elizabeth Minkel wrote a New Statesman piece in 2014 in response to actor Benedict Cumberbatch’s disparaging comments on fandom.

That year, Cumberbatch had been on a promotional press circuit for his BBC program

Sherlock and had complained in three separate interviews about young female fans writing erotic gay fan fiction about his character (Minkel, 2014). Minkel responded to these comments by writing “does it matter that … middle-aged men with very large platforms were sitting at a table pathologizing teenage girls’ sexuality — and making a whole load of potentially harmful assumptions about a topic they know literally nothing about? Absolutely”(Minkel, 2014, para. 6). One has to wonder what journalists, male or female, outside of the scope of fandom have contributed to this statement, and what journalists can observe from their peers both outside of fandom, and within fandom as well.

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Insider Reporting

I will now touch on perspectives I deem to be “inside” of fandom. These pieces typically come from journalists who are open about their own fandom identity, and often regularly cover fandom for one or more publications. These pieces are also often published by fandom or pop culture publications, but this is not always the case.

Furthermore, I am defining these journalistic perspectives by the authors’ life experiences and the perspectives they are bringing to the topic.

Journalism from inside fandom can address similar topics that mainstream journalists cover, but with different focuses and angles. For instance, similar to the top- down analysis of Tumblr that ran in Paper Magazine, the pop culture and nerd interest site Syfy put out a piece entirely on the history and legacy of AO3. Writer Caitlin Busch looked into how the creators of AO3 made a space “independent from corporate oversight” and wanted to focus on preserving fandom artifacts and history (Busch, 2019, para. 1). The piece delves into the site’s impressive metrics — 700 volunteers running a site with 2 million users and 225 million page views a week — but also touches on how

AO3 is important beyond mere numbers (Busch, 2019). Busch includes interviews with the site’s founders, who speak on how they wanted to fight censorship and attempts at corporate profit that were coming from other fandom sites (Busch, 2019). Busch also cites AO3 founder Francesca Coppa on a few major takeaways from AO3 — its commitment to women, celebrating the “amateur” work of fandom, and creating a space independent of corporate oversight (Busch, 2019).

The Mary Sue also covers fandom history, but its reporters often delve into personal stories that are especially impactful to those in fandom. One example was a

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piece that covered the circumstances and impact of the first ever Star Trek slash fic, “A

Fragment Out of Time,” and how fandom practices and trends have shifted based on this single work (Hale-Stern, 2018). Notably, this particular fic has been preserved by fandom for a long time, and fandom wiki site Fan Lore archived a 2007 zine interview with Diana

Marchant, the first Star Trek slash author, on their website for historical purposes

(Legacy, 2007). Yet despite many mainstream publications focusing on fandom history in their articles, this particular aspect of fandom history is rarely highlighted outside of fandom press.

Fandom press can additionally touch on often-ignored aspects of past and present fandom life. In a short but insightful article for The Daily Dot, Gavia Baker-Whitlelaw wrote about Yahoo Groups shutting down and deleting all old content, and how a large collection of fan fiction and fan history from the early 2000s would be lost after the platform shuttered (Baker-Whitlelaw, 2019). Baker-Whitelaw reflects on how “the history of internet culture is a history of lost and destroyed information,” and both remembers the history of Yahoo Groups while also musing about the future of other fandom platforms and archives (Baker-Whitlelaw, 2019).

Fandom history is often equal parts preservation and reflection, which was quite evident at the end of 2019, many publications ran pieces on notable takeaways from the past decade. During this time, two separate writers covered how fandom had defined the decade. Alexis Nedd’s piece for Mashable focused on both the changing trends of entertainment in the 2010’s, and on the growing mainstream power of fandom, including how fan voices began to actually influence the media they loved, from Brooklyn 99 fans pushing networks to bring back the show after it was cancelled to Westworld writers

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changing the plotline of an upcoming episode after fans guessed a planned plot twist before it aired (Nedd, 2019). But along with producers’ increased connection with fans, there are also plenty of times in recent years when producers were still disconnected from exactly what the fans wanted, such as the poor reception of Star Wars: A Solo Story and the Harry Potter spinoff franchise Fantastic Beasts, despite the original series maintaining large and loyal fanbases (Nedd, 2019). Nedd ultimately summarizes the fan and producer relationship in this way: dedicated fans have become a sought-after demographic for media producers, but producers also risk making fans unhappy with an adaptation that fans could easily imagine writing better on their own (Nedd, 2019).

Aja Romano hit on similar points for Vox in her piece “Fandom went mainstream in the 2010’s – for better or worse.” Romano credits massive franchises like the MCU for increasing fandom interest in the 2010’s, more “streamlined” sites like Tumblr for making fandom more user-friendly, published fanfiction like Fifty Shades for bringing the concept of fic to the mainstream, and massive boy bands like One Direction and BTS for turning the old idea of “shrill fangirl” into something more engaged and nuanced

(Romano, 2019, para. 4). Romano also observes many shifting trends in fandom; while producers were encouraging constant participation, events, and consumerism, there was a rise in niche fandom communities, and fans were often more interested in social justice, drama, and analysis than the type of engagement producers wanted (Romano, 2019).

Romano summarizes how fans and creators now have an increasingly complicated and more intertwined relationship, and creators have yet to figure out an effective way to respond to fan dedication and input (Romano, 2019).

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In addition to history, context, and commentary, some pieces offer a personal insight into fandom, and aim to speak directly to fans. In an interesting piece “Here’s how to add self care to your fandom,” writer Sage Anderson speaks about her experience as a BTS and K-pop fan, and how the expectation of constantly committing time, energy, and money to fandom can impact fans (Anderson, 2019). Anderson digs into the idea, even consulting a clinical psychologist who focuses on celebrity psychology, to examine the ways fandom can harm fans, and how fans can protect themselves from “stan burnout” — a type of exhaustion from long-term fandom that Anderson asserts is far more common than harassment — and keep fandom a positive experience for themselves

(Anderson, 2019, para. 30).

Other articles focus on how fans can actively improve their viewpoints in fandom.

For example, Jordan West, one of my interview participants, wrote an article for The

Mary Sue on how to include more diverse characters and perspectives in fan fiction, how fans can be complacent in racism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism inside their own fandom practices, and how privileged fans can put more effort into creating diverse perspectives in their work (West, 2015).

These fandom advice articles rarely come from a source outside of fandom and are a valuable addition to the discussion about fandom directly from fans themselves.

And indeed, some of the most impactful inner fandom reporting can come when writers are willing to share personal narratives alongside information. In an insightful piece for

Wired, Laurie Penny wrote about the impact of fandom on her own life. She recalls being drawn to fandom as a young girl and finding other girls like her — shy and socially awkward, but highly intelligent, creative, and passionate — who didn’t quite fit in

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anywhere else (Penny, 2019). She describes her experiences in massive fandoms like

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Harry Potter and compares her behaviors to fandom theory, and how she viewed her own fandom at a micro level in terms of social interactions and cultural connection (Penny, 2019). She reflects on the general societal disdain for fandom and women’s work, and how meeting fandom friends from many different backgrounds made her acutely aware of other communities and the true impact of sexism, racism, and her own privilege, as well as how to educate herself on these topics (Penny, 2019).

Penny’s fandom journey is lifelong, and she chronicles it thoroughly, noting how fandom followed her to college and educated her on life and art alongside her courses

(Penny, 2019). She saw the shift of fandom becoming more accessible with massive archival projects like the OTW and noticed a change of science fiction journals publishing more women, queer people, and people of color (Penny, 2019). But she also saw a shift in her own friend group, and how she and her friends clung to their storytelling and creativity as they entered the world of adulthood and dealt with personal tragedy, and how they used their own voices more actively in a changing media landscape (Penny, 2019). Penny’s piece is notable for her storytelling and ability to blend both anecdote, history, and larger issues together, and ultimately, her piece helps create a very specific and yet very large-scale portrait of fandom.

While many journalists inside of fandom seem to write directly for other fans, fandom-based press is also often a place to challenge mainstream assumptions about fandom. The Mary Sue ran a piece highlighting the novel The Stone Table by Francis

Spufford, an “addition” to the Narnia canon which Mary Sue writer Kate Gardner said

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was simply published fan fiction. Gardner not only brought attention to this novel, she also discussed how masculine versus feminine fan practice is labeled, and how it is treated in the greater world, particularly when it comes to literature (Gardner, 2019).

Fan writers can also offer fandom guides with their inside perspective that are largely meant for fandom newbies or those outside fandom, such as when Baker-

Whitelaw and Romano wrote their “Complete Guide to Fan Fiction” for The Daily Dot.

Baker-Whitelaw and Romano tackled a large range of common fandom “myths” they wanted to dispel. Many of these myths are gendered, such as when they disproved the idea that all fans are inherently young girls (Baker-Whitelaw & Romano, 2014). And then, quickly, Baker-Whitelaw and Romano moved on to an equally prevalent myth — that if fans are not young girls, then they are unattractive older women (Baker-Whitelaw

& Romano, 2014). They challenge this dichotomy while also stating that women of all ages and backgrounds have contributed to fandom (Baker-Whitelaw & Romano, 2014).

Also, while other mainstream and fandom articles alike choose to focus on the success stories of large scale fan authors and otherwise label fan fiction as good practice for professional publication, Baker-Whitelaw and Romano push back against the idea that a fulfilling hobby inherently has to result in professional skill, or even that all fan authors have ambition to one day be professional writers (Baker-Whitelaw & Romano, 2014). In fact, they double down on the idea that fan fiction is inherently different from published work both in its content and the way it is posted and consumed, and that the unique format and community of fan fiction may actually be what is appealing to many fans as opposed to the potential for professional publication (Baker-Whitelaw & Romano, 2014).

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Notably, criticism articles in fandom press are often response articles to other journalists. Baker-Whitelaw and Romano explain fandom in their article, but they also challenge other “fanfic explainer articles,” particularly those that choose to only highlight

“weird and creepy examples of fanfic concepts” or only focusing on female fans’ interest in male/male pairings, without delving deeper into how fan fiction functions, how slash fiction can be meaningful to women’s expression of their sexuality, and what other content is available in fandom (Baker-Whitelaw & Romano, 2014, para. 36).

Finally, Baker-Whitelaw and Romano address other trends they have seen with reporting on fandom. Namely, they comment on the need for journalists to keep some kind of fourth wall intact. While keeping fandom totally secret isn’t entirely possible at this point, the authors encourage journalists to think about the information they are publishing about fandom, and what should perhaps be kept in fandom, such fans’ full names and identities (Baker-Whitelaw & Romano, 2014). They end with this advice for journalists: “consider that you’re contributing to a media culture in which fannish practices are routinely mocked, which contributes toward ongoing sexism and dismissal of the predominantly women-based communities that participate in them. Is it really worth it? And, again, 268 million other journalists have made the ‘fanfic is so weird and funny’ joke already” (Baker-Whitelaw & Romano 2014, para. 61).

Now, to return to Schulman’s New Yorker article that specifically upset many fans. Gardner directly responded to the piece, but also larger journalism, in a piece rather appropriately called “Let’s update the way journalists are writing about fandom.”

Gardner specifically critiques Schulman for not gathering enough perspectives, citing only older scholarship like Henry Jenkins, and not consulting any female fan scholars

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(Gardner, 2019). Gardner also comments on Schulman being an outsider to fandom and says that while a personal stake is not required in writing about fandom, it is certainly helpful simply because fan culture can be difficult for outsiders to fully understand

(Gardner, 2019). But she also muses on the fact that fandom is never again going to be fully hidden from the public, and by extension, from the press, so journalistic pieces about fandom will probably continue, many with similar approaches and views as

Schulman’s piece (Gardner, 2019). In addition, she says she believes that fandom issues are probably better left to be written about by someone who can empathize with them

(Gardner, 2019).

Ultimately, inner fandom reporting often serves two separate but related purposes: primarily, it informs fans about topics that are important to them, or it can inform outside audiences about what is important to fandom. But it also serves as a response tool to reporting and information fandom deems to be inaccurate or irresponsible. By using the same tools and skill sets as other journalists, but with more hands-on knowledge and experience, journalists inside of fandom can help to redefine the available messages about fandom and defend themselves from inaccuracy and misinformation. But at the same time, this approach divides fandom journalists’ energy. While they want to focus on topics personally interesting to them, they also must act as a defender of fandom and a bridge to novice audiences, despite often working for smaller, niche publications that will not reach the same audiences as the pieces they are responding to.

This is not inherently a bad thing — indeed, the role of reporting from within a topic can bring special insight and information not seen elsewhere. But not only can serving multiple roles divide a journalist’s energy. Also, while it is difficult for a

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journalist to present pure objectivity in any story, a journalist reporting on a story so close to their own personal experiences may cause an audience to distrust their viewpoint.

I am both a participant of fandom and a journalist, so regardless of where I publish this article, my own stance in fandom sets me as an “inner fandom” reporter.

However, to be completely fair to myself, my subject, and my audience, I must observe the body of both inner and outer fandom journalism and the trends of both, and then determine what gaps need to be filled with my own reporting.

Ethics

Ethics of personal interviews

As with every journalistic piece, I acknowledge that with this project, I am holding to a core set of journalistic ethics. I have a responsibility for accuracy, which is to honor my subject’s personal stories, put them in the appropriate context, and be truthful

(Painter, et al., 1991). Because this project is so based in personal narratives, I need to stay true to my subject’s words, experiences, and opinions, and take care not to edit or frame these stories in a way that would misrepresent the information my subjects gave me. The exception to this would be if any information they gave me turned out to be factually incorrect, in which I have the responsibility to provide a correction in order to provide an accurate story to my audience.

I also have a responsibility to reciprocate any respect I might expect from someone to both my subject and audience, and ensure that none of the information I include in the final piece would make these groups feel I am being malicious against them in any way (Painter, et al., 1991). My piece is intended as a showcase of personal

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stories, and while these stories do not have to be wholly positive, they should be truthful and also shared with the subject’s permission as appropriate.

My personal set of ethics going into this project are most closely aligned with that of duty ethics, in that I am primarily guiding my decisions through my own personal and societal “duties,” or roles (Plaisance, 2014). Specifically, I am focused on my duty as both a journalist and a member of fandom. While I have a duty as a journalist to cover a topic fairly, I also have a duty as a member of fandom to use my own insight and personal experiences to appropriately convey the topic at hand. But I also have a duty to the marginalized groups covered in this project to cover them with fairness and nuance, and to not give into any negative stereotypes or narratives that would portray them in a malicious and unfair light. I also acknowledge that because this topic is so personal to me, some of my ethical duties are conflicted, and I have to choose some of my moral duties above all others. Because I am working here as a journalist, when in doubt, I placed my commitment to be fair and unbiased against my personal attachment to the topic at hand. While my instincts as a fan are to portray fandom through a highly personal lens, I have a duty to step back and regard my subject as rationally as I can.

Handling conflict of interest

Before I move forward, I would like to provide a closer look at conflict of interest and how it has impacted my project.

Sandra Borden and Michael Pritchard define a conflict of interest as an outside interest or responsibility that a journalist has interfering with their primary role as a reporter (Borden & Pritchard, 2001, p. 74). While journalists do not have to give up all

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outside interests or consider their secondary interests to be less important than journalism, within the context of reporting journalism should be the reporter’s first interest.

My conflict of interest for this project is my long-time interest and personal connection to fandom. I did not want to completely disconnect myself from fandom while

I was working on this project, and I also could not entirely separate my previous fandom experiences from my research and writing process. But because I was cognizant of this conflict, I examined how this conflict would influence my project and I implemented a few strategies to remedy my conflict of interest as best as I could.

First, I ensured that my core arguments were influenced by my research and professional observation rather than my own personal experiences. Borden and Pritchard outline “the criteria for sound arguments” in journalism as evaluating any personal biases present in the core arguments of a particular piece, and instead grounding journalistic arguments in key terms and arguments based on widely recognized truths and definitions

(Borden & Pritchard, 2001, p. 74). Thus, the arguments of my final piece were ultimately formed from nearly a year of own research, interviews, and observation, and were not solely products of my own prior personal experience in fandom.

Next, I critically examined my personal connections to fandom. For me, fandom is a deeply involved hobby, and my involvement within fandom gives me insider knowledge as a reporter, but also clear personal conflicts. To address this, I followed two specific pieces of ethical advice in regards to my particular conflict of interest.

Following advice outlined by Associated Press journalist Tony Rogers, I did not form personal relationships with my sources (Rogers, 2019, para. 10). While we had

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pleasant conversation and exchanged personal anecdotes during our interviews, we did not have contact outside of our professional connection. I followed my sources on social media to keep up with their professional work, but did not engage with them directly on social media or reach out to them with personal messages that did not directly deal with my project. I also followed another piece of Rogers’ advice, and did not include my own personal relationships in fandom in my final project (Rogers, 2019, para. 11). While I have many friends in fandom, I did not cover them or interview them at all for this project. Instead, I interviewed people with professional authority in the field that I had not previously spoken to, and, as previously stated, I developed no personal relationship with these sources during the completion of my project.

Finally, by writing this section of my project, I am not only disclosing my conflicts of interest to my audience, I am thoroughly explaining my own personal connection to fandom, how it influenced my reporting, and what I did to remedy any conflict in order to provide my readers ample context.

The Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Committee states that “the audience must believe the information it is receiving is accurate,” and I view disclosure of personal or professional conflict as vital to this role of journalism. The audience depends on journalists to provide information they may not otherwise be able to access

(Borden & Pritchard, 2001, p. 84). Therefore, they should also be informed of the context in which a particular piece was written if that context could change their interpretation of the piece. This context includes the reporter’s personal and professional conflicts of interest.

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It should be noted that while it is necessary and honest to disclose my conflicts of interest, I also realize this may make readers question my intention and cause distrust in my work as a journalist in this particular project. However, by disclosing his information

I am giving my readers the ultimate power over what they will chose to believe rather than misleading them by not including key information about the context of my reporting.

Ultimately, I view disclosing my conflicts of interests as a worthy risk within my project for the sake of a greater ethical outcome.

Fandom and the outside world

The interviews I conducted featured a unique aspect, which is that not all participants wanted their fandom connected to their personal lives. While some worked in fandom spaces and openly embraced their fandom “identities” — such as screen names and online activity — alongside their real names and identities, others did not. Some participants chose to use a separate name or alias for their fandom work that was completely removed from their real name. Others were open to using their real names while discussing fandom but wanted to only use their real identity in my piece and keep their fandom pen names and identity disconnected.

For some subjects, this separation was due to personal embarrassment about the potential for those in their real life to know about their fandom practice. Others simply stated the separation between their real and fandom identities was a preference for personal enjoyment. As Kaila Hale-Stern interestingly put it in our interview, “It almost felt exciting to have an aura of mystery. That fandom persona is whoever the readers want to think she is. She has a more exotic life, maybe, than I do” (K. Hale-Stern, personal communication, November 1, 2019). The statement displays to me that in

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fandom, women simply gain an escape, however short and small, from the reality that they inhabit the rest of the time, and I wanted to honor this viewpoint.

To be fair to my interviewees and their identities, I kept in mind the ethics behind reporting on public versus private figures (Anderson & Killenberg, 1989). While many of these women are well known in the fandom sphere, they might be private figures in the real world. Thus, I had to balance treating my subjects like public and private figures in different aspects of their life and do all I could to make my intentions as both a reporter and an academic as transparent as possible. I made sure to make clear from the start of our interviews that what they told me was subject to publication either in the press or in academia, and if there was anything they did not want printed, they would have to explicitly tell me during our interview. I also asked them what name, pronouns, and titles they would like to use in order to protect both their real world and fandom identity. While

I intended to tell a holistic story, I also wanted to ensure I was not exposing information they did not want exposed, and that I was remaining respectful while also remaining accurate.

Bringing fandom into the spotlight

For all these reasons, I wanted to be equipped to balance the often-tricky give and take of fandom and mainstream spaces. Because I have personally been involved with fandoms for several years and understand many of the practices and motivations from a personal perspective, I hoped I could bring a more genuine point of view to my project.

By researching the past and present relationship between fandom and mainstream

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audiences and producers, I also hoped to give this issue greater context in my final piece and ultimately show how far-reaching fandom has become in the contemporary era.

Even though I had full intentions to present fandom in a context that provided personal empathy alongside thoroughly researched context, I am aware that my intentions do not determine the final impact of my project. By simply offering an insight into fandom — and, in this case, some intimate details of fandom life and issues — I am risking the audience coming away with further misunderstanding and prejudice against the topic. While I hope to bridge a gap in current fandom-related reporting, I also risk adding to the collection of unwanted fandom commentary that is already existent.

To combat this potential issue, I once again adhered to traditional journalistic ethics. I followed the long-followed journalistic code of ethics to reduce harm and seek truth in all I do (Plaisance, 2014). I also offered respect and accuracy to the topic at hand and appropriately backed up my personal interviews with outside research and sources

(Painter, et al., 1991). I also ensured that my interview subjects were both aware of my intention and that they were comfortable with my questions and topics (Anderson &

Killenberg, 1989). My ultimate goal by doing this was to both gain the trust of my subjects and to minimize as much harm as possible in my overall project.

Limitations

Finally, I should mention the limitations of my reporting itself, and places I fell short in my own goal to offer a completely comprehensive portrait of modern fandom experiences. The first problem came from the number of responses I received from potential sources. I contacted several sources for this project and had a fraction of these

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sources reply — a process I will discuss further in my methodology. Because of this, I was able to glean many valuable perspectives, but my pool of subjects did not include every desired perspective I wanted to cover, either because I was unable to reach certain subjects or the subjects, I did reach out to were uninterested in being interviewed.

It is also significant that I found my subjects because they have some form of notable work in fandom, whether this comes in the form of a leadership position for a notable fandom organization, a fandom award, or general notoriety within the community. All of these fans have some level of a platform within fandom, although some have greater influence than others. This does not make them inherently more insightful or important than other fans, but it does make them more visible. If I did not contact or interview a particular source, it was probably due to the fact that their work, for whatever reason, has been ignored or discounted within fandom itself.

Finally, even if I had interviewed more people and gotten far more information, I have to be aware of my format. I did not write a book, where I would have the space to freely explore a variety of topics with a much longer word count. I wrote a feature story for a news publication with a word count of a few thousand words, and it should be digestible for an audience who may not have the same personal interest and investment into this topic that I do. I could not possibly fit every significant talking point about fandom inside this format and had to choose what I think is both most important to the topic of fandom as a whole and makes for the most compelling narrative within my own piece.

Method

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Interviewee gathering process

When I was gathering potential interviewees, my first step was to go directly to fandom websites such as the OTW and The Mary Sue and look at their list of directors and editors. I went back to my initial research and looked up contact information for the authors whose books and papers I had read when first starting the project. I also dug into my familiarity with fandom; I revisited fan authors I had been familiar with prior to this project and looked for contact information for bloggers and podcasters I had previously followed for fandom commentary. I also used a relatively simple modern sampling method: I followed a number of familiar sources on Twitter, and then used Twitter’s suggested accounts feature to look for more authors, commentators, and authors with similar expertise. All these methods ultimately gave me 28 possible sources.

I should additionally make a note here that I decided for this particular project, I was only interested in speaking to subjects who identified as female or non-binary, or, more broadly, not cisgender men. While I acknowledge that many men have contributed to fandom and also to the body of knowledge in fan studies, I was seeking a perspective specifically from marginalized genders and how they experience fandom.

Additionally, I wanted to widen and diversify my pool of interviewees as much as

I could. I was only mildly successful. My first problem was the age of my interview subjects. While I originally planned to speak to women of many ages, my ultimate pool of subjects were almost entirely people between their mid-twenties and mid-thirties. The exception is Rebecca Tushnet, who is in her late forties at the time of this project. While this group of millennial fans were not the only age group I wanted to speak to at the beginning of this project, the age of my interview subjects ultimately helped me narrow

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the focus of my project. This particular generation of fans saw the rise of Internet fandom and how the spread of information changed fandom behavior and impact, and they offered both a valuable contemporary history lesson as well as modern observations.

The other aspect I struggled with was that of race. As a white woman, I acknowledge my inherent privilege within not only fandom, but the world. Sadly, this perspective means that I have the privilege to ignore racism or non-white perspectives all together. I certainly did not want to do this, but I found that as I gathered my initial interview subjects, nearly all of my contacts were white. Part of this is because it is easier for white people to rise to prominent positions in any field, whether it is law, journalism, academia, or anything else. Thus, many prominent and respected fandom figures happen to be white women. But this was not just a fault in the system; it was also a fault with my own research. Women of color exist in fandom and always have, and many of them are successful authors and scholars — I simply was not putting in enough effort to look for them. I tried to correct this and look for more diverse perspectives, and indeed reached out to many women of color for interviews later on. But ultimately, this should have been a more central part of my research and interview process from the beginning.

Moving on to the pool of contacts I did gather, I split my prospective interviewees into a few main categories to ensure that I was looking for subjects with many viewpoints. These categories were fanwork creators, forum staff members, scholars, professionals, and writers. These categories were purposefully broad to allow for flexibility, and many interview subjects also fit more than one category.

Fanwork creators consisted of people who have gained notoriety directly from their fan work. This mainly consisted of notable fan fiction writers and cosplayers. I was

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unfortunately unable to find other types of creators, such as creators of fan art, audio- based “pod fic,” or fan films.

Forum staff members consisted entirely of OTW founders, directors and board members. I was unable to contact directors of other major fandom websites. This is partially because OTW runs many of the current largest fandom websites, such as AO3 and FanLore, and thus has control over a large amount of the most popular fandom websites. Additionally, many other fandom-popular websites, such as FanFiction.net or

Wattpad, are corporate-owned. This means both that the directors of these sites are harder to contact, and also that the perspective coming from the owners of this site would likely be one outside of authentic fandom experience, which I was not interested in for this particular project.

My scholar categories referred broadly to anyone who had a strong academic presence in fandom or fan studies, and largely consisted of academics and authors. But I also included amateur researchers on this list who had a great amount of experience with fandom writing and research but were not academics by trade. Also, in my scholar category, I had a subcategory of “professionals,” or people who were connected to fandom and had unique professional qualifications. This mainly included lawyers who had connections to copyright and intellectual property law — a cornerstone of legal scholarship connected to fandom — as well as other academics such as linguists or historians.

My “writer” category was also quite broad and differed mainly from the

“scholars” category due to the format of the writing being produced. I generally categorized “writers” as people who were professional writers to some degree. This

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included journalists, published authors (both nonfiction and fiction), editors, and active bloggers who all had a strong connection to fandom.

After gathering and categorizing my possible sources, I divided them into first choices, who I wanted to speak with as soon as possible, and second choices, who I wanted to speak with if my first choices were unavailable. I then contacted the sources in waves, starting with my first choices and then moving onto my second choices. I used sources from both categories in my final project.

I looked for contact information for the subjects on their individual websites and social media pages. Almost all of them had publicly available contact information. For many sources, I was able to send them an email directly. For others, I sent emails through another party, which was often the case for published authors whose contacts ran through literary agents and publishing house representatives. Some had contact forms directly on the websites that operated as an alternative to email. I opted for email on first initial contact because for many sources who had a strong online fandom presence, their only available contact was some form of electronic communication. My previous reporting experience has also shown mixed results for direct phone calls for first contact, but typically a warmer reception in the form of an email. For this reason, I typically tried to contact sources first online before trying to contact them over the phone. For other sources, I was unable to find email or even phone information and turned to the next best thing: a Facebook or Twitter direct message.

I heard back from roughly half the sources I contacted; the rest I sent follow ups to but never received a message in return. Out of those that contacted me back, some did not want to give an interview, while others were simply busy with other professional

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obligations. A few were confused by my project or protested my subject entirely.

Nevertheless, I still was able to come up with a pool of enthusiastic interviewees. After receiving positive interest, I quickly set up interview dates with these subjects. Typically, subjects were able to talk quickly — within a few weeks — although a few of them required time to finish professional projects or tend to personal issues before speaking with me. I was fortunate in not having to cancel any scheduled interviews.

My interviewees

Ultimately, I was able to conduct full interviews with seven sources. The sources

I interviewed and who appear in my final project are as follows:

Jordan West is a cosplayer and blogger. She is on the board of a costuming non- profit in Minnesota and is a commanding officer in the Rebel Legion, a large international Star Wars costuming group. She writes for The Mary Sue, including her series “WTF Comics Club,” which is an extension of her real-world comic book club for women in her city.

Foz Meadows is a blogger, writer, and fandom commentator. She has published a number of fantasy novels and poems, is an essay contributor to a number of online publications and runs her own commentary blog.

Zina Hutton — also known by her nickname “Stitch” — is a fandom commentator and blogger. After being an active member of the DC Comics fandom for a number of years, she started her commentary blog, Stitch’s Media Mix, in 2015. She frequently blogs about fandom racism, particularly in K-pop and Star Wars fandom.

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Kaila Hale-Stern is an editor of The Mary Sue, a feminist-focused fandom website that offers daily pop culture news and commentary. She writes a variety of pop culture news and opinion pieces for The Mary Sue. Hale-Stern previously worked for Gawker, the tech site Gizmodo, and for the fandom-favorite blogging site Tumblr.

Suzanne Scott is an Associate Professor of Media Studies for University of Texas-

Austin and the author of Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence

Culture Industry. She is a longtime fandom scholar and commentator and has academic specializations in fandom studies, media studies, and gender studies.

Rebecca Tushnet is one of the founders of the OTW and AO3, and a professor at

Harvard Law School. She specializes in copyright, trademark, and intellectual property law. She served as a founding member of the board of the OTW from 2007 to 2010 and continues to work with their legal committee.

“V. Arrow,” also known by her pen name “aimmyarrowshigh” is a fandom academic, fan fiction author, and fandom commentator. She is a prolific fan fiction author in a number of fandoms, including The Hunger Games, Star Wars, and One Direction, has written fandom materials such as the Hunger Games fan guide The Panem

Companion, and has written numerous fandom essays, including as a contributor for

Anne Jamison’s book Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World.

Conducting interviews

I conducted all my interviews between October and November 2019. While I primarily contacted my interviewees over the phone, I gave them the option to conduct

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the interview in whatever way they would most feel comfortable. The final interview methods were all the ultimate choice of the individual interviewee.

Due to time issues, I conducted two interviews with West, one on November 1,

2019 and another on November 7, 2019. Both interviews were conducted over the phone.

The first interview was 22 minutes and the second was 43 minutes.

I conducted my interview with Meadows on October 15, 2019. The interview was via phone; we had originally planned to speak over Skype but due to technical difficulties on my part we switched to a phone conversation. The interview lasted for 51 minutes.

I conducted my interview with Hutton on November 16, 2019. The interview was via Skype audio and lasted for one hour and 43 minutes.

I conducted my interview with Hale-Stern on November 1, 2019. The interview was via Skype and lasted for 57 minutes.

I conducted my interview with Scott on October 10, 2019. The interview was via phone and lasted for 49 minutes.

I conducted my interview with Tushnet on October 8, 2019. The interview was via phone and lasted for 21 minutes.

I conducted my interview with Arrow on October 9, 2019. The interview was conducted via Google Hangouts Chat Messenger, and we talked on and off for around two hours.

Throughout the interviews, I asked core questions I had prepared ahead of time, but I also gave the subjects freedom to go “off script” and discuss any stories or topics that specifically interested them. I did this to facilitate a more personal feeling between

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myself and the subject, and also to get an idea of their genuine interests and feelings. I did try to keep the conversation somewhat on track when I felt like we were going too off-topic, but overall gave my subjects as much freedom as possible.

Generally, I found every interview to be insightful, and though I had different questions for each participant, I received interesting perspectives and stories from each interview. While many interviewees had similar viewpoints, some subjects disagreed with points I had gathered in other interviews or offered different ideas from what I had already heard from other sources. Overall this gave me a diverse collection of personal stories.

I also found my own personal knowledge of fandom to be greatly helpful in the interview process. I was able to relate to many of the experiences the interviewees offered, and also did not have to slow the pace of our interviews by asking for technical details or definitions of fandom history and practices. Because I was familiar with fandom culture, I was able to dig into underlying issues and messages beneath the surface, ultimately resulting in a rich interview and research process.

Discussed topics

Throughout all of my interviews, six general topics of discussion often came up: the history of fandom, personal anecdotes and experiences, gender, current issues in fandom, professional experience, and mainstream perception and coverage of fandom.

There were other topics brought up as well, but these were the core categories I focused on. I organized my participants’ discussion points into these general categories in my personal notes and used these categories to outline my overall project.

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When they discussed the history of fandom, this history was often contemporary.

Most of the women I interviewed were older millennial women between the ages of 25 and 35 who came of age on the early Internet, so many of their memories surrounded rudimentary Internet forums and websites, and how they have witnessed fandom change and shift over the last few decades. They also touched on older forms of fandom, such as the zine and convention-heavy fandom of the 1960’s and 1970’s, but most of these women were speaking from admiration for these past days rather than personal experiences. Most of them discussed contemporary history, such as the mass deletion of content on fandom website LiveJournal and the rise of other fandom websites like

Tumblr and AO3.

Personal anecdotes took up the majority of our interviews, but there were a few core ways I categorized “personal stories” in my notes. Most of these had to do with how the women started their involvement in fandom, and ways they engaged with the medium

(blogging, writing, costuming, and so on). Many of them also told stories about personal relationships, often friendships but occasionally romantic relationships as well. Many of these stories also overlapped with other categories, and I put these anecdotes into multiple categories.

Gender was a common thread through most of the interviews, partially because many of my questions were specifically about my interviewees experienced being a woman in fandom. Several interviewees touched on the importance of female fandom as a whole, misogyny they had encountered both in and outside of fandom, interpersonal relationships with other fandom women, and the contrast they noticed between feminine

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and masculine fandom. Often, this gendered commentary overlapped with personal anecdotes, and I categorized these instances into multiple categories in my notes.

I generally tried to categorize “issues in fandom” as anything I noticed the interviewees speaking about wanting to change, or that had made their fandom experience negative. This included racism, sexism, ageism, personal attacks and bullying, and also outside issues, such imperfect platforms for fandom activity. Racism and misogyny were notably the most common talking points in all my interviews, although interpersonal relationships and frustrations with other people in fandom were a large focus as well. While some interviewees offered possible solutions or changes they would like to see in fandom going forward, most of them did not have any idea on how to solve the current problems infiltrating their fandom experience.

Professional experience with fandom was not a major focus of my final pieces but was still a large enough part of my interviews to warrant its own category in my notes.

Most interviewees touched on their professional identities and what they did for living, any published work they had done for fandom, and also their thoughts on other people doing monetized fandom work or making fandom into a career. The most intriguing conversations in this category were how fans engage in professional-level work in fandom every day, such as writing novel-length fan fiction, running their writing through beta readers, and working with other fans to create large events or charity drives.

Although I did not dive too deeply into the career of any one interviewee in my final piece, I frequently touched on the time, effort, and passion that many fans pour into their fandom experience.

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Finally, most interviewees spoke about the “mainstream” or outside view of fandom. Much of this discussion dealt with common misconceptions they had heard about fandom, and often, journalistic coverage they had noticed about fandom in recent months. What is so interesting about these talking points is the differing viewpoints that so many interviewees expressed, sometimes in the course of one interview. While some admitted that fandom was becoming more mainstream, many argued that this was causing anxiety within fandom, and that there were growing issues with fandom infighting and capitalism trying to benefit off of fan labor. While other journalistic coverage I had read argued that fandom becoming known to the public was purely positive, many actual fans I spoke with seemed to have several concerns over what this new chapter of fandom meant.

A few miscellaneous topics also came about these interviews, including the audience for fandom content and legal issues they had previously encountered. These ultimately did not become a large part of my final article, but I still included them in my notes. For the most part, the previously mentioned six categories of talking parts were what took up the most room in my final piece.

Feature Writing

I ultimately chose to write a feature piece for my final project. I chose this both because it is a form of journalism I personally enjoy, and also because I thought it would work well for the subject I had in mind. I have past experience writing feature pieces and find them an engaging way to portray both information and personal stories. In this piece,

I wanted to both offer a personal look at specific stories of fandom women, while also

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putting these stories into a full context to show that fandom is more than anecdotes.

While personal stories are vital to a social practice like fandom, it is also important to put individual experiences into a greater context of social power and history to better understand why these personal experiences matter. In this case, a feature piece worked quite well to accomplish this goal, and I wanted to further outline and structure my article to put equal weight in personal stories and general academic and current cultural context.

Organizing and outlining

When working on my professional project, I wanted to outline the article in a way that would both effectively display the information I had researched, as well as actively engage a reader who may be encountering this topic for the first time.

I wrote up two outlines during my initial organizing process, one which focused on characters and one on topics. The topic-driven outline moved fairly straightforward from topic to topic, starting with a general state of fandom, moving to fandom history, then to personal history and issues in fandom, and finishing with the future of fandom.

Throughout this outline, gendered issues would be included to keep a consistent narrative and tone. Quickly, I found this outline to be restricting and dry, as well as difficult to organize in an interesting and concise way.

My other outline was a character-driven outline, which I found much more appealing and decided to keep for the remainder of the project. This outline primarily moved around three primary characters and used my other sources and research as contextual information in between these characters. I used West, Hale-Stern, and Hutton as my main characters. I initially used Meadows as a major character instead of Hale-

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Stern, but after trying to organize Meadows’ interview materials, I found their insights were best suited to offer overall context rather than personal narratives.

In my initial draft, I started with a general introduction, and then introduced West into the narrative, followed by a contemporary history of fandom. After this, I introduced

Hale-Stern, followed by a section on the issues with the “mainstreaming” of fandom in recent years. Next I introduced Hutton, and then used her narrative as a way to talk about personal, underlying issues in fandom. I ended up reflecting on the general state of fandom and journalism and tried to answer my own question of how we should address and talk about fandom in the future. After my initial draft, I decided to switch Hutton’s narrative and the section about underlying issues in fandom to be directly after the section on fandom history and moved Hale-Stern’s section and the part about mainstreaming of fandom towards the end of the article, right before my conclusion. I also later shortened and combined Hale-Stern’s personal narrative with the mainstreaming of fandom section.

These were the major changes I made from my initial outline; ultimately, I tried to keep my article character-focused while also providing ample commentary and context to ground the stories of my interviewees.

Also, in the outlining process, I quickly realized that to fit into the format I had chosen for myself, I had to cut out large swaths of information from my interviews.

While I found many side discussions from my personal interviews — everything from fic tropes to the influence of capitalization on fandom publishing to historical anecdotes — personally interesting, and I would happily write a separate article on these topics, I had to limit my focus and strengthen my chosen angle. I ultimately wanted to present a top- down perspective of both the positives and negatives in fandom and offer a look into how

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journalism often handles fandom incorrectly. This was the final focus I chose to pursue in my final outline and piece.

Two final versions

There are two final versions of my feature piece included in this project. The first is a longer version, which I will refer to as Version 1, and the other is an abridged version, which I will refer to as Version 2. Version 1 contains a more in-depth examination of my topic and is around 10,000 words. Version 2 is shorter in order to be a digestible length for professional publication and is around 3,000 words.

Aside from mere length, there are a few core differences in the two versions.

Version 1 contains much longer sections on fandom history, mainstream reception, and personal issues within fandom, as well as longer personal narratives, with details and quotes I had to remove from Version 2 for the lack of length. Version 1 also contains an additional section on the personal impact of fandom, including several personal stories I did not include in Version 2. I also reordered a few quotes and paragraphs between

Versions 1 and 2 in order for these sections to make sense in each narrative. Often, the order of the information I was providing had to be adjusted due to the presence or absence of additional quotes and context. The result of moving around certain sections of my feature to fit each version was two narratives that were less cluttered and more logical.

While there is obviously a difference in word count and some content in these versions, I followed the same basic goals with each piece: to provide an effective story about fandom and to highlight personal narratives and current major topics in fandom

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life. The two versions I wrote simply accomplished this goal for two distinct audiences.

One is written for an audience interested in a more in-depth examination, such as an academic audience. The other is for an audience that has less time and initial connection to the topic, such as a typical casual audience reading a magazine or newspaper source.

This audience has less emotional investment, and thus requires a more succinct piece.

With my two versions, I have provided something for both of these groups.

Market research and publication process

As I was writing my final feature piece, I started to look more seriously into options to publish my final feature story. I wanted to see if I could find a print or online publication that accepted long-form journalistic submissions and whose audience would align with one I was trying to reach. I researched several publications in a number of categories and reached out to the submissions team for many of them.

For my market research, I looked into feminist publications, fandom and self- proclaimed “nerd interest” publications, general cultural publications, and general, far- reaching publications that regularly accepted and published feature stories.

I was interested in feminist publications because of their interest in women’s stories, and my own prolonged focus throughout this piece specifically on women and gender-non-conforming individuals. I looked at nine feminist publications: Bitch Media,

Sasee, Ms., Bust, Wear Your Voice magazine, ILY Mag, Bustle, Ravishly, and DAME.

I looked into nerd-interest and fandom interest publications because of the general topic my project would explore, and also because publishing to an audience already familiar with fandom culture opened up the possibility to explore more in-depth topics in

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fandom. I decided not to submit to The Mary Sue simply because two of my major sources were editors and contributors to the site and I did want to cause a conflict of interest. I ultimately looked into four fandom and nerd interest publications: Wired, Tech

Times, The Daily Dot, and Mashable.

The general “cultural” publications were publications that had a well-regarded culture section, and regularly ran feature pieces on popular culture topics. The goal here was to reach a novice but interested audience so that I could both educate and further enlighten a large potential audience. I reached out to five cultural publications: Variety,

Vanity Fair, Vulture, Paper Magazine, and Vice.

Finally, I looked into publications that covered a large range of topics and offered the space and freedom to publish large-scale features. I looked into this option both for the potential of a large and flexible audience, and also for the freedom to publish a longer piece. I looked into five of these publications: Medium, Longreads, Slate, The Atlantic, and The Odyssey.

I realize my selected publications constitute a fraction of the available publications that take freelance articles and that would potentially publish a popular culture related piece like this one. However, the publications I chose to submit my piece to best reflected the voice and focus of my own article, while also sporting a gap in their pop culture and fandom cover that my article could fill.

I chose to ultimately contact these publications in waves. I organized the publications according to which ones I was most interested in working with and how well their own freelance guidelines fit with the article I had written. After doing this, I had sorted the publications into three categories. My first choices publications are Bitch

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Media, Bustle, DAME, Paper Mag, The Atlantic, Medium and Longreads. My second choices are Ms., Bust, Wear Your Voice magazine, Ravishly, Wired, The Daily Dot,

Mashable, Vulture, Variety, Vanity Fair and Vice. My third choices are Sasee, ILY Mag,

Tech Times, Slate, and The Odyssey.

At the time of writing this paper, I have only submitted pitches for my piece to my first choice publications. I have not received any formal publication offers nor rejections from any of these publications I submitted to. I will continue to look into publication and follow up with these publications as needed, as well as sending pitches for some of my second and third choice publications.

Personal Reflections

In my short journalistic career, I have grown used to writing about my own community. Particularly in the past several years, I have worked for a handful of local publications and written many stories that focus on my hometown. I have published stories about places I have visited since I was a child and I have interviewed old family friends and acquaintances for quotes. I am not unfamiliar with the trials and tribulations of writing about your own community. But writing this particular project felt very different, and especially personal in a different way.

My own fandom journey started when I was 14 years old and has continued into my adult life. For the last eight years, I have moved between fandoms about young adult novels, superhero movies, and boybands, and have found both comfort and hardship in all of them. I have often turned to the online world when the real world felt too difficult to navigate. I spent my first year of college writing a novel-length fan fiction as I dealt with

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the difficulty of being away from home for the first time. Over the course of the same year I was writing this thesis, I was spending my scarce free time writing another long fic with a friend I had met in a Harry Styles fan group chat years earlier. Fandom has helped me unravel what it means to be a woman, has allowed me to make sense of my sexuality, and has connected me to friends who live in entirely different countries and yet I still talk to every day.

But I have also been privy to the hardship that many of my interview subjects discussed. I have seen fandom arguments quickly turn nasty and racism and homophobia fly freely. Both strangers and former friends, many of them grown women, have bullied me in fandom. And I have also struggled to balance my passion for the media I love alongside frustration with the creative decisions that go into this media. Yet I also would not be the person I am today without fandom. So, while I cannot say my fandom experience has been entirely positive, I do not regret any of the many hours I spent online, loving my favorite things with people who have come to mean the world to me.

In addition to my own difficulties with fandom, I have also experienced other people judging my fandom. I have often defended my interests against my friends and family and have endured more than a bit of teasing for my active fandom involvement. I am also very aware that much of this judgement is due to the fact I am a woman. I have spent many nights debating with one of my best friends who questioned why I liked to write fan fiction about boy band members, while no one had ever questioned him for owning well over 200 comic books. I have often asked myself why his form of fandom remains so unquestioned, but I have to readily defend my own fandom practices.

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I know first-hand what it is like to traverse fandom and its many sticky points, but also to defend myself when it is challenged. So, when my interviewees expressed their challenges and frustrations both with fandom itself and how others talk about fandom, I was not an outsider learning something new — I understood every word. I had a story of my own related to every anecdote they told me. In fact, my interviewees and I frequently paused in the middle of a question to talk about a fic trope or a band we both loved. For a few brief moments, in the midst of a long conversation about social issues, feminism, and capitalism, we were simply two fangirls — separated often by a decade in age and several miles, but fangirls nonetheless.

The deeper I delved into this project, the more passionate I became as I discovered the words to express issues I had always noticed but never been able to describe, and listened to others share experiences I had never had myself, such as fandom history I was too young to experience, or persistent racism I was immune to as a white woman. I emerged with even more passion for my topic, and with a sense of urgency to tell a story about fandom that I knew was sorely needed.

Conclusions

Major themes and findings

Throughout these projects, I gathered a few core observations about fandom as a whole and how journalists have approached fandom both in the past and in the present.

First and foremost, fandom remains a gendered issue. A large part of media fandom is women, and misogyny, sexism, and gendered behavior still permeates most aspects of fandom life for these women. Because of this, reporters cannot look at fandom without

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making critical examinations of gender and how both the press and greater society views women, their interests, and their behaviors.

Secondly, personal narratives are a vital way to cover any story and can bring a level of empathy to a topic that a reader might otherwise have trouble understanding. I found that in my coverage of this particular story about fandom, making personal narratives central to my story was important to make the overall story more detailed and to humanize the story for readers.

Finally, the press has had mixed success covering fandom up to this point. Like any other community, fandom has a variety of problems that range from small interpersonal problems like bullying to large-scale racism and sexism that can bleed in from the “real world” space. It is important to talk about these issues in fandom, but these topics need nuance. The positive and negative corners of fandom are intertwined, and their coverage should be handled carefully to appropriately show the shades of grey that exist within these communities.

Yet despite multiple complex moral, ethical, and personal issues in fandom already existing, many reporters choose to ignore these issues and continue to make cheap shots at fans and the “weird” things they enjoy. Not only is this ill-informed, it is counterproductive to the goals of journalism. Journalists should seek to cover new and important stories, and mocking fans for their interests accomplishes neither of these objectives. What is absent in the current news cycle, but needed more than ever, is nuanced coverage of fandom that respects fans’ triumphs as well as their shortcomings.

Ultimately, there remains a complicated push and pull between fandom and the media. Fandom is no longer the private space it once was, so while fandom cannot expect

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total privacy from the media, reporters still owe fans basic respect. Often, reporters have failed to extend this respect to fans by ridiculing fandom as a whole, or simply not covering it with nuance or extensive context. These past missteps have made it difficult for fans to trust the media, and this has only been made worse by the fact that many fans are already coping with internal fandom issues that are often amplified by poor fandom reporting. However, this does not mean reporters should stop covering fandom. In reality, reporting on fandom remains important. But it is increasingly vital for reporters to cover fresh and informative fandom stories, and to take care not to ignore important aspects of fandom life for the convenience of an eye-catching headline.

Future areas of academic study

Beyond my specific project, there remains a multitude of topics in fandom that I did not thoroughly cover but would make for valuable and intriguing academic or journalistic studies of fans in the future.

One intriguing focus might be to examine another age group, such as older fans who lived through the largely face-to-face fandom of the pre-Internet era, or young teenage fans who are coming of age in fandom at the current moment. Another focus would be to examine other aspects of identity closely. Fans of color, queer fans, disabled, or economically disadvantaged fans all have unique aspects to their lived experience that also influence their fandom interactions. While I tried to cover female and non-binary fans with a variety of personal stories, fully focusing on any one of these populations would allow any one researcher to find greater nuance in these fans’ lives to a level I was unable to accomplish in my own piece.

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In addition to real-world demographics, future projects can also hone in on inner fandom differences. For example, rather than looking at fans who interacted with fandom in a variety of ways, like I did, future researchers or journalists could cover only fan fiction writers, cosplayers, bloggers, copyright lawyers, or any number of fandom specialties. It might also be interesting to focus on fans of one particular fandom, or to more closely contrast fans from different fandoms to see how their individual practices differ and overlap.

Ultimately, while I did all I could to show a variety of unique narratives in my final piece, I also was limited by both my format and my own ability to research and dig deeply into multiple topics at once. But this only means that in the future, myself or other researchers will have the ability to write on a number of in-depth topics that will further enrich the body of research on fandom as a whole.

Suggestions for other journalists

Both my own experience completing this project and my observations from reading the work of other journalists covering fandom have proved to me that there is no one correct way to cover fandom. Journalists’ own life experiences, as well as their personal connection to fandom, will influence how they cover the practice. Additionally, multiple formats of reporting — from profile pieces to explainer articles, from economic evaluations to cultural thick pieces — can offer original and insightful viewpoints of fandom. And perhaps most importantly, both journalists in and outside of fandom are not immune to biased and incorrect reporting.

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I believe that the most important element of covering fandom is simply research.

In order to cover fandom effectively, a reporter should have a solid idea of what is needed in fandom coverage and what has already been said, as well as what sentiments have been received well and which have not. Some preliminary research will go a long way to alleviate confusion, frustration, and misinformation for both the reporter and the audience.

Also, a basic level of respect should be given to fans above all. Even if a reporter does not understand fandom or has negative feelings towards fans and their practices, fans should still be given the decency of privacy and understanding that is afforded to any other interview subject. Fans should also be given enough respect that a reporter fully reflects on their piece before publishing a story that might mock or pathologize a group that is largely made up of marginalized people and has already been heavily stigmatized and misunderstood by reporters in the past.

Ultimately, I do not think my article is the be all and end all of fandom reporting.

It will also not be the last article; other pieces will follow this one, with different angles and varying levels of accuracy. For my own piece, I wanted to achieve something very simple, and perhaps a bit selfish: I wanted to write an article on fandom I would like to read, and that I believed others should read, too. I wanted to portray fandom not as bizarre, not as utopian, not as alien, but as simply what is: something that can be very fun or very frustrating, but that is fairly mundane. Millions of people wake up in the morning, go to work or to class, and come home to talk about their favorite TV show, movie, or celebrity. Some of them write fiction, some make art, some make films, some argue and get into fights and some chat with their friends late into the night. Fandom is just another

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aspect of life and deserves an honest story. I hope that my own take has provided people a taste of that.

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Appendix A1

The following questions were used for my personal interview with Jordan West:

● What was your first fandom and what was the first thing you created for

fandom?

● Do you still create for fandoms?

● How did you get into cosplay and how does that impact your fandom?

● Have you done anything professional with your fandom work? How

important do you consider that possibility?

● Why did you want to start writing/speaking/blogging about fandom?

● Who would you say is your core audience?

● What is the most interesting topic for you to write about?

● What are the biggest challenges about talking to a larger audience about

fandom? / What do you wish people outside of fandom spaces would

understand about fans?

● Do you think fandom is still weird or taboo?

● What do you see as the future for your job in relation to fandom?

● What is your most memorable experience as a fan (Positive or negative)?

Why?

● How have you personally seen fandom change?

● What do you think still needs to change in fandom spaces?

● How do you think your identity has impacted your role in fandom?

● What shared experiences have you had with others in fandom?

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● How do you think creating for fandom has impacted you, personally,

professional, creatively?

● Ultimately, what do you love about fandom?

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Appendix A2

The following questions were used for my personal interview with Fox Meadows:

● What was your first fandom and what was the first thing you created for fandom?

● Do you still create for fandoms?

● What is your most memorable experience as a fan? (Positive or negative) And

why?

● How do you think creating for fandom has impacted you, personally, professional,

creatively?

● Have you ever done anything professional with your fandom work? How

important do you consider that possibility?

● Why did you want to start writing/speaking/blogging about fandom?

● What is the most interesting topic for you to write or talk about?

● Who would you say is your core audience?

● What are the biggest challenges about talking to a larger audience about fandom?

/ What do you wish people outside of fandom spaces would understand about

fans?

● What do you see as the future for your job in relation to fandom?

● How do you think your identity has impacted your role in fandom?

● What shared experiences have you had with others in fandom?

● How have you personally seen fandom change?

● What do you think still needs to change in fandom spaces?

● Do you think fandom is still weird or taboo?

● Ultimately, what do you love about fandom?

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Appendix A3

The following questions were used for my personal interview with Zina Hutton:

● What was your first fandom and what was the first thing you created for a

fandom?

● Do you still create for fandoms?

● Have you ever done anything professional with your fandom work? How

important do you consider that possibility?

● How do you think creating for fandom has impacted you, personally,

professional, creatively?

● Why did you want to start writing/speaking/blogging about fandom?

● Who would you say is your core audience?

● What is the most interesting topic for you to write or talk about?

● What is your most memorable experience as a fan? (Positive or negative)

And why?

● How have you personally seen fandom change?

● What do you think still needs to change in fandom spaces?

● How do you think your identity as a woman of color has impacted your

role in fandom?

● What shared experiences have you had with other women in fandom?

● Do you think fandom is still weird or taboo?

● What do you wish people outside of fandom spaces would understand

about fans?

● Ultimately, what do you love about fandom?

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Appendix A4

The following questions were used for my personal interview with Kaila Hale-Stern:

● What was your first fandom?

● What is your most memorable experience as a fan? (Positive or negative) And

why?

● Why are you interested in writing about fandom as a journalist?

● Who would you say is your core audience at The Mary Sue?

● What is the most interesting topic for you to write or talk about?

● How is your professional and personal relationship with fandom different?

● What do you want to do in the future in your profession and specifically with

fandom?

● What do you want other journalists to understand about fandom?

● How have you personally seen fandom change?

● What do you think still needs to change in fandom spaces?

● How do you think your identity as a woman has impacted your role in fandom?

● What shared experiences have you had with other women in fandom?

● Do you think fandom is still weird or taboo?

● What do you wish people outside of fandom spaces would understand about fans?

● Ultimately, what do you love about fandom?

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Appendix A5

The following questions were used for my personal interview with Suzanne Scott:

● What was your first fandom/earliest experiences with fandom?

● What is your most memorable experience as a fan? (Positive or negative)

And why?

● How have you personally seen fandom change?

● What do you think still needs to change in fandom spaces?

● How do you think your identity as a woman has impacted your role in

fandom?

● What shared experiences have you had with other women in fandom?

● Do you think fandom is still weird or taboo?

● How and why are you interested in studying fandom from an academic

standpoint in the first place?

● How is your academic and personal relationship with fandom different?

● What is the best part of including fandom in your job? What about the

hardest/worst/most difficult part to study and explain?

● What do you want to do in the future in your profession and specifically

with fandom?

● What do you want others in your field to understand about fandom?

● Ultimately, what do you love about fandom?

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Appendix A6

The following questions were used for my personal interview with Rebecca Tushnet:

● What are your own experiences with fandom? (re: are you a fan

yourself?)

● How and why are you interested in looking at fandom from a legal

standpoint in the first place?

● What did your role at OTW/AO3 entail?

● Why was your work with OTW important to you?

● What has been the most personally impactful part of your work with

OTW?

● How is your academic and personal relationship with fandom different?

● What do you want to do in the future in your profession and specifically

with fandom?

● What do you want others in your field to understand about fandom?

● How do you think your identity as a woman has impacted your role in

fandom?

● What shared experiences have you had with other women in fandom?

● ·How have you personally seen fandom change?

● What do you think still needs to change in fandom spaces?

● Ultimately, what do you love about fandom?

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Appendix A7

The following questions were used for my personal interview with V. Arrow:

● What was your first fandom and why did you want to get into fandom in the first

place?

● Do you remember the first thing you created for fandom?

● How has your writing for fandom changed since you started?

● What is your most memorable experience as a fan? (Positive or negative) And

why?

● How do you think creating for fandom has impacted you, personally, professional,

creatively?

● Have you ever done anything professional with your fandom work? How

important do you consider that possibility?

● How have you personally seen fandom change?

● What do you think still needs to change in fandom spaces?

● How do you think your identity as a woman has impacted your role in fandom?

● What shared experiences have you had with other women in fandom?

● Do you think fandom is still weird or taboo?

● What do you wish people outside of fandom spaces would understand about fans?

● Ultimately, what do you love about fandom?

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Hellekson, K. & Busse. K. (2006). Introduction. In K. Hellekson & K. Busse (Eds.), Fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the Internet: New essays (pp. 1-32). McFarland & Co. Hill, M. (2016, July 3). The forgotten early history of fan fiction. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4xa4wq/the-forgotten-early-history-of-fanfiction Jamison, A. (2013). Fic: Why fan fiction is taking over the world. BenBella Books, Inc. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York University Press. Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture. Taylor & Francis. Jones, S. G. (2014). The sex lives of cult television characters. In K. Hellekson & K. Busse, The fan fiction studies reader (pp. 116-131). University of Iowa Press. Kapurch, K. (2015). Rapunzel loves Merida: Melodramatic expressions of lesbian girlhood and teen romance in Tangled, Brave, and femslash. Journal of Lesbian Studies, Volume 19 (Issue 4), pp. 436-453. Karlsson, M. & Olin-Scheller, C. (2015). ‘Let’s Party!’ Harry Potter fan fiction sites as social settings for narrative gender constructions. Gender & Language, Volume 9. (Issue 2), pp. 167-188. Karpovich, A. L. (2006). The audience as editor: The role of beta readers in online fan fiction communities. In K. Hellekson & K. Busse (Eds.), Fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the Internet: New essays (pp. 171-188). McFarland & Co. Keilies, J. L. (2019, November 13). Even nobodies have fans now (for better or worse). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/13/magazine/internet-fandom- podcast.html Klink, F. [@flourish]. (2019, December 9). I was recently quoted in a NY Times piece. I told the journalist "please don't write the piece you've pitched. [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/flourish/status/1204080729954623490 Klink, F. & Minkel, E. (Producers). (2019, September 18). Fansplaining Episode 109: Covering Fandom [Audio podcast]. https://www.fansplaining.com/episodes/109- covering-fandom. Legacy. (2006, January). Legacy interview with Diana Marchant. Fan Lore. https://fanlore.org/wiki/Legacy_Interview_with_Diane_Marchant Li, X. (2000, June 4). Large online community in need of legal assistance... [Online forum post]. Google Groups. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/xing$20li$20fanfiction.net/law.listserv.net- lawyers/03yX_rPwHrU/1G5W4ZZy13UJ Liu, R. (2018, June 18). The subversive sexual power found in erotic fandom forums. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zm8w5x/erotic-fandom-tumblr-kink-sexuality- v25n2

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Lookadoo, K. L. & Dickinson, T. M. Fifty years of the man from U.N.C.L.E.: how the ever- changing media sustained and shaped one of the oldest fan communities. In A. F Slade, A. J. Narro, & D. Givens-Carroll (Eds.), Television, social media, and fan culture (pp. 353-375). Lexington Books. MacDonald, A. (1998). Uncertain Utopia: Science Fiction Fandom & Computer Meditated Communication. In C. Harris & A. Alexander (Eds.), Theorizing fandom: Fans, subculture, and identity (pp. 131-152). Hampton Press. Miller, L. (2015, March 9). You belong to me: The fan fiction boom. Vulture. https://www.vulture.com/2015/03/fanfiction-guide.html Minkel, E. (2014, October 17). Why it doesn’t matter what Benedict Cumberbatch thinks of Sherlock fan fiction. New Statesman America. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/10/why-it-doesn-t-matter-what- benedict-cumberbatch-thinks-sherlock-fan-fiction Morrison, E. (2012, August 13). In the beginning, there was fan fiction: From the four gospels to Fifty Shades. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/13/fan-fiction-fifty-shades-grey Nedd, A. (2019, October 17). How fandom won the 2010s. Mashable https://mashable.com/article/fandom-won-the-2010s/ OTW Legal Committee. Legal advocacy. Organization of Transformative Works. https://www.transformativeworks.org/legal/ Painter, C., Patterson, P. & Wilkins, L. (2019). Media ethics: Issues and cases. Rowman & Littlefield. Penny, L. (2019, August 19). We can be heroes: How the nerds are rewriting pop culture. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/culture-fan-tastic-planet-fanfic/ Plaisance, P. L. (2014). Media ethics: Key principles for responsible practice. SAGE Publications, Inc. Riech., J. E. (2015 July 23). Fanspeak: The brief origins of fanfiction. Tech Times. https://www.techtimes.com/articles/70108/20150723/fan-fiction-star-trek-harry- potter-history-of-fan-fiction-shakespeare-roman-mythology-greek-mythology- sherlock-holmes.htm Rogers, T. (2019, February 9). 6 ways reporters can avoid conflicts of interest. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/avoid-conflicts-of-interest-2073885 Romano, A. (2019, December 30). Fandom went mainstream in the 2010’s – for better or worse. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2019/12/30/21004981/fandom-history-changes- corporate-marvel-veronica-mars-k-pop Romano, A. J. (2020, March 1). China has censored the Archive of Our Own, one of the Internet’s largest fan fiction websites. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2020/3/1/21159275/china-ao3-archive-of-our-own-banned- censorship

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Schulman, M. (2019, September 16). Superfans: A love story. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/16/superfans-a-love-story Spies, M. (2019, September 25). I made the Internet vote to determine the worst fan base. Here’s what I learned. Vulture. https://www.vulture.com/2019/09/worst-fan-base- tournament-2019.html SPJ code of ethics. Society of Professional Journalists. https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp Trier-Bieniek, A. (2015). Sci fi and skimpy outfits: Negotiating objectification, gendered boundaries, and authenticity within the Star Trek fandom. In A. Trier-Bieniek (Eds.), Fan girls and the media: Creating characters, consuming culture (pp. 1-20). Rowman & Littlefield. West. J. (2015, March 19). How to offend everyone and make yourself cry: Writing diversity in fan fiction. https://www.themarysue.com/diversity-in-fanfic/

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Daughters of the digital: The women that define fandom as we know it (Version 1)

In 2009, teenage girls shut down San Diego Comic Con.

The nation’s largest comic convention has opened its doors every year since 1970 to increasing numbers of media fans eager to compete in costume contests, buy merchandise, meet fellow fans, and sit on panels for upcoming films and TV shows. The event is a celebration of fandom set in the sweltering heat of summer in California, and it practically begs for emotions to run high. And in 2009, those emotions seemed to break an unspoken dam.

That year, the cast and crew of Twilight: New Moon were attending one of the event’s many panels and showing an exclusive preview of the new film, and nearly 6,000 fans turned out for the event. The San Diego Tribune reported that many fans — most of them young teenagers — camped out days ahead of the panel, sporting homemade t-shirts and wide-eyed eagerness.

At the same time, another crowd was forming in protest of the Twilight fans’ presence, carrying signs with messages like “Twilight ruined Comic Con.” In the years that followed, fans debated which franchises should be allowed into the conventions, and what events were going to cater to those who identified themselves as the “real” fans that had always roamed Comic Cons’ halls — most of whom were older men.

Suzanne Scott, an assistant professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry, had seen her fair share of wild crowds in her 13 years attending Comic Con, but this incident at Comic Con quickly made her realize something bigger was going on.

“The fact there seemed to be enough people who were willing to waste their own time at the con by protesting young women, it felt like a real turning point for me,” Scott said. “If we’re going to say fandom is in the middle of a gender or culture war, that to me was one of the earliest signs I saw.”

*

Like many children of the 90’s, Jordan West grew up with Harry Potter.

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It is not an uncommon story. Neither is how much they loved reading and writing fanfiction about the magical world in high school, and along with many of their peers, later moved onto mega fandoms like Marvel comics and Star Wars. After growing up in a family that loved sewing, they became interested in fandom costuming — also known as cosplay — and conventions when they were 17. They witnessed the popularity of the fan fiction hosting site LiveJournal and then joined its successor, Archive of Our Own, when the site was still in beta. They are a fandom veteran, and they are still sticking around.

Today, West is on the board of a costuming nonprofit in Minnesota and is a “commanding officer” in the Rebel Legion, a large international Star Wars costuming group. They also volunteer with these groups to do charity events, and work for occasional cosplay workshops and panels. They even met their fiancée in a costuming group. At the time their fiancée was a new cosplayer and West was experienced, but the two bonded over being some of the youngest members of the group. Their connection deepened through feminist action meetings they organized and attended together. The pair started dating six months after meeting and moved in together four months after that.

“In a few months of dating we were already talking about ‘well if we get married, it’s going to be a Star Wars wedding,’” West said. “And we’re now planning our Star Wars wedding.”

West’s fiancée proposed while they were both in cosplay, while taking a picture in a local park after their cosplay group had marched in their city’s Pride parade. Exhausted from a hot summer day, West resisted the additional outing but eventually relented. After a group photo, the pair took a picture of just the two of them.

“I stood like a cosplayer waiting to take a picture, and she said, ‘actually I had something else in mind,’ and then she went down on one knee,” West said. “It was so spectacular and so sweet and so nerdy that I have almost forgiven her for doing this while I was painted purple.”

But years before their current involvement with cosplay and fandom, West had just moved to a new area in Minnesota and was struggling with chronic major depressive disorder. They felt isolated and craved connection with people in their new community but were unsure of where to start. At the time, West had a friend in California who ran a women’s comic club, and they found the idea intriguing enough that they brought it up in therapy. Their therapist pushed them to start a comic club of their own, and after some initial anxiety, West gave it a shot.

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Soon, what started as a way for West to make friends turned into a massive project for women who loved comics. Today, West’s name has appeared on a litany of bylines for the feminist pop culture site The Mary Sue, with their most read posts being their “WTF Comic Reads” series. The series is an online extension of their real-world women’s comics club, which meets monthly at a small independent bookstore in Minnesota to discuss “classic” comics like “Watchmen,” and also female-led comics like “Captain Marvel,” “Saga,” and “Bitch Planet.”

Both their club and corresponding series attracted plenty of women with a long-term or newly burgeoning love of comics. This interest didn’t shock West by any means; they were introduced to comics by other women and have met many female comic fans outside of their own book club. Yet they still encounter surprise from people when they discuss their love for comics. They admit most of this surprise comes from those outside of fandom, but within fandom, they have met many men who are surprised to find so many women interested in comics — despite the fact that a large portion of their audience on The Mary Sue are men.

“I’ve definitely had conversations with guys who thought they knew more than me about comics,” West said. “That’s always kind of gratifying because that’s usually not the case. There’s a certain satisfaction about getting into comics and saying, ‘I used to write comic reviews for The Mary Sue, and I run a women’s comic book club.’ I know what I'm talking about. That usually shuts people up pretty quickly.”

But even though West knows enough to hold their ground, and their negative experiences are few and far between, they are always aware of her place, and they know many other women are as well.

“I personally have never had a really bad experience in a comic book shop,” Scott said. “I’ve never been questioned for my presence there, but to be a woman in those spaces is to be cognizant of the fact that you are going to be asked to perform in particular ways. And that’s a bond that’s been placed on women in fan culture and not placed on men. This idea that you’re going to have to authenticate your identity in some way.”

Now, even after wrapping up “WTF Comic Reads,” West remains a fandom writer at heart. They have always been interested in analyzing media and pop culture. Many of their papers in high school revolved around the topic, and they continued to research media in grad school. In particular, West wanted to focus on topics she was passionate about, and that included issues they saw over and over again in fandom, a passion that continued to their professional work.

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And they’re good at it, no matter how long it took them to embrace that talent.

“I kept wanting to start (my first) essay by saying ‘I’m not an expert’ and after a little while, the only reason I was doing that was because I was conditioned to downplay my expertise as a woman,” West said. “I was like, you know, there’s probably not a lot of people in this fandom or in the world that know more about this subject than I do. So yeah, I am an expert on this. I have a strong background on this. I can write about this with authority. Why am I trying to make it sound like I can’t?”

*

In the initial rise of Internet fandom, it was much harder for like-minded fans to find each other than it is now. Fans — many of them women — were scattered amongst mailing lists, chat rooms, and a network of websites dedicated to singular fandoms. But in the last few decades, that scattered fandom approach has slowly moved towards more sites that hosted works from hundreds of thousands of fandoms rather than only a few. These sites gained massive user bases quickly, and many have fallen just as easily.

Scott joined fandom when the blogging site LiveJournal was the hub of fandom, filled with fan fiction and visited daily by many enthusiastic fan writers. But despite a large and loyal user base, LiveJournal soon faced trouble. Primarily, issues arose when Warriors for Innocence, a right-wing religious organization, expressed concern over certain content on the site, including child pornography, rape, BDSM, and incest content. These complaints would later lead to LiveJournal deleting around 500 accounts, primarily in the Harry Potter fandom, in 2007.

In the years after the mass deletion, dubbed “strikethrough,” many fans made a rapid migration to Tumblr, the microblogging platform founded in 2007, the same year as strikethrough. Kaila Hale-Stern, an editor for The Mary Sue, recalls being in her late twenties and going with her friends to see a Benedict Cumberbatch film when she was active in the Sherlock fandom, and suddenly seeing the shift in person.

“We met some younger women outside the theater and said, ‘oh we heard you guys talking about Sherlock, we’re from Tumblr,’ And we were from LiveJournal,” Hale-Stern said. “And after that, everyone started making this exodus to Tumblr.”

Tumblr quickly hit its stride, with more active fandom users populating the site and using it loyally. Specifically, Hale-Stern remembers 2012 to 2014 as the “golden age” of Tumblr fandom, with millions of fans interacting with some of the biggest mega fandoms of the decade like Harry Potter, the Marvel Cinematic universe, and the eventual

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resurgence of Star Wars. But Tumblr was also not perfect. Hale-Stern noted that it is harder for writers to gain popularity on Tumblr, since it was an image-focused platform rather than text-focused like LiveJournal. And recently, Tumblr, once a haven for fans escaping the LiveJournal bans, has followed a similar pattern when the site banned adult content on the site in 2018 — although it still has millions of loyal daily users.

Amongst all the ups and downs of fandom sites in the modern century, one remains steadfast: Archive of Our Own, or AO3.

The brainchild of the nonprofit Organization of Transformative Works (OTW), AO3 has helped to centralize fandoms that used to be spread across multiple different sites with varying rules and structures. But since its founding in 2009, AO3 has become a centralized effort to house fics, articles, essays, and fandom lore all in one place, with a consistent set of rules.

Rebecca Tushnet, one of the OTW’s founders and a professor at Harvard Law School, and the other AO3 founders took notice of increasing commercialization of the Internet in the late 2000s. In particular, most major fan fiction sites did not place any focus on fair use rights and frequently purged content without alerting its users first. This was made worse by the fact that there were not many alternatives to centralized fandom sites in this time period. The massive site Fan Fiction Net routinely purged content in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, including deleting adult content from the site. Additionally, several large fan sites were founded by venture capitalists — many of them male — who were interested in profiting off female-written fan works. One of the biggest examples was FanLib, which was started in 2007 by three male web designers with over $3 million in starting capital.

These trends worried Tushnet and other founders Francesca Coppa and Naomi Novik enough that they looked into creating a non-profit site with a built-in structure to protect fan rights and history.

“We’d all lived through different sites just disappearing for different reasons, whether that was legal threats, or the individual admins just couldn’t devote the time and energy to a non-commercial endeavor, and there was no institutional structure to protect it,” Tushnet said. “So being able to create an institution that could have a voice and a continuing existence was super important.”

In 2019, AO3 won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work, further cementing its importance to the modern state of fandom as a whole. But it is still not the only tool of modern fandom. Fans who love fic often turn to AO3, while those who appreciate visual

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fandom may lean towards blogging sites like Tumblr, and fans who relish in the immediacy of interacting with other fans during TV shows or concerts may turn to Twitter to enjoy live tweeting and updates.

“Fan culture has become very vast, you can find your corner of it anywhere you like,” Scott said. “If you have any kind of predilection towards a text you can find a subcommunity within the broader fannish network that caters to those preferences.”

Regardless of the platform, online fandom is far different than the fandom of sixty years ago, which was defined by physical meetups at conventions and underground zine printing and distribution. And the rapid growth of the Internet, along with the hurried rise and fall of different platforms, often leads to generational gaps within fandom women, and nostalgia for the days of fandom past.

Fandom writer and commentator V. Arrow emerged into fandom early on, when AO3 wasn’t founded yet and LiveJournal was still invite-only, and fandom was mainly dependent on independent websites to share fanworks. While Arrow acknowledges this era of fandom was less regulated, she still has a soft spot for this time.

“I actually really loved that era of fandom because of the way it cultivated total freedom of creativity,” Arrow said. “You were 100% in charge of what you put out.”

Fandom commentator Fox Meadows also admires older fandom for a different reason: a shared history. In the mid-20th century, fandom was a much more tightly packed space, with fans physically passing down zines to each other and interacting with new fans to get them fully accumulated to fandom. New fans quickly learned what zines to read, what shows to watch, and what arguments had been going on for years, and all this information came directly from other fans.

While modern fandom women use the Internet as an archiving tool to document past fandom arguments, lore, and large events in recent fandom history, the Internet does not have the same touch as that old, physical fandom. But even with increased documentation efforts, fandom has still grown from a handful of recognizable faces in local fan clubs to millions of fans worldwide. And in modern fandom, Meadows has noticed a disconnect between fans themselves as fandom grows quickly and continuously focuses on the present rather than the past.

“There are too many ways to just interact with fandom now that you don’t necessarily get the 101 on fandom history,” Meadows said. “I think something that defines a lot of

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individual fandoms at the moment in the digital age is that you don’t have that continuity of memory. You just participate with this sort of immediacy and watch the thing unfold.”

*

In the late nineties, when the Internet was first starting to burst with fandom content, Zina Hutton was eight years old and in love with Sailor Moon. She spent her days with her niece as they recorded a radio show on cassette tapes about the anime and wrote fan fiction, without even realizing there was an entire community of people just like them. In 2001, she discovered online fan fiction after her family moved from the Virgin Islands to Florida, and she has not left the Internet since.

Hutton — who also goes by her fandom moniker “Stitch” — largely spent her early days in fandom operating a y!Gallery account, and occasionally writing Supernatural and Smallville fanfiction under an anonymous handle. She eventually emerged from anonymity while writing for the DC fandom, where she was an active fic writer for six years. As she moved out of her most active fandom, she transitioned into writing commentary, and started her commentary blog, Stitch’s Media Mix, in 2015. Primarily, Hutton’s writing is focused on fandom racism, and how unavoidable it is for her as a black woman in fandom.

Her inspiration to write fandom commentary in the first place came from her observations that fandom will often put on a happy face, even in the midst of constant debate. Hutton also sees that in the midst of the insistence of fandom positivity, her place as a commentator is as important as ever.

“People have this idea that you have to perform fandom in a certain, super positive way, or else you’re not a fan,” Hutton said. “That’s really frustrating and everyone is so determined to smile the pain away. Because people are so unwilling to be critical of the things they love, I go ‘I’m going to be critical for you.’.”

Hutton’s blog continues to revolve mainly around fandom racism, which is something she is painfully familiar with. She has seen it pop up in fandom’s treatment of black women, whether fans are saying black female characters shouldn’t be in relationships or that black characters should be recast as white actresses. She has noticed anti-black racism from other fans of color and has even seen white fans pretending to be black online in order to defend racist fandom practices. Hutton herself has encountered constant pushback and for writing about racism. She has managed to keep some harassment at bay for a good deal of blocking and blacklisting, but she has never found rest from the rampant racism in nearly every corner of fandom.

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“There’s no fandom I can be in where I can go ‘black people are respected as characters, as performers, and as fans,’” Hutton said. “None.”

These days, Hutton’s readership is primarily made up of her long-time friends and a few core, active readers, although she admits she has several silent readers that rarely interact with her. Her blog only has about 500 followers, less than her old NSFW fanfiction blog, and she has lost several readers and patrons over the years, particularly since writing about her recent interest in K-pop.

But even in the days she had a popular fic blog, other fans rarely spoke to her, or would go through other bloggers to talk about her fics. Some fellow fans would come to her defense privately when backlash turned ugly but would not do so publicly. Her experiences have left her frustrated, and it is only made worse when she sees people still questioning her motives.

“I’ve always found it really weird to say she’s doing this for clout,” Hutton said. “Like, what clout? People are really mean to me. People I don’t know screenshot my tweets and insult me. I had people insult my appearance. And this isn’t dude bros, these are self- proclaimed feminists who care about intersectional feminism and have BLM on their public twitter bios but then on their fandom account they’ll go ‘Stitch is one of those black people who make it all about themselves.’”

Hutton has repeatedly struggled to keep fandom friendships and has many friends unfollow or block her for her criticism. She often struggles with speaking to people online who may try to twist her words against her or misunderstand her stances. These continued experiences have largely changed how Hutton interacts with fandom, and how close she allows herself to get with other fans.

“People don’t get that I exist as a multi-faceted human being,” Hutton said. “I’ve actually found myself unwilling to be as friendly and I hate it because I’m very friendly, but it’s kind of like am I going to be friends with someone only for them to be like, ‘peace out’?”

Still, Hutton stands by her beliefs, and her writing, despite the constant backlash she receives from former friends and long-time haters alike.

“I hate being wrong,” Hutton said. “I do my research. I’m not going to publish something with incorrect information. I’m genuinely, legitimately always right. People that try to push back against my writing genuinely can’t push back so they go ‘she has to be doing it

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because she’s jealous or she can’t write’ like, I got a book published. I’m good. I can write.”

These days, Hutton performs most of her fandom offline. She hand-writes fic, which she sends to a small group chat, but is mainly trying to focus on original work in addition to her commentary. When she wakes up early to watch BTS concert videos or music videos, she texts a real-world friend rather than going online. She wears BTS merch to work and shows videos to co-workers. She spent the weekend after this past Thanksgiving in Miami attending a Korean festival with a friend she’s known for a decade.

But despite holding onto a few core friendships she still greatly values, the ugliness behind fandom communities has made Hutton question her own place inside of it.

“I love the friends I’ve made in fandom but at the same time I deeply hate fandom,” Hutton said. “And I hate saying that. But fandom is really awful and the people who have the power to try and change things, the big name fans, the ladies with their Mary Sue staff positions or their Nerdist staff positions, are uninterested in doing better because all that matters is that their thing is protected.”

*

When AO3 won a Hugo award, it was a moment where seemingly, all of fandom was finally united around a shared victory. But Dr. Rukmani Pande, author of Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race, tweeted that the win might be used in the future by fans to invalidate criticism of fandom as a whole — including greater issues like fandom racism.

Hutton has observed that in the last decade, fandom has continued to cling to examples of content censorship like Strikethrough, but will often ignore the long-term implications of equally wide-spread occurrences like “Race Fail,” an event in 2009 that started as a discussion of racism in the sci-fi and fantasy community and quickly turned ugly. While Hutton thinks people have learned from the experience, she thinks they have learned in all the wrong ways.

“You see a lot of people hovering on the edge of saying something so racist they would never be able to come back from it, and what they were saying was already pretty racist,” Hutton said. “Fandom now is like ‘we learned from that,’ and what they learned is they can’t come right out and say ‘black people are ruining my fandom experience,’ because they know that’s too racist but they figured out that they can tell their friends to block all the black fans. They don’t say black fans, they say antis.”

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While many fan scholars want to claim fandom as a feminist space, there are still ugly corners of fandom racism which Scott admits that she and other white scholars are sheltered from. Not only this, but white fandom scholars often do not actively attempt to understand the roots and impact of fandom racism.

The reality is that while the majority of news and scholarship on fandom has focused on misogyny against women in fandom, often from male fans, women can police and attack other women in fandom just as viciously. And as Hutton’s and many other fans of color’s experience shows, women in fandom can often uphold racism and white male supremacy.

On one hand, Hutton has seen some shifts in fandom representation and how fans of color interact with both each other and with fandom as a whole, and she believes many of these changes have been for the better. In particular, Hutton has seen an influx of fans of color, particularly black fans, being more comfortable sharing their identity and opinions.

“More people are pushing forward saying with their chest, ‘we’re here too’ that has definitely changed,” Hutton said.

But on the other hand, Scott has noticed that whiteness is often an “unspoken” part of many personal accounts of female fandom, and the lives of fans of color are not explored with the same focus or nuance. Scott sees that most often, there is a narrative that fandom women are inherently welcoming and there are no exclusionary practices in fan culture. But this narrative ignores nuances of fandom. When fandom was a smaller place, it was perhaps easier for fans to come together under one opinion or highly similar experiences. But now, that reality is near impossible.

“There’s so many places for fans and fan communities to live online, you can’t treat them universally as a unified fan community in the way you used to be able to theorize of a unified fan community,” Scott said.

More concerningly, these narratives of a unified fandom can ignore the uglier parts of fandom and can cut women of color out of fandom almost entirely, which can create patterns in fandom that are disturbingly familiar to the world outside of fandom. In particular, Scott has seen a parallel of white women — many of them older — upholding the status quo both in fandom and in politics. In particular, she points to when white female fans called for Chris Hardwick to return to The Walking Dead after he was accused of sexual and emotional abuse in 2018 and how, in her observation, this mirrors white women voting for President Trump in 2016.

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Scott also points to “#Gamergate” — an explosive event in 2014 that mainly centered on discussing women in video game spaces, and soon became a showcase of ugly Internet bigotry — as being an indicator of what was to come in the political climate in the following years.

“I think the people that were involved in GamerGate or saw it unfold in 2014 were less surprised at what happened in 2016 than people who did not see it,” Scott said. “People would see the vitriol being directed as marginalized communities and they had seen it firsthand.”

This concerning pattern of white fandom women perpetuating racism not only harms individual fans, it also challenges some wide-spread beliefs about fandom; mainly, that it is an entirely progressive and safe space.

“I think there’s been a real investment in imagining female centric fan culture as both a feminine and feminist space, and I think that what we haven’t really grappled with as much is that it is potentially a white feminist space,” Scott said.

West has seen a similar pattern when it comes to fandom women, and unfortunately, some of the worst parts of fandom have come from women that consider themselves feminists.

“I think there are a lot of women in fan spaces who would probably call themselves feminists but subscribe to a really toxic idea of what feminism is and what femininity means,” West said. “I think that that’s changing, I think that’s getting better. But that's definitely something that continues to be an issue and we have a tendency to keep repeating the same toxic tropes.”

Out of all the denial she has seen in fandom, Hutton is most bothered by the constant denial or ignorance of what fandom racism looks like, particularly from white women in fandom.

“People will go ‘I didn’t realize this was racist because I’ve seen it so much in fandom and when you lay it out, I can see it’,” Hutton said. “People have been gaslighting each other about what racism in fandom looks like.”

Racism is not the only way fandom can reinforce many of the oppressive systems that many fans are trying to escape. Scott points out that there are still several pockets of fandom that are uncomfortable with queering canonically straight characters or will altogether ignore canon queer characters. Hale-Stern has seen vicious ageism from

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younger fans aimed towards fans that have stuck around for decades. And the frequent in- fighting in fandom spaces suggests that there are much deeper issues inside these groups of women that still need to be solved.

In particular, divisive tropes like “dubious consent,” underage sex, and sexualized slavery often run rampant in fandom spaces and can gain plenty of popularity among fandom creators. Hutton admits she has written her fair share of problematic content, and while this is an author’s personal choice, it is also a symptom of their fan culture.

“When you’re in fandom, you normalize things you maybe shouldn’t or you definitely shouldn’t,” Hutton said. “I was in a fandom culture that was sexualizing and romanticizing things we shouldn’t have and we’re all egging each other on, and everyone is telling you ‘yes.’”

Some of the content that is seen in fandom often means that fans can go to extreme ends to justify their interests. Hutton sees the most harmful recent trend in fandom is fans weaponizing both their own and other’s identities and trauma in the midst of fandom debate and discourse. This has increasingly evolved to attacking anyone who dislikes something that is beloved by anyone who is a trauma victim or has a marginalized identity. Hutton sees the biggest harm with this practice is that now, there is an unspoken expectation for fans to reveal their trauma willingly.

“No one should ever feel the need to disclose their trauma to be taken seriously in an argument in fandom,” Hutton said. “You don’t need to tell me, I don’t care. I barely care about my own trauma; I don’t want to deal with anybody else’s trauma. And you should never, ever expose yourself and unveil trauma to people that don’t care.” While problems within fandom can have multiple sources, West sees the most persistent issues for women in fandom coming from one common source: internalized misogyny. Although they have seen many women in fandom proudly call themselves feminists, the in-fighting in fandom spaces suggests that there are much deeper issues inside groups of women that need to be solved.

“I think a lot of the problems that come up with interpersonal relationships between women — competitiveness and the cattiness and the resentment and the flouncing — I think that all comes back to this internalized misogyny about these ideas of how women are supposed to interact, be successful and relate to each other that we’ve just taken in and haven’t questioned,” West said.

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But most fans don’t like to acknowledge the uglier sides of fandom. Scott says that criticism of fandom or focus on the negative impacts of fandom can often upset older fans in particular, who may still hold a great deal of nostalgia for older views of fandom.

“People were genuinely upset about this idea that fandom could not be a welcoming place, which runs counter intuitive to all the early literature that paints fandom as this potentially utopian, politically progressive sphere,” Scott said.

This is the case both for fandom newbies and long-time fandom veterans. Arrow is a long-time media fan and has been active since 2001 when she started writing fic and created a website for the boy band Dream Street. Her site went on to become the band’s largest and most visited fansite, and Arrow won an award from Popstar! Magazine for her site and fic in 2003. Arrow later received an onslaught of attention when she became active in The Hunger Games fandom and created a map of Panem that was widely used by the fandom in the following years. She later received a book deal to write The Panem Companion and was invited to speak at San Diego Comic Con in 2013. But all her success in the fandom has also come with a sense of trepidation in how she interacts with other fans.

“I'm still cautious about social interaction,” Arrow said. “We've all learned that anonymity can breed cruelty. My skin is too thin not to care about the knowledge that there are people who hate me,” Arrow said.

Indeed, one of the aspects of fandom that can turn the nastiest is also one of the biggest draws that brings people into fandom in the first place: the ability to discuss the thing you love with other people. Even among people who have a shared interest, they will rarely have the same opinion. And differing opinions among very passionate people can make for some ugly debates.

Tushnet has seen many of the same arguments come up in fandom multiple times: who owns stories, how sex should be depicted, what stories are irresponsible to tell. But there is more here than a mere difference in opinion. Tushnet sees these debates as both a sign that stories still have power, and that fans want to have influence over the stories they love.

“I favor the idea that a lot of these battles are so vicious because the people that want to control stories understand that they can’t control what Hollywood makes,” Tushnet said. “But they can influence what fellow fans are doing.”

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Scott also thinks the tension between criticism and praise has gotten more challenging as there is more mainstream hostility now being lobbed at fandom.

“I think part of the problem is there’s so much of the hostility happening within fandom right now, both from industry and from other fans,” Scott said. “You either have to unabashedly love a thing and not criticize it in the eyes of some industry participants and fans, or you can only be critical of a thing and not acknowledge the things it does well.”

But fandom debates are not a bad thing — far from it. Criticism is what makes fandom more than blind worship and turns it into a dynamic and ever-evolving community.

“I love that fandom is characterized simultaneously by unabashed love for a thing but also criticism for a thing,” Scott said. “I think those two things coexisting are essential to fandom.”

Fandom has always been a place for discussions, and more often than not, disagreements. But this often stems from fans fighting for the upper hand or to have their own opinion reign victorious in the ongoing fandom discourse, which Meadows finds counterproductive.

“Fandom at its worst has a tendency towards puritan interpretations of things and arguments of if something is good and bad and there is no in between,” Meadows said. “Fandom at its most positive is a plurality of opinions, interpretations and voices.”

Sometimes, fighting within a space of highly passionate people means going back to the basics of human interaction. Meadows likens mediating arguments in fandom to teaching their six-year-old son not to be angry when he loses at a video game, and instead to stay calm and step away.

“At times if you’re really passionate, you have to learn to step back from it, because even if you feel really strongly that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s a positive feeling you’re having,” Meadows said. “Sometimes self-moderation is stepping away from the argument and recognizing the fact that it upsets you doesn’t mean that the person who upset you is a bad person.”

All of these issues — the bullying, the infighting, the harassment — is an unfortunate side effect of garnering a diverse body of people that is accessible to just about anyone. It is all the more difficult when, as Hutton sees it, so many fans are unwilling to see how their actions can carry over into fandom space.

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“People don’t think fandom is part of the real world,” Hutton said. “They think you come into a house, you take your shoes off, you drop your bag off, and you’re in fandom. That none of the dirt on your shoes or the weight in your bag follows you.”

*

Hale-Stern has always been interested in being a writer online.

She started out in Yahoo Groups when she was 12 and began writing fan fiction when she was 14. She came from a generation that was skeptical and at times fearful of strangers on the Internet. But like many young women on the cusp of adolescence in the 90’s and with a steady Internet connection, her love for fandom and its community quickly became a second teacher.

“I would say I actually learned more about being a woman from fandom,” Hale-Stern said. “I remember being thirteen reading X Files, beautiful stories with Mulder and Scully, and thinking this is the way someone should be loved, and this is how a strong woman acts.”

She briefly stopped writing in college, feeling like she had to “grow out” of fandom, only to come back later. Not only did she return, fandom quickly became a staple of her professional career.

Hale-Stern has always been interested in being an online writer or blogger but could not find any opportunities to do so when she graduated college in 2006. She worked at Gawker Media, Tumblr, and Gizmodo before coming to The Mary Sue and writing fandom as an actual beat. Now, Hale-Stern hires “young, hungry writers,” many of them in their early twenties and straight out of school, with opportunities to write online Hale- Stern herself did not have when she was starting out. And while Hale-Stern’s own interest in fandom waxes and wanes, she remains tied to her passion.

“This right now is really an ideal job for me,” Hale-Stern said. “It’s been my fixation since I was 12. I would be happily writing it for the entirety of my journalistic career.”

While Hale-Stern has seen firsthand the impact that personal fandom can have on a professional career, it’s a big contrast from when Hale-Stern was in college and fandom was never shared outside the safety of fic sites and forums.

“It was sort of like Lord of the Rings, like ‘keep it secret, keep it safe,’” Hale-Stern said. “I think there was also an element of shame involved with that.”

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But now, Hale-Stern and her early fandom friends are claiming their fandom alongside their roles as professors, lawyers and graduate students. These long-time fans publish their own work, moderate book panels, and proudly proclaim their fandom roots. But Hale-Stern still wants to create a bit of a division between her everyday fandom and what she writes about as a journalist. In fandom spaces, she does not go by her first name or post her face in an attempt to keep her fandom and professional life as separate as she can.

“I’m always a little afraid of having my fandom identity uncovered, not because I’m ashamed of it, but it’s just that separate corner for myself,” Hale-Stern said. “It almost felt exciting to have an aura of mystery. That fandom persona is whoever the readers want to think she is. She has a more exotic life, maybe, than I do.”

Hale-Stern realizes that at times fandom has to be separate from the professional space, but she also sees a lot of new ways that fan artists and writers can find connections into the professional world, including in her own work.

“I’m really lucky in that I’m working in an online space that’s friendly to fandom and my knowledge of it has helped me get several jobs, but I can’t say that’s the case for many people,” Hale-Stern said. “I don’t recommend everyone talk about their fandom experience at a job interview, but at The Mary Sue, it will maybe get you the job.”

But fandom has not only changed for fans. While Hale-Stern grew up in a fandom space that was constantly in fear of studios handing out lawsuits and shutting down fan archives, now studios are engaging directly with fandom, such as holding fan art competitions.

And with more acceptance of fandom, there has quickly come a wave of publishers and media producers entering fandom and monetizing a community they still do not fully understand. Through her fandom-focused career, she has seen firsthand the disconnect between fans and some of the people that make modern fandom possible in the first place.

“I think one of the biggest disappointments when I worked at Tumblr was realizing that the people that worked at Tumblr did not use it the way the hardcore users do,” Hale- Stern said. “I would be talking to an engineer in the elevator and I would say ‘we need to be able to do this’ and they would say ‘why.’ Some people...it never enters into their lexicon at all.”

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*

Slowly but surely, it seems like fandom has become mainstream. Or at the very least, it is moving out of the dark. Despite the discussion and disagreements that followed the event, the new shape of fandom was never more obvious to Hale-Stern than when AO3 won a Hugo award.

“That would not have happened even a couple years ago, and to have people in that room standing up proudly declaring they were part of the community...that’s a sea change,” Hale-Stern said. “It used to be something secret and hidden and now you’re standing up with your colleagues, and it’s really exciting.”

But Meadows does not think fandom has been “accepted” yet. While they do see more awareness around the issue in mainstream media and every day, they do not believe this recognition is deep-rooted.

“It’s becoming big enough that people who are not into it themselves are aware of it,” Meadows said. “But that doesn’t mean that everyone has a full or even accurate comprehension of what goes on in it. I don’t think that necessarily correlates to a greater understanding of it beyond just a superficial level.”

That is not to say all forms of fandom are looked down upon, but unfortunately, many of the types of fandom that are more favorably viewed are the ones that are most visibly favored by men.

“I think other forms of fan engagement that are very pathologized tend to align, not coincidentally, with the ways in which women have historically engaged in fandom,” Scott said.

One of the biggest examples of fandom that has long been accepted in day to day life is sports fandom. While there are enormous industries dedicated both to sports and media properties, the practices of sports fans are more widely accepted than the everyday practices of media fans, as evidenced by the existence of sports bars, news industries dedicated to sports reporting, and the massive celebrations of sports events like the Superbowl, even among non-sports fans.

“I think if you actually start talking to someone outside of fandom about what we actually do, then it goes weird,” West said. “If you’re a football fan and you start talking about statistics and odds about games and things, people might not care, but they’ll smile and nod. They won’t walk away thinking you’re kind of a freak.”

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Alongside more acceptance of fandom, there has also come a wave of industry entering fandom and monetizing a community they still do not fully understand. In particular, some of the most well-known examples of fandom in the mainstream come from projects that have “filed off the serial numbers” — or, republished fan fiction in which repurposed characters are given original names. This practice is far from uncommon. Names like E.L. James and Cassandra Clare come up in most articles about fandom as examples of successful authors who got their start in fan fiction writing or directly published their fan fiction. But plenty of less well-known authors publish their former fic every year. Not only that, but mainstream publications are increasingly interested in publishing “fic rec” lists or fic reviews for a large-scale audience.

But while fan fiction and other feminized practices have turned out profits and garnered plenty of attention in recent years, the main instances of public fandom have focused on making masculinized practices like buying merchandise and collectibles becoming increasingly accessible. Scott states that this is because what is accepted and what is rejected by fandom is tied not just to sexism, but to capitalism as well.

“The good and bad fan activity tends to align what is more or less approved of by industry,” Scott said. “You often find the ways in which women want to engage, which is outside capital, tend to be less accepted than the promotional imperatives of a digital media industry that needs to figure out ways to monetize and mobilize their fan bases.”

But while corporations continue to seek out a certain type of fandom to promote their projects, most female fans still have to fight to make themselves heard, and to sanitize their own voices to make their interests appetizing for an outside audience.

“There’s a push to make fandom more serious and elevate it, which is great, but then people say it ‘It’s not just porn,’” Hale-Stern said. “I feel like we should be talking about why women and other groups of marginalized people are creating this stuff because it’s not out there otherwise.”

Scott sees AO3 as a “good test” for a fandom space created on feminist ideals, and what that might mean for industrial encroachment into fandom and the control of female fans going forward. Arrow believes that keeping fan fiction and other types of fandom free are the key to keeping the space as powerful as it currently is, and also, keeping fan fiction rooted in its original purpose — to entertain a fandom audience, not to sell to a mainstream audience disconnected from the original media and audience.

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“No matter how well-written a fic for something I know nothing about is, it's going to come across as poorly written and hokey to me because I don't have the insider knowledge to fill expositional gaps,” Arrow said. “There's no way, in good faith, to give fic to people who don't have a background in fandom at large and that fandom specifically.”

Not only does fandom give fan fiction its core purpose, Arrow also believes that fans not being rewarded monetarily is a major reason fandom is such an important place for so many women.

“I think that with a lot of work and intention, you could probably create, like, a women- only commune, but ultimately your boundaries are set by men because of money,” Arrow said. “The fact that fandom necessarily resists monetization is key to it being a positive space.”

Keeping their work free and also accessible to a large and eager audience also means that hundreds of young female authors are getting experience and exposure that is often far more difficult in a typically mainstream publishing environment.

“The honest truth is The Mary Sue gets pitched hundreds of books a day and basically can’t cover them,” Hale-Stern said. “But I could publish a story on AO3 tonight and have 20,000 hits in a couple days.”

Additionally, many fandom women aren’t looking for professional career opportunities when they engage with fandom — they just want to express their thoughts about a community they are passionate about, as is the case with Hutton.

“I don’t make anything resembling a living wage writing about fandom,” Hutton said. “No one is legitimately going ‘Zina, let us pay you to write a book about fandom.’ And I don’t know if I’d want that.”

But on the other side, fan fiction and other fandom works staying free means there is no profit for the largely female participants. While some fans view free work as a building block in creating a positive space for women, Hale-Stern likens free fandom work to a well-known sentiment from feminist scholar Joanna Russ: “women’s writing keeps us poor.”

So, while there looks like there is more mainstream acceptance for fandom on the surface, there is something deeper brewing underneath. After all, there was more to that incident Scott remembers from Comic Con than pure sexism. It was also the year after

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the first time Comic Con had completely sold out tickets, and just before the event attendance would grow into the six-figure range. Just like the rest of fandom, Comic Con was growing from a niche gathering of self-proclaimed nerds to a cultural phenomenon, and it caused fans to lash out.

“It wasn’t just expressing anxieties and issues with Twilight as a property or fans,” Scott said. “It was about this idea that fandom as a microcosm had grown too fast, too large, too diverse, too mainstream.” *

In her years of working with the OTW, Tushnet and other AO3 staffers have heard plenty of personal fandom stories, with thousands of fans often contacting Tushnet and her coworkers about the personal impact fandom had on them. More than anything else, it is these stories that make Tushnet value her work and realize the importance of fandom as a whole.

“When I read these stories about people who went from isolation to community, I cry every time,” Tushnet said. “If I could do one thing, it would be to make everyone involved in this space read that, so they know there is some very important stuff that should be preserved.”

West is one of those fans. Her adolescence and adulthood both belong to fandom, and so much of her current life is defined by the hours she has spent in the company of other fans.

“It’s affected literally every aspect of my life,” West said. “I was kind of a weird, nerdy kid. And then the Internet became more of a thing, and I realized there was a larger world out there. I don’t think I would be alive today if it wasn’t for the connections I have made through fandom.”

While fandom has deeply impacted so many people, there is no one explanation on why fandom is as powerful as it is. Meadows predicts that part of its power may be the pure passion for one thing, and the ability to connect with people all over the world you would never be able to speak to otherwise.

“The thing about fandom is that it is a community where you are all basically inhabiting the same trash pile,” Meadows said. “We’ve all found something absurd that other people care about along with us. And there’s something really joyful in that.”

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Not only has fandom given so many people a valuable community, the growth of the Internet has made it so much easier for fans to move beyond their physical locations, and to find close friends from all over the world, all united by a singular passion.

“We want a way to communicate about the things we care about with people who care about the same things,” Meadows said. “And the people around you, even if you like them and love them and get along with them, don’t necessarily overlap with the people that share these same interests.”

This remains especially important for women, and in particular, young girls who are newly coming up in online spaces. In addition to her recreational writing in fandom, Arrow has studied the social impact and coping of teenage girls, particularly those with trauma, and the importance for these girls to have a space dominated mainly by other women to come home to.

“The ability to have discussions without needing to make space for male voices and perspectives is huge and being able to have collaborative space for criticism and media analysis that has genuinely no regard for male gaze or male sexual priority is so important,” Arrow said.

Fandom can also continue to offer a more positive outlook even to those like Hutton, who have been exposed to some of its ugliest corners but stick around nonetheless for the moments fandom can offer some much-needed support and community.

“Fandom genuinely makes me want to be a better person,” Hutton said. “I’m talking to all these people who are so good and it’s really lovely to see ... if I didn’t know so much and had the experiences I had negatively in fandom I would buy into all the hype of fandom because I’ve seen how good fandom is.”

Ultimately, the call to fandom for dedicated fans of all ages, genders, and backgrounds has many possible roots — the opportunity to connect with others, to be unapologetically passionate, to let off some steam. But wherever the root cause of becoming a fan comes from, the result is often the same: a life-long connection to something bigger than oneself.

“Fandom is my home,” West said. “This is where I live. I’m always going to be commenting and participating and trying to change things for the better.”

*

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Of course, there is something complicated about this article existing at all. Fans in general often have a less than ideal relationship with the media itself. Scott observes that more and more, there are an increasing number of long form pieces focusing on fandom published in large publications that inherently misunderstand fandom or focus solely on the oddity of it.

While journalists from fandom-specific blogs and websites regularly tackle nuanced and insightful pieces on fandom, when fandom goes outside this space, things can quickly become muddied. In particular, a New Yorker feature that ran earlier this year drew negative attention from a number of fan scholars and writers. Namely, many fans, including Hale-Stern, felt the piece was dated and failed to cite contemporary fan scholars, including any female scholars. Scott states that this type of criticism is not new, and often comes up when those outside of the fandom space try to enter in order to write a story that may not be flattering to the fans they are observing.

“(The problem) is mostly when outliers come in and they’re very clearly coming from a distance and mocking ethnographic stance of ‘look at these odd people that I am clearly not a part of,’” Scott said.

With this increased mainstream attention, those involved in fandom are doing more to make fandom palatable for the masses. But alongside increasing generational divides and internal issues like racism and sexism that desperately need to be solved, the frontlines of fandom can quickly become messy. But then, fandom is expected to put on a united front for a mainstream audience regarding them with increased scrutiny.

“We’re fighting this battle against the media and then within fandom itself,” Hale-Stern said. “It’s a very tricky area.”

Scott also points to issues in the ways academics and journalists typically talk about fandom — and specifically, how female writers are expected to write about fandom.

“I think objectivity has been masked with a sort of masculinized ethos problem, like, men are objective and rational, and women are subjective and emotional,” Scott said. “When men write about fandom they are seen as doing so from an objective stance, when women write about fandom we are seen as writing too emotionally or being too affective in our understanding of things.”

But there can be great value in putting more distinctly feminine interests in professional spaces, particularly in academia and other professional fields. For Tushnet, she has dedicated her legal career to copyright law and fandom legal issues, but she does not see

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a problem with the connection between her professional occupation and her fandom. In fact, it was her experience in fandom that made her realize the importance of the legal issues she now specializes in.

“As an academic, you want to focus on things that are interesting to you,” Tushnet said. “I don’t see myself as too different from any other academics in that I’ve chosen to study that I love. I knew the things I and my friends cared about mattered so I did not think of them as trivial or unworthy of study.”

In wider academia, Scott finds fan studies are distinct because fan scholars actively use their own identity as fans in their research methods, while other researchers may try to distance themselves from their areas of study. But passion is one of the core elements of any course of study, particularly in the humanities, and Scott believes more academics should realize that.

“We need to acknowledge that all academia in some way is based around fandom,” Scott said. “You have to have a deep investment in something in order to spend the amount of time with it that academics have to spend with their work.”

Hale-Stern wants to keep covering fandom on The Mary Sue and outside of it, specifically through a feminist lens, and to show there is a place for fandom in the mainstream media, and the world.

In particular, West also sees the valuable in representing the stories of all people in media, whether it’s queer, gender, racial representation, or beyond. And even more, she wants fans to find those connections and stories.

“I feel like we all have our stories and I think it’s important to recognize our stories as fans and as geeks are significant and are a part of the larger geek community and those stories are valuable,” West said.

This move towards valuing marginalized stories is already happening on The Mary Sue. West sees her audience aligning for the “young, nerdy, feminist” brand already established at The Mary Sue, and while West’s articles are mainly read by women, she also has a fair bit of her audience that are men as well.

“I think that the more people who can relate to something I’ve written, the better,” West said. “I think a well written thing, if it’s articulate and it’s relevant and it’s relatable, people are going to connect with it.”

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Hale-Stern has also noticed that while The Mary Sue is a feminist publication named after a trope equally supported and ridiculed by fandom women, the site’s readership actually has 2% more men than women reading. While she acknowledges that some of their male readership could be trolls, she thinks most of this interaction is genuine.

“I think they’re coming to us for a perspective they aren’t going to get elsewhere, and conversations they’re not going to get being in their own spaces,” Hale-Stern said.

But even with more audiences coming to nuanced fandom and media reporting, there is still a shadow of judgement hanging over those who engage with fandom. Hale-Stern wants people to realize that plenty of people they encounter on a day to day basis are also fans, and this is far from a bad thing.

“I wish people knew how many serious professionals in all walks of life do this with their free time,” Hale-Stern said. “Even more and more, people are making the pipeline jump, both artists and writers, they’re going to keep coming out fandom, that’s not going to stop unless some kind of catastrophe and the Internet implodes.”

Fandom pieces are not going to end, and there needs to both be a new way to write them and a new way to examine them. The piece from The New Yorker did not exist in a vacuum, and neither does this one. With increased mainstream attention, there are inevitably going to be more articles on fandom. But when fandom communities are dealing with increasing generational divides and internal issues like racism and sexism that desperately need to be solved, the frontlines of fandom can quickly become messy when reporters come knocking. In the middle of personal conflict, fandom is suddenly expected to put on a united front for a mainstream audience regarding them with increased scrutiny, trying to find out the truth about what exactly fandom is.

But the real truth is that the problems in fandom do not have entirely clean solutions. Like the issues in the real world, they are complicated and as much a result of changing times as the people who are currently participating. The people who participate in fandom can be writers, artists, bullies, friends, scholars, and students, sometimes all at once.

And none of them are going away anytime soon.

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Daughters of the digital: The women that define fandom as we know it (Version 2)

In 2009, teenage girls shut down San Diego Comic Con.

The nation’s largest comic convention has opened its doors every year since 1970 to increasing numbers of media fans eager to compete in costume contests, buy merchandise, meet fellow fans, and sit on panels for upcoming films and TV shows. The event is a celebration of fandom set in the sweltering heat of summer in California, and it practically begs for emotions to run high. And in 2009, those emotions seemed to break an unspoken dam.

That year, the cast and crew of Twilight: New Moon were attending one of the event’s many panels and showing an exclusive preview of the new film, and nearly 6,000 fans turned out for the event. The San Diego Tribune reported that many fans — most of them young teenagers — camped out days ahead of the panel, sporting homemade t-shirts and wide-eyed eagerness.

At the same time, another crowd was forming in protest of the Twilight fans’ presence, carrying signs with messages like “Twilight ruined Comic Con.” In the years that followed, fans debated which franchises should be allowed into the conventions, and what events were going to cater to the “real” fans that had always roamed Comic Cons’ halls — most of whom were older men.

Suzanne Scott, an assistant professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry, had seen her fair share of wild crowds in her 13 years attending Comic Con, but this incident at Comic Con quickly made her realize something bigger was going on.

“The fact there seemed to be enough people who were willing to waste their own time at the con by protesting young women, it felt like a real turning point for me,” Scott said. “If we’re going to say fandom is in the middle of a gender or culture war, that to me was one of the earliest signs I saw.”

*

Like many children of the 90’s, Jordan West grew up with Harry Potter.

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It is not an uncommon story. Neither is how much they loved reading and writing fanfiction about the magical world in high school, and along with many of their peers, later moved onto mega fandoms like Marvel comics and Star Wars. After growing up in a family that loved sewing, they became interested in fandom costuming — also known as cosplay — and conventions when they were 17. They witnessed the popularity of the fan fiction hosting site LiveJournal and then joined its successor, Archive of Our Own, when the site was still in beta. They are a fandom veteran, and they are still sticking around.

Today, West is on the board of a costuming nonprofit in Minnesota and is a “commanding officer” in the Rebel Legion, a large international Star Wars costuming group. They also volunteer with these groups to do charity events, and work for occasional cosplay workshops and panels. They even met her fiancée in a costuming group, and her fiancée proposed when they were both dressed as Star Wars characters

But years before their current involvement with cosplay and fandom, West had just moved to a new area in Minnesota and was struggling with chronic major depressive disorder. They felt isolated and craved connection with people in their new community but were unsure of where to start. At the time, West had a friend in California who ran a women’s comic club, and they found the idea intriguing enough that they brought it up in therapy. Their therapist pushed them to start a comic club of her own, and after some initial anxiety, West gave it a shot.

Soon, what started as a way for West to make friends turned into a massive project for women who loved comics. West’s name has appeared on a litany of byline for the feminist pop culture site The Mary Sue, with their most known posts being her “WTF Comic Reads” series. The series is an online extension of her real-world women’s comics club, which meets monthly at a small independent bookstore in Minnesota to discuss beloved comics like Watchmen, and also female-led comics like Captain Marvel, Saga, and Bitch Planet.

Even after wrapping up “WTF Comic Reads,” West remains a writer at heart, and they continue to be passionate about writing about issues she sees over and over again in fandom.

And they’re good at it, no matter how long it took them to embrace that talent.

“I kept wanting to start (my first) essay by saying ‘I’m not an expert’ and after a little while, the only reason I was doing that was because I was conditioned to downplay my expertise as a woman,” West said. “I was like, you know, there’s probably not a lot of people in this fandom or in the world that know more about this subject than I do. So

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yeah, I am an expert on this. I have a strong background on this. I can write about this with authority. Why am I trying to make it sound like I can’t?”

*

In the initial rise of Internet fandom, it was much harder for like-minded fans to find each other than it is now. Fans — many of them women — were scattered amongst mailing lists, chat rooms, and a network of websites dedicated to singular fandoms. But in the last few decades, that scattered fandom approach has slowly moved towards more sites that hosted work for hundreds of thousands of fandoms rather than only a few. These sites gained massive user bases quickly, and many have fallen just as easily.

Scott joined fandom when LiveJournal was the hub of fandom, filled with fan fiction and visited daily by many enthusiastic fan writers. But LiveJournal soon faced trouble. Primarily, this trouble came when Warriors for Innocence, a right-wing religious organization, expressed concern over some sexual content on the site, including child pornography, rape, BDSM, and incest content. These complaints would later lead to LiveJournal deleting around 500 accounts, primarily in the Harry Potter fandom, in 2007.

In the years after the mass deletion, dubbed “strikethrough,” many fans made a rapid migration to Tumblr, the microblogging platform founded in 2007. Kaila Hale-Stern, an editor for The Mary Sue, recalls being in her late twenties and going with her friends to see a Benedict Cumberbatch film when she was active in the Sherlock fandom, and suddenly seeing the shift in person.

“We met some younger women outside the theater and said, ‘oh we heard you guys talking about Sherlock, we’re from Tumblr,’ And we were from LiveJournal,” Hale-Stern said. “And after that, everyone started making this exodus to Tumblr.”

Tumblr quickly hit its stride, with more and more active and loyal fandom users populating the site. Specifically, Hale-Stern remembers 2012 to 2014 as the “golden age” of Tumblr fandom, with millions of fans interacting daily with some of the biggest mega fandoms of the decade like Harry Potter, the Marvel Cinematic universe, and the eventual resurgence of Star Wars. But Tumblr has been dwindling in prevalence and many bloggers left after the site banned adult content on the site in 2018 — although it still has millions of loyal daily users.

Amongst all the ups and downs of fandom sites in the modern century, one remains steadfast: Archive of Our Own, or AO3.

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The site has centralized fandoms that used to be spread across multiple different sites that had varying rules and structures. But AO3 was a centralized effort to house fics, articles, essays and fandom lore all in one place, with a consistent set of rules.

Rebecca Tushnet, one of the OTW’s founders and a professor at Harvard Law School, and the other AO3 founders took notice of increasing commercialization of the Internet in the late 2000s. In particular, most major fan fiction sites did not place any focus on fair use rights and frequently purged content without alerting its users first. This was made worse by the fact that there were not many alternatives to centralized fandom sites in this time period. The massive site Fan Fiction Net routinely purged content in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, including deleting adult content from the site. Additionally, often large fan sites were founded by venture capitalists — many of them male — who were interested in profiting off female-written fan works. One of the biggest examples was FanLib, which was started in 2007 by three male web designers with over $3 million in starting capital.

These trends worried Tushnet and other founders Francesca Coppa and Naomi Novik enough that they looked into creating a non-profit site with a built-in structure to protect fan rights and history.

“We’d all lived through different sites just disappearing for different reasons, whether that was legal threats, or the individual admins just couldn’t devote the time and energy to a noncommercial endeavor, and there was no institutional structure to protect it,” Tushnet said. “So being able to create an institution that could have a voice and a continuing existence was super important.”

In 2019, AO3 won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work, further cementing its importance not only in the fandom community, but in the modern shift of fandom as a whole. But even with a massive platform like AO3 housing millions of fandom users, online fandom is far different than the fandom of sixty years ago.

The rapid growth of the Internet, along with the hurried rise and fall of different platforms, often leads to generational gaps within fandom women, and nostalgia for the days of fandom past. Even though modern fandom women do use the Internet as an archiving tool to document past fandom arguments, lore, and large events in recent fandom history, fandom has still grown from a handful of recognizable faces in local fan clubs to millions of fans worldwide. Fandom commentator Fox Meadows is seeing a modern disconnect between fans as fandom grows quickly and fans continue to focus on the present rather than the past.

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“There are too many ways to just interact with fandom now that you don’t necessarily get the 101 on fandom history,” Meadows said. “You just participate with this sort of immediacy and watch the thing unfold.”

*

In the late nineties, when the Internet was first starting to burst with fandom content, Zina Hutton was eight years old and in love with Sailor Moon. She spent her days with her niece as they recorded a radio show on cassette tapes about the anime and wrote fan fiction, without even realizing there was an entire community of people just like them. In 2001, she discovered online fan fiction after her family moved from the Virgin Islands to Florida, and she has not left the Internet since.

Hutton — who also goes by her fandom moniker “Stitch” — largely spent her early days in fandom operating a y!Gallery account, and occasionally writing Supernatural and Smallville fanfiction under an anonymous handle. She eventually emerged from anonymity in the DC fandom, where she was an active fic writer for six years. As she moved out of her most active fandom, she slowly moved into writing commentary, and started her commentary blog, Stitch’s Media Mix, in 2015. Primarily, Hutton’s writing is focused on fandom racism, and how unavoidable it is for her as a black woman in fandom.

Hutton sees anti-black racism pop up everywhere in fandom, from fans calling for black actresses to be recast in their favorite franchises to white fans pretending to be black online to defend racist fandom practices. Hutton herself has encountered near-constant pushback and harassment for writing about racism. She has managed to keep some harassment at bay with a good deal of blocking and blacklisting, but its presence is always there, and she has never found rest from the rampant racism in nearly every corner of fandom.

“There’s no fandom I can be in where I can go ‘black people are respected as characters, as performers, and as fans,’” Hutton said. “None.”

Even before the days of Stitch’s Media Mix, other fans rarely spoke to Hutton, or would go through other bloggers to talk about her fics. And when she got into arguments online because of her views, other fans were more likely to defend her privately than to stand up to her publicly. Her experiences have left her frustrated, and it is only made worse when she sees people still questioning her motives.

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“I’ve always found it really weird to say she’s doing this for clout,” Hutton said. “Like, what clout? People are really mean to me. People I don’t know screenshot my tweets and insult me. I had people insult my appearance. And this isn’t dude bros, these are self- proclaimed feminists who care about intersectional feminism and have BLM on their public twitter bios but then on their fandom account they’ll go ‘Stitch is one of those black people who make it all about themselves.’”

These days, Hutton performs most of her fandom offline. She hand-writes fic, which she sends to a small group chat, but is mainly trying to focus on original work in addition to her commentary. When she wakes up early to watch BTS concert videos or music videos, she texts a real-world friend rather than going online. She wears BTS merch to work and shows videos to co-workers. She spent the weekend after this past Thanksgiving in Miami attending a Korean festival with a friend she’s known for a decade.

But despite holding onto a few core friendships she still greatly values, the ugliness behind fandom communities has made Hutton question her own place inside of it.

“I love the friends I’ve made in fandom but at the same time I deeply hate fandom,” Hutton said. “And I hate saying that. But fandom is really awful and the people who have the power to try and change things, the big name fans, the ladies with their Mary Sue staff positions or their Nerdist staff positions, are uninterested in doing better because all that matters is that their thing is protected.”

*

When AO3 won a Hugo award, it was a moment where seemingly, all of fandom was finally united around a shared victory. But Dr. Rukmani Pande, author of Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race, tweeted that the win might be used in the future by fans to invalidate criticism of fandom as a whole — including greater issues like fandom racism.

Meanwhile, Hutton has observed that fandom has continued to cling to examples of censorship like Strikethrough, but will often ignore the long-term implications of events like “Race Fail,” a wide-spread discussion of racism in the sci-fi and fantasy community that quickly turned ugly in 2009.

While Scott and many other fandom scholars have pointed out fandom’s potential to be a feminist space, there are still ugly corners of fan prejudice which Scott admits that she and other scholars are both sheltered from, and often do not do enough to seek out and understand.

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“People were genuinely upset about this idea that fandom could not be a welcoming place, which runs counter intuitive to all the early literature that paints fandom as this potentially utopian, politically progressive sphere,” Scott said.

Racism is not the only way fandom can reinforce many of the oppressive systems that many fans are trying to escape. Scott points out that there are still several pockets of fandom that are uncomfortable with queering canonically straight characters or will altogether ignore canon queer characters. Hale-Stern has seen vicious ageism from younger fans aimed towards fans that have stuck around for decades. And the frequent in- fighting in fandom spaces suggests that there are much deeper issues inside these groups of women that still need to be solved.

“I think a lot of the problems that come up with interpersonal relationships between women — competitiveness and the cattiness and the resentment and the flouncing — I think that all comes back to this internalized misogyny about these ideas of how women are supposed to interact, be successful and relate to each other that we’ve just taken in and haven’t questioned,” West said.

All of these issues — the bullying, the infighting, the harassment — is an unfortunate side effect of garnering a diverse body of people that is accessible to just about anyone. It is all the more difficult when, as Hutton sees it, so many fans are unwilling to see how their actions can carry over into fandom space.

“People don’t think fandom is part of the real world,” Hutton said. “They think you come into a house, you take your shoes off, you drop your bag off, and you’re in fandom. That none of the dirt on your shoes or the weight in your bag follows you.”

*

Hale-Stern has always been interested in being a writer online.

She started out in Yahoo Groups when she was 12 and began writing fan fiction when she was 14. She came from a generation that was skeptical at best and fearful at times of strangers on the Internet. But like many young women on the cusp of adolescence in the 90’s and with a steady Internet connection, her love for fandom and its community quickly became a second teacher.

She briefly stopped writing in college, feeling like she had to “grow out” of fandom, but quickly returned later. Not only did she return, but fandom quickly became a mainstream staple of her professional career.

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She worked at Gawker Media, Tumblr, and Gizmodo before coming to The Mary Sue and gaining fandom as an actual beat. Now, Hale-Stern hires “young, hungry writers,” many of them in their early twenties and straight out of school, with opportunities to write online that Hale-Stern herself did not have when she was starting out. And while Hale- Stern’s own interest in fandom waxes and wanes, she remains tied to her passion.

“This right now is really an ideal job for me,” Hale-Stern said. “It’s been my fixation since I was 12. I would be happily writing it for the entirety of my journalistic career.”

Hale-Stern has seen firsthand the impact that personal fandom can have on a professional career, and it’s a big contrast from when Hale-Stern was in college and fandom was never shared outside the safety of fic sites and forums.

“It was sort of like Lord of the Rings, like ‘keep it secret, keep it safe,’” Hale-Stern said. “I think there was also an element of shame involved with that.”

But now, Hale-Stern and her early fandom friends are claiming their fandom alongside their roles as professors, lawyers and graduate students. These long-time fans publish their own work, moderate book panels, and proudly proclaim their fandom roots. But alongside this renewed pride among fans, Hale-Stern also now sees producers embracing fandom in a new way.

While Hale-Stern grew up in a fandom space that was constantly in fear of studios handing out lawsuits and shutting down fan archives, now studios are engaging directly with fandom, such as holding fan art competitions.

And with more acceptance of fandom, there has quickly come a wave of publishers and media producers entering fandom and monetizing a community they still do not fully understand.

In particular, some of the most well-known examples of fandom in the mainstream come from projects that have “filed off the serial numbers” — or, republished fan fiction as original work. Not only that, but mainstream publications are increasingly interested in publishing “fic rec” lists or fic reviews for a large-scale audience.

But while fan fiction and other feminized practices have turned out profits and garnered plenty of attention in recent years, the main instances of public fandom have focused on making masculinized practices like merchandise and collectibles becoming increasingly

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accessible. Meanwhile, female fans still have to fight to make themselves heard, and to sanitize their own voices to make their interests appetizing for an outside audience.

“There’s a push to make fandom more serious and elevate it, which is great, but then people say it ‘It’s not just porn,’” Hale-Stern said. “I feel like we should be talking about why women and other groups of marginalized people are creating this stuff because it’s not out there otherwise.”

While there looks like more acceptance for fandom on the surface, there is something deeper brewing underneath. After all, there was more to that incident Scott remembers from Comic Con than pure sexism. It was also the year after the first time Comic Con had completely sold out tickets, and a time just before the event attendance would grow into the six-figure range. Just like the rest of fandom, Comic Con was growing from a niche gathering of self-proclaimed nerds to a cultural phenomenon, and it caused fans to lash out.

“It wasn’t just expressing anxieties and issues with Twilight as a property or fans,” Scott said. “It was about this idea that fandom as a microcosm had grown too fast, too large, too diverse, too mainstream.”

***

Of course, there is something complicated about this article existing at all. Fans in general often have a less than ideal relationship with the media itself. Scott observes that more and more, there are an increasing number of long form pieces focusing on fandom published in large publications that inherently misunderstand fandom or focus solely on the oddity of it.

While journalists from fandom-specific blogs and websites regularly tackle effective pieces on fandom, when fandom goes outside this space, things can quickly become muddied. In particular, a New Yorker feature that ran earlier this year drew negative attention from a number of fan scholars and writers. Namely, many fans, including Hale- Stern, felt the piece was dated and failed to cite contemporary fan scholars, including any female scholars.

But that piece does not exist in a vacuum, and neither does this one. With increased mainstream attention, there are inevitably going to be more articles on fandom. But when fandom communities are dealing with increasing generational divides and internal issues like racism and sexism that desperately need to be solved, the frontlines of fandom can quickly become messy when reporters come knocking. In the middle of personal conflict,

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fandom is suddenly expected to put on a united front for a mainstream audience regarding them with increased scrutiny, trying to find out the truth about what exactly fandom is.

But the real truth is that the problems in fandom do not have entirely clean solutions — like the issues in the real world, they are complicated and as much a result of changing times as the people who are currently participating. The people who participate in fandom can be writers, artists, bullies, friends, scholars, and students, sometimes all at once.

And none of them are going away anytime soon.

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