#fan/creator interaction

[fansplaining]

Bafflingly, there’s very little evidence of Disney trying to curb the toxic side of Star Wars fandom, a community dedicated to sabotaging Disney products and alienating potential customers. Time after time, actors of color have faced ruthless online abuse with minimal protection from the company that put them in the spotlight. It’s all very well to launch projects like The Acolyte and promote them with upbeat press tours, but what matters is the follow-through. And that half of the equation currently involves cancelling the show within weeks of its release, pissing off its fans, and leaving the lead actor to be harassed on Instagram by jeering troglodytes.

— @hellotailor in our latest article, which digs into how the recent cancellation of The Acolyte fits into the broader patterns of the Star Wars franchise. Read the whole piece—or listen to an audio version!

[elizabethminkel]

For years, I (and @fansplaining generally) have been closely watching fan anxiety over renewals in the extremely unstable streamer era—and then it happened to me. 🥲 I wrote about my beloved Interview with the Vampire, the "nobody is watching the best show on TV" narrative, and fans' frustrations with the confusing marketing decisions this season.

(Also I had to slip in a shout-out to Tumblr—"my home base, Tumblr, which is far more likely to host gifsets, shitposts, or graduate-seminar-level analyses of the show than discussions of terrestrial television ratings." Thank you IWTV fans of Tumblr for continually creating all three of these things, you are sustaining me!!! I've even started using the "For you" tab to see more, who have I become lol.)

[luniviravosshipper]

Actually feels like I'm losing my mind sometimes 'cause the TDP fandom is the only fandom where it feels like people are hardly at all fawning over the well curated selection of gay DILFs in the series.

Like this is one of the few children's media I know that has canonical mpreg (that's somehow done in a way that's also treated with just as much seriousness as it's treated comedically) and... no one cares? I mean, maybe that wasn't shocking to the fandom at the time and of course a ton of other shit has happened that's gone beyond that (like the cannibalism maybe), but seriously. Surely that should attract people to this show, right?

I mean, tragic old man yaoi became so popular in 2024, I saw everyone talking about it all throughout the year on Tumblr. And no one looked into exploring viravos more through that? Like, what? The way the ship so perfectly aligned with people's ideals for that trope and even hit points that I felt like some people said the most popular ships of that trope weren't able to fit... And if anything it seems like viravos has died down since mid 2024 (around when season 6 came out and when this trope seemed to be peaking in popularity because of the other media coming out at the time that used it) within the show's own fanbase. And it used to be the second most popular ship at that too.

And again, it's one thing for none of these characters or ships to be the main appeal for the fanbase itself... But somehow none of these things draw other people in? That's the crazy part to me. That's what's mind boggling.

[lynxalon]

i've seen a fair bit of... pessimism about dorym lately, esp with the ep107, for example wondering if dorian's opposing views on the gods making orym fall out of love, and i have to say. i very highly doubt it, ur fr talking about the man who has held on to will for so long, holding onto will's family and affectionately calling this *his* family too because that didn't stop when will died. i dont think falling out of love is an option or even a thought to orym.

that said, we know that orym has contingencies for if anyone in bells hells crosses the line into being a version of themselves they would despise, for anyone who jeopardizes their mission. his mission. i think, for the first time since knowing dorian, orym finally has a contingency for him. the longer dorian is back, the more orym sees how scarred he is by what's happened (understandable so) and knows that dorian is with bells hells all the way. but if he isn't...

[alphacrone]

sims mods are so insane bc there’s like mods for immersive new gameplay and full sets of beautifully designed clothes and hair and furniture and then there’s also mods for like. filing a tax return. sims modders have the RANGE.

[ami-dark]

The old man's memory isn't as sharp as it used to be, but there's a child he'll never forget...

[fansplaining]

Our April piece is live! 💫 Sacha Judd dives into the history of RPF, its thorny intersections with things like celebrity fandom and conspiracy theory shipping, and the erosion of the fannish fourth wall over the past few decades:

In the internet era—and especially with the rise of social media—we’ve witnessed an unprecedented increase in our access to public figures, the objects of our fandom. That’s led to collisions between celebrity culture, transformative fandom, parasociality, and conspiracy thinking. As a consequence, we’ve seen a full life-cycle in the acceptance of RPF, from something that was once seen as a completely taboo behavior to widespread tolerance and back again. And now, when our life online has consolidated into a handful of crowded platforms and fan communities have grown exponentially in size, we face a reckoning with the ethics of RPF in a world where few fandom boundaries remain.

Read or listen to a full audio version via the link above!

[fansplaining]

As promised, this was the topic of our latest episode:

Click through for the audio and a full transcript, plus show notes with links for further reading!

Since the WGA strikes began, the studios have been trying—and failing—to turn fans against the writers (and now the actors). I reported on a very strange SDCC this year, which was full of labor conversations and solidarity along the full spectrum of the fan/creator divide. As one member of SAG-AFTRA told me during an awareness-raising demonstration across from the convention center, “The people that I have met today have been all thumbs-up, V for victory, hugs. We love it, and we’re very pleasantly surprised.”

[arimilaer]

✨ WRITER INTERACTIVE ✨

Tag yourself or your favorite fic author — describe them with hearts! Are they the sleepless machine? The sexy brain? The angst dealer? The bathtub companion? This is your reminder to love loudly and read passionately.

You are free to take and publish this picture, the only request is not to erase the watermark🤲🏻.

(And you can start following me too, I'm new here and want to find a community!).

[pro-sipper]

What do proshippers generally believe about shipping real people? Stuff like creator x creator or celebrity x reader?

That it falls under the umbrella of "you should be allowed to write anything you want". Once again, it's not my personal thing. There's no real life pairing I read for, and the whole "blank x reader" is not appealing to me at all.

But I have no problem with people writing that stuff, or knowing it's out there. I saw someone a while back say that it's basically just writing about another character, and I agree with that. No matter how much a creator posts or how open a celebrity seems with their personal life, we're still only seeing a tiny snippet of their lives. We have no clue who they are when the cameras aren't recording because we just don't know them. And whatever someone chooses to write about is mostly stemming from that particular persona that they happen to put on for the world and that's it. It's completely separate from our reality because they're basically just writing about another made up character

The problem I have, and it's what I imagine most proshippers also take issue with, is when people start blurring the lines between fiction and reality. To me, there's a world of difference between posting something on ao3, and speculating on secret relationships in the comments of someone's youtube video. Or between talking about something on tumblr, and tagging the person directly on twitter.

I just don't understand people who condemn rpf and talk about how gross and invasive it is, but think it's funny to tag celebrities on twitter to bring up (what they think is) cringe-worthy fanfic tropes that people have written them into. Or people who print out fanworks to shove into an actor's face at a meet and greet and ask them what they think about it. That's where the lines get crossed, to me.

I think ao3 and tumblr still have an air of mysticism to them. A little secrecy, a little privacy. In the sense that someone in the public eye would have to put in a little work to find this stuff for themselves. They'd have to go to the site and search themselves up to find anything. As opposed to just about anyone in the world being able to force this content in their line of sight with a simple @ on a site like twitter.

So to me the problem isn't that this content exists. The problem is when people don't know how to keep fandom stuff private. Write all the rpf you want but remember at the end of the day these are real people, not your blorbos. You don't know them. It's inappropriate to say these things to them personally (which yes, also includes tagging them on twitter or in the comments of their videos). But it's also inappropriate to run up to them with other people's content just to say "look what these FREAKS wrote about you!!" And I think people either forget or just genuinely don't care about the latter.

[asgardian--angels]

things I wish I could relive for the first time again:

that magical window where you finish a new piece of media, having watched/read it all by yourself with no fandom contact whatsoever, and you are just so happy about it, and full of interesting theories and takeaways, and just in love with it as a gorgeous piece of art.

because I swear to god as soon as you join the fandom for anything, you're bombarded with how you're supposed to view characters and their arcs, how you're supposed to morally and ethically judge the plot and the ways it apparently failed to present the right message, and if you don't you'll either be shunned for not sharing the popular headcanons or you'll be harassed for not criticizing the source material enough.

like how is it that the fans of a piece of media are also the ones being the most negative about it? If I like a show or a movie or a book, well, I liked it. That's kind of the point. I'm actually not here to tear it apart and talk about how it didn't live up to standards other people had! I enjoyed it for what it was, and forcing myself to find negative things to say about it doesn't actually bring me more enjoyment of it or reap any benefit to me. Fandom's a double-edged sword; you want to join a community to share your love for a piece of art, and the price you pay for a modicum of joy is a mountain of negativity. that's one main reason that I never engage with fandom until I'm completely done with a show, because if I was plugged into all of that commentary and discourse during the process, I'd be completely colored by how I'm expected to interpret everything this piece of art is presenting to me without being able to even form my own opinions.

[triglycercule]

i dont wanna bring it over to the actual xpau blog but can i just announce that xpau mtt must have SOMETHING going on between them. am i being delusional??? AM I DELUSIONAL I CAN SENSE THE POLY FORMING OK I CAN SEE IT

something is Up here. i can tell something is fishy between them. something is very very polyamorous..............

[theokusgallery]

I initially showed up for Arsenic, and now I'm here for all your art! I hope I'm not overstepping or anything when I ask: What happened with the OMORI fandom? Were they rude or stupid or something? I like the game and the most I do with the OMORI fandom is reblog art and stuff, is that okay to follow you or would you rather someone like me not follow you?

Oh hi ! Thank you for continuing to like my art! <3 Long story short, I got drama thrown at me. But tbh that's not really what makes me dislike the fandom most, because fundamentally the only way that's tied to the fandom is the fact that it shows how quickly people will jump on a hate train — which is. the real reason, actually. That and the general oppressive atmosphere

If all you do is reblog art, you're chill, I just try not to talk to OMORI fans anymore personally. Being in that fandom's made me paranoid for a period of time and I just don't want to go back to that

[tariah23]

As an aside, I do tend to keep away from most popular ships whenever I do find myself interested in shipping characters from something I’m into for obvious reason……

Fans are usually obnoxious and flanderize tf out of said characters, treating them like oc’s simply because they haven’t bothered with touching the source material ever since they first picked up the thing and artists get cocky and pretentious, always trying to bolster themselves up as the person who “made random already popular ship, popular in the first place-“ or “the most important artist for this ship-“ it’s always been so weird to me personally. I always feel as if I’m shooting myself in the foot or stepping on a landmine whenever I do end up liking popular ships (which has always been pretty rare for me) lol.

[hermitcraftx]

just got a dm abt one of my posts and y'all please don't try and show the hermits (or any minecraft youtuber or content creator for that matter) my posts, i'm uncomfortable with it and don't want any of my posts shown to a cc. if they stumble upon it naturally that's unfortunate but i can live with it since i do maintag a lot (something i REALLY need to stop doing tbh i already know i need to make a tagging system just for my blog that wont clog results) but going out of ur way to show a cc is entirely different and something i am not comfortable with.

no hate to the person at all but even if i wasn't a little silly and weird with it sometimes i wouldn't be comfortable with it, i want my blog to be a purely fandom only space with none of the creators involved <3 please respect this

[fansplaining]

Our first piece of the year is live—and it's a big one! With the recent release of the classic BBC sci-fi show Blake's 7 on Blu-ray, Lena Barkin looks back at the infamous 1980s clash between fans and creators that became known as the Slash Wars:

The Slash Wars happened in the late 80s and early 90s, but their central fandom questions are still being explored today. How much interaction should there be between fans and artists? How does capitalism interact with fandom’s gift-based economy? How public should fanfiction about characters portrayed by real people be? How do we ethically engage with the media properties we love when it involves so many conflicting people, stories, and viewpoints?

For fans of fandom history—or anyone grappling with these questions in fandom today—this is a must-read. You can also listen to a full audio version via the link above. 🚀