fansplaining

[fansplaining]

🌴 Fansplaining is coming back to SDCC this year! 🌴

"The Fandom Advantage: How Fan Creativity Fuels Pro Entertainment Careers" featuring Daphne Olive, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Lin Codega, Tessa Gratton, Meghan Fitzmartin, and Brent Lambert (moderated, of course, by @elizabethminkel.)

These folks come from/are in fandom and have worked on the pro side of fan-favorite properties, too. (Just to name a few: IWTV, Star Wars, DC, The Witcher, SPN, Percy Jackson, plus beloved indies like FIYAH Literary Magazine.)

Read the full panel description:

If you're headed to SDCC, we'd love to see you there—it's at noon on Saturday at the San Diego Central Library! 💞

[fansplaining]

🌴 Fansplaining is coming back to SDCC this year! 🌴

"The Fandom Advantage: How Fan Creativity Fuels Pro Entertainment Careers" featuring Daphne Olive, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Lin Codega, Tessa Gratton, Meghan Fitzmartin, and Brent Lambert (moderated, of course, by @elizabethminkel.)

These folks come from/are in fandom and have worked on the pro side of fan-favorite properties, too. (Just to name a few: IWTV, Star Wars, DC, The Witcher, SPN, Percy Jackson, plus beloved indies like FIYAH Literary Magazine.)

Read the full panel description:

If you're headed to SDCC, we'd love to see you there—it's at noon on Saturday at the San Diego Central Library! 💞

[fansplaining]

Flamingo only saw one episode of Starsky & Hutch during its original run on TV in the 1970s. “I remember seeing the episode ‘Gillian’ with a friend of mine,” she says. In it, the titular pair of detectives hug, and Starsky tells Hutch, “You're the best friend I got in the whole world.” Flamingo and her friend looked at each other. “Our friendship was new, and we burst into tears,” she says. “We’re still friends today.” It was that onscreen friendship that she credits with sustaining a fandom that’s now been running for 50 years. “You just don’t see that level of closeness [in most media],” she says. “And don’t we all long for that? Isn’t that a human need?” 

In our June article, Jay Castello talks to the Starsky & Hutch fans who've spent decades preserving S&H fanworks—and trying to model their fandom friendships after the relationship on the show.

💞 Read the piece or listen to an audio version! 💞

[fansplaining]

This focus on portraying a real, desirable example of friendship is one of the things that’s made the Starsky & Hutch fandom so durable. While it lends itself to both gen and slash exploration, it also stands up to scrutiny on its own in a way that shallower depictions might not—and it provided a model for members of the fandom.  “I kind of took that example when I was a teenager watching the show and made that my thing,” said Lisa. “I wanted to be that friend. I wanted to have that kind of friendship.” And she did: she still has friends she met in the ’70s. Flamingo, too, says the show influenced her close relationships: one friend she made through the fandom lived with her for 20 years. 

In our June article, Jay Castello talks to the admins of the Starsky & Hutch Fiction Archive about their decades-long efforts to preserve fanworks—and fandom friendships.

✨ Read the piece or listen to an audio version! ✨

[fansplaining]

This focus on portraying a real, desirable example of friendship is one of the things that’s made the Starsky & Hutch fandom so durable. While it lends itself to both gen and slash exploration, it also stands up to scrutiny on its own in a way that shallower depictions might not—and it provided a model for members of the fandom.  “I kind of took that example when I was a teenager watching the show and made that my thing,” said Lisa. “I wanted to be that friend. I wanted to have that kind of friendship.” And she did: she still has friends she met in the ’70s. Flamingo, too, says the show influenced her close relationships: one friend she made through the fandom lived with her for 20 years. 

In our June article, Jay Castello talks to the admins of the Starsky & Hutch Fiction Archive about their decades-long efforts to preserve fanworks—and fandom friendships.

✨ Read the piece or listen to an audio version! ✨

[fansplaining]

Our June piece is live! 😎 Jay Castello reports on the Starsky & Hutch Fiction Archive—which has been archiving S&H fic for decades—and how the show's onscreen relationship has inspired relationships within the fandom, too:

The Starsky & Hutch Fiction Archive continues to grow, preserving stories about love 50 years after the pilot first introduced this special relationship to viewers. New Starsky & Hutch fics appear both there and on AO3 at least every few days. At SHareCon, fans in their 20s meet fans in their 80s; the former often tell Lisa that they were introduced to the show by their grandmothers. “I’m so inspired,” she says. “I would like to think it could be around for another 50 years.”

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

[fansplaining]

Our June piece is live! 😎 Jay Castello reports on the Starsky & Hutch Fiction Archive—which has been archiving S&H fic for decades—and how the show's onscreen relationship has inspired relationships within the fandom, too:

The Starsky & Hutch Fiction Archive continues to grow, preserving stories about love 50 years after the pilot first introduced this special relationship to viewers. New Starsky & Hutch fics appear both there and on AO3 at least every few days. At SHareCon, fans in their 20s meet fans in their 80s; the former often tell Lisa that they were introduced to the show by their grandmothers. “I’m so inspired,” she says. “I would like to think it could be around for another 50 years.”

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

[fansplaining]

Putting the finishing touches on our June piece (by the brilliant Jay Castello) and here's a little hint. 😘 It'll be out tomorrow morning!

[fansplaining]

🌴 Headed to SDCC? 🌴

We're excited to announce that we're hosting a panel again this year! Featuring some beloved Fansplaining guests as well as some voices you'll be reading/hearing from us later this year! 

We'll share full panel details including the lineup, date, time, and location when SDCC gives us the go-ahead in the coming weeks. 😎 

[fansplaining]

You could make an argument that AI-generated fanfiction isn’t fanfiction at all—the words aren’t penned by a fan, but rather by a series of statistical probabilities drawn from a giant database.

Fanfiction is that FUN PART, from start to finish. We get to spend as long as we want thinking about our favorite characters, but we also get to put all that down on the page, with no real rules or restrictions—no length or genre limitations, no publishing-industry pressures, no reader to satisfy but ourselves.

— @elizabethminkel wrote a great piece for @ellipsus-writes blog that I enjoyed, which you can find here.

[fansplaining]

🎉 Our May piece is live! 🎉 And it's an exciting one:

"I Came to Ruin You: The Collecting Practices of K-Pop Fandoms"

From photo cards to video art installations, a tour through a recent exhibition showcasing K-pop fans’ communal creativity and cross-cultural exchanges.

by Rea McNamara and Bo Shin

This piece is a bit of a departure for us—rather than our standard fandom reporting or analysis, this is an expanded version of a fannish art exhibition, complete with images, videos, and excerpts from the K-pop fans and artists whose work was featured in the show. The co-curators, Rea and Bo, are both BTS fans, so they write about that position as both fans and curators as well.

By highlighting the creativity, passion, and collaborative spirit of K-pop fans, I came to ruin you recognized fans’ roles as cultural producers. Their collecting practices intersect with and challenge traditional art forms, transforming what might otherwise be considered ephemeral or niche into meaningful cultural expressions.

[fansplaining]

It was crucial to situate these materials within an exhibition-making display strategy that resonated with their visual culture and aesthetics. The K-pop shelf and desk are common ways fans display their collectibles at home and in the office; online, Pinterest boards are also plentiful.  The shelf—often a white Ikea shelving unit—is a display with art historical precedent, reminiscent of bookshelves reverently captured in chaekgeori. The late 18th-century Korean still-life paintings featured “books and things”—the literal translation of chaekgeori—alongside other symbolic homewares and objects. These paintings showed a reverence for scholarly objects, a then-ascendant Korean cultural value, and became our own Kunsthalle for these fan objects.

In our latest piece, we go on a tour through the recent exhibition I came to ruin you: The Collecting Practices of K-pop Fandoms, co-curated by Rea McNamara and Bo Shin. In the passage above, Rea and Bo draw a throughline from 18th-century Korean art to today's fans displaying their collections!

Check out the whole article, including images, videos, and audio of the main text: https://www.fansplaining.com/articles/i-came-to-ruin-you-the-collecting-practices-of-k-pop-fandoms

[fansplaining]

🎉 Our May piece is live! 🎉 And it's an exciting one:

"I Came to Ruin You: The Collecting Practices of K-Pop Fandoms"

From photo cards to video art installations, a tour through a recent exhibition showcasing K-pop fans’ communal creativity and cross-cultural exchanges.

by Rea McNamara and Bo Shin

This piece is a bit of a departure for us—rather than our standard fandom reporting or analysis, this is an expanded version of a fannish art exhibition, complete with images, videos, and excerpts from the K-pop fans and artists whose work was featured in the show. The co-curators, Rea and Bo, are both BTS fans, so they write about that position as both fans and curators as well.

By highlighting the creativity, passion, and collaborative spirit of K-pop fans, I came to ruin you recognized fans’ roles as cultural producers. Their collecting practices intersect with and challenge traditional art forms, transforming what might otherwise be considered ephemeral or niche into meaningful cultural expressions.

[fansplaining]

Our May piece comes out tomorrow, and it's a fascinating one! Attention: K-pop fans! Art fans! Collecting fans! Transformative work fans! There's something for everyone. 😄

[fansplaining]

For the wonderful folks at @ellipsus-writes, I wrote a guest blog post about fanfiction and generative AI!

"Where the Wild Stories Are"

If you outsource the act of being a fan to AI, what does that leave you? Fan creators are powerful because they’re deeply participatory media consumers—they don’t passively absorb a work, but grab onto it and reshape it to their will. Large tech and entertainment corporations prefer the passive: they want us sitting there, clicking a button, as stories wash over us like the automatic scroll of a video app. Next, next, next.

On the AI forces swirling around fanfiction—but especially people using AI to generate fic. (Why?! The writing is the fun part!!)

(Also if you're unfamiliar with @ellipsus-writes, definitely check them out, especially if you're looking to get off gdocs as Google bludgeons the product to death with useless AI features. This post was editorially independent—not sponsored content—though we were very happy to do a sponsored segment for them on @fansplaining a while back. Their values strongly align with much of transformative fandom—and they even have an export-to-AO3 button!)

[fansplaining]

A call for recs! Please send The Rec Center your favorite character study fics. In addition to being one of the great fanfiction modes, character study submissions also tend to diversify our rec lists, with more gen fic and more stories that center characters from outside the m/m juggernaut ships (but obviously your favorite Dean Winchester character study is also more than welcome haha).

Since Fansplaining gets new followers regularly, some of you may not be familiar with The Rec Center, a long-running project of @elizabethminkel & @hellotailor (but not @flourish, except for some great guest recs from time to time). Fandom-related articles, tumblr & bluesky posts, fanart, and fic recs in your inbox every Friday!

@hellotailor & I are running ⭐ CHARACTER STUDY ⭐ recs in the newsletter this week and while we have a bunch, we'd love some more in the bank—this is a place where fanfiction really shines! If you have a favorite character study fic, please share via the link above!

[fansplaining]

If you outsource the act of being a fan to AI, what does that leave you? Fan creators are powerful because they’re deeply participatory media consumers—they don’t passively absorb a work, but grab onto it and reshape it to their will. Large tech and entertainment corporations prefer the passive: they want us sitting there, clicking a button, as stories wash over us like the automatic scroll of a video app. Next, next, next.

For fanfic writers, it can feel like generative AI is closing in on all sides. … But isn’t writing the whole point of fan writing? The incomparable Elizabeth Minkel shares her take on the intersections of fan culture and the rise of AI. Read more over on the blog!