Category: Guest Post

OTW Guest Post

OTW Guest Post: pod_together

Claudia Rebaza Leave a comment

From time to time, the OTW will be hosting guest posts on our OTW News accounts. These guests will be providing an outside perspective on the OTW or aspects of fandom where our projects may have a presence. The posts express each author’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. We welcome suggestions from fans for future guest posts, which can be left as a comment here or by contacting us directly.

klb and Paraka are the mods for the pod_together community. klb has been active in podfic fandom since 2009 and has helped create and run a number of challenges and events, including pod_together, the Awesome Ladies Podfic Anthology, and theatripod.

Paraka joined online fandom in 2003 via vidding before discovering podfic in 2006. Her first podfic was posted in 2008 but she really got going in 2010 when she started running challenges, creating comms, talking meta, and hosting other podficcers on her website parakaproductions.com. Today, they talk about getting into fandom, the beginning of pod_together, and the collaborative nature of the community.

How did you first get into fandom and fanworks?

klb: I always had a tendency to feel fannish about various canons (getting really invested, always wanting more and wanting to spend a lot of time talking and thinking about the characters and worlds), and sometime in high school that tendency led me to the X-Files fanfiction website Gossamer Project. I couldn’t believe how amazing fanfiction was—I never wanted to stop reading it!

paraka: I also tended to feel fannish about things before officially ~discovering~ fandom in university when my roommate introduced me to Queer as Folk (US) and vids. It was the first time I had regular access to high speed internet and the time to browse and found myself obsessed with fanvids, then later fanfic, then later still podfic.

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OTW Guest Post

OTW Guest Post: Judith Fathallah

Claudia Rebaza Leave a comment

From time to time, the OTW will be hosting guest posts on our OTW News accounts. These guests will be providing an outside perspective on the OTW or aspects of fandom where our projects may have a presence. The posts express each author’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. We welcome suggestions from fans for future guest posts, which can be left as a comment here or by contacting us directly.

Judith Fathallah is presently a postdoctoral researcher at Solent University. Her first book was Fanfiction and the Author and she is currently working on a second book, provisionally titled The Genre Fandom Shaped: Emo, New Media and Genre. Today, Judith talks about her article in Transformative Works and Cultures.

How did you first find out about fandom and fanworks?

In 2002 I was fourteen. My family had recently gotten dial-up internet at home. I was allowed about an hour a day online which I mostly used for AOL messenger and MySpace. Through MySpace I discovered some of the bands which are still my favourites to this day, and started to find community around them with likeminded teens – even including a couple who went to my school!

I was quite an unhappy teenager and found MySpace a huge help in meaningful socialization. But I probably discovered Fanfiction.net from Googling things to do with Lord of the Rings, which I was then obsessed with. It absolutely blew my mind, because like a lot of us, I’d been writing fanfiction since I was six or seven, without realizing it had a name or that anyone apart from me did it. (Except for when I managed to persuade my older brother to produce for me more stories featuring Sonic the Hedgehog. Which he never finished, incidentally.) (more…)

OTW Guest Post

OTW Guest Post: Hansi Oppenheimer

Claudia Rebaza

From time to time, the OTW will be hosting guest posts on our OTW News accounts. These guests will be providing an outside perspective on the OTW or aspects of fandom where our projects may have a presence. The posts express each author’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. We welcome suggestions from fans for future guest posts, which can be left as a comment here or by contacting us directly.

Hansi Oppenheimer is a Filmmaker & Fangrrl committed to supporting and promoting underrepresented voices in Pop Culture. She has been called a the “By-any-mean necessary-MacGyver of no budget documentaries” and her films, the Rashomon of documentaries with their focus on oral history and on fan recollections. Today, Hansi talks about the collection of activities under her Squee! project.

How did you first find out about fandom and fanworks?

I’ve been actively involved in online fandom since roughly 2001 when I began to collect interviews for a documentary on the band The Replacements. I used message boards and My Space as well as talking with fans at performances to collect interviews for the film Color Me Obsessed which was released in 2011.

In 2012 I discovered fanfiction and wanted to explore that as a topic for my next project. I was reading academic works but I was having a really difficult time getting anyone to discuss writing fic on camera and was told that many writers felt they had been burned by the media and its focus on slash. I was more interested in exploring why fanfic existed: some of it offers opportunities for representation and diversity, some is just for the joy of creating a “what if” story and some of it is just for fun and wish fulfillment. I support all of these approaches.

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