Category: Guest Post

OTW Guest Post

OTW Guest Post: Euclase

Sarah Loch 3 Comments

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.

Elicia Donze, also known as Euclase, is a professional artist and fan creator who has been active in fandom communities since the 90s. She is an outspoken advocate for the creation and protection of fandom safe spaces for female and queer communities and a longtime supporter of fandom culture and derivative works. Today, Elicia talks about her history in fandom, her preferred media, and what she loves about fandom

How did you first get into fandom and fanworks?

Way back in 1998, I made a geocities website about Eowyn from The Lord Of The Rings for a class assignment. A few years later, the movies came out, and a few lovely fan girls saw my site and invited me to join their forum, Parma Eruseen, which was quite a big forum in the day, where I eventually became a moderator and fan fiction and fan art contributor. From there I went to livejournal, then Tumblr, but I’ve been creating fan works since I was a child, and I’ve been sharing them online for about as long as the means to do so has been available.

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OTW Guest Post

OTW Guest Post: Ann McClellan

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.

Ann McClellan is Professor and Chair of English at Plymouth State University where she teaches classes on 19th and 20th century British Literature, film/adaptation studies, and digital literature. Her scholarship interests include Sherlock Holmes and/in popular culture and British women’s campus fiction. Today, Ann talks about her article on Sherlock Holmes fandom in the latest issue of Transformative Works and Cultures.

How did you first become aware of fandom and fanworks?

In a sense, I always ‘knew’ about fandom through my own research and teaching interests in adaptation studies, but no one ever called such texts “fan texts” when I was in school. I’ve long been interested in how ‘authorized’ writers and filmmakers have colonized and transformed canonical texts like The Scarlet Letter, Jane Austen’s novels, and Shakespeare’s plays, but it wasn’t until a friend introduced me to Sherlock when it premiered on PBS in 2010 that I really learned about fan culture and fandom more specifically.

Of course, events like ComicCon had already entered the contemporary zeitgeist by 2010 when Sherlock reached the US, so I was aware of such gatherings, but I had no idea how pervasive and diverse they were until my own explorations in online Sherlock fandom beginning in 2011. I can’t remember the precise reason or prompt, but I began researching Sherlock online and discovered LiveJournal and fan fiction for the first time—in my forties! I instantly became addicted to the serial nature of fan fiction and writers’ ability to immerse me into the show’s world through various ‘fix it’ fics, AU fantasies, slash, and other genres. Soon, this new world of fan fiction became my personal and professional obsession and my previous plan to write a book on Sherlock Holmes in popular culture quickly morphed into a book on Sherlock fan fiction and world building.

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OTW Guest Post

OTW Guest Post: Alice Huzar

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.

Alice Huzar is a Canadian/British filmmaker currently in production on Fanfic: The Documentary. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia and reads far too much fanfic.

How did you first find out about fandom and fanworks?

I’ve been aware of fanart and fanvids for years, but they really never really hooked me in, and I’d encountered specific individual fanfic stories from time to time, but never delved further. It wasn’t until I read Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell a few years ago that I became aware of the whole fanfiction world. The book really grabbed me and I was really intrigued by the idea of writers and readers being so hooked by stories that existed outside of the original canon. I didn’t understand the appeal, and so started reading fanfic myself to try and discover what people loved about it. I got hooked really really quickly, and am now a massive advocate for fanfiction.

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