- Frontline featured a number of fandoms in its documentary Generation Like. “From the agency that’s leveraging the Twitter followers of celebrities like Ian Somerhalder (The Vampire Diaries) to make lucrative product endorsement deals, to the ‘grassroots’ social media campaign behind the Hollywood blockbuster The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, “Generation Like” explores how companies are increasingly enlisting kids as willing foot soldiers in their marketing machines.”
- A “Social Media Week” event featured a panel on “Fueling Social Fandom”. “‘You think about fandom not as a one night stand everytime your show is on…it’s a long time relationship,’ Fishman said, adding the most important thing for TV executives to do mirrors a relationship: listening.”
- Sugarscape is one of many sites featuring a fanfiction contest but this one is done piecemeal. “The idea is that every day when the story is updates, you’ll have the chance to add the next paragraph all over again and by Sunday 23rd February, we’ll have the full fan fiction. So even if yours doesn’t get picked the first day, keep entering every time the story updates and you could see your writing up on the site!”
- Kotaku used votes instead to create a ‘Fan Built Bot’ for Transformers. “Windblade is a rare female Transformer…Some people are vexxed by the idea of female Transformers…we do get an episode where most of the old-timey female robots are destroyed for being female, which doesn’t seem nice. In the IDW Comics continuity, Arcee is the result of a failed experiment to introduce gender to Transformers. That doesn’t seem nice either.”
- While some fan activities in the news seem more about recreation or transforming the format of a work, the question for many these days may be whether they’re part of a corporate marketing effort and to what end.
What ways of creating fandoms or fanworks have you come across? Write about it on Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.
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