- Geek Anthropologist posted a video of Charlotte Fillmore-Handlon, a PhD Student at Concordia University, Montreal, presenting her paper on Fan Fiction, Fan Autoethnography, and Everyday Life. “I define fan fiction more broadly to include stories written both in and outside of fandom communities. In order to illustrate my argument, I will employ an autoethnographic approach, recalling my own experiences writing fan fiction as a young pre-teen. In light of the recent trend of positioning oneselves as an aca/fan (Academic/Fan) in fandom studies, I differentiate between fan fiction and fan autoethnography.”
- Video game scholar Victoria Hungerford wrote about The SwanQueen Fanfiction Community’s Non-Philosophy. “This paper hopes to explore what SwanQueen fans are doing and how fanfiction acts as a philosophy in itself, as a way to understand and interpret media production, representation, creative economies, culture, communication and existence. The SwanQueen community is a generative community that subverts dominant ideology while at the same time clinging on to some traditional notions of relationships as ‘end game’…Fanfiction embodies fandom as a fundamental aspect of every day life and is political. The SwanQueen community is a non-philosophy community that tries to understand their relationship to one another, as well as their relationship to the greater OUT fandom, and the larger Geek, Nerd, Dork (GND) communities of the Internet.”
- Columnist Stephen Downes of Ireland’s TheJournal.ie could have used some academic research when discussing why fanfic is making people nervous. From claiming that “FanFic is split evenly between the genders, with just as many girls as boys engaging in writing…although popular topics are largely split between sci-fi-fantasy (boys) and erotic-paranormal-fantasy (girls)” to saying that “it will be an interesting journey to see where we end up when the author of a story featuring Captain Kirk has never seen Star Trek”, it is perhaps unsurprising that his conclusion is “FanFic’s impact on young people, in particular, is slowly rotating from the positive to the negative, as young readers stop reading, watching and learning from mainstream mediums and begin to solely enjoy and mimic FanFic.”
- Women Write About Comics wrote about some statistics on female comic fans. “Graphic Policy has been updating data, accessible via Facebook, for the past several months using data visualization with graphs and charts as part of their Facebook Fandom Spotlight series…This month’s post showed that women comics readers hit approximately 47% of all self-identified Facebook comics fans, which puts a very different spin female comics fans on the well-known 2012 survey completed after DC’s new 52 reboot saying that of the respondents saying that 93 percent of the respondents were male.”
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