- Matt Binder wrote in Salon that right-wing conservatives in the U.S. were trying to exploit the activities of misogynistic fans for personal gain and political capital. “A common tactic used by right-wingers is the call to ‘stop politicizing everything’ — while at the same time trying to push forth their own political agenda in the culture wars, of course. Keeping politics out of any art form is laughable, but there is a certain extra level of hilarity in attempting to do so with one that already has a long history of social justice…these are actual panels from an actual Green Lantern co-starring Green Arrow comic from April 1970 addressing racial justice head-on.”
- At Medium is the Message, Rex Sorgatz discussed changing habits regarding spoilers. “Back in the aughts, we survived a similar crisis, when two cultural events coincided:The quality of television programming suddenly got much better [and] The conversations around television exploded on social media. The collision of these trends triggered a nuclear reaction — a pop culture fission, spewing immense heat. People got very, very serious about The Spoiler Alert. The burgeoning recap society, in particular, was put under immense scrutiny.”
- Japan Times talked about how marketing tricks meant fans were skewing the music sales charts. “The problem is that music purchases by idol fans aren’t really music purchases at all: They are a sort of abstract currency by which the fans make extravagant expressions of love for the group — the more you buy, the greater your love. They’re a completely different class of consumer from someone who simply buys a song in order to listen to it, and trying to force them to behave like traditional music fans misses the point.”
- The Millions featured a long piece from Elizabeth Minkel on academic courses on fanfiction. “The cynical side of me expected to hear that a fanfiction class in an Ivy League English department would’ve been met with criticism from the old guard…But [Jamison] hasn’t encountered professional backlash at Princeton or back home in Utah. ‘I’m sure there are people who think that but they haven’t told me about it — not my colleagues…I get more pushback on YA and, frankly, on Victorian women’s poetry than I do on fanfic. Nothing can match the snideness with which male scholars of modernism tend to regard Victorian poetry by women.’”
Where have you seen fans changing cultural practices? Write about them in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.
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