Welcome to This Week in Fandom, the OTW’s round up of things that are happening! Before we get started, did you see that Avengers: Endgame will be re-released in cinemas on June 28, in a bid to break Avatar‘s longstanding box office record? The re-release will come with a deleted scene, an introduction from Marvel’s Kevin Feige, and some new preview footage of the upcoming Spiderman: Far from Home. Is it worth going back to the cinema for? What do you think? Let us know in the comments!
A few weeks ago we wrote about the television adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s 1990 novel Good Omens. Unfortunately, the series’ religious themes have proven upsetting for some viewers. This week, the US Foundation for a Christian Civilisation obtained 20,000 signatures on a petition demanding that Netflex cancel the show; which was aired, as it happens, as a one-off miniseries on Amazon Prime. Both networks got some mileage out of the mix-up:
ok we promise not to make any more https://t.co/TRPux36kcX
— Netflix UK & Ireland (@NetflixUK) June 20, 2019
Hey @netflix, we'll cancel Stranger Things if you cancel Good Omens. 😉 https://t.co/EJPmi9rL7g
— Prime Video (@PrimeVideo) June 20, 2019
Meanwhile, Michael Sheen (who plays the angel Aziraphale) and Neil Gaiman have been busily engaging with the show’s more enthusiastic fans, with Twitter timelines populated with praise for the fandom and its creations. Sheen also offered a spirited defence of fanfiction on the same platform when one viewer disparaged it. No wonder he’s ‘fandom’s new boyfriend’, as this article from The Mary Sue has it.
If you’re more interested in an IRL partner then fandom might be able to help out there, too; The Daily Dot ran a great article this week featuring couples who met through fandom. Journalist Gavia Baker-Whitelaw interviews fans from the One Direction, X-Files and The 100 fandoms, amongst others, in a piece which explores the ways that a fan community facilitates connection and argues for the importance of that shared experience. ‘Even if your partner isn’t in the same fandom as you, or you move onto different interests, you still understand where the other is coming from — a mindset that goes much deeper than just being a fan of the same thing.’
And finally, you might have noticed the story in our recent newsletter about the new Chinese fans we’ve been welcoming to AO3. Kotaku posted an article exploring what’s been happening, which includes interviews with a number of OTW staff. ‘Providing access to… fan culture in its myriad forms’ is one of the key tenets of the OTW’s mission and we’re glad that we are able to do that for at least some of our Chinese userbase.