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In our latest, Tabby Kibugi reports on K-pop fandom in Kenya, Nigeria, and other African nations. As fannish interest skyrockets and fan-led gatherings are popping up at a rapid pace, the industry continues to ignore African fans, rarely scheduling concerts or official events there.

Read the whole piece or listen to an audio version:

Our latest is live! 💞 Tabby Kibugi reports on the blossoming K-pop scene in Kenya and Nigeria. As the industry continues to largely ignore the continent, fans are left to build K-pop spaces for themselves—and they're thriving:

For attendee Ella, a K-pop fan since 2021, experiencing a K-pop event IRL for the first time felt surreal. “I didn’t know that we have such a big K-pop community in Kenya. I was glad to see that other people listen to K-pop just like me,” she told me. “I especially loved people suddenly breaking into dances whenever a K-pop song started playing. If you walked in halfway through, you'd think we were a real K-pop group, and by the end of the day I’d made friends I still keep in touch with.”

In our latest, @bookshop reports on growing creative censorship—and criminalization—around the world, from Australia to China to the U.S.

In Russia, a writer was recently sentenced to 18 months of forced labor for writing Stray Kids fanfiction. In this piece, Aja talks to Russian fans about the current climate of fear for many fans there.

Read or listen to an audio version:

Our latest is live! ⚖️ @bookshop reports on the increasing criminalization of creativity around the world—especially queer and/or erotic works, and including fanworks. Recent rulings against an Australian erotica writer and a Russian fic writer, the confirmation that danmei writer Mo Xiang Tong Xiu was imprisoned for her work, and growing repression in the U.S., where many global platforms for creative works are based, are all signals of just how worrying the current climate is:

With a barrage of new and expanded laws plus harsher enforcement of existing ones, governments around the globe are criminalizing more and more forms of creative expression. It’s no longer far-fetched or hyperbolic to say that at any given moment, depending on what country you’re in and what government you’re up against, individual works of fiction—including fanworks—could be criminalized for being queer, or pornographic, or generally deviant.  How far the law typically extends seems to be entirely arbitrary, but in recent years, we’ve seen regressive censorship and punishment nipping at the heels of fanworks. Online platforms and payment processors then often comply with these laws by instituting sweeping content bans, further marginalizing women, queer and trans people, and sex-positive communities—the currents in which fandom flows.

Our latest is live! ⚖️ @bookshop reports on the increasing criminalization of creativity around the world—especially queer and/or erotic works, and including fanworks. Recent rulings against an Australian erotica writer and a Russian fic writer, the confirmation that danmei writer Mo Xiang Tong Xiu was imprisoned for her work, and growing repression in the U.S., where many global platforms for creative works are based, are all signals of just how worrying the current climate is:

With a barrage of new and expanded laws plus harsher enforcement of existing ones, governments around the globe are criminalizing more and more forms of creative expression. It’s no longer far-fetched or hyperbolic to say that at any given moment, depending on what country you’re in and what government you’re up against, individual works of fiction—including fanworks—could be criminalized for being queer, or pornographic, or generally deviant.  How far the law typically extends seems to be entirely arbitrary, but in recent years, we’ve seen regressive censorship and punishment nipping at the heels of fanworks. Online platforms and payment processors then often comply with these laws by instituting sweeping content bans, further marginalizing women, queer and trans people, and sex-positive communities—the currents in which fandom flows.

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Our latest piece is live! The great @annejamison (who you might know as the author of Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World) writes about the recent Good Omens finale as a sort of metatextual gesture to fans—and especially fanfiction:

And so, May 13th found me awake at 1 A.M., watching the series finale through bleary and teary eyes. Despite widespread sorrow at the glittering yet gutting conclusion for our heroes, 6,000+–year-old angel and demon Aziraphale and Crowley, I thought it was the most heartfelt and validating love letter to fanfiction I’ve seen come out of a commercial enterprise. Unfortunately, this message got tangled up with the show’s other unique ambitions: to save itself from its author—not Pratchett, the other one—and restore the Good Omens legacy to its fans.

Our latest piece is live! The brilliant Soila Kenya writes about the dominance of English in fandom and especially fanfiction spaces, and why for her and the fellow fans she interviewed from Kenya, Nigeria, and Burundi, this is partly about the global dominance of English-language pop culture, but especially about the legacies of colonialism:

The deep psychological imprints of this language disparity remain. And therefore, when I encountered fanfiction, it didn’t even occur to me that there were fanfics written in any language but English, let alone Swahili or any of the 42 indigenous languages in Kenya.

Click through to read the whole piece or listen to a full audio version! And if you enjoy it, please consider becoming a (free) member or especially a paying subscriber—we want to commission more pieces from Soila and other smart writers and we need your help to pay them!

Soila was one of my favorite WorldCon panelists last year and here she's written a really thoughtful but also extremely enjoyable treatise on what can sometimes be the "cringe" effect of reading—let alone writing!—fics in your native tongue.

It's our launch day—so of course we had to start things off with a bang. 😎

Editor (& footnote lover) @lincodega goes deep on The Pitt and the elements that make it ripe for fanfiction. (With a little critique of all those recent bad Pitt fandom pieces along the way.) This piece will appeal to Pitt fans & non-Pitt fanfiction people alike!

This is at the heart of transformative fandom, and is a huge part of what makes The Pitt so good at rewarding fans who care enough to create the fandom. It gives opportunities for people to imagine a text greater than 15 episodes a year. It’s a heady mix that has pushed fandom to clock into their own fanfic shift after every episode and get to work. A thousand fics a week don’t write themselves.

Highlight: "Anne Rice is infamous for sending cease-and-desist letters to fans who produced fanwork, and is often cited as one of the factors that drove fandom culture 'underground' in the early aughts. With her death five years ago, I fear we lost an apex predator in the space."

Start the tape—er, COUNTDOWN. Fansplaining relaunches in THREE (3) days, and we're celebrating by sharing some of the adorable new fandom fans we commissioned from the brilliant @redgoldsparks!

* I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

*The King in Yellow

* The Lottery

* The Masque of the Red Death

* The Monkey’s Paw

* The Most Dangerous Game

* The Nameless City

* The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

* There Will Come Soft Rains

*The Yellow Wallpaper

* The Veldt

* “you think those were fucked up? What about [X]!”

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers*

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson**

The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe

The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs

The Most Dangerous Game by Richard O'Connell

The Nameless City by HP Lovecraft

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K LeGuin

There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

Honorable Mention from the comments/reblogs:

All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury

*note: this is actually a collection of short stories and clocks in at about 72k words

Hey y'all! So I know I haven't posted much lately BUT college has been crazy. And related to that, for one of my classes I'm doing a study on the relationship between time within the greater fandom community and understanding of fanfiction-related jargon. Below I have the link to the survey which will just have three multiple choice questions relating to your relationship to fandom and then a list of 15 terms to define if you know them. 

Please reblog this or otherwise share the survey link with anyone you think might be interested so I can have as large of a sample size as possible for this. The form will be open until April 24th. 

Thank you all so much! 

(and yes, I will post the data when I get it all collected for all you fellow nerds)

(I know this isn't the most even way to represent animal groups but I tried to go off of what I saw mentioned most in the notes)

Kami