Stratt was a historian. She wasn't just pirating for the sake of entertainment for the astronauts, she was doing a full historical backup of the planet. Who knows how much knowledge and communications ability, how much art and culture and history, how much niche knowledge of how to make specific pieces of modern technology or modern medicines, was lost as the wars for resources isolated everyone, as the death tolls led to the deaths of specialized trade workers and scientists, as the power grids failing across the planet (or cut off, potentially) led to all the cloud servers going dark. Stratt was facing methods of combating extinction and she did her best to ensure that if/when the Hail Mary worked, it would send back not just the hope of the future in the solution to the astrophage, but the restoration of history and culture and knowledge.

Some AAVE speakers pluralize 'child' as 'childrens'. People get racist about this ("It's already plural!"), but 'children' actually comes from Middle English speakers doing the same thing: slapping their plural marker on word already pluralized by an extinct plural marker.

To oversimplify: in Old English, 'childer' ('ċildra') was the plural of 'child' ('ċild'). Middle English developed an '-en' plural marker, which we see in 'oxen'. Instead of updating to 'childen', people slapped their preferred '-en' onto the end of 'childer' - so now we have 'child-er-en'. AAVE carries on this tradition with 'child-er-en-s'.

"Pure" language is just impurity obscured by the passage of time.

"Specialina has rare squirrel blood passed down from the time a secret ancestor married a squirrel god. This gives her super powers to climb trees and find nuts!" 👍👍👍 Inheritable traits are a thing after all.

"Because Specialina has rare squirrel blood, she is entitled to rule over the rodent kingdom, and if she is kept from her rightful throne bestowed by her ancestry, the vile rat people will continue to corrupt the land." ⚠️⚠️⚠️ Oops, no one is entitled to rule over others, especially through genetics. And think about why a certain group of people is your designated "evil" race.

We've been live for a month, and what a whirlwind it's been! Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who's supported the project so far. We genuinely could not get off the ground without this early support.

Since we launched, we've published some incredible writing:

Our launch post, explaining what Fansplaining: The Publication is all about.

Fansplaining editor @lincodega on the elements of The Pitt that make it ripe for fanfiction (as well as what journalists can't stop getting wrong about the Pitt fandom).

@morgan-leigh on Three Bags Full (first titled Glenkill in its original German), the beloved mystery novel that was the source for The Sheep Detectives film.

Soila Kenya on non-native English speakers reading and writing fanfiction in English, the language that has the most global "linguistic capital" in fandom.

@annejamison on the Good Omens series finale as a metatextual commentary about fandom and fanfiction—and one that gave the characters back to the fans.

@elizabethminkel on depictions of tech on television, and how we read these characters in light of our shifting feelings about real-life tech.

We've got so much more in the works, including:

Thai GL fandom

Conlang enthusiasts

Fandom stats as fanworks

Covering Game of Thrones

Negative comments vs bots on AO3

Homestuck's fanworks

Gay pirates

And, of course, @hellotailor recapping The Vampire Lestat over the next two months! ✨

If you like what we’ve been doing, please become a subscriber!

Subscriptions start at $7 a month/$70 a year. We also have a significant discount for students, educators, un/underemployed folks, etc. Email [email protected] and we'll be happy to share the code.