#fandom journalism

In our latest, @michellejaworski writes about the Game of Thrones media industrial complex from the inside.

Read or listen to an audio version:

Our latest is live! ⚔️ Ahead of the premiere of House of the Dragon season 3, @michellejaworski writes about her years spent deep in the Game of Thrones content mines. The grind of covering these shows and their expansive, contentious fandoms destroyed her own fannish love for the franchise—until she finally stepped back and became just a viewer again, and found that love once more:

While I also participated in the GoT fandom, I tried to keep some distance from it, so that it never seemed like I was in fannish spaces only to take advantage of them for my career. It was an ethical balancing act I never quite knew if I successfully managed. At times, the entire experience of covering the show could be overwhelming. I loved it. I hated it. It made me. It broke me. Covering GoT and then House of the Dragon made me never want to engage with the franchise again. In the end, it took logging off and getting reacquainted with a gentle knight and his royal squire to bring me back into the fold.

The great Tabby Kibugi is working on her next piece for us and looking to talk to African K-pop fans of all sorts. She's not on Tumblr, so we're sharing her post here to reach more folks:

Are you a K-pop fan based in an African country? For Fansplaining, I'm covering the growth of K-pop fandoms across Africa and how fans are creating their own spaces through conventions, fan events, dance crews, etc. Email: [email protected], for a chat. Thx!

BTW, if you missed Tabby's first piece for us:

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.

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We've been thrilled by the initial enthusiasm around this project, but we have yet to reach a baseline of subscriber revenue to pay writers each month, let alone editors. We'd like to open widely for pitches—it's vital to us that we get as many voices in here as possible—but we just can't afford it yet.

Check out our subscriber tiers: fansplaining.com#/portal/

Make a one-off donation: fansplaining.com/#/portal/support

We've been relaunched for two days, and the response has been incredible so far! 😍 Hundreds of people have already signed up to help support getting more deep, thoughtful journalism about fandom out into the world.

You can read all about this new chapter via the link above, but TL;DR, our long-running fandom podcast has expanded to become an independent, subscriber-supported journalistic outlet with a full editorial team, publishing one longread a week by, for, and about fandom.

If you haven't become a Fansplaining member yet, please join us! It's free to sign up. And if you have the means, we'd really appreciate you becoming a paid subscriber. Our lower tier gets you access to all our articles—all articles have audio versions read by the authors, btw!—and our higher tier also gets you all past and future special episodes. (We're going to do at least one per month going forward, maybe more!)

We also have a discount for underresourced folks: lower income, students, unemployed or precariously employed, etc. If this is you and you'd like to subscribe, please don't hesitate to write us for the discount code ([email protected]).