Welcome to the second issue of Fannish! Brought to you despite storms and floods and a week-long power outage.
There's been only a little change in the AO3 stats since last issue. In the top five overall, Genshin Impact has lost its spot to Boku no Hero Academia. In the top five growing fandoms, surprisingly four of five are the same as last time. Johnny Keep Walking! is no longer on the list, but the top spot is taken by Alien Stage, which has more than doubled in size over the past two weeks. The release of the latest video in the series seems to have really energized the fandom.
I gather these links from a variety of sources–Google alerts, social media, anywhere I can. If you find any news stories or other resources like Fannish includes that you'd like to share with your fellow subscribers, send them in! You can mail them to fannish@substack.com. Thanks in advance!
Random fandom
News and information about all corners of fandom.
French soap opera ‘Ici tout commence’ finds global queer fandom
Praises the work of fan translators and other fans whose efforts allow people around the world to follow the show. (via OTW Signal)
New 'Spider-Man Unlimited' Story Arc Pens a Love Letter to Fanfic
In an interview with Meagan Damore, comic writer Preeti Chhibber talks about her Spider-Man Unlimited story arc, and how fanfiction influenced it.
"When I was growing up, people used it with such a derision. They were just like, 'Ugh!' You didn't tell people that you were into fanfic. You didn't acknowledge it in real life. It was something that was the secret part of your life for you and your nerd fan friends."
"So bringing that into it, because something I love about fanfic is the use of tags and tropes. You so easily can know what you're getting into, even if you don't fully know what you're getting into, just by someone being like, '…and there was only one bed!' and you're like, 'Oh, I know what's coming!'"
A Rom-Com You Might Have Written
On The Idea of You, which was (at least partly) inspired by RPF about Harry Styles.
Arts, Interrupted: The World of Fan Fiction
A podcast episode from The Michigan Daily. Begins with a truly staggering misunderstanding of the early history of fanfiction, then goes on to discuss the fanfic-to-publishing pipeline, Stucky fics, and the hosts' personal history with fanfiction.
Step inside the world of mega-fandom
An audio news segment (transcript linked) from SBS News about fans of music, particularly BTS and Taylor Swift.
Flair for Fanfiction: Students See Their Work as an Art Form
From the Organization for Transformative Works
The April 2024 membership drive has ended. $207,088.91 was raised from 6073 people in 70 countries, exceeding the goal of $50,000.
The next public meeting of the OTW board will be 02:00 to 03:00 UTC on April 21 on the Board Discord Server.
The 2024 OTW budget is out.
$317,388.37 (47.1%) is budgeted to running AO3.
$161,831.47 (24%) is budgeted to administrative expenses.
$159,357.74 (23.6%) is budgeted to Fundraising & Development.
$18,249.93 (2.7%) is budgeted to running Fanlore.
22.4% of the 2024 revenue is expected to come from the April and October membership drives.
21.9% is expected to come from matching programs (such as Humble Bundle donations).
However, given that the April drive vastly exceeded the goal, I suspect those percentages might not be accurate!
Kindred spirits
Fanac for your reading or viewing pleasure. Other newsletters, podcasts, whatever fits.
The March 2024 OTW Newsletter is out. The Open Doors project has preserved more than 100 archives!
The April 2024 OTW Signal is also out.
Fanac… ademia
"It's not your Tumblr": Commentary-style tagging practices in fandom communities
Published (open access) in Transformative Works and Cultures.
Tagging practices on online platforms prioritize descriptive elements that contribute to information discovery. As a secondary tagging practice, commentary tags expand the functionality of online tagging to incorporate creative and expressive elements that initially seem to contribute little to information discovery systems. These tags have gained popularity, particularly within online fan communities and their preferred platforms, such as the social media blogging site Tumblr. Although popularized on Tumblr, commentary-style tags have become a recognizable fandom practice across platforms that host fan communities, including the fan work repository platform Archive of Our Own. Examining fan use of commentary tags provides insight into how such tagging practices could broaden information discovery to incorporate elements of creator expression and deepen user engagement with information resources.
The commentary-style tags referred to are the sort of tumblr-esque "i wrote this instead of sleeping" or "No Beta We Die Like Sirius" tags that aren't simple descriptors. These conflict with the kind of hierarchical, organizational, 'folksonomy' tags imagined by earlier incarnations of the internet, and they're a perennial topic of discussion (which is to say drama) in community spaces.
Personally, I don't mind one or two of these, and I think some more creative tags like "Genma Saotome's A+ Parenting" are useful in communicating more nuanced information about the themes of a fic. On the other hand, even on tumblr I found it annoying to have to read a paragraph written as a block of 30 tags, and I'd rather see that kind of stuff in an author's note.
Kennedy concludes that commentary-style tags are useful and people should just get used to them, more or less: "Instead of denouncing these tags in information systems as meaningless, exploration of multipurpose tagging systems could broaden information discovery, both within and outside of fandom, to encompass elements of discovery, creator expression, and cultural preservation."
Fanfic stats
What's popular among fan writers, and what's growing in popularity.
The fandoms on AO3 with the most new fics over the past two weeks are:
Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling (+192 per day)
Hazbin Hotel (Cartoon) (+141 per day)
Marvel (+115 per day)
僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia (Anime & Manga) (+101 per day)
DCU (+96 per day)
The quickest-growing (by percent new fics, minimum 100 fics) over the past two weeks are:
Alien Stage (Web Series) (+294, +136.7%)
A YouTube series (homepage) about a singing competition death game.Regretevator (Roblox) (+114, +38.8%)
A Roblox game. "Regretevator is a roulette style elevator puzzle game where you can hang out, look for secrets, and have fun."Masters of the Air (TV 2024) (+163, +38.3%)
A drama about World War II on Apple TV+.SolarBalls (Web Series) (+38, +29.7%)
A YouTube series.Mashle: Magic and Muscles (Anime) (+57, +26.0%)
A fantasy manga. The anime adaptation is available on Crunchyroll.
Statistics were collected between 2024-03-30 and 2024-04-13.