This Week In Fandom History

The bees' knees! This week, for the ONE HUNDREDTH EPISODE, V and Emily take a trip back 100 years to look at four fandoms that ruled the year of 1924: George Gershwin's jazz, Harold Lloyd's romantic comedies, Little Orphan Annie's laughs, and Babe Ruth's colossal clout. From the amazing breadth of the Gershwin brothers' catalog to the hilarity of what passed for celebrity gossip in Photoplay, from...

It's locked! This week, V and Emily (although V hardly gives Emily a chance to get a word in edgewise) delve into the 94-year history of the Nancy Drew fandom. From a congressional hearing about whether Nancy is Bad For The Children in the '50s to a woman in the '30s who made her living traveling from town to town to evangelize against the girl sleuth, Nancy Drew is an OG fandom with big "fuck you...

No more mutants! This week, Emily and V look at an event that had seismic effects both in-universe in its franchise and out-universe, in the real world: Marvel Comics' M-Day. The events depicted in the House of M event would go on to drive much of the forward motion of X-Men for the next 15 years and spawned whole swaths of the Marvel universe (including Agatha All Along !). And of course, any swi...

Time to catch the boat of losers! This week, V and Emily encounter not one, not two, not three, but SO MANY areas of fandom that we've never covered on the show, nor encountered in our elderly lives, as we cover the Total Drama fandom and its juggernaut ship, Noah/Cody AKA NoCo. From anime terminology and Wattpad novels to TikTok stitches and Roblox's existence, we are out of our depth this week....

The Warblers are like rockstars here! This week, Emily and V look at the juggernaut slash ship to come out of Glee: Kurt Hummel/Blaine Anderson, AKA Klaine, which was born in the space of three glorious musical minutes this week in fandom history in 2010, when Blaine (Darren Criss) serenaded Kurt and the rest of Dalton Academy's student body with an accappella rendition of Katy Perry's "Teenage Dr...

Argh, DC... This week, V and Emily take another frustrating look at how DC Comics just loves to kill off Robins, this time with added explicit misogyny toward the fanbase as well as the character they've doomed to the gallows. On the bright side, V got an amazing primer from listener katieiscunning, who loves the character of Spoiler AKA Robin AKA Batgirl AKA Stephanie Brown, and made V and Emily...

Scullay!!! This week, Emily and V head back to a happy happenstance in 1994 as the birth of Gillian Anderson's real-life baby changes the fictional life of Dana Scully forever, in more ways than one. By changing the scope of Scully's life, the lore of The X-Files grew and expanded into something network TV had never seen before. Plus, we love how much Gillian and David Duchovny love each other, an...

Apocalypse now? This week, V and Emily start out the episode by talking about the super-cool annual convention that Good Omens fans created and host as part of The Ineffable Society: the Ineffable Con, going strong since 2019. Then, we have to delve into the allegations against Good Omens co-author and showrunner Neil Gaiman, former Tumblr everyman and (alleged) total sleazebag. Looking at the Gai...

*insert Tarzan yell here* This week, Emily and V explore a totally new-to-them fandom thanks to requester pandaimitator: Tarzan of the Apes . And frankly, it's crazy that we haven't heard about everything this old-timey fandom created that we still use and do today. Fan clubs! Conventions! Fan campaigns! Fanfiction! The Pizza Hut Book-It model of consumerism! The concept of the franchise itself! W...

Get out your tissues, listeners! (Seriously.) This week, V and Emily split the episode in two parts: first, the very silly attempt to understand how the Forever Knight fandom went to WAR! for the thirteenth time in 2010. Second, a look into the fannish life and ongoing impact of Forever Knight BNF Susan M. Garrett, who seems like she was a completely awesome fangirl, writer, and person. V and Emil...

What?! This week, Emily and V travel all the way back one year to look at... the dumbest thing we've ever had to cover for this show, possibly. You all remember this one: @ao3topshipsbracket pitted Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes against Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet, and things got insanely, unnecessarily, WEIRDLY nuts. We're baffled. We're a little bitter. We're mostly confused? Sources The Infamous Poll...

#*@%$(*! This week, V and Emily head back to the event that caused the Great Schism Of One Direction Fandom: The Bullshit Tweet. V has an epiphany about her longest-ever fic and one of her big OTPs of the early 2010s, and Emily feels a lot of empathy for both Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson in the face of all the, well, bullshit thrown at them for years. Plus, Zayn Malik has common sense about em...

Come together, right now! This week, Emily and V head back to the extremely seventies 1970s to look at a fandom currently having a resurgence on Tumblr: The Beatles. V has actually been to "The Fest," as groovy kids call it, and wrote a paper on Beatlemania that got published a zillion years ago to boot, so she chimes in about what this fandom is like from ground level while Emily marvels at the g...

Fukkin' preps. This week, V and Emily have their brains melted by not ONE incredibly stupid and obvious literary fraud, but TWO incredibly stupid and obvious literary frauds! Yes! In one week! And both involving the most infamous fanfic of all time, everyone's favorite: My Immortal . Dust off your fishnets and stretch out your middle fingers, it's time to get goffik. Sources The Hollywood Reporter...

Icicle ?! This week, Emily and V hold a sort of jazz funeral for a fandom event that shaped both of them as human people, and that cannot and should not ever happen again. The Three-Year Summer was a pivotal stretch of time for fandom culture as a whole because a) every fucking person alive was in this fandom, b) the whole point was that there was no canon and the world was wide open for the takin...

::General rage noises:: This week, V and Emily discuss the trope-namer for "fridging," or the killing off of female characters purely to cause manpain and advance male characters' stories. It's rage-inducing. Plus, the Hawkeye Initiative brings attention to undue sexualization of female comics characters, and Dead Men Defrosting debunk the myth that male superheroes suffer as much as women do.  Ad...

Buy gold...! This week, Emily and V look at one of the coolest fan experiences that they've ever heard about: Gravity Falls fandom's Cipher Hunt. To both celebrate and mourn the end of the series, writer Alex Hirsch created an international scavenger hunt for the fandom, and OUR LOVELY PATRON HOLLY played a pivotal role in connecting fans across the world! Plus, a look at the messages between Alex...

Up, up, and... oh no. This week, V and Emily look at yet another fandom whose femslash juggernaut OTP got dealt an unfair hand by TPTB, in looking at the fallout of the Supergirl Season 2 Musical Recap from San Diego ComicCon 2017. So much rage. So much disappointment. So much annoyance. Why can't femslashers have nice things?! This Week In Fandom History is a fandom-centric podcast that tells you...

Dream a little bigger, darlings. This week, Emily and V go deeper and deeper into the mindscape of fandom in 2010, when Inception became an unlikely juggernaut fandom-that-ate-fandom because of two minor (as in tertiary) characters played by internet boyfriends Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon Levitt. They talk that iconic ending, reasons this weird movie resonated with people so hard, and how fandom i...

ATTACK! This week, V tells Emily about the 2023 DDoS attacks against the OTW, particularly AO3, and how amazing the SysAdmin volunteers defended the servers and got the sites back online. Plus, how fandom reacted to A Very Bad 24 Hours In Fandom History -- because there was ANOTHER dumb/bad event happening over on Tumblr, too! -- and perhaps the greatest fanfiction of all time.

We can do this all day! This week, Emily surprises V with an episode all about her blorbo, Steve Rogers (Captain America). It's a loosey-goosey chat about their baby blorbo boy, from his origin as the creation of two Jewish men who wanted a golem to punch Hitler in the face to their own origin stories as Steve fangirls. Plus, a rundown on AO3's top ten Steve ships! Note: There were some technical...

Bubble, bubble, bubble pop! This week, V and Emily explore the highs of fandom and lows of the kpop trainee system as they look at one of the coolest fanworks ever made, possibly: the guerilla zine  Bubble Pop! Spearheaded by one Washington D.C. kpop fan who wanted to know who the other kpop fans of her city were, Bubble Pop! was the coolest (and most fun-sounding) party of this week in fandom his...

Beam us up! This week, Emily and V were expecting a disaster of epic proportions and bad feelings all around, but instead we got a surprisingly delightful and warm story of fandom community spirit saving a very bad situation. We both cry in this episode. It's fine. It's just Star Trek fans being great, okay?! Have you ever met a new friend at a convention? What would you do with a suitcase full of...

See ya later, pala-dudes! This week, V and Emily hit a double-header in the Voltron: Legendary Defender fandom (thanks to two requesters and V's VLD primer pal, Fran!). First, V attempts to explain what the show is about and why it launched on Netflix with a built-in fandom. And then... oh, boy. You know how our ending stinger is "well-behaved fandoms rarely make history"? Well, this fandom is VER...

And I can hear them now! This week, Emily and V pre-emptively apologize for their French accents and inability to pronounce "Enjolras" as we look at the Les Mis fandom holiday of Barricade Day. While the real event was an unmitigated tragedy, and it was also an unmitigated tragedy in the book, musical, and movie adaptations, Barricade Day is a wholesome fandom holiday for Les Mis fans to gather an...