This Week In Fandom History

Let teenage girls make bad art, GODDAMMIT! This week, Emily and V beat a familiar drum as they recount the unfortunate invention of Mary Sue: she's beautiful, she's smart, she's the best pilot in the Galaxy, and all your faves are in love with her. And so what?! Who does it really harm to let girls have a power fantasy?! God forbid women do anything. And by anything, we mean write self-insert Mary...

Who the hell is Bucky? Well, this week, V and Emily just have a breezy totally chill chat about exactly that question -- who is this most wet and pathetic of scrungly little meow-meows, and why does he drive fandom so absolutely, singularly insane? What makes Bucky Barnes the most blorbo? Does the MCU know what to do with him? Will Thunderbolts make V tear her own face off?!?! Ahem. The story of B...

Baaa, says the Yuletide Goat! This week, Emily and V celebrate 20 years of fannish Yuletide, the biggest fic exchange there ever was for the tiniest fandoms there could ever be. V, newly freed from Yuletide Jail, chimes in with on-the-ground experience while Emily gives the stats and facts as someone who's never heard of Yuletide before now. Featured are Yuletide's greatest hits: Folgercest, Wait...

Chomp! This week, V and Emily get deep into them guts of the omegaverse to take a long, hard look at where it came from, why it spread so quickly throughout fandom-at-large, and how it's been adapted differently in Western versus Eastern fandoms. With Emily as a noted omegaverse Li'l Hater and V as a noted Buzzfeed-approved omegaverse aficionado, all perspectives are represented (from Alpha to ome...

They attempted the impossible, and that makes them mighty! This week, Emily and V jump into the Firefly 'verse, and the Whedonverse at large, to take a look at the 2002 Firefly Immediate Assistance Campaign. They look at all of the odds stacked against Firefly by the Fox Network, and how so many of those marketing woes made the show catnip for fandom. Plus, the Jossification of scifi in the 2000s,...

What an amazing bowl of word salad! Yes, those words are all in the right order, and this week, V and Emily explain how, why, and who the culprits were in this fandom wank of epic proportions. It's got everything. Cannibal mermaids. Chinese-Pakistani sex trafficking survivors. Politician RPF writers. Lin... Manuel... Miranda. This is truly one of the fannish implosions of all time. Were you involv...

Another week, another purge... this week, Emily and V take a stroll back to Yahoo! Groups for a crash course on what they were, how they worked, and why they mattered. The episode takes a surprisingly sad turn as they consider how draining it is to constantly report on purges of huge portions of fannish history and what it really means when a company axes a huge repository of people's hard work, c...

Not the popslash! This week, V and Emily revisit one of their favorite topics -- "let teenage girls create bad art because it deserves to exist" -- as they recall one of several big Fanfiction.net content purges. This time, it was the total destruction of the RPF section, a loss of tens of thousands of stories in one fell swoop. Yes, V talks about Dream Street again. Yes, Emily talks about Backstr...

Live long and prosper! It's another Star Trek episode as this week, Emily and V venture into an alien cave to learn about "Shelter" by Leslie Fish and Joanne Agostino, AKA, the first Kirk/Spock slash fic. Fellas, is it gay to confess your love to your commanding officer in an alien cave and consummate your relationship with tender, tender sex? And fellas, is it problematic that Bones was also ther...

It's just a jump to the left, and a step to the ri-i-i-ght... into fandom history! This week, thanks to a timely fan suggestion from Tumblr, V and Emily delve into the surprisingly adorable and totes emosh world of Rocky Horror Picture Show fandom. With tons of recollections from in-person fans of the '70s and '80s, this OG cosplay fandom surprised and delighted us with its creative, devoted follo...

TEARFULLY: We love you. STOICALLY: This week's episode is about the introduction of Castiel and the birth of Destiel (plus the 2007 WGA strike).

POW! This week, V and Emily venture to the DC side of comics fandom as they learn about "A Death in the Family" and the poll to kill off, or save, Batman's Robin at the time, Jason Todd. From the involvement of grandmothers trying to soothe weeping children who loved Robin to utterly bananas racism in the comic itself, "A Death in the Family" changed the course of Batman comics for decades and sti...

All hail (but thoughtfully)! This week, Emily's fluffy episode praising the OTW took a slight detour as this summer revealed some very ugly spots on the underbelly of the Org we all love, support, and depend on. She and V talk through their feelings about some of the things we've all learned about the OTW that are less than utopian in an episode that is... pretty fucking heavy, actually. But we st...

Welcome, true believers! This week, V and Emily take a turn towards becoming an economics podcast -- no, wait! Don't go away! It's still interesting and we get to be li'l haters! This week in fandom history, Disney bought Marvel, and V tells Emily all about the absolutely terrible shitbag dude who's been behind most of the worst MCU decisions (and it's NOT Feige!). Also the amount of money that Di...

Live long and prosper! (Again!) This week, it's another Star Trek deep dive as Emily tells V the heartwarming, weep-inducing tale of the August Party, the first Star Trek fan con. With the cutest quotes and reminiscences in the world, and a wealth of people being NERDS to boot, this is a delightful event in fannish history and one we're glad to have gotten to learn about! Have you ever attended a...

Protect teenage girls at all costs! This week -- because it IS still this week, we got it in under the wire! -- V and Emily return to the scorched earth battleground of One Direction fandom, but this time, the missiles were launched by the national media of Great Britain. After an offensive, heinous "documentary" about One Direction fans aired on shock-doc specialist Channel 4, even fandoms dedica...

Helloooo, Chicago! This very special bonus episode was recorded LIVE at FanExpo Chicago '23 on the Creator Stage, and we're so excited to get to share it with you all! To celebrate and thank FXC for inviting us to perform, we decided to honor the Windy City and give a brief overview of a few fannish events in a fandom that owes it all to the Chi: due South. The heartwarming tale of a Canadian Moun...

Those aren't just stormtroopers! This week, Emily and V head back to 1997, when two guys who really loved Star Wars started a fannish endeavor that has grown to epic proportions. The illustrious 501st Legion, Vader's Fist, began as a cosplay club for stormtrooper fans and now spans the globe as an elite society of 10,000 Star Wars fans who delight in all manner of Star Wars villains as they do cha...

Bazinga! Just kidding. Not that kind of big bang (thank goodness). No, this week, Emily and V are talking about the origin of a fanfiction staple: the big bang challenge. Today, it's hard to throw a rock without hitting a fandom feverishly in the midst of a big bang. But in August 2005, the concept was new, novel-length, and named for Draco's passion for Harry. Have you ever participated in a big...

Elementary, my dears! This week, V and Emily visit one of the tentpoles of modern fandom: BBC Sherlock. Besides being the -lock of Superwholock, Sherlock birthed one of the biggest pairings on the internet (Sherlock/John), complete with its own far-fetched conspiracy theory, and continued on the century-old legacy of Sherlock Holmes fans being absolutely bananas for their fave detective and his ne...

Those are our blorbos and they're crazy! This week, Emily and V take a trip to Hawkins, Indiana, and reminisce about the massive impact that Netflix's Stranger Things has had on the fandomsphere. (Is the Fandomsphere its own realm like the Upside-Down? Discuss.) From Mileven versus Byler to Steddie versus Hellcheer and Ronance versus -- well, no one's really against Ronance, Stranger Things explod...

Do you want an extra hour in the ball pit? This week, for the first time, V and Emily are joined by a VERY SPECIAL GUEST, Lauren Shippen of the podcast Dashboard Diaries! They discuss the convention to end all conventions, the first (and only) DashCon. From its birth on the blue hellsite to its death in a Chicagoland hotel, DashCon was truly a lesson for the ages that just because sometimes fandom...

Troubled kids, unite! This week, V and Emily -- well, okay, this week, V basically recaps the Percy Jackson series for Emily, because eighteen years ago this week, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief was released and fandom got a new fave (good riddance to a certain magical wizarding school). However, V and Emily do have some words for Rick about his complete inability to understand children's a...

I do! This week, Emily and V talk commentfic and comment memes back in the LJ days because the "Let's Get Gay Married!" Commentfic Meme started this week in fandom history as a celebration of marriage equality passing into law in New York state. Plus, a rundown on what commentfic and comment memes were like since they've mostly gone the way of the dinosaur -- largely extinct -- and they were a mag...

Oil of Olay?! This week, V and Emily take a short trip through fandom history to 2022, when the most controversial OTW elections to date* announced its candidate roster. The controversy turned out less to be about the OTW than about the 227 Incident that got AO3 banned in China -- and holy moly, was it an incident. Your cohosts do not speak Mandarin, so apologies for ALL of the pronunciations in t...