TWiM, Issue 8: February 1, 2019

[thisweekmod]

Happy February! We're coming up on our second week in existence and are currently at 588 subscribers. Wow!

Thank you so much to everyone who's been submitting links and suggestions for the issues. Thank you also to the folks who've kindly let me link to them! I'm glad that everyone's been enjoying the newsletter and finding it useful. I'm having fun collecting and sharing links, and I look forward to sharing lots more.

---

GeekDad posted Toxic Fandom: When Criticism and Entitlement Go Too Far: "Like most people in fandom, I ship quite happily and I have yet to send a single death threat, because… well, sending threats of physical harm over a fictional relationship involving cartoon characters seems nonsensical to me (plus, it’s a crime in most jurisdictions)."

isozyme posted fannish currency and me, a Modest Name Fan : "setting aside the question of would removing kudos on AO3 lead to more comments (no, it would not), i'd like to talk about the value of my hit counter and my kudos number for me."

melannen posted Thoughts on canon het: "There’s a large cohort of people who think the only interesting story about romance is How They Got Together. In fanfic this works, because we can write How They Got Together 20 million times and it just gets deeper and richer with repetition, but when you’re trying to do this in a series with continuity, you either end up writing excruciatingly endless will-they-won’t-they, or repeated breakups and get-back-togethers that mostly just present a case for why they shouldn’t, or a bunch of romance-of-the-weeks that aren’t worth getting invested in, or the situation where they get together and the romance does, in fact, stop being interesting, because the writers think the interesting part is over."

Phil Plait for SyFy Wire posted Love what you love. Let others love what they love: "But it becomes a far more serious problem when these people want to declare that others shouldn't watch it because of that. That's called gatekeeping — they are standing in front of the only way in, stating None shall pass — and it's the antithesis of fandom."

olivermoss posted Post like it's the future: "tl:dr if this platform gets the momentum that I hope it will, the culture here will be something new, not a recreation of the days when I was using dial up to connect to Juno."

silveradept posted Expanded thoughts on the question of fandom, networks, and money: "Until things change structurally so that a person isn't forced to choose between what they love and what they need, people gotta do what they gotta do. If fandom requires a certain amount of privilege to participate, then only the privileged will be able to participate in fandom."

---

Flashback - 1984

Today's flashback offering was submitted by rosefox! It's different from previous flashbacks, as it's a whole book just about fanzines (history/background of zines: Fanlore).

Don West's book Fanzines in Theory and in Practice is available as a free download from the TransAtlantic Fan Fund. From the opening paragraph: "This is a book about fanzines. However, it has little to say about the mechanical details of fanzine production: the cutting of stencils, the layout of articles, the printing and so forth. The primary concern here is with the ideology of fanzines; not how but why they are produced and why certain approaches and strategies are more to be favoured than others."

---

thisweekmeta collects links of fandom meta and discussions from all over the web, and welcomes submissions from readers. If you know of an excellent fandom discussion post that we've missed, whether new or old, please feel free to leave a comment on this newest issue or email the editor.

The FAQ can be found here, and our editorial guidelines can be found here. Questions, concerns, and feedback are all welcomed.