Last week in Sydney I recorded an episode of Josh Szeps' Uncomfortable Conversations pod. We talked about the good internet, fandom and communities, argued over whether Substack has a nazi problem and whether AI is really transformative. It was a great chat, even if his commenters on some platforms didn’t exactly warm to me. Check it out on YouTube, spotify, or your pod place.
One of the things that sparked me to finally knuckle down and write my book proposal last year was this series of tweets from a Succession stan account at the end of 2022:
I’ve always been interested in fandom migrations, so I clocked this thread right away, but the third tweet slapped me in the face and evicted me from my own home. That was me. I made the CJ/Toby Hands Clean fanvid before most of you were born.
Now, to be clear, this is not a good fanvid. It was my first and only attempt. I was working with a wild combo of vhs home recordings a guy in Florida had posted me in the mail and early pirated digital files patiently downloaded as .rar files and reassembled. I knew nothing about editing. I basically cut this in the video equivalent of MS Paint and called it done. I feel like the resolution was better at some point; no idea why it’s compressed as all hell now. But I made it for a fandom friend who loved it, and that was enough for me.
This isn’t really a newsletter about fanvids. Vidders are a whole community of people who are incredibly talented and with whom I’ve spent not nearly enough time. If you want to see a genuinely great fanvid, this is my favourite:
It was made as part of an auction for charity in response to the request: “a multi-fandom vid set to Sia’s ‘The Greatest’ revelling in the bad-ass wonderfulness of characters of colour in SF/F/horror TV and movies of the last 3-5 years.” Can you imagine any more perfect result.
Over the years I’ve encountered a whole raft of different ways in which vids do something special for a fandom. An angst-ridden tour through Chuck and Blair’s best star-crossed moments in Gossip Girl. Ferociously tight editing of Captain America and the Winter Soldier set to Kiss with a Fist. A serial killer and his favourite FBI agent, from Hannibal the series. Fanvids can be about fanfiction: like this trailer for a Larry fic in which Louis is an English fashion designer and Harry is an American football player. In RPF fandoms like hockey, fanvids can create stories out of things that were never intended to hold these kinds of narratives to begin with:
(Arguably. I’ll contend to my dying day that sports is just Grey’s Anatomy for boys)
But eons ago, when I made that fanvid, I made it for my friend and the tiny group of fellow West Wing fans that would enjoy it on a tucked-away corner of the internet. It felt safe: private even as it was communal. Then one day, someone who liked it uploaded it to this brand new thing called YouTube (yes, I am that old). I was mortified. I was a lawyer at a giant global firm, and suddenly my extremely copyright-dubious side project was on the same site as Lazy Sunday. I messaged the uploader—more than once—until she finally took it down.
Now, of course, I don’t care. I’m no longer embarrassed that I was a talentless hack: I was making something out of love, for a community I was part of, who cared deeply about the same things that I did. But the point is that I got to choose when and how I shared that little vid.
When The Cut published a roundup of fanfiction for the hit show The Pitt last month, linking directly to fics without permission, it hit that same nerve. The one that knows what it feels like to have something personal—something made for your community—suddenly yanked out of context and served up to an audience that doesn’t understand it and probably never will.
The article framed the stories as quirky internet ephemera, half-celebrated and half-mocked.
The authors, blindsided, started locking down their work.
So I wrote one of these fics, and I have never felt so weirdly violated in my fannish life. It was one of the ones she was vaguely nice about as opposed to actively insulting but it just feels so gross? Like, my mother reads The Cut, there is a universe where my mother now reads my fic purely by accident. I've been posting on A03 since 2010 and I just archive-locked my fic for the first time because it feels so weird to be exposed in a mainstream publication like that.
eta: I think that what feels different about this vs a rec list is simply the amount of exposure and the type of exposure. Like, I am under no illusions about the level of access people have to publicly posted fic! But this is a situation in which mainstream audiences without an understanding of fandom etiquette and norms are now being exposed to the fannish world and it feels like a recipe for disaster. Just let me write my old man yaoi in peace. Yknow?
This is why fandom has a fourth wall. It’s not about secrecy—it’s about context and consent. It’s about understanding that transformative works exist in a space that’s both public and private, where visibility comes with risk. That doesn’t mean fanworks are shameful. It means they deserve respect, and that respect includes understanding the norms before you blast a spotlight into someone else's space.
AO3 has this wonderful feature that allows creators to “orphan” works.
Orphaning is an alternative to deleting a work which you no longer want associated with your account. Orphaning will permanently eliminate all your identifying data from the selected work. Orphaning is a way to remove some or all of your works from your account without taking them away from fandom. We hope you'll use the orphan_account to allow your works to remain in the Archive even if you no longer wish to be associated with them, or have them connected to your account. Orphaned works will be maintained by the Archive to be enjoyed by future fans; existing bookmarks and links will not break.
I’ve orphaned works I no longer want to be connected to, and I think this is so much better than deleting them. But here’s the problem. If you’ve been “outed” and had your name or fan identity connected to a story linked to on a mainstream site, that connection lives on—even if the AO3 record has been purged of your details. Meaning your only real choice is to delete the story, which is a loss for everyone.
I think about this all the time as I write and speak and share about fandom. I’m constantly walking a tightrope between wanting to celebrate, validate and draw attention to the vibrant, creative, supportive communities that fans create, and being acutely aware that these spaces often have these characteristics because the rest of the internet doesn’t know they’re there.
I’ve sought explicit consent for the reuse of every piece of fanart I’ve ever shared, for example, because even though it’s technically “public” — there’s a world of difference between putting your heart and soul on tumblr, and having someone throw it up on a wall-sized screen at a tech conference for an audience who’s never thought about these things before in their lives. If anyone ever contacted me and asked me to remove something, I’d scrub the internet ‘til my knuckles bled to get rid of it.
If you’re not part of a community—and you’re not willing to listen to it—maybe don’t mine it for content.
If, on the other hand, you want to see some truly great fanvids you can get an online ticket to VidUKon (30 May-1 April).
after I wrote about the ISS, Alice suggested I read the Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital by Samantha Harvey, set on the space station. She was right, I loved it. One thing really stuck with me. You’ll recall one of my fun facts from that newsletter was that when the first astronauts went to the ISS it was the last time that humanity was all together on planet earth. Orbital puts this in another incredible way:
“In the photograph Collins took, there’s the lunar module carrying Armstrong and Aldrin, just behind them the moon, and some two hundred and fifty thousand miles beyond that the earth, a blue half-sphere hanging in all blackness and bearing mankind. Michael Collins is the only human being not in that photograph, it is said, and this has always been a source of great enchantment. Every single other person currently in existence, to mankind’s knowledge, is contained in that image; only one is missing, he who made the image.”
this is EXACTLY what I mean when I talk about reweirding the web. Neal Agarwal, who continuously turns out excellent web projects has just released Internet Roadtrip, in which everyone is in the car and you vote on which direction to go, and what to listen to on the radio.
i’m not usually one to give credit to amazon, and avoid linking to them, BUT these audible audiobook pacers at a marathon?? genius. With the right book, even I could probably run that far (jk).
loved this video from Billboard about the Grateful Dead’s fandom. The Deadheads made it possible for the band to tour continuously, even as it didn’t really have radio hits. The tailgating, recording/sharing live shows, and seeing multiple shows on tour are all things we now associate with Swifties or Harries, but it came into being with the Dead.
Share this email with someone you think will like it. Word of mouth is better than growth hacking.