This Week In Fandom History

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This week, our C-List Superhero is Louise Grant AKA the Blonde Phantom (Marvel Comics), and our A-List Superhero is Namor (Marvel Comics and the MCU). Our Uninformed Expert Panel this week is Emily Jaye, as always, and our special guest is our wonderful Patron Lina @pandaimitator. Listen in as they learn about our two heroe...

Slash fans, rise up! (Sorry.) This week, V and Emily look at a triple-shot of '90s slash goodness: the multifandom zine "Nothing to Hide," the STIFfie Awards of 1998, and STIFfie founder Mary Urhausen. We're wading deeper into a pool that we thought we knew the depths of but boy, were we wrong, because there are shows that got slashed that we NEVER thought had slashy sexiness content. Plus, a look at the 1997 MediaWest controversy ...

Muffins! This week, Emily and V are... surprisingly heartwarmed? Pleasantly shocked? Tentatively on board with a fandom they were very nervous to cover? We're talking about Bronies this week, which is to say, adult (mostly male) fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. This week in fandom history, they were acknowledged by their show canon with the inclusion of their fandomwide blorbo, a backgrounder named... well... therein li...

Welcome to another episode of the TWIFH special miniseries podcast, CONstruction: How to Throw A Fan Convention. Each month, V will catch up with John @jarrow, the logistics guy with all the spreadsheets and contracts for TGI Femslash, about, well, how to throw a successful fan convention. If you've ever thought, "It sure would be fun to spend the weekend with other people talking about my blorbo" but didn't know where to start, Jo...

Do ya feel lucky? Punk! This week, V and Emily are so, so, sososo delighted by a new-to-them fandom: Harry/Johnny, which is technically -- technically -- the Dirty Harry fandom, but is REALLY just an offshoot of Starsky & Hutch. Created wholecloth by two fannish friends based on a single look in the middle of a movie that is only the second out of five in a series that is Decidedly Not Slashy, Harry/Johnny was a hugely influent...

He tries his best! This week, Emily and V look at a fandom event that was listed on our research spreadsheet as, simply, "A HUGE FUCKING DEAL." Fandom has loved few characters the way it loved, and still loves, Ianto Jones of Torchwood. Unfortunately, he was created by a showrunner who hates fandom even more than most showrunners with the urge to Punish hate their female fans. Even so, fans' love for Ianto is -- like his love inter...

You have two nickels! This week, Emily and V joined forces with... Emily and Vee! You requested it in our May listener survey: it's a wild conversation with fellow fandom podcast, Mind the Tags. We stumble over direct addresses and begin to wonder which universe we're really in (is it 616??) as we discuss the past, present, and future of fanfiction, and our own origin stories as Vs and Emilys of the fandom podcasting multiverse. Th...

::Magical girl transition!:: This week, V and Emily were asked to finally, after three and a half years of hosting a fandom podcast, tackle an anime episode. So, because we are not anime girlies, we asked THEE anime expert, Erica Friedman, to join us and explain all things yuri! From school stories in the 1920s and 1930s to Sailor Moon's magical girls, and from Japan to the United States, Erica teaches us about the importance of F/...

Welcome to another episode of the TWIFH special miniseries podcast, CONstruction: How to Throw A Fan Convention. Each month, V will catch up with John @jarrow, the logistics guy with all the spreadsheets and contracts for TGI Femslash, about, well, how to throw a successful fan convention. If you've ever thought, "It sure would be fun to spend the weekend with other people talking about my blorbo" but didn't know where to start, Jo...

Shake it off? This week, V and Emily delve way too deeply into a corner of the internet that makes them feel insane: #gaylor, which in some accountings kicked off this week in fandom history with Glee's #shirtgate. How? Why? Whomst? Where? It's all been way-too-meticulously recorded for the ages, so join us down the rabbithole. Also featuring Sebastian Stan??? (How could it be a TWIFH episode without mention of Bucky Barnes, tho. T...

Defraud fans and prosper? This week, Emily and V take yet another jaunt to a fan convention gone horribly awry, and once again, it's Star Trek and it's in Dallas. This time, the key ideas are leaking spinal fluid, nuclear-angry celebrity guests, the relative gullibility of us scifi nerds, and German diplomacy. Talk turns very real as we look at the pros and cons (no pun intended) of the mainstreaming of fandom when it comes to conv...

Send a SASE! This week, V and Emily take a look at the illustrious -- pun intended -- life and career of Big Name Fanartist and writer Beverly Zuk, whose Fanlore page is a riot of full-frontal Vulcans. We look at the fascinating fic she wrote, particularly "The Third Verdict," and read through her instructions of how to become a fanartist in 1978. Plus, we marvel at the Star Trek Welcommittee and their work to help fans connect in ...

Help us, Obi-Wan, you're our only hope! This week, Emily and V look at three separate events that, as we say in Star Wars fandom, "rhyme": the releases of Star Wars (1977), Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983), and Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018). While audience reactions to the three movies aren't identical, the Force grip that Star Wars has on all of us has remained steadfast since the beginning. Star Wars is more than a fandom. I...

Roar! This week, V and Emily look at a 70-year-old fandom that we'd never considered before: Godzilla. Thanks to a request, we look at the schism in the fandom, and the Godzilla canon, caused by Hollywood's GODZILLA (1998) -- also known as Zilla or GINO -- as well as the special effects fanzines of the '60s and '70s. We learn about Japan's bananas intellectual property laws in the '90s, and about a BANANAS crossover zine that spann...

Welcome to another episode of the TWIFH special miniseries podcast, CONstruction: How to Throw A Fan Convention. Each month, V will catch up with John @jarrow, the logistics guy with all the spreadsheets and contracts for TGI Femslash, about, well, how to throw a successful fan convention. If you've ever thought, "It sure would be fun to spend the weekend with other people talking about my blorbo" but didn't know where to start, Jo...

Accio legal system? This week, Emily and V look into the super-bummer that was a harbinger of even worse super-bummers to come: the time JK Rowling sued her biggest fan for basically knowing more about Harry Potter than she did. And everyone in the whole world sided with her, because it was 2008 and the deification of that woman was REAL. Fortunately, it's 2026, the scales have fallen from our eyes, we've already covered Lindaaaaa ...

To the Common Room! This week, V and Emily look with such fondness at the best era of fic since the internet began: the 2012 Avengers Tower era. This requested episode features Clint in the vents, Thor eating Pop-Tarts, a surprising number of penguins, Darcy Lewis, and genuine softness towards Tony Stark. Also, we have a pitch for Disney+ and a new drinking game for all you listeners. Journey back with us to a time and a place wher...

And print! This week, Emily and V learn what a letterzine was as they look at one of the biggest of its kind from the 1980s and well into the '90s: multifandom slash zine, Late For Breakfast. They also discuss the now-mysterious biggest slash fandoms covered in the zine, from Bodie/Doyle to Blake's 7 and TWIFH nemesis, due South, as well as some shallow-dive biographies on the two fans who spearheaded Late For Breakfast over its le...

Gross! This week, V and Emily are balls of white-hot rage as they discuss the very 2008 debacle that was the Open-Source Boob Project at Penguicon '08. The originator of the project -- the same dude who created the Purity Test that everyone in the late aughts took in college, because of course he was -- tried to defend his lechery with a veneer of "social science experiment," and as usual, it did not work and just remained totally ...