Fandom, explained

If you’ve spent any time on Twitter this week, you may have noticed an outpouring of fandom art as part of the viral “ship dynamics” meme — in which people, mostly fanartists, are sharing their love of their favorite kinds of relationships through stick figures.

For anyone unfamiliar with the concept of a “ship,” it’s a very popular term within fandom, a shortened form of the word “relationship” that’s used both as a noun to describe a romantic pairing you love (e.g. “Han/Leia is my favorite ship”), and a verb to describe the act of “shipping” that pairing, or rooting for them to get together and live happily ever after (e.g. “I ship Rory/Paris”).

Aesthetically, these seven hunky dreamboats couldn’t be more different. They range from a burly bear to a muscled jock to a fey Goth. But one thing they all have in common: They’re great dads — and over the summer, they became great boyfriends.

Dream Daddy, the hit dating game that took over gaming and fandom communities across the internet, was an odd choice to become the game of summer 2017. The game, which casts you as a fun-loving dad looking for love among the hot dads in your new town, has drawn praise as well as considerable criticism for its unprecedented take on queer masculinity, its arguably fantastical depictions of gay romance, and its marketing to a primarily female fan base.

In October 2007, at a rare appearance at a packed Carnegie Hall, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling casually tossed off one of the biggest announcements in the history of her landmark fantasy phenomenon: Dumbledore, Harry’s mentor and the greatest wizard in the world until his dramatic death in book six, was gay.

The audience immediately leapt to its feet and roared its approval. Rowling seemed surprised. “If I had known this would have made you this happy,” she said, “I would have announced it years ago.”

On June 13, one day into the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, the following exchange took place between Sherlock co-creator Mark Gatiss and a Johnlock shipper — that is, a fan of the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes drama who supports the hypothetical queer romantic relationship, or “ship,” between Sherlock and John Watson.

The shipper’s melodramatic comment may have been facetious, but Gatiss’s “RIP” response caused a serious fandom meltdown among Johnlock supporters. Over the next few days, hundreds of them responded in dismay, with many accusing Gatiss — an openly gay man — of being insensitive to queer fans on the day of a major tragedy within the LGBTQ community.

Earlier this year, the New York Times turned heads by asking whether the hit Broadway musical Hamilton’s historical fudging on certain points is, well, good for us. It’s an excellent piece of concern trolling, giving several historians an opportunity to hand-wring about the musical’s overglorification of Alexander Hamilton, the immigrant revolutionary who authored the Federalist Papers and founded the US Treasury.

Several historians interviewed in the piece were quick to emphasize the liberties Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda has taken with regard to the show’s historical timeline, geographic location, and political context, which Miranda himself has been upfront about time and again. But Miranda’s blatant overidentification with his subject — he also stars in the title role — seems to have pushed many of them over the edge, leading to questions of whether Miranda’s celebration of Hamilton may be misleading students of history.

Earlier this month, William Shatner, a self-professed fan of the Starz drama Outlander, entangled himself in a complicated conflict over shipping in the fandom that has been building throughout the show’s two seasons. Shipping is the common fandom practice of rooting for two characters or real-life people to get together. In this case, the ship in question involves two actors from the show.

After days of heated debate with fans, the turmoil culminated in a unique move: An assistant of Shatner’s, Paul Camuso, introduced a fandom website, Outlander Anti-Bullying, which offers “good practices for being online in fandom.”

This article is part of a series on fan culture and its many related topics. Start with our primer on fandom and follow along with the series every day this week.

Constance Grady: The world is full of misconceptions about fanfiction, but one in particular confuses me every time I come across it. It’s the idea that fanfiction is by its nature meant to replace and correct the work that inspired it.

This article is part of a series on fan culture and its many related topics. Start with our primer on fandom and follow along with the series every day this week.

If you don’t know what fandom is or how to feel about it, the internet is ready and willing to help you out.

Under US copyright law, it is illegal to profit from someone else’s intellectual property. This means you cannot write a story using someone else’s characters or setting or plot and sell it, unless you are writing an officially licensed tie-in novel or you’ve renamed the characters and changed them just enough to claim plausible deniability. (In fan fiction circles this practice is called “filing off the serial numbers,” and it’s what E.L. James did when she changed her Twilight AU (alternate universe) fic Masters of the Universe into Fifty Shades of Grey.)

If you want to distribute fanfic that is explicitly labeled as fanfic — say, a novel that’s set in Harry Potter’s universe or that involves characters from The Lord of the Rings, you must do it for free on sites like Archive of Our Own or FanFiction.net.