Elizabeth Minkel is a staff writer for The Millions, and writes a regular column on fan culture for the New Statesman. She is on Twitter @ElizabethMinkel.
From abuse of Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones to the #GiveElsaAGirlfriend movement, accusations of “fan entitlement” are simplistic and wrong.
I was listening to the conversations of other fans, but I wasn’t talking. For years—for more than a decade, in fact—I didn’t say a word.
When an update is made to the Harry Potter universe, it makes news around the world – whether for good reasons or bad.
Shipping is a complicated and subversive way of responding to a story’s characters – there’s a whole lot more to it than just “getting them together”.
How fandoms are affected when their favourite characters return to their screens.
Suddenly, the media has woken up to something that fans have known for a long time: there is a whole world of explicit and implicit relationships beyond what we see on screen.
Women love things that are “for boys” because these things are actually “for humans”.
Once, calling a published, original work “fanfiction” would have been meant as an insult. As the term has gained credibility, so definitions have blurred.
Dylan Marron, creator of the “Every Single Word” series that highlights the whiteness of modern and classic films, talks about the conversations his work has sparked – and how difficult it got once he mentioned Harry Potter.
A visit to GeekyCon, which started out as a Harry Potter fan convention, reveals the way the generation who grew up with the boy wizard are turning their magical passions into real-world success.
