Fansplaining

An independent, subscriber-supported publication of reporting, criticism, and more—all by, for, and about fandom. (Plus 9 years as a podcast: 250+ episodes in our back catalog!) For more info, please visit fansplaining.com <3

[fansplaining]

How Fans Make Fictional Languages Real

Na’vi, Klingon, and other conlangs get more use IRL than they ever have onscreen.

Our latest is live! ✨ Maria Temming reports on the worlds of fictional constructed language (aka conglang) speakers. For fans gathering around Na'vi, Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki, or High Valyrian, it's about more than a connection to canon—it's about community.

Conlang aficionados will also note that the definition of a “useful” language depends on who you want to communicate with. Sometimes, that’s a friend with a different native language, or the people who live in a country you want to visit; other times, it’s the people in your fandom. That doesn’t just make a conlang useful. “Once it starts to have real speakers,” Mikaelon says, “in a way, it becomes a real language too.”

Read or listen to an audio version via the link above!

[hellotailor]

The Vampire Lestat: The Queen of the Damned

In episode 5, “New York,” Lestat strips back his rock-star facade and confronts his memories of Akasha.

"There’s no way of knowing how Claudia might have behaved if she'd lived to see 2025, but Louis’ fantasy is embarrassingly shallow, opening with Claudia smiling sweetly and telling him that she missed him (would she really??) before segueing into small-talk about Louis’ latest business ventures. Much like with Daniel Molloy and Miss Lily, he’s paying someone to listen to him—now with an increased level of emotional baggage. Is Regina doing a convincing impression of Claudia? Obviously not! She’s basing her entire performance on secondhand accounts from Daniel’s book. Her job is to enact a vague outline of a happy family dinner, and in the same way that people manage to fall in love with chatbots, Louis’ imagination does the rest of the work.   In reality, Louis and Claudia’s relationship was far more contentious.  Much of their conflict stemmed from Louis feeling a sense of ownership over Claudia, leading all the way back to the moment of her turning: a horrifying scene where Louis dragged her body across the floor like a ragdoll and begged Lestat to give her the Gift. In the years after her transformation, her fathers kept her in a childish role that she quickly outgrew. The casting change from Bailey Bass to Delainey Hayles became an unintentionally effective transition point between Claudia’s adolescence and adulthood, when she and Louis began living as brother and sister. The complexity of this relationship can’t be translated into a staged hangout with Regina and her actress friend."

[hellotailor]

re-upping this because Fansplaining just lifted the paywall for recaps 4 and 5, making them available to free subscribers!

[fansplaining]

FYI! Become a free member and you can read or listen to Gav's TVL recaps for episodes 1-5.

The final two recaps will remain behind our paywall for quite a while, so you'll have to be a paying subscriber for those. But! You still have time to get in on our BITEME sale, just $5 a month for your first two months, starting from whenever you sign up. (And we'll have more TVL writing later in the summer, too.) This sale ends after the finale!

Reporting, criticism, and more, all by, for, and about fandom.

[fansplaining]

Beyond simple aesthetics, someone might be drawn to a conlang because of the worldview built into it. Every language is embedded with the cultural perspectives of its speakers, fictional or otherwise. In Klingon, for instance, there is no verb “to be.” “Klingons don’t say somebody is happy. They say you are going through the experience of happiness,” Lipscombe says. “You are happy-ing. You are sad-ing. That’s a temporary thing. It’s not something you are.” Na’vi performs a similar twist of perspective for English speakers by making the word “tok,” which describes being somewhere, a verb that takes an object. In Na’vi, you do not simply exist in a space—you happen to that place. Those elements of a fictional culture might resonate with someone regardless of their attachment to the fictional characters.

In our latest, Maria Temming reports on fictional constructed language—aka conlang—communities, and the ways those languages can bring fans closer to the source material.

Read or listen to an audio version:

How Fans Make Fictional Languages Real

Na’vi, Klingon, and other conlangs get more use IRL than they ever have onscreen.

[fansplaining]

How Fans Make Fictional Languages Real

Na’vi, Klingon, and other conlangs get more use IRL than they ever have onscreen.

Our latest is live! ✨ Maria Temming reports on the worlds of fictional constructed language (aka conglang) speakers. For fans gathering around Na'vi, Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki, or High Valyrian, it's about more than a connection to canon—it's about community.

Conlang aficionados will also note that the definition of a “useful” language depends on who you want to communicate with. Sometimes, that’s a friend with a different native language, or the people who live in a country you want to visit; other times, it’s the people in your fandom. That doesn’t just make a conlang useful. “Once it starts to have real speakers,” Mikaelon says, “in a way, it becomes a real language too.”

Read or listen to an audio version via the link above!

[elizabethminkel]

Maria is SUCH a good reporter, and this piece was a real joy to edit. My assumptions around conlangs (either as something that purely extends from canon *or* as something that's totally about language learning and not about the source material) were upended by this—it's a mix of that whole spectrum, but mostly, it's very community oriented. She interviewed so many speakers of the big fictional languages, and I learned a ton about these corners of fandom! Highly recommend this piece.

[fansplaining]

Throughout this season, we’ve seen how Louis’ grief for Claudia is the deepest wound in his life, sending him down dark paths of violence and delusion. Yet that grief is shaped by selfishness and disrespect, expanding out from his sense of ownership over Claudia to the disaster of his transactional relationship with Regina. Season 2 ended with Louis displaying Claudia’s dress in his home as part of a family shrine. Yet, from Claudia’s perspective, that dress is just another possession that he hangs on his walls alongside his art collection. Finally able to share her own side of the story, all Claudia wants to say is that she hates Louis, hates Lestat, and never wants to hear from them again. Targeting Lestat for his part in the Paris trial, she dismisses the song he wrote in her honor, aligning it as an act of vanity alongside Louis hanging up her dress.

In her analysis of The Vampire Lestat episode 6, @hellotailor writes about how when we finally hear Claudia's own words in the seance scene, she obliterates Louis and Lestat's self-centered perceptions of her life and death. 

Read or listen to an audio version:

The Vampire Lestat: Sparing the Ambiguity

In episode 6, “Montreal,” Louis and Lestat share a tumultuous night ahead of Lestat’s farewell show.

[fansplaining]

The Vampire Lestat: Sparing the Ambiguity

In episode 6, “Montreal,” Louis and Lestat share a tumultuous night ahead of Lestat’s farewell show.

Our Vampire Lestat episode 6 recap is live! 🩸✨ @hellotailor breaks down the first chronological episode of the season: "Blessedly," she writes, it's essentially "an extended conversation between our two lead characters."

For most of this season, Lestat has spent every waking hour with his band and entourage (whom he keeps at arm’s length) or with Gabriella (a bottomless source of emotional exhaustion). Meanwhile, Louis has been lonely in a different way, attempting to pursue a healthy relationship with Lemuel (who mostly remains offscreen) before embroiling himself in a toxic situation with Regina. With a few months’ distance from episode 5, Louis and Lestat are now in the right headspace to spend an entire night together as companions, tacitly confirming that every other relationship in their lives is secondary. 

Read or listen to an audio version via the link above!

[elizabethminkel]

Tied for my favorite episode of the season (with 3), I could not WAIT for folks to get here. As Gav writes, the final moments in the park before [redacted] are "a testament to how much character development this show can cram into one episode." And just wild performances from all involved! (That fight scene is one for the record books.)

[fansplaining]

The Vampire Lestat: Sparing the Ambiguity

In episode 6, “Montreal,” Louis and Lestat share a tumultuous night ahead of Lestat’s farewell show.

Our Vampire Lestat episode 6 recap is live! 🩸✨ @hellotailor breaks down the first chronological episode of the season: "Blessedly," she writes, it's essentially "an extended conversation between our two lead characters."

For most of this season, Lestat has spent every waking hour with his band and entourage (whom he keeps at arm’s length) or with Gabriella (a bottomless source of emotional exhaustion). Meanwhile, Louis has been lonely in a different way, attempting to pursue a healthy relationship with Lemuel (who mostly remains offscreen) before embroiling himself in a toxic situation with Regina. With a few months’ distance from episode 5, Louis and Lestat are now in the right headspace to spend an entire night together as companions, tacitly confirming that every other relationship in their lives is secondary. 

Read or listen to an audio version via the link above!

[fansplaining]

The Vampire Lestat: Sparing the Ambiguity

In episode 6, “Montreal,” Louis and Lestat share a tumultuous night ahead of Lestat’s farewell show.

Our Vampire Lestat episode 6 recap is live! 🩸✨ @hellotailor breaks down the first chronological episode of the season: "Blessedly," she writes, it's essentially "an extended conversation between our two lead characters."

For most of this season, Lestat has spent every waking hour with his band and entourage (whom he keeps at arm’s length) or with Gabriella (a bottomless source of emotional exhaustion). Meanwhile, Louis has been lonely in a different way, attempting to pursue a healthy relationship with Lemuel (who mostly remains offscreen) before embroiling himself in a toxic situation with Regina. With a few months’ distance from episode 5, Louis and Lestat are now in the right headspace to spend an entire night together as companions, tacitly confirming that every other relationship in their lives is secondary. 

Read or listen to an audio version via the link above!

[fansplaining]

Need to catch up before tonight's penultimate episode of The Vampire Lestat? You can find all of @hellotailor's recaps up to this point here:

Reporting, criticism, and more, all by, for, and about fandom.

[fansplaining]

Fansplaining, the publication by, for, and about fandom, is excited to expand our freelancer pool and open to pitches.

Fansplaining is officially open for pitches! 🥳 Please read our guide to get a sense of what we're looking for, and if you have any questions we haven't answered here, feel free to get in touch! [email protected] 

[lincodega]

We've all got our Favorite Topics, and some of mine are:

Eroticism, porn, and smut

Virality and popularity within fandom culture

Tabletop roleplaying games, text-based roleplaying, and OC culture

Pitches on niche projects or subjects within big fandoms and large franchises like Supernatural and Marvel 

The intersection of drag and fandom

Fandoms around “prestige” shows like Severance, Widow’s Bay, Half Man, etc.

Contemporary trend pieces (you have to have at least three examples for it to be a trend!)

if you've got THOUGHTS and can write an ARTICLE about it I want to knowwwwwwww. Pitch us!!!

[fansplaining]

Fansplaining, the publication by, for, and about fandom, is excited to expand our freelancer pool and open to pitches.

Fansplaining is officially open for pitches! 🥳 Please read our guide to get a sense of what we're looking for, and if you have any questions we haven't answered here, feel free to get in touch! [email protected] 

[elizabethminkel]

We posted our Official Pitching Guidelines TM yesterday, and we are now open to any and all pitches!

One thing I'd say to Tumblr folks in particular is every day on this website, I read more thoughtful, smart, nuanced analysis—on fandom itself, or on books/films/TV/etc with fannish followings—than like 95% of what gets published in the media. We want to publish you! I absolutely understand wanting to keep stuff as fandom meta, which is an important practice, but if you have a broader idea you've been itching to expand with the guidance of an editor, please consider pitching. You don't need to have been published in a journalistic outlet before—just share some writing that gives us a sense of your analysis.

[fansplaining]

Many of today’s fandom meltdowns feel much like the ones of the past, just hyper-scaled to match the size and pace of modern online life. But the latest blow up in the Heated Rivalry fandom feels like something new. Conflict has always been a part of online fandom, but generative AI destabilizes fandom at its core by destabilizing the entire idea of community. On an internet in which it is increasingly difficult to determine if the words in the fic you're reading, or the comments on the fic, were even human, what’s left? If we can’t figure out collective ways to mediate the threat AI poses, then fandom’s function as a digital space where we gather to connect and share is at risk of being destroyed. 

In our latest, Kayti Burt reports on the fallout around the "Fandom Has a Hidden Generative AI Problem" document, which pointed at a host of fic writers, many from the Heated Rivalry fandom, who had residue of Claude outputs in the HTML of their stories:

Heated Rivalry is at the Center of Fanfic’s AI Reckoning

A controversial anonymous document exposing Claude remnants in fics has collided with a fandom culture of production at hyper-speed.

[fansplaining]

Heated Rivalry is at the Center of Fanfic’s AI Reckoning

A controversial anonymous document exposing Claude remnants in fics has collided with a fandom culture of production at hyper-speed.

Our latest is live! 🏒 Kayti Burt reports on the fallout around the recent document attempting to identify fanfiction authors using AI, and how Heated Rivalry is ground zero for fandom's broader reckoning with AI-generated text on all sides:

“Fandom Has A Hidden Generative AI Problem” gives shape to a breakdown in a basic social contract for online fandom and all online community and discourse. While fanfiction writing is  generally pseudonymous, readers have historically at least been able to rely on the assumption that a fellow human being is writing the story they are reading. With the introduction of AI, that fundamental pact between fic writer and fic reader has been fractured. Fandom is a place for people to be in community together—to bond over shared obsessions in a way that can make us feel a little less alone. Realizing someone has outsourced that connection to a machine can make us feel even more alone.

Read or listen to an audio version via the link above!

[elizabethminkel]

Since this falls within my general beat, I obviously have been paying attention to AI and fanfiction pretty closely since these tools were released to the general public. I was not surprised to see this come to a head in Heated Rivalry—truly bananas numbers of fics being posted and updated, huge pools of readers and writers trying fandom for the first time, the promise of Manacled-esque P2P mega-deals in the air.

As always, Kayti is a pleasure to edit, even on such a bleak topic: she's an extremely sharp and thorough reporter, and she captures a variety of fan reactions here, including nuanced interviews with several fic writers. This whole debacle is not an isolated incident, and I'm not sure how we (fanfiction writers and readers) are going to get through this. If fic is going to become something you churn out with a machine in the hopes of getting a publishing deal, where does that leave those of us who actually love writing about these characters for the joy of it?

[fansplaining]

Heated Rivalry is at the Center of Fanfic’s AI Reckoning

A controversial anonymous document exposing Claude remnants in fics has collided with a fandom culture of production at hyper-speed.

Our latest is live! 🏒 Kayti Burt reports on the fallout around the recent document attempting to identify fanfiction authors using AI, and how Heated Rivalry is ground zero for fandom's broader reckoning with AI-generated text on all sides:

“Fandom Has A Hidden Generative AI Problem” gives shape to a breakdown in a basic social contract for online fandom and all online community and discourse. While fanfiction writing is  generally pseudonymous, readers have historically at least been able to rely on the assumption that a fellow human being is writing the story they are reading. With the introduction of AI, that fundamental pact between fic writer and fic reader has been fractured. Fandom is a place for people to be in community together—to bond over shared obsessions in a way that can make us feel a little less alone. Realizing someone has outsourced that connection to a machine can make us feel even more alone.

Read or listen to an audio version via the link above!

[fansplaining]

Fansplaining, the publication by, for, and about fandom, is excited to expand our freelancer pool and open to pitches.

Fansplaining is officially open for pitches! 🥳 Please read our guide to get a sense of what we're looking for, and if you have any questions we haven't answered here, feel free to get in touch! [email protected] 

[hellotailor]

The Vampire Lestat: The Queen of the Damned

In episode 5, “New York,” Lestat strips back his rock-star facade and confronts his memories of Akasha.

"There’s no way of knowing how Claudia might have behaved if she'd lived to see 2025, but Louis’ fantasy is embarrassingly shallow, opening with Claudia smiling sweetly and telling him that she missed him (would she really??) before segueing into small-talk about Louis’ latest business ventures. Much like with Daniel Molloy and Miss Lily, he’s paying someone to listen to him—now with an increased level of emotional baggage. Is Regina doing a convincing impression of Claudia? Obviously not! She’s basing her entire performance on secondhand accounts from Daniel’s book. Her job is to enact a vague outline of a happy family dinner, and in the same way that people manage to fall in love with chatbots, Louis’ imagination does the rest of the work.   In reality, Louis and Claudia’s relationship was far more contentious.  Much of their conflict stemmed from Louis feeling a sense of ownership over Claudia, leading all the way back to the moment of her turning: a horrifying scene where Louis dragged her body across the floor like a ragdoll and begged Lestat to give her the Gift. In the years after her transformation, her fathers kept her in a childish role that she quickly outgrew. The casting change from Bailey Bass to Delainey Hayles became an unintentionally effective transition point between Claudia’s adolescence and adulthood, when she and Louis began living as brother and sister. The complexity of this relationship can’t be translated into a staged hangout with Regina and her actress friend."

[fansplaining]

The Vampire Lestat: The Queen of the Damned

In episode 5, “New York,” Lestat strips back his rock-star facade and confronts his memories of Akasha.

Our Vampire Lestat episode 5 recap is live! 🩸✨ @hellotailor writes about Lestat's memories of Akasha, the continuation of Louis's tangled mess with Regina, and additional fuel for the Devil's Minion fire.

Of the latter, she writes:

For this relationship to work out, Daniel has to accept Armand as he is, and I think we see hints of that already. His initial reaction to Armand’s confession was defensiveness and disgust, demanding that Armand “prove it.” But once Armand really gets into the thick of his monologue, he brings Daniel to the brink of tears. Eric Bogosian plays this as if he’s physically trying to shake off the intimacy of their shared memories, as Armand talks about watching Daniel weep after his estranged daughter’s graduation. Armand claims that his feelings for Daniel outweigh his decades-long partnership with Louis, because neither half of that marriage could have the man they wanted. He only kept Daniel at arm’s length because he was mortal, but now that they’re both vampires, they might finally come together as two lonely halves of a maker/fledgling bond.

Read or listen to an audio version via the link above!

[elizabethminkel]

Just wanted to note that when I was editing this, I highlighted "two lonely halves of a maker/fledgling bond" with the comment, "you are so devil's minion pilled". Gav, of course, cannot and would not deny it.

Hard to believe we're nearing the end of the season already! This episode has so many interesting elements—Akasha, of course, and the way you can start to see Louis and Lestat's storylines coming together outside of, like, divorce-baiting shenanigans (love those too ofc).

Become a subscriber (our BITEME sale is still going strong!) or buy one-off access for just $1 to read or listen to Gav's audio version!