30+ | they/them | fangirl, complainer, hateful sjw | psa: the search box has never worked and I doubt it ever will HOLY SHIT IT FINALLY WORKS THAT'S BEEN IN MY BLOG HEADER FOR YEARS, YOU FINALLY DID IT SEARCH FUNCTION 8/3/16 NEVER FORGET
first a club room for their small gatherings (some fans at the time estimated there were only 200 or 300 "actifans" in the whole US). Here they gathered their fanmags (the word "fanzine" was a work in progress), their professional mags like Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, Weird Tales, and others, most named under the same basic scheme which must have made things rather confusing. In these days "fanfiction" and "fanart" were not about other people's characters and worlds, but only served to distinguish which original science fiction had made it past an editor to be professionally published. Plenty of fans dreamed of going pro, and if a piece was rejected from a promag, they might just send it to a friend and have it mimeo'd into a fanmag instead. (Not printed! Literal printing looked great, but it was incredibly expensive back then, and running a printed fanmag/zine with a machine that had to be rented or borrowed sent a number of fans into the red.)
The fanzine side of things is represented by a little cartoonist setup: Harry Warner, Jr. wrote an article in 1941 about all the physical work that went into putting a fanmag together, estimating that it took him about three hours a day to assemble and mimeograph his well-viewed publications, Spaceways and Horizons. In 1939, Warner estimated that Spaceways had a circulation of 110.
At the time, there was hot debate over the split between hard science fans, who thought the purpose of fandom should be encouraging young men to go into real scientific careers, and the more carefree set who enjoyed sci-fi (called scientifiction or stf. at the time) for the story and art aspect. Hugo Gernsback was the most prominent advocate for the hard-science view, and among fans there was William Sykora, who led a fan club called the International Scientific Association. Sykora's resignation as the ISA's chairman would prove to be the spark that lit the flame of fandom's biggest early feud: New Fandom vs. the Futurians.
Sykora resigned both because of his college workload and because he felt the club was neglecting its original purpose of encouraging scientific study. When his friend and ally Don Wollheim took over as chairman, he found the ISA's membership and finances in such a bad state that he disbanded it—which did not sit well with Sykora when he inevitably returned to fandom and wanted his club back. The hard-science faction is represented in my club room with all sorts of scientific things, including a rocket, because there were clubs that were actually sending some small ones up.
You will also see on the side a little occultic setup for fans like Tigrina, who briefly fascinated the boys of the Los Angeles Scientific League when she wrote in to discuss Satanism. Under her real name, Edythe Eyde, she went on to create the first lesbian zine in the US, after a stint as the LASFL's secretary.
The second room, representing the early conventions, begins with some liquor bottles for the Futurians, and a lucha libre corner for Sykora and Wollheim to duke it out. (Not pictured: the outside jail pen I constructed for Sykora and Forrest J Ackerman, the two sex offenders of First Fandom.)
Here we see a projector for the films shown: "Metropolis" at Worldcon 1939 (obtained by New Fandom; noted Communist Don Wollheim had sent a postcard to his mortal enemies in the leadup to the con, forcing them to issue a public statement that they did not send any money to Nazi Germany in order to acquire the film); at Worldcon 1940, a fan film called "Monsters of the Moon" was put together by noted fan Bob Tucker, using clips from actual movies provided by Forrest J Ackerman. In 1941, it was back to full-length films with The Lost World.
Also at Worldcon 1940, cosplay really began to get off the ground, although Morojo and Ackerman had attended the previous year's convention in futuristic costumes of their own design. First prize at the costume party went to provocateur Dave Kyle as Emperor Ming, while others went as Buck Rogers, a nurse, Giles Habibula, the Invisible Man (covered in bandages), various spacemen dressed in robes, and so forth.
The Decker Dillies, a small club from Indiana with no BNFs, nonetheless made a big splash by bringing their skeleton, Oscar, to the proceedings.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were among these early fans, and Superman made his debut in one of their fanzines before he ever saw the pages of DC Comics. According to Bob Tucker, Siegel attended Worldcon 1940, dressed in his street clothes, and when asked where his Superman suit was, he "looked pained and patiently explained we should know it was beneath his clothes."
Not pictured: the boxcar that Olon Wiggin and Lew Martin rode to the convention, traveling in the cold for 30 hours. They won an award for surmounting the greatest difficulty in order to attend, and successfully pitched Denver as next year's host city.
At Worldcon 1941, Erle Korshak brought a skeleton head for the costume party (as a "deathshead") that was reportedly auctioned off to guest speaker Robert Heinlein, who proceeded to offer it back up for auction. Other costumes included Forrest Ackerman as the Hunchback of Notre Dame, with a mask made by Ray Harryhausen himself; E. E. Evans as a BEM described as a "Bird Man from Rhea" with individually applied feathers; Walt Daugherty as a space pilot, using junked materials from the airplane factory where he worked; Old Granny from Slan and a variety of other copyrighted characters.
in the corner, hovering over all, we have Art Widner's car, known to his fellow fans as FooFoo Special, a kind of embodied creature occasionally referenced in fanzines. It was especially noted for the ride Widner took to the 1941 Worldcon with some fellow fans. Jack Speer also had a named car, unfortunately known as the Panzerkampfwagen (technically his brother's), which was used to conduct "the Philadelphia Blitzkrieg", an incident in which he, Elmer Perdue and Milton Rothman drove to Philadelphia to acquire materials for a FAPA zine mailing that the local fans had lost interest in mailing out themselves.
1941 was the first semi-recorded Worldcon, with fan Walt Daugherty recording as much of the proceedings as he possibly could, and offering selected copies of the records for sale later. E. E. Evans reported that the whole thing took up about 70 full records, recorded on both sides. Daugherty also handed out medals he had made for the best zine awards.
in 2024 I felt like I was ready to articulate exactly what troubled me about the way that Neil Gaiman cultivated an image and a particular relationship with his fandom and then. well. and the thing is that it would still have troubled me if he hadn’t turned out to be an evil rapist and was just kind of a self-obsessed guy with poor boundaries, but now it’s impossible to talk about that lol.
I am interested in what you have to say. I am interested in your perspective on this matter of reputation, fandom, and social/parasocial relationships.
I have tried but honestly I can’t really rewind my own brain to 2024 before the scandals broke and when it was all fresh in my mind due to the excitement around the Good Omens show. Ultimately it came down to having bad boundaries with his own fandom… the “rockstar” thing was very purposefully cultivated, and he got way too comfortable publicly encouraging a really extreme degree of hero worship in a way that felt deeply irresponsible from a public figure.
Like… his tumblr was quite active, his askbox was open, and he no doubt received dozens to thousands of asks per day. The ones he chose to publish were frequently over-the-top “you’re literally the reason I’m still breathing” “your books are so important to me I’m going to name my ovaries after you” type shit that’s like… personally I think you have to be a little bit of a creep not to find kind of uncomfortable. He would never attempt to graciously de-escalate or redirect that sort of interaction and really normalized it as the way to speak to and think about him while also courting the down-to-Earth and accessible Tumblr uncle thing. Just. Like. He made himself irresistible to a kind of psychologically vulnerable young queer woman hungry for validation in a way I had thought was shameless and irresponsible and retroactively think was very calculated.
Somebody PLEASE tell me why the Tomodachis can have fights between an adult and a child where the adult tells the SMALL CHILD, "I won't forgive you"? Imaoka made Chibita depressed and I wanted to pick him up and drop him into the ocean
Less than a quarter of the agreed upon number of aid trucks are entering the Gaza Strip and much of it is commercial, meaning that people need MONEY to buy their basic needs. Money that they don’t have as most people don’t have income and lost their livelihood during the genocide.
The Sameer Project was forced to reduce water by 50% last week, stopped grocery vouchers for 100 families, reduced hours in our two medical points and is no longer taking individual medical cases.
DISASTROUS is an understatement for the situation in Gaza so we beg you to mobilize, fundraise, donate, send emails, share and do everything you can to support our people in Gaza!
Donate to the Food & Water Campaign https://chuffed.org/project/help-us-deliver-vital-aid-to-gaza-families-in-need
paypal.me/mahertali (Paypal option, please make sure to add a message saying "Water")
http://account.venmo.com/u/Maher-Ali (Venmo option, please make sure to add a message saying "Water")
If you have the means, consider donating to the Khartoum Aid Kitchen which feeds around 20,000 people a day in Sudan, who are suffering from extreme starvation.
The War in Sudan has created the World’s largest Humanitarian cris… Mustafa Ibrahim needs your support for Fight Hunger in Sudan: The Khart
Some recent posts of theirs with information about what they do:
While I'm at it, why do so many reasonable (?) people hear Chuck say, "Jimmy started working at the store when he was 9, and when it started failing, I discovered large amounts of money missing from the books", and interpret this as "when Jimmy was 9 Chuck already wanted him dead for stealing from the till", instead of the much more logical "Jimmy was 18 or 20, probably not working there anymore, by the time Chuck checked the books, and he made this assumption based on witnessing Jimmy's ongoing bad behavior and scamming by that older age"? Because obviously a number of years passed between "Jimmy 9" and "Chuck angry", based on simple logic, the sum of $14,000, and the fact that Chuck says, "over the years," in his story. Time travels one way. Chuck thinking Jimmy began doing something at 9, later on, doesn't mean he was ever "beefing with a 9-year-old".
Sometimes I like checking in on the BCS subreddit and seeing people talk about their version of the characters, like when they talk about Chuck as if he spent his life being, like, Confederate General Ebenezer Scrooge, which actually seems to be countered by a number of things in canon. He talks about wanting his house to be filled with music and friends! He can sing ABBA songs, his ex-wife still cares about him and he freely admits that he still has feelings for her in public, he has an entire building full of people come out and give him a round of applause when he comes back in for an hour or two—he was not a no-fun social recluse before he got sick. He resents Jimmy's charm not because he's completely inept himself, but because Jimmy is so good at it that he can get himself out of trouble effortlessly. Even with their parents, who should value them both equally; even his wife, the one person who chose him above everyone else, and should be reliably on his side and able to see through Jimmy's cheap tricks.
So I want to start by saying that I personally gravitate towards extremely niche ships where I'm often the only person who's interested. Because of that, I try to keep a very high standard of what I consider "intentional subtext". I've seen a lot of fandom theories where the person is clearly just spiraling and making things up out of a desire to validate their ship and make it more popular, and I really don't want that to happen to me just because I wound up in a space where no one is peer reviewing my opinions.
However. Lux-Pain does contain the following things:
An explicitly gay adult man with romantic feelings for another man
A lot of very intentional yaoi bait with the teenagers
A fujoshi character who comments on the above
According to a link on TVTropes, shortly after the game's release, the director commented on Atsuki/Liu Yee being popular with fans (on his now-dead blog)
A location (the radio tower) that references a real spree killing incident, the one that sparked the "denpa" genre as a whole
So, taking all of that into account, I don't think I'm reaching too far to say that Hoshino and Yamato's sad little aborted revolution is somewhat reminiscent of Yukio Mishima's attempt to overthrow the Japanese government, and that Hoshino's crashout where he thinks of Yamato as his "soulmate" seems like he could very well have feelings for him.
Within the game itself, I don't think I would consider Hoshino to be "a gay character" in the way Inagaki is—but in Japan, especially at the time this game was being written, there's a very different spectrum of what constitutes "gay". In Western media, if a character does or feels something gay, that's enough for (reasonable) people to say, okay, the character is officially gay/bi/whatever. However, Japanese media fans don't see things that way. They don't expect the character's identity to be confirmed the way we do. Thus there's a pretty big industry of bait-y media full of pretty boys or pretty girls, that centers around them having interactions that are written very deliberately to draw in shippers. With (let's say) American media, when a character behave like that, we envision them going to Pride: appearing in online lists of Gay Characters; showing up on the cover of Out or Advocate. We assume their goal in life is to find a same-sex partner or come out publicly, and if they don't do this we see them as closeted: the unhappy ending.
However, the Japanese characters are not considered "gay characters". They may even be written to show a little token interest in the opposite sex, even though that's not what the majority of fans are there for. Some franchises will show obvious signs of the creators wanting the characters to be officially gay, like Love Live specifying that men can't be shown in canon at all, but in general, making a character Officially Gay is seen as even more of a political statement than it is in America, and except in niche art, it's almost unheard of to make such a statement with a main character.
The issue is that (speaking in terms of 2007, when Lux-Pain came out) even though Japan's homophobia isn't the aggressive, stamp-this-out religious thing it is in America, and many people are actually pretty open to doing gay things, declaring yourself a gay person is more difficult than it is in most parts of America. It's seen as making trouble for other people by asking for special treatment. Gay behavior in private can be tolerated because you're not imposing on others, and sometimes it's seen as sort of a phase for young people before they go on to get married like a normal person. Making a big deal about your identity, demanding that people acknowledge and accept it even if it's very different from the mainstream, is not quite as popular. To use an example, look at Kaworu from NGE. To many Western fans, the question was twofold: does Kaworu love Shinji, and, is Kaworu gay? Is he a gay man? Do we look at him and categorize him differently from characters like Kaji or Toji? If someone was trying to disprove KawoShin, the go-to argument was, "You can't prove Kaworu is gay—and even if you can prove it, Shinji isn't." It was not, "Shinji doesn't like Kaworu like that." The two questions were inextricably intertwined.
Meanwhile, to many Japanese fujoshi—even though there is official material where Asuka explicitly mocks Kaworu as a "homo"—the relevant part of "homo" was not necessarily, "Is Kaworu-kun attracted to men in general, exclusive of women?" so much as, "Kaworu-kun is attracted to Shinji, which makes KawoShin shippers happy." If you look up "カヲル ゲイ" or "カヲル ホモ", you can still find a number of responses saying things that are not really typical of how Western fans try to debunk gay ships. They'll say things like, "He loves Shinji's existence, and he still would even if Shinji were a girl, so he can't be considered 'a gay character'". Here the resistance is not to labeling his behavior as love or attraction to another boy, but to labeling the character as gay, as someone whose identity excludes the possibility of normative behavior. And in turn, Japanese fans don't see it as off-limits to ship Kaworu with girls. He does get shipped with both Asuka and Rei.
So all that to say, we can't say that Hoshino is an officially gay character in the same way as Inagaki. Inagaki is the gay character, the one and only character allowed to be the gay one. By virtue of his existence, every other character is excluded from being an official gay person—as in identity, not in action or ship teasing. In a way, he almost exists in the story to make the ship-teasing with other characters less socially threatening. As long as he's the (secretly) femme gay guy, the audience can be sure that none of the main characters will be anything less than acceptably masculine. And in Inagaki's case, while he's much kinder representation than a lot of token single gays in anime (not trying to hit on Atsuki takes him well over the finish line), there are still limits in place. We can be pretty sure, for instance, that his crush is straight and won't be returning his feelings.
With Hoshino, meanwhile, the topic is barely even addressed, and there are just a couple of quick possibilities: Hoshino briefly thinks of Yamato as "my blood brother... my soulmate, even", and he's shown to be unmarried at 40—although this last and his hairstyle are both supposed to be because he spent most of his life in the army. Lux-Pain's impact in Japan has mostly been wiped away, and ironically the terrible English localization has been responsible for most of its lasting impact, so ultimately it's hard to say whether these things would have been seen as subtext for Japanese gamers.
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