Feb 13, 2025
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New generations of fans are cultural archaeologists, working with the materials of the past to create the passion of the present.
As 2024 wraps up, we're highlighting the incredible reporting and commentary we've been able to publish this year thanks to your continued financial support. (If you'd like to help us publish more in 2025, click that link! Even $1 a month helps.)
Today, we're re-sharing our October piece, @areyougonnabe's deep dive into modern-day Beatles fandom, and the pleasures of RPF at a historical distance:
Today’s young Beatles fans can consume every atom of sound and image from the 1960s, but however fond they are of Ringo’s silly tweets or Paul’s new music, there’s a line of demarcation somewhere in the past which spiritually separates then from now. Real-time, ongoing celebrity pop culture can be full of anxieties, but an older band’s story can be more like reading a book that was already written.
Click through to read or listen to an audio version!
New generations of fans are cultural archaeologists, working with the materials of the past to create the passion of the present.
We're thrilled to publish our newest piece—this time by a returning writer. @areyougonnabe first wrote for us about Tumblr back in 2020 (and also was one of the podcast's final guests this year before we went on hiatus). Now she's back with a deep dive into contemporary classic rock fandom—the shippy, transformative kind—and the interesting temporal shift that happens within historical RPF:
Today’s young Beatles fans can consume every atom of sound and image from the 1960s, but however fond they are of Ringo’s silly tweets or Paul’s new music, there’s a line of demarcation somewhere in the past which spiritually separates then from now. Real-time, ongoing celebrity pop culture can be full of anxieties, but an older band’s story can be more like reading a book that was already written.
Read or listen to an audio version via the link above—and to support more in-depth fan culture journalism, consider becoming a patron!
It kind of awakened me like a sleeper agent, this interest in history, and in studying history, that I had heretofore never experienced. I mean, my only sort of thing that I can compare to the way that The Terror made me feel, the way that I dove headfirst into the history behind the show, is like when I got into a band and I would go on the Wayback Machine and look at all their old MySpaces and, like, try to find every picture of them from 2004. Except now it’s, like, dead guys from 100 years ago. But it’s the same, my attention was directed in the same way.
— @areyougonnabe on the most recent episode of the podcast, discussing her newly discovered love of polar history and how that led her to organize the hybrid fan-academic conference Terror Camp. Listen to the whole conversation or read a full transcript!
Episode 216: Allegra Rosenberg
On Episode 216, “Allegra Rosenberg,” Elizabeth and Flourish talk to the fandom journalist and con organizer about her journey from tween fan reporter to writing a book about the pre-digital history of fan culture. Topics discussed include coming of age on Tumblr, learning to put on IRL events while deep in music fandom, getting that fannish feeling from immersive theater, and, of course, @terrorcamp, a fandom-academia hybrid event that celebrates fans’ investment in historical research.
Click through to our site to listen or read a full transcript!
creating a podcast by, for & about fandom
We just released our newest episode—a conversation with the delightful @areyougonnabe—for patrons at $2 a month and up. ❄️ To get early access to this and all future episodes, pledge today!
Everybody left on Tumblr who’s pretty funny is a chucklefuck, such as myself, who just wants to do it because it’s fun.
@benepla speaking the truth in @areyougonnabe’s piece about Tumblr in 2020, “The Ever-Mutating Life of Tumblr Dot Com”
But [Tumblr’s] value, of course, is more than just what it isn’t, and what it points away from. Despite all the drama and discourse lurking in its corners, it’s easy to make your own Tumblr life as simple and as happy as you want it to be. There are no algorithmic threats lurking around every corner, no onslaught of promoted posts from politicians or influencers. More than anything else, Tumblr in 2020 is a self-sustaining ecosystem. It’s a semi-sealed and increasingly fertile terrarium, a nigh-impossible perpetual-motion machine of a platform going productively psychotic in its isolation.
@areyougonnabe, “The Ever-Mutating Life of Tumblr Dot Com”