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case posting in fandomsecrets| RULES: 1. One secret link per comment. 2. 750x750 px or smaller. 3. Link directly to the image. More details on how to send a secret in! Optional: If you would like your secret's fandom to be noted in the main post along with the secret itself, please put it in the comment along with your secret. If your secret makes the fandom obvious, there's no need to do this. If your fandom is obscure, you should probably tell me what it is. Optional #2: If you would like WARNINGS (such as spoilers or common triggers -- list of some common ones here) to be noted in the main post before the secret itself, please put it in the comment along with your secret. Optional #3: If you would like a transcript to be posted along with your secret, put it along with the link in the comment! |
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otw_news_feedMediafans, a multifandom fanfiction archive, and Futures Without End, a Duncan/Methos zine it hosted, are being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).
In this post:
Mediafans was a personal fanworks archive for creators Rachael Sabotini and Melina, as well as several other creators. It also hosted the Highlander zine Futures Without End, which was started by Melina and Maygra de Rhema and ran for four issues. Mediafans went offline in 2013, taking digital access to Futures Without End with it.
The purpose of the Open Doors Committee’s Online Archive Rescue Project is to assist moderators of archives to incorporate the fanworks from those archives into the Archive of Our Own. Open Doors works with moderators to import their archives when the moderators lack the funds, time, or other resources to continue to maintain their archives independently. It is extremely important to Open Doors that we work in collaboration with moderators who want to import their archives and that we fully credit creators, giving them as much control as possible over their fanworks. Open Doors will be working with Melina to import Mediafans and Futures Without End into separate, searchable collections on the Archive of Our Own. As part of preserving the archives in their entirety, all fanfiction and fanart currently in the archive and zine will be hosted on the OTW’s servers, and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.
We will begin importing works from Mediafans and Futures Without End to AO3 after May. However, the import may not take place for several months or even years, depending on the size and complexity of the archive. Creators are always welcome to import their own works and add them to the collection in the meantime.
We will send an import notification to the email address we have for each creator. We’ll do our best to check for an existing copy of any works before importing. If we find a copy already on AO3, we will add it to the collection instead of importing it. All works archived on behalf of a creator will include their name in the byline or the summary of the work.
All imported works will be set to be viewable only by logged-in AO3 users. Once you claim your works, you can make them publicly-viewable if you choose. After 30 days, all unclaimed imported works will be made visible to all visitors.
Please contact Open Doors with your Mediafans or Futures Without End pseud(s) and email address(es), if:
Please include the name of the archive in the subject heading of your email. If you no longer have access to the email account associated with Mediafans or Futures Without End, please contact Open Doors and we’ll help you out. (If you’ve posted the works elsewhere, or have an easy way to verify that they’re yours, that’s great; if not, we will work with Melina to confirm your claims.)
Please see the Open Doors Website for instructions on:
If you have further questions, visit the Open Doors FAQ, or contact the Open Doors committee.
We’d also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of Mediafans and Futures Without End on Fanlore. If you’re new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.
We’re excited to be able to help preserve Mediafans and Futures Without End!
– The Open Doors team and Melina
Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.
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wwdn_feedI want to take a moment and say thank you for all the messages of comfort and support that so many of y’all have shared with me since Marlowe passed. I haven’t ever felt this kind of grief, for this long, in my life. When I am feeling the most sad, when I’m sobbing until I can’t breathe, I feel closest to her, so all I can do is go through it, honor it, and embrace her memory.
There’s a dog on Instagram called Wesley the Chicken Nugget. I adore him, and I love it when his person shares photos and video of him being a dog, so I completely understand how we can love animals we’ve never met. I know that lots of you loved Marlowe, and that comforts me every day.
So thank you, from Anne and me, for choosing to be kind.
I had to take a couple weeks off from recording stories for It’s Storytime (I’ve come to believe that four or five weeks of bereavement leave isn’t unreasonable) but we’re back to work and there’s a new story this week that I wanted everyone to know about.
It’s called To Carry You Inside You, by Tia Tashiro. Here’s my intro:
I grew up in the entertainment industry, not by choice, so I had a front row seat to the abuse and exploitation of child actors like myself. I grew up absolutely terrified of upsetting anyone on the set, robotically doing whatever I was told, so I could just get through it and have one of the precious and rare hours of my childhood where I got to just be a kid, before I was ripped out of childhood and thrust back into a place I never wanted to be.
Today, we are going to visit a future where child actors are still exploited, still used up and discarded, facing an adult life without purpose, that they were never prepared for, because nobody cared what happened to them past an arbitrary age.
We will meet a young woman who is doing her best to assemble the pieces of a stolen childhood into a fulfilling adult life. It isn’t what she wanted, or would have chosen for herself, but she’s doing her best, which is all any of us can do.
This is one of those examples of speculative fiction that I point to when I talk about the power of storytelling that lands on different people for different reasons. This story isn’t about me, but holy shit is it about me. In fact, when I reached out to Tia and asked for permission to do the narration, I mentioned that she captured the experience of being a child actor so perfectly and honestly, she must have some firsthand experience … imagine my surprise when she told me that she didn’t, that she used her imagination to create those moments.
Holy shit. That’s incredible. Please let me know what you think, if you listen.
Anyway, I’m doing my best to promote the show and just let people know it exists, but I keep getting crushed by the algorithm. On Threads, the posts before and after I talked about the podcast have thousands of views and hundreds of interactions, but my post about this episode has like 20 interactions and has only been seen by about 2000 of the 5000000 accounts that follow me. That seems … odd. And honestly, it’s kind demoralizing that one of the few direct ways I have to tell people this exists seems to work against supporting that. I’ve tried letting Bluesky know, and the 13 people who tend to notice me there are excited about it, I’m sure, but it just doesn’t seem to get traction there at all. If anyone reading this has experience bringing something to an audience who will probably love it, but just don’t know about it, I’d be grateful to hear anything you have to say about it.
Last thing, that is explicitly in service of promotion: If you listen to the podcast, you can help me out by rating and reviewing it wherever you are subscribed. The show’s audience is growing slowly but steadily, and I know it isn’t because of me; it’s because listeners are recommending it. That means so much to me. Thank you.
otw_news_feedAO3 Tag Wranglers continue to test processes for wrangling canonical additional tags (tags that appear in the auto-complete) which don’t belong to any particular fandom (also known as “No Fandom” tags). This post overviews some of these upcoming changes.
In this round of updates, we continued to adjust existing canonical “No Fandom” tags to add or remove new subtag and metatag relationships. We also continued to streamline creating new canonical tags, prioritizing more straightforward updates which would have less discussion compared to renaming current canonical tags or creating new canonical tags which touch on more complex topics. This method also reviews new tags on a regular basis, so check back on AO3 News for periodic “No Fandom” tag announcements.
None of these updates change the tags users have added to works. If a user-created tag is considered to have the same meaning as a new canonical, it will be made a synonym of one of these newly created canonical tags, and works with that user-created tag will appear when the canonical tag is selected.
In short, these changes only affect which tags appear in AO3’s auto-complete and filters. You can and should continue to tag your works however you prefer.
The following concepts have been made new canonical tags:
Additionally, we continued to adjust existing canonical tags to add or remove new subtag and metatag relationships, which help users find related content and filter in/out content as they browse works on AO3.
While some of these tags may be tags and concepts you’re intimately familiar with, others may be concepts you’ve never heard of before. Fortunately, our fellow OTW volunteers at Fanlore may be able to help! As you may have seen in the comments sections of previous posts, Fanlore is a fantastic resource for learning more about these common fandom concepts, and about the history and lore of fandom in general. For the curious, here’s a quick look at a few articles about concepts related to this month’s new canonical tags:
While we won’t be announcing every change we make to No Fandom canonical tags, you can expect similar updates in the future about tags we believe will most affect users. If you’re interested in the changes we’ll be making, you can continue to check AO3 News or follow us on Bluesky @wranglers.archiveofourown.org or Tumblr @ao3org for future announcements.
You can also read previous updates on “No Fandom” tags as well as other wrangling updates, linked below:
For more information about AO3’s tag system, check out our Tags FAQ.
In addition to providing technical help, AO3 Support also handles requests related to how tags are sorted and connected. If you have questions about specific tags, which were first used over a month ago and are unrelated to any of the new canonical tags listed above, please contact Support instead of leaving a comment on this post.
Please keep in mind that discussions about what tags to canonize and what format they should take are ongoing. As a result, not all related concepts will be canonized at the same time. This does not mean that related or similar concepts will not be canonized in the future or that we have chosen to canonize one specific concept in lieu of another, simply that we likely either haven’t gotten to that related concept yet or that it needs further discussion and will take a bit longer for us to canonize it as a result. We appreciate your patience and understanding.
Lastly, we’re still working on implementing changes and connecting relevant user-created tags to these new canonicals, so it’ll be some time before these updates are complete. If you have questions about specific tags which should be connected to these new canonicals, please refrain from contacting Support about them until at least three months from now to give us adequate time to do so.
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otw_news_feedEvery month in OTW Signal, we take a look at stories that connect to the OTW’s mission and projects, including issues related to legal matters, technology, academia, fannish history and preservation issues of fandom, fan culture, and transformative works.
A discussion on NPR Radio centered on a growing debate: should fanfiction have remained tucked away in private internet forums and zines, or was its advance into the mainstream inevitable and even beneficial?
That conversation seems to reflect a broader cultural shift, indicated by several recent news stories describing fanfiction as not only a major force in pop culture, but also a legitimate creative endeavor.
For example, in an article for Vogue, Alexandra Romanoff describes how fanfiction gave her the incentive to immerse herself in romance in her writing while helping her better understand story structure and how to develop a complete narrative.
I had such a specific vision in my head for how these people interacted, how they felt about their world and each other. Eventually, there was nothing to do but to start typing it all out into a Word doc.
This growing legitimacy is also reflected in fanfiction’s increased visibility in publishing and the media. In How fan fiction went mainstream, Danielle Hewitt and Noel King explain that after a wave of commercially successful books and films which began as fanworks, from 50 Shades of Grey and The Love Hypothesis to Heated Rivalry, publishers are now actively scouting fan spaces for talent—a dramatic reversal from earlier attitudes that treated fanfiction as something to hide.
I think part of it is just a broader mainstreaming of fanfic, and that people are kind of waving that fanfic flag proudly in a way that they hadn’t a decade or so ago. And if we’re understanding the structures of traditional publishing, whether it is the editors who are acquiring works or literary agents, a lot of these people are people who grew up on fan fiction, right? So they might not have the same hangups or ideas about fan fiction that previous generations had. They’re interested in it, and they see it as a legitimate form of writing.
Beyond publishing, fanfiction is also being recognized for being, at its core, a collaborative community. Writers create and share stories not for profit but for connection, creativity, and mutual enthusiasm. In a story for the University of Tennessee’s The Pacer, author Bethany Collins emphasizes this aspect, portraying fanfiction as one of the internet’s most honest and participatory forms of storytelling.
Fan fiction is unapologetically sincere. People are not pretending they are above caring. They are not hiding their excitement behind layers of irony. They are saying, very openly, “This story mattered to me, so I made something in response.” That kind of vulnerability can look embarrassing from the outside, especially in a culture that often rewards detachment and sarcasm. But it is also what makes these communities feel so human.
In fandom, emotion is not something to be hidden. It is the entire point.
An article published in The Harvard Gazette describes how the Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University’s primary location for East Asia-related collections, is building a unique collection of K-pop fan merchandise to chronicle the global rise and cultural impact of Korean pop music. The collection, which includes items from the 1990s to today, includes things like posters, magazines, and other fan goods tied to idol groups.
The project was inspired in part by a course on “Korean Stars” taught by Professor Chan Yong Bu, who uses these materials to help students understand how fandom, celebrity culture, and media industries shape K-pop’s success.
The Harvard Gazette article emphasizes that K-pop fandom has historical roots going back to early 20th-century Korean celebrity culture and evolved through television stars in the 1980s and first-generation idol groups in the 1990s.
Overall, the collection treats fan merchandise not just as memorabilia, but as important cultural artifacts that reveal how K-pop’s global influence is built, marketed, and experienced by fans.
Would you like to learn more about the preservation of fannish history? The AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP), a project of the OTW, is dedicated to the digital preservation of zines and other fannish artifacts, with permission from the creators and/or publishers. If you are interested in helping us preserve fanworks for the future, or if you have any questions about the FSHP, please contact the Open Doors committee!
We want your suggestions for the next OTW Signal post! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or news story you think we should know about, send us a link. We are looking for content in all languages! Submitting a link doesn’t guarantee that it will be included in an OTW post, and inclusion of a link doesn’t mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.
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otw_news_feedThe Organization for Transformative Works’s April Membership Drive is over and we are delighted to say that we are finishing with a total of $362,171.85 raised, far exceeding our goal of US$150,000. These donations came from 9,702 people in 87 countries: thank you to every single one of them, as well as to all of you who posted and shared the news about the drive!
We are particularly pleased that 8,035 donors chose to take up or renew an OTW membership with their donation. The OTW would not exist without its users all around the world, and your continued support for us is our absolute pride and joy! We are so glad to know that our ongoing mission to support, protect, and provide access to the history of fanworks and fan culture continues to resonate with the people that matter most of all: the fans themselves.
If you were intending to donate or join and haven’t yet done so, don’t worry! The OTW accepts donations all year and you can always choose to become a member with a donation of US$10 or more. Memberships run for one calendar year from the date of your donation, so if you donate now you’ll be able to vote in the 2026 OTW Board elections, which will take place in August. And our exclusive thank-you gifts are available whenever you donate!
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otw_news_feedIn case you missed it, earlier this month AO3 exited open beta! Earlier this year, we also reached 10 million users and 17 million fanworks. We’re awed by all these milestones we’ve reached as a community, and, as always, are very grateful for all your support.
These milestones would not be possible without the hard work of the volunteers who are part of the Accessibility, Design, & Technology committee (AD&T). AD&T is the team behind developing, updating, and maintaining the AO3’s software and infrastructure, whose work you can keep up with by reading the release notes posts with the list of code updates and fixes. Recently, our AD&T volunteers and contributors moved collections to Elasticsearch as well as made improvements to bookmark filtering and sorting.
If you’re familiar with coding and would like to help, we welcome contributions from anyone! Check out our Contributing Guidelines and other documentation on our GitHub repository. All contributors are credited in our release notes.
If you’re interested in helping AO3 but don’t have any coding experience, consider contributing to AO3 in some other way, such as by donating!
We’ve prepared new donation gifts for this Drive as well, such as the US$350 Fix-It Kit, for when you need to do a little fix-it for canon; and the US$100 tech travel bag for all your fic reading and fanwork creation needs!
As per usual, we have a sticker set at the US$45 level, with a theme in celebration of the inherently human and collaborative nature of fannish culture and fandom, as well as encouragement of new beginnings.
Fiber Art Weavers, who generously donated OTW-themed recycled cotton blankets previously have kindly donated some more this Drive! We’re very excited to add them to our donation gifts at the US$600 level, but please note that these are limited in number and cannot be saved up for with a recurring donation unlike the other gifts. Once again, thank you so much to Fiber Art Weavers for their donation!
If you want a gift but don’t want to donate all at once, you can also set up a recurring donation and save towards the gift of your choice. Simply select a thank-you gift that your recurring donation will be adding up to, and once you’ve “saved” enough to get your item, you will get an email from Development & Membership to confirm your shipping address. You must respond to this email for the donation gift to be sent to you. Those of you in the U.S. might also be able to double your contribution via employer matching: contact your HR department to find out if this is an option for you. For more information regarding donating, refer to the Donations and Membership FAQ.
A donation of US$10 or more will also allow you to become a member of the OTW. OTW members have the right to vote for the Board of Directors—the OTW’s governing board. You have until June 30, 2026 to become a member if you would like to vote in this year’s election, which will be held in August. For more information about OTW elections, refer to our elections website.
While we hope that many of you will take this opportunity to donate and join the OTW, we’re grateful for the support of all members of this community, in all its many forms! Whether you create, share, comment on or kudos fanworks on AO3; edit Fanlore; read Transformative Works and Cultures; or spread information from OTW Legal, you all help shape the OTW and its projects every day. We are grateful for your time, energy, and engagement!
Update April 24 13:27 UTC: We are grateful for all your enthusiasm for the OTW-themed blankets! Unfortunately, our limited supply has now run out and it is no longer available as a donation gift. All other items are still available.
case in fandomsecrets - [ SECRET POST #7059 ]oglaf_comic_feed - The Urgecase in fandomsecrets - [ SECRET POST #7058 ]case in fandomsecrets - [ SECRET POST #7057 ]case in fandomsecrets - [ SECRET SUBMISSIONS POST #1009 ]otw_news_feed - Mediafans and Futures Without End are Moving to AO3case in fandomsecrets - [ SECRET POST #7056 ]case in fandomsecrets - [ SECRET POST #7055 ]wwdn_feed - come closer and seeotw_news_feed - Updates to “No Fandom” Additional Tags, April 2026case in fandomsecrets - [ SECRET POST #7054 ]case in fandomsecrets - [ SECRET POST #7053 ]otw_news_feed - OTW Signal, April 2026case in fandomsecrets - [ SECRET POST #7052 ]otw_news_feed - April 2026 Membership Drive: Thanks for your Supportcase in fandomsecrets - [ SECRET POST #7051 ]oglaf_comic_feed - Haltcase in fandomsecrets - [ SECRET POST #7050 ]case in fandomsecrets - [ SECRET POST #7049 ]otw_news_feed - April 2026 Membership Drive: Behind the Scenes of AO3branchandroot
