Fansplaining’s Next Chapter
We’re relaunching as a weekly publication featuring reporting, analysis, criticism, personal essays, and more—all by, for, and about fandom.
by Elizabeth Minkel
She’s outlining her next fic.
Fansplaining was born at a major inflection point for fan culture. It was 2015, and all sorts of people were talking about fans: they were the great hope of franchise-obsessed Hollywood studios, or an irresistible object of curiosity for traditional media outlets, or a subculture that everyone in the world suddenly had an opinion about. (Cue random people at parties trying to (badly) explain fanfiction to me, never mind that I was the one who’d been reading and writing it for decades.)
When Flourish and I met on a panel at SDCC 2015, we instantly realized we were on the same page: our longtime hobby had been thrust into the mainstream, but even if we weren’t too happy about it, we knew there was no going back. We created the podcast to reach across the groups talking about fans—entertainment, media, academia, and especially fans themselves—to try to understand this rapidly shifting landscape. We recorded more than 250 episodes and built an incredibly sharp, engaged listenership (some significant portion of those 250 episodes were in fact prompted by smart listener questions), until, in 2024, Flourish left for the twin commitments of priesthood and new parenthood, and the podcast went on hiatus.
In the 18 months since, I’ve kept the Fansplaining platform going while I tried to decide what to do with the podcast. During that time, I returned to my roots as a journalist and editor, shifting Fansplaining to a written publication with one in-depth piece per month, funded by our Patreon supporters. We’ve published Aja Romano on Kpop Demon Hunters, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw on missed opportunities for the Star Wars franchise, and Allegra Rosenberg on modern-day Beatles RPF. Newt Albiston wrote about exploring gender through fandom text-based roleplaying; Lena Barkin detailed the Slash Wars, a pivotal series of events in 1980s/90s Blake’s 7 fandom whose core questions still resonate today. (You can see all the work by our talented writers in our archives.)
But a “hiatus” can only go on for so long—and even over the past year and a half, the ground beneath us has continued to shift. With the media industry in a tailspin, culture sections have been first on the chopping block; we’ve recently seen whole teams and publications decimated, and longtime, deeply respected critics fired, destroying any sense of institutional memory or connection to the good work on fans some journalists managed to do these past 15 years. Fantastic new worker-owned outlets have been springing up, but while some have crossover with Fansplaining’s remit (hello Rascal and Aftermath!), none of them are really about media fandom, transformative works, or cultural writing with a fannish slant.
You can probably see where this is going—by the end of 2025, it seemed pretty obvious to me, anyway. While I love the podcast format, there’s a gaping hole in the media landscape right now: a huge pool of talented writers with nowhere to publish and pay them for their work, and a large body of readers who want sharp reporting and analysis on fannish topics, or culture writing about properties beyond a few blockbuster franchises. A decade ago, the mainstream media was interested in publishing good work on fandom (even if they still published a lot of bad); now, it’s just endless paeans to the Dramione pull-to-publish novels, or 100,000 badly researched “Why do women love M/M romance?” pieces. (Toss in a few lists of AO3 links and call it a day!)
We can do better than this; we’re going to do better than this. This spring, Fansplaining will relaunch as a full weekly publication, featuring reporting, analysis, criticism, personal essays, and much more, all under our longtime strapline: “By, for, and about fandom.”
The Patreon will be shut down and Fansplaining will move to a subscription/paywall model (likely hosted on Ghost), with the hope of publishing at least one piece a week to start. Depending on how much subscriber revenue we can bring in, we’d love to publish even more. This pace will let us be a bit more timely, responding to trends or dust-ups (without being reactive, of course); it’ll also let us publish a far wider range of work in addition to our existing formats, including reviews, comics, and maybe even some short-season or one-off podcasts. (Speaking of audio, I’ve heard from so many of you thanking us for the audio component of these written stories; we’re very hopeful we can continue to do that with pieces going forward.)
Who’s “we,” you might be asking? ;-) No, not Flourish—as you could probably have guessed, they’re still pretty busy with the priesthood and that new child, though they might be up for those one-off special episodes. But with a far larger scope of publication, we need more folks on board. To make Fansplaining 2.0 happen, I’ll be working with two super-smart writer/editors who’ve been covering fandom for a long time: Aja Romano (Vox, The Daily Dot) and Lin Codega (io9, co-founder of the aforementioned Rascal!). I’ve also been talking to a number of writers, artists, and scholars about how we can work together in the coming months; more on that soon.
In the near term, Fansplaining 1.0 will publish a few more pieces that can’t hold until our relaunch (starting with Gavia Baker-Whitelaw on Heated Rivalry next week!). After that, I’ll put the Patreon on pause while we move the site over and prepare to relaunch. Don’t worry; our full podcast catalogue as well as all the existing articles will be on the new site, too. (People just can’t stop clicking on our 2016 fanfiction tropes survey!! No, I am not running another one.)
If you’re interested in helping get Fansplaining’s transition off the ground—I’ve already commissioned a few pieces for relaunch and would love many more in the pipeline—we’d greatly welcome one-off donations, or even briefly becoming/re-signing up as a Patreon supporter before I shut the account (existing supporters will get a special rate for the new site…just sayin’...). If you’re potentially interested in becoming a larger investor in the project, please don’t hesitate to get in touch: fansplaining at gmail.com.
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate everyone’s patience in this hiatus period, and I’m incredibly excited about Fansplaining’s next chapter. We’ll keep folks posted over the coming months via Tumblr and Bluesky, but if you’d like to receive updates about the relaunch directly in your inbox, you can sign up here:
Elizabeth Minkel is the editor and host of Fansplaining. She’s written about fan culture for WIRED, Atlas Obscura, The New Yorker, the New Statesman, and more. She co-curates “The Rec Center,” a weekly fandom newsletter, with fellow journalist Gavia Baker-Whitelaw.