A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shows four different images of nearby stellar nursery NGC 1333.


• Centauri Dreams looks at the hot Saturn TOI-197, and the way it was detected.


• D-Brief notes how galaxy NGC-1052 DF2 has been confirmed as the second galaxy apparently lacking in dark matter.


• Gizmodo notes new confirmation, from an orbiting probe, that Curiosity detected methane emanating from Mars back in 2013.


• Hornet Stories tries to correct some misconceptions about the Burning Man festival.


• The Island Review links to a New York Times profile of post-Maria Puerto Rico.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Martin Shkreli has been tossed into solitary confinement.


• JSTOR Daily notes the work of psychologists in the 1930s US who profiled individuals who did not fit the gender binary. Would these people have identified themselves as trans or non-binary now?


• The LRB Blog notes the fondness of Jacob Rees-Mogg for extreme-right German politicians from the AfD.


• Language Log shares a written ad in Cantonese from Hong Kong.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money compares China now to the Untied States of the past, and finds interesting correspondences.


• Marginal Revolution notes the deep and significant commitment of China under Mao to providing foreign aid.


• The NYR Daily looks at the complex, once-overlooked, life and career of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writer of "The Yellow Wallpaper".


• Out There notes that, while dark matter is certainly real, "dark matter" is a poor name for this mysterious substance.


• Jason Davis at the Planetary Society Blog considers the challenges to be faced by Hayabusa 2 when it fires a sampling probe into asteroid Ryugu.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel considers how into the universe a spaceship could travel if it accelerated consistently at one gravity.


• Strange Company examines the life and adventures of Jeffrey Hudson, a royal dwarf in 17th century England.


• Daniel Little at Understanding Society builds on the work of V.K. Ramachandran in considering the ethics of development ethnography.


• Window on Eurasia notes the new identification of Azerbaijanis as victims of genocide by neighbours, and what this means for the relations of Azerbaijan.


• Arnold Zwicky has fun, in a NSFW fanfic way, with figures from comics contemporary and old.

• Anthrodendum reviews the book Fistula Politics, the latest from the field of medical anthropology.


• Architectuul takes a look at post-war architecture in Germany, a country where the devastation of the war left clean slates for ambitious new designers and architects.


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at newly discovered Kuiper Belt object 2008 VG 18.


• Laura Agustín at Border Thinking takes a look at the figure of the migrant sex worker.


• Centauri Dreams features an essay by Al Jackson celebrating the Apollo 8 moon mission.


• D-Brief notes how physicists manufactured a quark soup in a collider to study the early universe.


• Dangerous Minds shares some photos of a young David Bowie.


• Angelique Harris at the Everyday Sociology Blog takes a look at what the social sciences have to say about sexuality and dating among millennial Americans.


• Gizmodo notes the odd apparent smoothness of Ultima Thule, target of a very close flyby by New Horizons on New Year's Day.


• Hornet Stories notes the censorship-challenging art by Slava Mogutin available from the Tom of Finland store.


• Imageo shares orbital imagery of the eruption of Anak Krakatau in Indonesia, trigger of a devastating volcanic tsunami.


• Nick Stewart at The Island Review writes beautifully about his experience crossing the Irish Sea on a ferry, from Liverpool to Belfast.


• Lyman Stone at In A State of Migration shares the story, with photos, of his recent whirlwind trip to Vietnam.


• JSTOR Daily considers whether or not fan fiction might be a useful tool to promote student literacy.


• Language Hat notes a contentious reconstruction of the sound system of obscure but fascinating Tocharian, an extinct Indo-European language from modern XInjiang.


• Dan Nexon at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the irreversible damage being caused by the Trump Administration to the United States' foreign policy.


• Marginal Revolution notes a paper suggesting users of Facebook would need a payment of at least one thousand dollars to abandon Facebook.


• Lisa Nandy at the NYR Daily argues that the citizens of the United Kingdom need desperately to engage with Brexit, to take back control, in order to escape catastrophic consequences from ill-thought policies.


• Marc Rayman at the Planetary Society Blog celebrates the life and achievements of the Dawn probe.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that so many Venezuelans are fleeing their country because food is literally unavailable, what with a collapsing agricultural sector.


• The Russian Demographics Blog breaks down polling of nostalgia for the Soviet Union among Russians.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that simply finding oxygen in the atmosphere of an exoplanet is not by itself proof of life.


• Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy reports on how the United States is making progress towards ending exclusionary zoning.


• Whatever's John Scalzi shares an interview with the lawyer of Santa Claus.


• Window on Eurasia reports on a fascinating paper, examining how some Russian immigrants in Germany use Udmurt as a family language.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the lives of two notable members of the Swiss diaspora in Paris' Montmartre.

One writer of slash fan fiction, who wished to remain anonymous—professing, like many I interviewed for this article, to being “ashamed” of her involvement with the fan fiction community—pointed to the double standard between onscreen romances for straight and queer couples. “The sort of love stories I like are totally reflected and visible in [mainstream media’s] canon straight romances,” she said. “Professionally produced media doesn’t give me that sort of well-written, emotionally devastating love story with LGBT+ characters.” The eroticism, the passion, the high stakes—in most cases, these are all reserved for straight characters. It’s up to the queer fans to claim them for themselves.

Take, for instance, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where the superpowered members of the Avengers are mostly male, toned as hell, and love to banter: Right out of the gate, fans were eagerly exploring the possibilities of Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, and Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, becoming lovers. On Ao3, there are almost 10,000 stories pairing the two romantically; that’s 3,000 more than the next most popular pairing, which also features two male characters in a queer relationship (Agent Coulson and Hawkeye). Parks and Recreation, one of television’s most beloved sitcoms, has more stories that romantically pair protagonist Leslie Knope with her female best friend, Ann Perkins, than with her husband, Ben Wyatt. And in case you were wondering, Shakespeare fan fiction does exist, and yes, Henry IV’s Prince Hal does fall in love with his childhood friend Ned.

This re-pairing of characters can be written off as unsatisfied fans indulging in wish fulfillment and the occasional erotic daydream. Outsiders who have ventured into the world of fan fiction—including Slate’s David Plotz and Laura Miller—have struggled to remain neutral while describing the genre, referring to an “obsession with emotional intensity” that has “spawned slash” or raising eyebrows at “romances, often torrid, between ostensibly straight male characters.” But when you are a member of the product’s original target audience—when you identify with characters whose sexualities are socially approved and unthreatening—you are much less likely to understand how empowered one can feel when writing queer romance into straight stories. There is power in giving Harry Potter a crush on Draco Malfoy, or creating a world in which Scandal’s Olivia and Mellie leave Fitz for each other; there is power in creating a means by which those in the mainstream might see from your sidelined point of view. It’s easy to trivialize, but the fact is that fan fiction is one of the few outlets that an increasingly frustrated queer audience has to engage with material that refuses to engage with them.

Annie Proulx got ficced. In a recent interview in the Paris Review, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author confessed that she wishes she’d never written her most famous work, the short story “Brokeback Mountain,”about the star-crossed romance between two cowboys. Having fans is a good thing, especially for authors of ­quiet, spare realism — not exactly a cohort with a healthy surplus of readers. But in the last few years, writers, filmmakers, and other artists have seen fans seize control of their creations and re­imagine them as fan­fiction, or fic, as its aficionados like to call it. Proulx first got ficced when a whole new audience came to “Brokeback” after the Academy Award–winning film adaptation was released in 2005. Less reverent than her typical reader, these fans have busily set themselves to producing what Proulx has termed “pornish” fiction based on her story’s two main characters, Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar. “Unfortunately,” she said, “the audience that ‘Brokeback’ reached most strongly … can’t bear the way it ends — they just can’t stand it. So they rewrite the story, including all kinds of boyfriends and new lovers and so forth after Jack is killed.” The resulting stories, Proulx grumbled, “just drive me wild.”

Proulx is far from the only mainstream artist being dragged unwillingly into a new, fan-dominated world. Once exiled to obscure corners of the internet, fanfiction — amateur fiction based on characters from preexisting works or real-life celebrities — has lately become a force driving popular culture. As Proulx realized, fans these days aren’t satisfied to just sit back and consume. They want to participate. They want to create. And they don’t want to wait for anyone else’s permission to do it. Millions of fanfiction stories have been uploaded onto vast online archives where other fans read, rate, and comment on them. Romances, often torrid, between ostensibly straight male characters like Harry Potter and his onetime nemesis Draco Malfoy are especially popular, and there’s an entire category of fanfiction, called mpreg, in which beloved male characters and celebrities (e.g., One Direction singer Harry Styles) are able, bizarrely, to get pregnant. Fandom’s untrammeled imagination is also colonizing the wider world. E L James’s Fifty Shades of Grey started as Twilight fic. And what are J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek and Star Wars reboots — which take the original source materials (called “canon” in fic circles) and shape them to new ends — if not examples of the fanfiction spirit when enabled by hundreds of millions of dollars?

Although human beings have been stealing and reworking each other’s stories for millennia, fanfiction as we now know it began back in the days of Star Trek fanzines, on whose mimeographed pages female Trekkers wrote of Mr. Spock swooning in the arms of an ardent Captain Kirk. For decades, fanfiction communities — soon to migrate en masse to the web — ­functioned as a subset of science-fiction and fantasy fandom, where they were treated, by the mostly male nerds who ran things, like a younger sister best banished to her room whenever company came by. The internet changed all that by ushering in the era of the networked fan, often a girl who sampled her first taste of fic in Harry Potter fandom. Like it or not, the once-Olympian creators of the canon — known among fic writers as TPTB, or “the powers that be” — now have little choice but to listen to them. Robust, established online networks of Harry Potter and Twilight fans played a significant role in making The Hunger Games books into best sellers and, after that, blockbuster films.