Fandom Spaces Have a Boundary Problem

At the end of February, amid the ever-persisting Heated Rivalry craze, an article was published for New York Magazine called “The Great Fujoshi Awakening: Why Do So Many Women Love Men Who Love Men?” In the article, the author made very specific references to works of fanfiction online, going so far as to link one of the works within the article. There was immediate public outcry by fans on Twitter discussing the impropriety of bringing free fan works into a for-profit space without the fanfiction author’s consent. While the work was delinked soon after, it brought attention to the rapidly increasing lack of boundaries in fandom spaces, both by fans, people interacting from an outsider perspective, and people involved in the source material.

A multitude of comments have surfaced recently regarding a “separation of church and state” in an analogy for keeping fandom spaces separate from the creators and/or cast and crew of the source material the fans are for. This idea is not new, as there have been conversations around the legality of fanfiction for quite some time. There can be copyright problems, which fans of Anne Rice’s literary works are probably familiar with. Rumors around Anne Rice suing fans for writing fanfiction in the 1990s have circulated for years, but in reality, she just took a stance against fanfiction out of a desire for creatives to come up with their own stories and leave her alone. Some fans said they received cease-and-desist letters from Rice’s lawyer to remove their fanfiction from the internet. It is important to note that Rice later changed her opinions on fanfiction due to realizing she could easily avoid coming into contact with fan works. Because similar problems have occurred over the years, some fanfiction websites, like Fanfiction.net, even have a list of authors whose works are prohibited from the site on account of the authors’ stricter copyright claims. 

Most of the time, copyright claims are only an issue for fanfiction if the creator is somehow profiting from the material. Fanfiction is on public websites with free access, and there are rarely instances where fanfiction authors are making money from their works because they know it would be a copyright issue. Part of the problem with the aforementioned article was that it was behind a paywall, indirectly profiting off of someone’s fanfiction that was temporarily linked. It’s incredibly important to note that Heated Rivalry itself stemmed from fanfiction. Author Rachel Reid adapted her first book in the series, Game Changer, from fanfiction she wrote about Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She’s far from the first person to do so: Fifty Shades of Grey began as Twilight fanfiction, and The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood began as Star Wars fanfiction. 

It’s incredibly important to note that what all of these published authors have in common is that they’re women. To recenter Heated Rivalry, much of the backlash revolved around the idea that straight women were fetishizing gay men. There are plenty of straight female fans of Heated Rivalry, but to act as though they’re the only fans of the show or book series is disingenuous. There is a wide array of queer people who are fans of both, and there are queer people in the cast and crew. The show creator himself is a gay man, and he’s spoken at length about the nuances of why women are drawn to the show. The inflammatory comments surrounding the fanbase of Heated Rivalry are steeped in thinly veiled misogyny. When one Twitter user asked, “Why do men keep calling things women are into mass psychosis?”, another replied, “Cause they can’t use female hysteria anymore.” The fanfiction writer whose work was linked in the New York Magazine article made a statement on Twitter about the situation and also called attention to the rampant misogyny and ignoring of just-as-present queer fans. He (@/subc0rax) wrote, “It feels like a shame that an article that’s seemingly willing to engage with the reasons women enjoy this kind of romance and explore the fact that not all of these fans are even women doesn’t seem to be able to connect the dots and entertain the possibility that there are gay men enjoying the current Heated Rivalry craze with the same fervour and adoration as its female audience.” 

Many of the problems stem from fan works reaching the eyes and ears of the authors and other direct participants of the source material. Many of these instances have been brought up in relation to the Heated Rivalry article. One situation was on the Graham Norton Show, where Norton displayed romantic fan art between the X-Men characters Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr to actors James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender. It is uncertain as to whether or not Norton received permission from the artist to project it on television and/or show it to the actors, but it also didn’t feel like it was in good faith and was much rather poking fun at the fan art. There have been similar issues in The Pitt fandom, where interviewers have been asking actors directly what their opinions are on ships (desired romantic pairings between characters, short for “relationships”) of their characters, sometimes even asking if they’re going to happen in the course of the show. An article was recently posted titled “‘The Pitt’ Fans Are Horny Little Freaks,” to which the author was essentially berating fans for shipping characters and creating fan works based on the show. The Pitt actors have also been shown erotic fan art in recent interviews, as a means for inciting some sort of reaction, once again without any consideration for the artists who very probably did not intend for the actors to see it. One Twitter user (@/midwestprincsss) commented, “I really don’t like that fanfic and fanart are being used to make actors give a reaction that’s profitable for the publication interviewing them. Fan work is not for corporations or the folks in the project. It’s for fans.” Most fans feel similarly, especially since the people showing the actors or whoever is involved with the source material are often doing so in bad faith.

Within fandoms, there are boundary problems surrounding parasocialism, in which fans act overly familiar with celebrities as though they know these people in real life. A divisive aspect of fanfiction in many fandoms is real person fiction (RPF), where people write about real people. While plenty of people write and make fan art for their own enjoyment, there are also plenty of people who take it too seriously and begin to intrude on the celebrities’ personal lives. Some will comment cruel things on a celebrity’s Instagram page, and some will go so far as to stalk a certain celebrity and their family. This was a longstanding issue in the Dan and Phil fandom, which kept the YouTubers from talking about their sexualities, relationships, and personal lives for well over a decade. There have been more recent issues for actors in the Disney+ Percy Jackson television adaptation, too, as the teenage lead Walker Scobell took to Instagram to call out “fans” who have been stalking and harassing his friends and family. These examples illustrate that this is not a one-sided issue of outsiders intruding on fandom but also fandom intruding on the lives of the creatives involved in the works they claim to love. 

This is not any one fandom’s problem, as these issues have been arising since before the age of the internet. However, the increased amounts of social media platforms and the rise of public-facing fandoms have made these issues more apparent. So what should we do? First, news outlets need to stop using fan works without the creators’ consent, especially when they’re profiting off of it. Otherwise, fandoms are always going to have problems. There will always be plenty of kind, welcoming, and respectful fans, just as there will always be some fans who start arguments, breach boundaries, and give their fandoms a bad reputation. As many things do these days, many of these problems boil down to critical thinking and media literacy skills. There needs to be a boundary between fans and what their fandom is for, or we will lose any worthwhile contact going forward. Fanfiction writers and fan artists shouldn’t be afraid of their works being exposed on television or published articles, and actors and other creators shouldn’t be afraid of their lives or the lives of their loved ones being aggressively disrupted.

Re-Visiting Andrea Arnold’s 2011 Filmed Adaptation of Wuthering Heights: A Conversation About Adaptations

Emily Brontë’s sole published work, Wuthering Heights, is not a beautiful story. It’s barely even a love story, much less “the greatest love story of all time” as the tagline for Emerald Fennell's upcoming adaptation goes. Brontë wrote this story to showcase the brutal ugliness of humanity by exploring the devastating fallout of generational abuse, racism, and classism. As Peter Bradshaw writes for The Guardian: “Director Andrea Arnold and cinematographer Robbie Ryan strip the story ruthlessly down to its bare essentials: pain, anger and love.” 

Arnold’s greatest strength in this film is her decided lack of romance. The Earnshaw family home is not a picturesque country house, but a grimy farmhouse smack dab in the middle of nowhere, bombarded by brutal rainstorms. According to Jeannette Catsoulis for NPR: “Captured with ravishing naturalism–from eye-straining candlelight to painfully harsh daylight…the film has a melancholy, sinister atmosphere only partly explained by its lashings of rain and banks of gray fog.” Catherine (Shannon Beer as an adolescent, and Kaya Scodelario as a young adult) and Heathcliff (Solomon Glave as an adolescent, later James Howson as a young adult) do not go on Bridgerton-style promenades across a flowery, green landscape, but hike their way through harsh, windy, grassy terrains that leave them caked in dirt. 

Arnold’s aesthetic may not be the most conventionally attractive, but it shows a clear understanding of the text’s Gothic nature and immerses the viewer in the world that Brontë herself was drawing from. The Earnshaws themselves are portrayed as rough, middle-class farmers, especially in comparison to the wealthy, upper-class Lintons. There is meant to be a clear class divide between Wuthering Heights and the neighboring estate of Thrushcross Grange, as shown in scenes of Catherine and Heathcliff sneaking across the moors to peek into the Lintons’ windows. Where the Lintons are well-dressed, educated, and sophisticated, the Earnshaws must work in fields and can only afford to send one person–Hindley (Lee Shaw)--to university. 

Another highlight of Arnold’s film is the attention paid to Catherine and Heathcliff’s shared childhood. When Heathcliff is first brought to the Earnshaws, he is around six or seven years old, while Catherine is five and Hindley is fourteen. Their connection is one that is innocent of the societal divides that await them in adulthood. It may surprise newcomers to know that Catherine’s narrative action is confined to the first half of the novel until her death halfway through. Consequently, Kaya Scodelario is not given as much screen time as audiences may have expected from such a well-established actor. However, part of Wuthering Heights’ tragedy comes from the juvenile naivete of its characters. By the time Edgar Linton (Jonny Powell when younger and James Northcote when older) proposes to Catherine, she is fifteen while he is only a few years older (but likely still a teenager). Catherine’s life is cut tragically short before she ever truly gets a chance to grow up. 

Of course, the most standout choice that Arnold makes in her film is the decision to cast Black actors in the role of Heathcliff. Despite Heathcliff’s explicit description as “dark-skinned” along with numerous assumptions about his race which strongly imply that he was not white, almost every adaptation before the 2011 version–and including the upcoming movie–has cast a white actor in the role. Racism in Wuthering Heights was not an afterthought, but a prominent part of the story, especially where Heathcliff was concerned. Characters such as Nelly Dean and even Catherine herself constantly refer to his darker complexion and features, while Hindley calls him Romani slurs. Bradshaw writes that this casting choice leads to Heathcliff being “confronted with overt and brutal racism from those of his new family who resent the outsider, and are determined to treat him like any farm animal.” Heathcliff’s race is part of the overall theme of “othering” that is present throughout the story; he is not like these white people, and he is mistreated because of it.  

A major criticism of Fennell’s film is her decision to cast Australian actor Jacob Elordi in the role of Heathcliff. This backlash was further fueled by her casting director, Kharmel Cochrane, defending the choice, remarking that “you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life”.  However, this book is meant to reflect real life, and that includes England–and Yorkshire’s–complicated history of racial prejudice that is a catalyst for the abuse that Heathcliff suffers as a child. Frankly, it is frustrating how many filmmakers have chosen to simply ignore the explicit references to Heathcliff being non-white, considering that it is made very clear in the text. There are only so many times a filmmaker can say it’s an “interpretation” when one of the first things readers learn about Heathcliff is that he is “dark-skinned.” 

Unfortunately, for all the things that Arnold gets right in her adaptation, there are several areas in which she falls short. As Roger Ebert points out in his November 2012 review: “What she hasn’t done is make a terrifically entertaining film. Although this version dumps many of the novel’s passages, particularly from the later chapters, it’s dreary and slow-paced, heavy on atmosphere, introverted.” Like many past iterations, Arnold cuts out the narrative framing device of Nelly Dean telling the story to Mr. Lockwood, along with the second half of the story, which follows the children of Catherine and Edgar and Heathcliff and Isabella. Additionally, dialogue is incredibly sparse in this film, which quickly wears out as the film goes on, which creates confusion rather than intrigue. 

Arnold’s film is far from perfect, and to an extent, it is unfair to pass harsh judgment on Fennell’s film before it comes out. However, if future filmmakers wish to adapt the challenging Gothic text, they should look to Arnold’s gritty, naturalistic version for a blueprint. Frankly, a movie that bluntly showcases the wildness of the moorlands and the intense connection between Catherine and Heathcliff is what Brontë herself would have wanted.

Working the Roots, Healing the Past

This past Summer, I had the opportunity to complete a fellowship with The Women’s Institute of Historic Hudson Valley. In my application, I proposed a research project and explained how I planned to use the library’s archives and resources to support it. I initially set out to study the medical practices that enslaved women in the Hudson Valley incorporated into their daily lives. However, what began as a focused project quickly expanded into a series of interconnected ideas.

In the paper I wrote, I examined the herbal knowledge enslaved women carried with them from their homelands and how they adapted that knowledge to an unfamiliar landscape with unfamiliar plants. While working through the stack of books given to me for this research, one text in particular stood out: Working the Roots: Over 400 Years of Traditional African American Healing by Michele E. Lee. The book compiles interviews with African American healers and documents traditional medicines and remedies passed down through generations.

Chapter 9 caught my attention most, as it explored conjuring and hoodoo remedies. In another article I wrote: From Communion to Questions My Shift Away from Catholicism, I reflected on growing up Catholic and eventually letting go of my religious identity after completing my confirmation. Since then, I haven’t identified with any organized religion; the only spiritual practice I have consistently kept is manifestation. At the same time, I have been on a personal journey to learn more about my West African roots. My fellowship offered the perfect opportunity to explore hoodoo and voodoo/vodou, not only for my project, but for myself. One of the first questions I had was: What exactly is the difference between hoodoo, voodoo, and vodou?

Voodoo originated in West Africa, particularly among the Fon and Ewe peoples in regions that are now Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, and Guinea. Enslaved Africans brought it to the Americas, especially Haiti, where it blended with Catholicism to form Haitian Vodou (note the difference in spellings, as ‘Voodoo’ is used in New Orleans, and ‘Vodou’ is in regard to the Haitian religion). Followers of Haitian Vodou believe in an unknowable supreme creator, Bondye (from the French Bon Dieu, “good god”), while priests and priestesses communicate with Loa, spirits that mediate between humans and Bondye.

The three main families of Loa—Rada, Petro, and Gede—serve distinct roles: Rada spirits are calm and benevolent, Petro are fierce and powerful, and Gede, often associated with zombies, represent the dead who obey the living. According to the Universal Life Church, the concept of zombies in Haitian Vodou emerged as a spiritual means for enslaved people to cope with the “deadness of being a slave,” reflecting Vodou’s role as a force of endurance and resilience.

Hoodoo, however, is a mix of Indigenous herbalism and European folk magic that emphasises the practical uses of magic for purposes such as healing or protection, and is not a formal religion like Vodou. Hoodoo also blends different religions into its traditions, and often calls upon Roman Catholic saints, as some hoodoo practitioners consider themselves catholics who believe in both catholic saints and African gods.

Hoodoo was developed in the American South, as enslaved Africans carried their spiritual knowledge across the Atlantic out of necessity and faith. Practitioners of hoodoo often use materials such as roots (hence hoodoo also being known as rootwork), herbs, crystals, animal parts, and sometimes even bodily fluids for ritual purposes. Hoodoo also may reference religious texts such as the bible, or more specifically, the Book of Psalms, for help from saints or others to guide the use of roots or other talismans as a part of the ceremony. 

One deity–or god–of hoodoo I especially became interested in was John the Conqueror, also known as High John the Conqueror. As detailed by Lee in her book, before the name was associated with the medicinal plant, it evolved in the African slave trade and the enslavement of African people in America. Stories often depicted High John as an African prince who was captured and put into slavery, but outsmarted his enslavers through cunning and nerve. It is said that when he was supposed to leave earth, he left his powers in the root of the Ipomea Jalapa plant, so that whenever used, his powers could be accessed by those with knowledge and faith to invoke his spirit.

This is the same plant that Fredrick Douglass, an American social reformer, abolitionist, and writer born into slavery, was given by the enslaved conjurer, Sandy Jenkins, for protection against slaveholders. He later escaped from his life of slavery. High John is said to provide protection, good luck in love and money, to command any situation, and is also used for success in court cases.

The presence of spiritual practices in African and African-American communities illustrates how traditions evolved under the weight of displacement and enslavement. Vodou preserved a structured religious framework rooted in West African cosmology and shaped by Haitian Catholic influences, while Hoodoo developed as a flexible, practice-based system that drew on African, Indigenous, and European knowledge. One key takeaway from my research was that these traditions and practices offered–and continue to offer more than belief; they provide strategies for healing, protection, and endurance.

Despite their depth and complexity, hoodoo and voodoo/vodou are often misunderstood. One of the most persistent misconceptions about voodoo/vodou, in particular, is that it is based on devil-worship or human sacrifice. This narrative has been amplified by sensationalized media portrayals. A notable example is The Princess and the Frog. Set in New Orleans, the film depicts Dr. Facilier, a voodoo priest, as the villain who uses his spiritual practices to manipulate and harm others. The Loa he communicates with are even portrayed as sinister forces. Although the film was groundbreaking for presenting Disney’s first Black princess, it still reinforces negative stereotypes about voodoo in subtle but harmful ways.

In response to these misconceptions, it felt important to highlight what hoodoo/voodoo/vodou are, and what they are not:

What It Is:

-A system of spiritual, herbal, and ritual practices rooted in African traditions.

-Practices that combine ancestral knowledge, ritual, and natural elements.

-A tool for survival, resilience, and resistance, historically providing enslaved Africans with ways to protect themselves and care for their communities in times of extreme oppression.

-A living, evolving tradition that continues to influence African American culture, contemporary spirituality, wellness practices, music, art, and community rituals today.

-A source of empowerment and community cohesion where social bonds, support networks, and collective identity are formed.

What It Isn’t:

-Devil-worship or inherently evil.

-Synonymous with human sacrifice.

-A cartoonish or ‘magical curse’ system as often depicted in movies and television.

-A monolithic tradition–practices vary by region, community, and individual practitioners.

-Inherently tied to misfortune or malevolent magic–it includes healing, protection, and positive intention.

-Superstition–these practices involve complex knowledge systems and should be coherent and purposeful.

The misrepresentation of hoodoo, voodoo, and vodou in popular culture often obscures the resilience, knowledge, and creativity embedded in these traditions.

My research this summer became more than an academic project; it became a way to engage deeply with the histories and practices that shaped African diasporic survival. From exploring herbal medicine and rootwork to learning about hoodoo and voodoo/vodou, I witnessed how knowledge was preserved, adapted, and carried forward despite enormous hardship.

This work not only expanded my understanding of history but also connected to my own journey with ancestry, spirituality, and self-expression. By uncovering these stories and challenging misconceptions, I hope to honor the ingenuity and endurance of those who came before me, and to carry lessons of care, resilience, and empowerment into my own work.