Tag Archives: fandom

When spring has sprung, Con season has begun!

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It’s March! The month when the weather can’t quite decide what to do with itself. The month where we get days with snow and -17 temperatures, and then days that are well above zero and starting to feel, ever so slightly, that we can finally escape the flurries and white outs and wind chills.

But there’s many reasons to celebrate in March. There’s St. Patrick’s Day, a super fun and easy-going holiday where you can wear green and embrace all things Irish. Easter and Passover sometimes fall in March (though not this year, they both show up in early April in 2026).

But one of my favorite things about March is the start of one of my favorite stretches of the year… CON SEASON!!!!!

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K-Pop! A Librarian’s Love

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Me at the Stray Kids DominATE world tour at Rogers Stadium.

Debut. Bias. Maknae. Leader. Line. Lightstick. Comeback. Aegyo. Visual. Idol.

These words in a row may sound a tad nonsensical to the uninitiated but trust me, they belong together. These are just some of the terms associated with one of the biggest music industries in the world: K-pop.

What is that? Well, the simplest definition is Korean popular music. For a longer answer it’s a music industry that trains pop music stars, or ‘idols’, and mashes up different types of music with pop, like hip hop, rap, rock, electronic, salsa, reggae, etc. The artists perform intricate dance numbers, have fans all over the world, and some music videos get millions, if not billions, of views online. And with the group Stray Kids having made their way through Toronto at the end of June (I was there!) and the movie K-Pop Demon Hunters now on Netflix this seemed like a great time to gush a little bit about one of my favorite sources of music.

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Type Talk: Fanfiction

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Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash

Welcome to the last post in this series created in honour of VPL’s ongoing Reading Challenge and this year’s Summer Reading Club. Today I wanted to talk about fanfiction! The name itself is basically self-explanatory, but for clarity’s sake: it’s fiction inspired by someone else’s source material. This can be anything under the sun, including movies, tv shows, video games, books, other fanfiction, art, and even people (which is a subgenre known as RPF, or Real Person Fiction) and can feature bands, celebrities, historical figures, and more.

Fanfiction is not just about written works, either. It belongs to the broader category of fanworks, which include fanart, fan videos, fan music, etc.

Sometimes, fanfiction’s connection to the source material is clear and obvious. Other times, were it not for the names of the characters, you might never know what original work inspired it.

You may be wondering how legal this is, and the answer is…complicated. It depends on the source material’s copyright restrictions, how relaxed the original creators are about derivative works (see Anne Rice, who was famously ruthless about it), and whether any profit is being made off it (short answer: no profit means it’s usually fine).

Here’s an article on that aspect of fanfiction, as well as how it relates to censorship and free speech, if you’re interested in learning more.

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