It's all kicking off at Romance Con

Finally, Something Is Happening On Threads

—by Cates Holderness and Adam Bumas

It turns out Meta’s half-baked Twitter competitor and brand account zoo actually does have some real actual humans using it: Romance readers and authors. And they have recently turned Threads into the messiest corner of the internet, believe it or not.

While BookTok is, of course, the driving force of the entire publishing industry, there are some writers and readers that still want a text-based, public site that’s neither as hateful as X or brainrotted as Tumblr or Bluesky. And unlike many Threads users, a lot of these folks are veterans of online fandom spaces, so they conduct themselves like a normal internet community — for good and ill. A great example is what happened recently with the author Julie Soto. 

For nearly a year, a Threads account run by Bookstagrammer @janaandbooks has been used to collect gossip and summarize book and author drama on the platform, which was quickly turned into a paywalled Substack called Lady Whistlethreads. @janaandbooks is very open about the fact that she’s doing it because Threads’ algorithm, despite some taming by Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos, still wants to make you angry more than anything else. And that perhaps explains why so many people got angry when Soto released her latest novel, Rose in Chains, on July 2nd.

Rose in Chains is part of an increasingly popular subgenre: Fanfic that’s been previously written for sites like Archive of Our Own or Wattpad, changed just enough to avoid a copyright dispute, and published and promoted with total transparency about its origins. This started after the huge success of Fifty Shades of Grey, but has become so commonplace that publishers and agents regularly trawl fanfic sites for future bestsellers. That’s how we got Rose in Chains, originally a Harry Potter fanfic about Draco and Hermione finding love in a world where Voldemort wins, now an original fantasy romance between characters “Toven and Briony.”

Which is where the drama started. Rose in Chains isn’t even Soto’s first one of these. Her debut novel began as a Reylo AU — fanfic about the characters Rey and Kylo Ren from Star Wars. But the source material of Soto’s new release has made it a problem for its target audience, who are wary of any association with JK Rowling’s TERF industrial complex. @janaandbooks took to Threads to defend Soto and other Draco shippers-turned-original authors, saying, “Do I think promoting these books is keeping [Harry Potter] relevant? Probably [...] So I plan to remind people not to support anything that gives her money.” (Yeah, I’m sure it’s bootleg fanfic that’s keeping Harry Potter relevant and not, uh, the new HBO Max show, but I digress...)

This wasn’t enough for a community that, broadly speaking, wants to wash its hands of Harry Potter altogether, however. The backlash was so immediate that @janaandbooks briefly locked her account, before reopening it and backtracking, later issuing a “formal apology to the trans community.” But the damage had been done, and the Threads algorithm that the Lady Whistlethreads had successfully mastered was now turning against her.

Soto’s association with Rowling via Harry Potter was the core of the problem, though. And the discourse spread to everything that involved her. Romance Con, a yearly convention for romance novel fans, had Soto listed as a featured guest since January, and had been organized since inception by Mischief Management, which got its start running LeakyCon, one of the oldest and most popular Harry Potter fan conventions. LeakyCon was held annually until 2024, and is now rebranded as “EnchantiCon,” which isn’t focused on Harry Potter anymore but still features it heavily. In light of the outcry over Soto, what these conventions were doing seemed even worse.

Mischief Management first acknowledged the backlash on Romance Con’s Threads account on July 14th, two weeks after Rose in Chains came out. The next day, the account posted, “Romance Con and Julie Soto have mutually agreed that she will no longer attend.” This acknowledgement, as well as sending an email about it to all other attendees, seems to be what finally brought this off Threads to the rest of the community. 

Within a few days of Soto dropping out, dozens of authors pulled out of the convention, as well, which brought more attention to the problem, which made even more authors decide to leave. According to the convention's website, the cascade has been going on long enough that over half of the authors attending Romance Con have pulled out, and Mischief Management has handed off running the convention — which, at this point, seems to consist mostly of mopping up the mess.

This whole fiasco is a great example of how important “the internet irl” has become. Things that happen online don’t just stay online, and events like Romance Con (or the January 6th riots) are all organized, hyped up, and attended by folks who hear about them via social media. And these events tend to go one of two ways — either they’re a success, like the recent DashCon 2, or a massive scam and/or failure, like the disastrous Bridgerton Ball. (Unclear how you’d assess the success of January 6th.) But as internetty as irl events are becoming, organizers still don’t seem to understand that that’s a two way street. Bringing the online world into a physical space also means bringing in all the messiness, as well. Effectively boiling everything down to mod drama. And that’s especially true if it involves JK Rowling.

Speaking of JK Rowling, Panic World is on YouTube now and we had our first big hit — thank you YouTube algorithm gods — and it’s all about her. Check it out!

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Yes the internet is full of garbage. Your job doesn’t have to be.

No we know, it can be really bad. Burning hellscape, that Community gif of the room on fire, the “5 to 9 after the 9 to 5” TikToks and it’s people going to the gym and eating ground beef in the dark, bad.

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You know how Garbage Day makes you feel smarter and less alone? Imagine that, but for work. 

Subscribe and be the smartest person in the group chat.

A Good Post

Hunter Biden Should Do More Podcasts

America’s boyfriend Hunter Biden recently did a massive interview with Channel 5 on YouTube and tore apart the Democratic establishment. He also took a moment to explain how to make crack cocaine, which was pretty informative! X user @big_business_ wrote, “Hunter Biden passionately breaking down the difference between crack vs cocaine felt like Ryan Coogler talking about the film formats he uses to shoot his films.”

If you don’t want to watch the whole interview, here’s a clip on X of Biden going after Democrats. And here’s a clip on X of him talking about crack if that’s more your speed, I guess.

Biden reiterated a lot of his same points in another interview this week, on the At Our Table podcast. Which, even if you don’t totally agree with Biden’s diagnosis of why the Harris campaign lost last year, is pretty cathartic to listen to. I don’t know about you, but I really just want to hear more Democrats drop the veneer of civility and talk like this. And, yeah, sure, if they want to talk about how to purify cocaine with products you can easily buy at a CVS, that’s fine too, I guess, whatever.

Benjamin Netanyahu Should Do Less Podcasts

Right-wing industry plants The Nelk Boys, the manosphere podcaster boy band put together by UFC owner Dana White to harvest Republican dark money, decided to sit down with Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. And the episode has not been well-received, even by their own conservative fan base.

The top comment on the YouTube version is literally just a user who wrote “Unsubscribed,” which has 34,000 likes on it. Uh oh!

Trump’s Nelkiest boys decided to “address the pod” on a Kick stream earlier this week. The Netanyahu interview was not a good idea. (Fuentes is saying that though because he’s a virulent antisemite, to be clear.) The Nelk Boys also brought on livestreamer Hasan Piker and Adam Friedland who slammed the Nelks for promoting Netanyahu.

Once again, if you don’t want to watch all of this, you can click here and watch this clip on X and click here and watch this clip on X and get a good sense of this whole thing.

There’s A Kids Version Of MechaHitler Now

There’s a Grok for kids now. Which is exactly the move a normal and responsible company would make after their AI model publicly started praising Hitler and threatened to rape people and then followed that up with a “Companion” mode that you can have sex with. All very normal.

Here’s a video of reporter Katie Notopoulos experimenting with the Grok build for kids.

You should, obviously, not let your kids get anywhere near this thing. As of right now, Grok is not an inherently conservative model — they can’t seem to build one that doesn’t turn into MechaHitler — but this should absolutely be viewed as part of a larger right-wing push to radicalize children.

Here’s a good Hollywood Reporter feature from May on how conservative groups like PragerU plan to destroy both education and children’s media.

There’s Big VTuber Drama Now

We got a lot of requests to cover this lol. VTuber Ironmouse released a video this week alleging that VTuber talent agency VShojo is witholding over half a million dollars in funds that were meant to go to a charity. This is probably a lot to process for many of you that do not follow this world, so a quick primer.

VTubers are influencers and streamers that use anime avatars to make content with. It’s a massive industry and at the top are talent agencies. This is a holdover from VTubing’s Japanese origins. So it’s very similar to Japan Idol industry. Many of these talent agencies even own the avatar that the streamers use.

Ironmouse is one of the most popular VTubers on Earth. She claims that VShojo is withholding funds that she raised for the Immune Deficiency Foundation and is now going independent and leaving VShojo, and has lawyered up to get funds they owe her personally. It’s unclear if she’ll be able to leave with the Ironmouse avatar.

Many other VTubers have signaled that they plan to part with VShojo, as well.

Another Good Post

Some Stray Links

• “Reddit is one of the last thriving islands of the old web. Can it survive AI?” (Adam is quoted in this!)

• “Newly discovered photos and video shed fresh light on Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein”

• “He Had Dangerous Delusions. ChatGPT Admitted It Made Them Worse.”

P.S. here’s rollerblade dog.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***