Our monthly fan studies and history column, Cultus Dispatches, has been on double hiatus, first while we prepared for last year's Mereth Aderthad event and then while awaiting data from the third installment of the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, which closed at the end of 2025. We are glad to be back, with a reminder that Cultus Dispatches is a column open to anyone with a story to tell related to Tolkien fandom history and cultures. Reply to this email if you have an idea for a future column!

This month's column was researched and written by Dawn and Grundy, two of the SWG site moderators, initially for a presentation at a roundtable on Tolkien fandom and AI. We had agreed to present about how our moderators and members developed the SWG's AI policy in May 2023. The tale—or the presentation—grew in the telling, as these kinds of simple-seeming tasks often do, inviting questions that ranged beyond our original purpose.

First, we wondered about how other small communities and events were responding to AI-generated fanworks. So we made a spreadsheet and collected data on fifty-eight Tolkien fandom events and their AI policies. From this effort, one conclusion was very clear: Tolkien fandom communities don't want AI-generated fanworks in their spaces.

That this boundary was drawn so firmly was noteworthy. Fanworks fandom does not draw a lot of boundaries. By definition, fanworks are transgressive, working as we do with texts to which we do not own the rights. Fanworks fandom is also a space where you can engage in interests that you wouldn't share at lunch with coworkers or on your weekly call to Grandma and generally expect to be left alone and not judged. When fanworks creators place something unequivocally on the side of NOPE, there is something significant going on.

So next we wondered about big multifandom archives. What were they doing with genAI? What were they seeing? And we wondered too if genAI was really that unique in earning the fandom's ire, or were fandom events using their rules to take a stance on approaches to fanworks that they found objectionable?

You can read what we found in Fandom Draws the Line: Fanworks, AI, and Resistance.