TikTok put Fantastic Frankey in its September 2026 Hispanic Heritage Month spotlight, but the more interesting story is in the work Frankey Smith has built beyond a platform feature. Through Fanboy Fighter, she writes about genre entertainment from a perspective she once struggled to find in fan spaces. Her approach to a more welcoming fandom is practical: make space for voices that have been overlooked, and let readers enter a conversation even if they have not memorized every installment of a franchise.
The fan space she wanted to find
In a 2023 introduction to Fanboy Fighter, Smith recalled spending years at conventions and in online forums while seeing few women of color guide the conversation. She also described encountering hostility in some of those spaces. Her response was to create the content she wished she could see. That origin matters because Fanboy Fighter is more specific than a broad appeal for people to be nicer online. Smith was asking who gets to set the terms of a fan discussion in the first place.
On the project’s homepage, she describes a goal of normalizing the Black female voice in a fandom landscape where she finds it underrepresented. The site invites people who have not felt seen to take part and presents itself as a home for reviews and articles by fandom creators. Those are statements of purpose, not a measure of how many people now participate. They do, however, explain the editorial choice behind the project: a fan’s point of view is part of the story, rather than an obstacle to supposedly neutral criticism.
That distinction can be easy to flatten into a slogan. Smith’s writing makes it concrete. She does not need to claim that every fan community is unwelcoming to explain why she wanted another place to speak. Her account is about spaces she experienced, and the publishing project she made in response.
Keeping the door open for the casual viewer
Consider her review of Ahsoka. Smith introduces herself as a casual Star Wars viewer, a position that many entertainment writers might treat as a limitation to overcome. Instead, she uses it as a useful starting point. She acknowledges that watching The Clone Wars or Rebels can help, while arguing that it is not a prerequisite for following the series.
That is a small but consequential editorial move. Long-running franchises can make a newcomer feel as though they have arrived late to a conversation with a reading list attached. Smith does not erase the value of deep knowledge; her review simply refuses to make it the price of admission. A reader who knows the animated series and a reader who does not can both understand where she is coming from.
It also shows that access is about more than representation in a cast or behind a microphone. It can live in the way a review addresses its reader. The voice says, in effect, that curiosity is enough to begin. For a culture built around shared enthusiasm, that is a meaningful invitation.
What a genre story looks like from a different angle
Smith’s review of Blue Beetle offers another example of how point of view changes criticism. She pays attention to Jaime Reyes’s family and to the film’s Latin-community context, treating those elements as central to her reading of a superhero story. That is her interpretation of this film, not a claim to speak for every Latino viewer or comic-book fan.
Put beside the Ahsoka piece, the pattern becomes clearer. One review takes the casual viewer seriously; the other looks closely at family and cultural belonging within familiar genre machinery. Smith is interested in what a story makes possible for someone watching it, as well as what happens on screen. Her work suggests that widening a fan conversation can change both who feels invited to talk and what the conversation notices.
Her voice has also moved into a more formal franchise setting. DC announced in December 2024 that Smith would host DC Studios Showcase: The Official Podcast, describing a show intended for established fans and newcomers alike. The announcement confirms the role and the show’s aim; it does not, by itself, tell us whether listeners felt included. What it does show is that the same question about access can travel from an independent fan site to an official discussion format.
Beyond the spotlight
TikTok’s September 15 spotlight describes Smith’s comics, anime, science-fiction, fantasy, and pop-culture commentary as a way to welcome fans and amplify underrepresented voices. That description is a discovery point, not independent evidence of the size or effect of her community. The stronger evidence for what she is trying to do is in the choices visible in her own writing and in the purpose she set out for Fanboy Fighter.
Smith’s contribution is not a promise that one creator can solve fandom’s arguments. It is a model for asking a better question when a fan discussion begins: whose experience is assumed, and who is being given a way in? Her answer has been to publish from her own perspective while leaving the door open for readers with different histories of loving the same stories.
Sources
- Fantastic Frankey, “Fanboy Fighters!” (August 18, 2023).
- Fanboy Fighter homepage (accessed through the September 24, 2026 research brief).
- Fantastic Frankey, “Zero games Played with Ahsoka” (August 18, 2023).
- Fantastic Frankey, “A Superhero with a Family” (August 17, 2023).
- DC, “DC and DC Studios Team Up with Max to Launch ‘DC Studios Showcase: The Official Podcast’!” (December 2, 2024).
- TikTok Newsroom, “Hispanic Heritage Month 2026: Celebrating #HispanicTikTok” (September 15, 2026).
