Anne Rice discovered fanfiction of her own characters, and legally killed the entire fandom overnight.

0:00 Pamala screw with the buffering, but yeah, it should be generally okay. But let's see. We're talking now. I think this is yeah, this is the syncing is better. Okay. Yeah, this is better and we are recording currently. Okay. Sorry. That's like such a

0:03 V Yeah.

0:04 Eva Hopefully the redex will go. Does that look better to you?

0:07 V Yeah.

0:07 V I think it's clearer.

0:13 Eva Awesome. Sorry. Okay, good, but but good that we interrupted ourselves.

0:16 V No.

0:20 V Yeah.

0:20 Pamala hold on, trying to here we go. Huh?

0:33 Pamala That's gonna change anything.

0:37 Eva Is your audio okay, Pamela?

0:39 Pamala Yeah, I'm still hearing a crackling when you two are speaking though. That's my only concern too.

0:45 Eva Hm. And your phone's not on your desk?

0:45 V I was hearing a crackling when Eva was.

0:49 Pamala Yeah, when Eva is Eva, can you just double check all your connections, please?

0:53 Eva Yes.

0:57 Eva Happily.

1:12 Eva Everything seems pretty secure. I don't know if that sounds any different.

1:15 Pamala Okay, that sounds it does sound actually a little bit better. There's no crackling now. Yeah.

1:18 V It does sound different.

1:20 Eva great. Okay. Maybe it was just my mic input. Sorry about

1:25 Pamala I think it's a variety of the internet against us.

1:29 Eva And this is why we schedule a fifty five minute recording.

1:33 Pamala Ha ha ha.

1:35 V Sure.

1:37 Pamala Okay, so where were we? We were in the midst of okay, fan fiction, you've found Geo Cities, you've encountered a lot of writers, you've now sort of jumped into sort of fandoms, distinguishing that fandoms, you know

1:43 Eva je us it is.

1:43 V Mm-hmm.

1:51 Pamala fans are fans at the Super Bowl in a football game, of course. And yes, there are academics who probably have their PhD in fandom land. But for you, what really for you, what is really a fandom? Like what how do you for you, for just you as V, what do you consider a fandom?

2:10 V Think it has to be generative and it has to be something that is done in community. Like you c even if you're sitting and you're you're writing hundreds of thousands of words of fanfiction for something, which tons of people do. I mean, people write incredibly long works. I've written incredibly long works, longer than I ever could manage with original fiction. But if you're doing it

2:18 Eva Mm.

2:36 V just by yourself, like in a diary, I don't think that that's the same thing as being in fandom. Because fandom is finding togetherness with other people who are also driven by that need to create and who love the same thing that you do. It's very I always think of fanfiction as almost being like an affection bid. Like, I love this thing. Will you love me because I love this thing and so do you? Like it's a very

2:42 Eva Mm, mm-hmm.

2:43 Pamala Okay.

3:02 Eva wow. That's beautiful.

3:05 V Yeah, and it's a very warm space now because of that. In the past, even, you know, as recently as five, ten years ago, people were not always kind. but now I think there are a lot more community norms, which is funny to say when it's a community of millions of people, but there are community norms of just understanding this is something that somebody made out of love. Respond out of love.

3:09 Eva Mm, mm-hmm.

3:20 Eva Mm.

3:34 Eva Mm-hmm.

3:35 V And that's a lovely thing.

3:35 Pamala Yeah.

3:39 Pamala Yeah. Absolutely. Are there r are there rules? Was it like less friendly before because people felt like there was rules and are there rules today?

3:39 Eva And share in that together. I love it. I love that.

3:42 V Mm-hmm.

3:52 V It that's where we're gonna get real nerdy. It depends on when we're talking about fandom history. Because fandom as a subculture that includes so that is much like the order to watch the Star Wars Skywalker saga. when did fandom start is something that is debated forever. I'm sure there are people

3:55 Pamala Mm.

3:56 Eva Let's go.

4:02 Eva How does how far back?

4:13 Eva Ha ha ha.

4:19 V Like I said, with PhDs in making an argument for why this fandom or that fandom or this year or that piece of media is when fandom starts. You can argue, and I often do, because I think it's accurate, you know, Dante's Inferno is fanfiction. It's self-insert fanfiction. He wanted to meet

4:30 Eva Mm.

4:44 V A bunch of other artists and fight God. So he wrote himself by meeting a bunch of artists and fighting God. And it's a fanfiction. Gilgamesh and and The Odyssey and and Oral Tradition are all taking characters that you did not create and writing a story about them. You can argue that all of that is fanfiction. You can argue that Shakespeare is fanfiction, especially his histories, because they are not history.

4:51 Eva wow. Wow. That's interesting.

5:02 Eva Mm.

5:13 V He is writing fanfiction, he is writing real person fiction about Julius Caesar, or about Richard III, or whatever. and it and and I think that those are all very valid arguments. And a lot of the time when people are trying to say fanfiction is valid, they will argue that those you know, very famous, very respected works are fanfiction because they

5:18 Eva Yeah. Right. Right. V This is amazing.

5:20 Pamala my god, you're blowing my mind.

5:41 V They do have that same transformative derivative quality. But fandom as a s named subculture actually started around 1938 with the introduction of sci-fi magazines and science fiction kind of as a genre. So there was a group of specific named known people in New York.

5:43 Eva Mm-hmm.

5:47 Pamala Okay.

6:04 Eva Hmm.

6:09 Pamala Mm-hmm.

6:10 V And a group of specific named known people in Los Angeles who were really into you know, astounding stories, and which was a sci-fi magazine, and decided that they were going to create their own stories based on the stories in the magazine. So they're fanfiction. They are who kind of coined the term fan fiction and began referring to themselves as the fandom. And they were very clicky.

6:20 Eva Mm-hmm.

6:30 Pamala Mm-hmm.

6:40 V And they hosted the first conventions, one of which was at the nineteen thirty-nine World's Fair in New York. Like that was the first WorldCon, which is a convention still going on today, which I think is super cool and very nerdy. but and they were they were clicky to the point where if you joined like five years after they founded their fan clubs, you couldn't be in fandom. You had to be in

6:44 Eva Mm.

6:48 Eva Mm.

6:55 Eva Very. Yes. We gotta get some of those guys on the show too.

6:58 Pamala Yeah.

7:09 V new fandom. And it was like, Come on, guys. Come on. You're such nerds. but it

7:12 Eva my god. Give me a break.

7:12 Pamala my gosh. Stop it. my gosh. my gosh. Bro town to the end town.

7:19 Eva Yeah, really. We're we bought the

7:24 V Yes, and and female fans were fans F A N N E. They couldn't be fans. They had to be fans, which is the worst.

7:33 Eva yeah. Classic. Gross. The words.

7:34 Pamala Why does everything in history have to be the worst? God, why do we always start everything in the same way? It's so boring and lame. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Okay, so establishment of fandom and fanfiction. I'm guessing that then there definitely was rules besides just when you joined.

7:40 V Yeah.

7:43 Eva I mean, not all men, but always men. Is that the saying? Yeah. Okay.

7:56 V Yes. Yes. Sorry, that's that's where I was getting back to. They were very codified rules. And part of why I mentioned there was both the group in New York and the group in LA is because they had different rules and they hated each other. It was a full East Coast versus West Coast rap battle of nerds. And there's there they kept encyclopedias of their own histories, which is really useful for somebody like me to go read them and

8:05 Eva Mm.

8:12 Pamala Course.

8:15 Eva Classic. I love it.

8:25 V It's called the Fancyclopedia, and they were publishing it through the 50s. and everything, every disagreement they had was like the staple war, which was about how should zines be stapled, because in New York they thought it should be stapled one way. And in at Los Angeles, they thought they should be stapled a different way. And so they went to war about it. Or there was the Great Exclusion Act where five

8:28 Eva Mm.

8:42 Eva Sure.

8:51 V fans were banned from a convention because they'd made such a big stink at the previous year's convention. And so they wrote pamphlets and were handing them out to random people on the street outside of the convention about why this other group of fans were fascists and unfair. And like fandom drama it's human drama, but worse.

9:12 Pamala drama the drama

9:14 Eva High drama, yeah. Right.

9:18 Pamala I mean, t tell me it tell me is there fan is there fan fiction about these two groups warring? Have we gone that deep?

9:18 V And so they they definitely had roles.

9:28 V Probably. Probably. I would not be surprised. I would not at all be surprised. one thing that I do want to mention that I personally think is incredibly cool though, is one of the founding members of Fandom, on the East Coast, is was a trans woman. And she was very involved both in founding fandom and in founding Casa Susana, which if you know anything about

9:51 Eva Very cool.

9:57 V Queer and trans history was a trans and gender nonconforming like campground and retreat out in the Adirondacks. And I think the Adirac, it might have been the Catskills, one of the mountains in New York. But she was very, very involved in both of these communities getting off the ground and both of them still happening today, which I think is incredibly powerful and incredibly cool. And

10:23 Eva That's impressive. Mm-hmm.

10:23 Pamala That's amazing.

10:26 V And I love that we can look at you know, sometimes people will come into fandom spaces and go, Why is everything so gay? And it's like, 'Cause it always has been. Literally it always has been.

10:37 Eva I love that.

10:37 Pamala Right. So are there are there also rules to how what you can write, what you can't write, what you how far you can go with a character, are like no. So it is a free for all on the writing side.

10:48 V No.

10:52 V Yes. And it that always has also been true. I mean, one of the founding the literal founding principle of the largest fanfiction site currently in existence, which is called Archive of Our Own, was our works, fanfiction in general, keeps getting chased off of sites that have investors because investors come in and see how gay everything is and they pull their funding and the sites keep banning.

10:52 Eva Beautiful.

11:18 Eva Sure.

11:21 V fanfiction or banning subsets of fanfiction or banning specific fandoms. And so after it happened on Live Journal in two thousand seven in an event called Strike Through, a group of fans got together and said, We need an archive of our own, where we don't have investors, we don't have ads, so nobody's trying to buy ad space, nobody has any financial reason to pull anything. We need to own our own servers.

11:38 Eva Mm-hmm.

11:51 V And that is why AO3 exists. And so sometimes and actually we're seeing literally today in the news cycle, people are jumping ship from Wattpad because they just increased censorship in their terms of service. They're all coming over to AO3, and people who have never been in traditional fandom spaces like AO three are seeing some of the content that is on AO3 and saying, that's gross. Why is that allowed here? And it's because

11:51 Eva Mm.

12:19 Eva Hmm.

12:20 V We own our own servers so that nobody can have their stuff banned. It's all allowed because any censorship opens the door for more censorship. And somebody saying, Well, I disagree with this content or this ship, or which ship is short for relationship. So people saying, you know, well, why are people allowed to write? I don't know why I keep going to Harry Potter. Harry Potter sucks. But like

12:32 Pamala Right.

12:32 Eva Mm.

12:40 Eva Thank you.

12:41 Pamala Yeah.

12:47 V Why are people allowed to write Snape and Harry in a relationship? That's disgusting. Well, if you ban that, then who's to say that you're not banning it because they're both men? And so then we have to agree and say, okay, we'll ban the next thing that's two men. And then you end up banning everything. So it's it's truly the rule and the one rule about writing is really the rule about reading, which is don't like, don't read.

12:58 Eva Right.

13:13 Eva Mm-hmm.

13:13 Eva Don't read. I love that rule.

13:17 V And and that is Yeah. And it it's

13:17 Pamala Mm, there's your title.

13:20 Eva Mm.

13:23 V It's definitely something where like I was just talking with a friend of mine yesterday about, you know, the the Wattpad situation where a lot of people are coming over and Wattpad is run on an algorithm and it's it is very corporate. It has tons of ads, it has it always had censorship and now it's just more explicit censorship. And so they're they're having this experience that we were all having, you know, in nineteen ninety eight of reading something it we were not ready for.

13:38 Eva Mm-hmm.

13:42 Pamala Right. Mm-hmm.

13:43 Eva Sure.

13:52 V In nineteen ninety-eight and it always lives in the back of your head, but you learned from it. Either you learned that you liked it or you learned that you didn't like it, but you learned something.

13:53 Eva Right. Right.

14:06 Pamala Well on that, yeah, I mean yeah, exactly.

14:07 Eva One way or another you're learning something, right, V? More of of that, never again.

14:12 Pamala Yeah. So on that note, can you t what do you think is the most famous fan fiction and and then also what's your favorite? And it could be a it could be a writer or it could be a subject.

14:30 V Sure.

14:31 Pamala Or something else that I don't know anything about.

14:33 Eva Mm-hmm.

14:35 V The most well unfortunately, most of the fan fictions that get really, really famous enough that they kind of break containment and get out of their specific fandom audience, like, you know, I I'll read certain fandoms and so I know certain stories as being like, wow, that's the the best one that's ever been written.

14:49 Pamala Mm-hmm.

15:00 V But then there's a different fandom, like I don't know anything about anime, so I'm sure there are anime fics that are stunningly beautiful and hugely popular, and I don't know anything about them. so the fics that that tend to go beyond just their one fandom tend to because they're really bad and everybody wants to laugh at them, which is kind of goes against what I said with everybody being kind, but

15:01 Eva Mm.

15:07 Pamala Right. Mm-hmm.

15:08 Eva Mind blowing. Right. Mm-hmm. Right.

15:23 Pamala Yeah.

15:26 Pamala Got it.

15:29 Eva Right.

15:30 V Like Fifty Shades of Grey was a fanfiction and it's really bad and it deserves to have people laugh at it. So I would say, unfortunately, probably the most famous fanfiction is Fifty Shades of Grey, which started as a Twilight fanfiction.

15:36 Eva Mm.

15:38 Pamala Okay.

15:42 Pamala Okay, I mean th they're I mean they're they're taking that check to the bank, so I I'm sure they don't care.

15:42 Eva I was gonna ask Right, that's right. No doubt. Well, and I was I was wondering how much is smut driven too. I feel like that that would produce a lot of fanfic, you know. Consumable, endlessly consumable.

15:47 V Right. Yeah, no, she doesn't care.

16:00 V It does. And I think that right. And I I think that also depends on the platform where you're reading. There's certain like AO3, because there's no censorship, has a lot more smut than Wattpad, which has or had some, but it was more mild and it tended to be written by younger people who didn't really know how it worked anyway. And in you know, it it wasn't

16:19 Eva Sure.

16:27 Eva Right.

16:29 V as much of a driving factor of why people were going there. for for Twilight Fandom, it was all smut. Ab absolutely all of it was smut in in Twilight Fandom, which is part of why Fifty Shades happened. and and was not at all unique, really, in other than that she was the one who said, I can change the names and get it published, which did not used to be nearly as common.

16:44 Eva Yeah.

16:47 Pamala Got it.

16:57 Eva Mm.

16:58 V as it is today. but yeah, I mean a lot of fanfiction is very driven by missing moments, let's call them, in the canon.

17:09 Pamala nice. Missing moment. That's such an that's such a sh that's chic way of saying it. is there a lot of concern around legal? Like when you're writing like fan fiction, do you does anybody worry about like legalities or stuff? Or is it pretty well known and versed in this realm?

17:10 Eva Yes. I love that. Right?

17:15 V Mm-hmm.

17:29 V It's it is legally protected as long as nobody is charging money for it, which is why to publish something like Fifty Shades, you have to change all the names. So it is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was partially argued by lawyers who are the lawyers for Archive of Our Own and who helped to create Archive of Our Own. and who, like one of the lawyers who argued that for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

17:29 V Is my lawyer. Like she's great. Her name is Heidi Tandy. and they have made the case that as as long as it is transformative, so so like parody falls under that, satire falls under that, and then using the characters in in ways that could not necessarily or could not be confused with I'm trying to write an official sequel and get paid for it.

17:29 V You can't do that. You can't write Lord of the Rings 2 and and pretend that you're JRR Tolkien 2 and and get paid for it. You can't do that. but there the one rule I guess I I should have mentioned of AO3 that is a at like a formal codified in the terms of service is you you cannot charge for any aspect of fanworks creation. You cannot charge

18:39 Eva Thank goodness.

18:55 V You can't have people do a Patreon to get your next chapter. You can't have people, you know, buying bound copies of your books. You can't you can't even, you know, if you have a a fandom podcast, you can't read fanfiction on it if you have ads. because just no nobody can get paid for fanfiction for it to stay legal. And that's

19:00 Eva Mm.

19:02 Pamala mm

19:07 Eva Can't monetize in any way from it.

19:13 Eva Mm.

19:20 Eva Mm-hmm.

19:22 V As more people are starting to realize, I could just change the names and get this published. That makes me very nervous as somebody who loves fanfiction and wants it to be able to still exist. it makes me nervous because now publishers and Disney and other big corporations are kind of in on the game of, wait, they just changed the names and that was Star Wars. They're like, wait, they just changed the names and that was Twilight.

19:30 Eva Yeah.

19:48 Eva Right.

19:51 Pamala Mm. I think I think that's Hollywood in general.

19:51 V But as long as people abide by the rules, yeah, it's legal.

19:54 Eva Yeah. Yeah.

19:57 Pamala Yeah. Okay. Is there any was there any like yeah.

20:01 V But actually, I can get nerdy about that question and I just remembered there was a before the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, so just before that. So I believe in 2000, might have been nineteen ninety-nine, Anne Rice discovered fan fiction of her characters and legally went after a all everybody who was writing Anne Rice fanfiction.

20:21 Eva I remember this.

20:23 Pamala I don't.

20:27 V And sent them cease and desist letters, was sending site takedowns and copyright notices to their hosts, so to GeoCities, to Angel Fire, to all of the web hosts that people were hosting their fanfiction on. And there was no legal protection for fanfiction under being a a derivative work at the time, because it we didn't have that framework. And so she she killed her entire fandom overnight. And so now I think it's

20:45 Eva Yeah.

20:50 Eva Mm.

20:53 Eva Yeah.

20:53 Pamala My God, that tracks that tracks.

20:55 V Delicious how much fanfiction there is for Anne Rice stuff now that she's dead. I think it's delicious that people are writing so much Lestat and Louis fanfiction. Because she would hate it and she did hate it, and she can't do anything about it. It's great.

21:00 Eva Yes, yes.

21:06 Pamala Rage on. Yeah. Yes, rage on.

21:11 Eva Absolutely. Absolutely. Also, I j this is just so funny and random, but I just to like maybe two hours ago saw a l tiny clip of a drag king doing a a Listot routine. It was so good. She'd hate that.

21:13 Pamala Yeah.

21:27 V Nice. She would hate that, yeah. Yeah.

21:28 Pamala Awesome. That's

21:30 Eva Yeah.

21:31 Pamala Yeah, that was gonna be my next question. Was if there was like anything like audacious, like someone who just can't someone who takes it all too seriously, so that sounds about right. Was there yeah, is there any works that have been audacious that are kind of like have upset hist history or people?

21:50 V Hmm. a lot of the time it's more the canon creators acting badly and upsetting their fandom than the fandom necessarily upsetting the content creators. Like Diana Gabaldon, who writes Outlander, wrote an essay on Live Journal maybe 15 years ago, about how fanfiction was like raping her children because

22:09 Eva Mm.

22:18 V It was making her characters do things that that she would never have them do. And everybody wrote back, No, it's not, because your children exist and are real. And your characters don't and aren't. So it's not like that. And that was gross, Diana. but yeah.

22:22 Eva She didn't intend.

22:32 Eva Yikes.

22:37 Eva Yeah. Ha is is there any conversation around talking about monstrous creators like JK Rowling it being such a horrific transphobe and and turf? What do we w we we don't care about that? We can still support Harry Potter fanfic and be separate from from her as a

22:53 V Yes, yes.

23:06 V I don't personally think so.

23:06 Eva person because she's not benefiting from it. Yeah.

23:10 V That is the argument that people who are still very invested in that world tend to make is that they would rather be supporting other creators who a lot of fanfiction writers are queer. they would rather be supporting queer works by queer authors that are not spending, you know, are not lining J.K. Rowling's pockets. But I think that that's still keeping the legacy of her work alive. And I don't think that keeping

23:23 Eva Mm-hmm.

23:34 Eva Mm.

23:39 V the names in people's mouths is worth what she does with that. so like I said, I mean, I don't like that the reference that I had for like gross content, but it is gross content because it's Harry Potter. You know? and it it it kind of breaks my heart that I mean it does break my heart that she's she was radicalized into what she is now because I did love Harry Potter and it was very formative for me.

23:44 Pamala Mm-hmm.

23:56 Eva Mm.

24:08 V And and for almost everybody I know, but it's there's other series out there that are better. There's other series out there that are created by good people. And

24:09 Eva Mm.

24:13 Eva Yeah.

24:16 Pamala Yeah, it's such a bummer. Yeah.

24:18 Eva Yeah.

24:22 Eva Mm-hmm.

24:23 V Yeah, it just kind of is what it is.

24:24 Pamala Yeah. Will you recommend some to will you will you recommend some of those for your subpage when we when we publish this so people can find some of those series?

24:25 Eva Lots of options.

24:34 V Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah.

24:36 Eva Awesome.

24:36 Pamala That'd be amazing. Yeah, I I would say w yeah, what am I I was gonna ask you, to your knowledge, obviously there's writing fan fiction, there's like animated and anime and animation fan fiction. Do you know what are some other fan fiction mediums?

24:56 V So the the main ones are like be media fanfiction, which is about fictional characters. And then there's real person fanfiction, which is about celebrities. and that has always had a more dubious, not legal standing, because you can't copyright your name and your likeness, but it's had a more of a dubious kind of ethical standing, even within fandom itself. Like some fans have been in fandom for

25:21 Eva Sure.

25:24 V 40 years and would never conceive of reading or writing RPF. And other people, that was their gateway into fandom. you know, I was a big boy band person. I've written a lot of RPF, I've read a lot of RPF. Would I now, now that there's social media and there's a different boundary between the stars and the fans in general, I would not. But when I was reading and writing it, like Twitter didn't exist.

25:51 Eva Mm.

25:53 V Everything we got was already a fictional character that they were playing for magazine interviews. It wasn't really about a real person. It was about, you know, Greg from Dream Street, who didn't really exist. Yeah. or like f Harry Styles in quotes. He's not Harry Styles. Like I'm I don't know who Harry Styles is, but I doubt it's Harry Styles, 'cause I don't think it could be.

25:58 Eva Right.

25:58 Pamala Okay.

26:04 Eva Fair game. That character. Mm-hmm.

26:05 Pamala Yeah.

26:05 Pamala Yeah. Okay.

26:13 Eva Yeah. Yeah.

26:19 Eva Yeah.

26:21 Pamala Right.

26:22 V But yeah, those are the two main kinds of fiction, I would say. And then there's also one that I've never personally interacted with, which is Filk, F-I-L-K, which is was named that because it was somebody mistyped in a convention program folk music that was written about Star Trek. And they accidentally typed it as Filk music.

26:35 Eva Hm. It's a new acronym.

26:45 Eva What? About st about Star Trek?

26:49 V And so now everybody just refers to fan written songs as filk because we can never let anybody live anything down for fifty years.

26:54 Pamala Okay. Fascinating. So there's so there's music. There's fanfiction music. There's fanfiction writing, fanfiction animation, anime and anime. Anything else? Those are

26:55 Eva that's good. That is good.

27:02 V Yes.

27:06 V Yeah. there's pod fic, which is where people do like audiobooks of fanfiction. There's what?

27:08 Eva Well I saw this drag king performance. Does that count?

27:08 Eva Hmm. I saw this drag king performance of Lestat. Does that count? yeah. It's a live performance, right? Yes.

27:19 V yeah, I would say that that counts. Yeah, and like Titanic, I would say counts, which is which is the drag show of Titanic where Celine Dion goes back in time to the Titanic. Yes, yes. I mean mm-hmm. I would say any kind of art that that humans can create, somebody has made it of the thing that they love. Like there's there's cookbooks of fan recipes where people

27:28 Eva Now on Broadway, or about to be.

27:33 Pamala Okay, so live performance, okay.

27:46 Eva Mm.

27:48 V will will, you know, bake cakes that are decorated like Spock or make foods that showed up in an episode of Star Trek or or Star Wars or the Hunger Games. yeah, there's I mean cosplay where people create gorgeous costumes of the characters that they love and wear those to conventions or just around. so sewing, millinery, haberdashery I suppose.

27:54 Eva What?

27:54 Eva I love that. Star Wars.

28:07 Pamala Right.

28:08 Eva Mm. Yeah.

28:17 V all of that kind of stuff is is also a fanwork. I it's just if you can create it, somebody's created it about a character that they love. Mm-hmm.

28:18 Eva Yeah.

28:24 Eva It's endless.

28:28 Pamala Yeah. So I guess, you know, that kind of takes us to our closing question, which is if somebody wanted to follow you down the rabbit hole of fan fiction, how do they get started?

28:42 V Well, I would say if somebody wanted to go on a personal journey into fandom, they have to love something. So, you know, watch a movie, read a book, listen to a podcast, you know, whatever it is, just let yourself love it and if you'll know I feel like I've I've talked about this with with my friends a lot, that there's always a moment like I said, there's things that I'm a huge fan of, but I'm not a fan fiction fan of.

28:51 Eva Mm.

29:10 V But if I'm gonna be a fanfiction fan of something, I just I sit there and there's a feeling in the back of my neck and I say, no. no, it's happened. And so I feel like if you get that moment of, no, yep, yep, then then you'll know. And I would say, you know, archive of our own dot org is a phenomenal place to start. You will see things that you wish you didn't, but you will also see things that change your life in a great way.

29:11 Eva Mm-hmm.

29:19 Eva It's coming. It's happening. Gotta make.

29:41 V Tumblr is still around and the home of fandom for visual art. and and if people wanted to follow me personally and learn more about the history of fandom diving in, I co-host a podcast called This Week in Fandom History, where we dive week by week into events that shaped fandom culture and as a result, culture as a whole, because fandom, you know, changed the world.

30:07 Eva Mm.

30:10 V the way that people love things in groups is how we get human society, I think. So

30:19 Pamala Yeah. It really is just a joyful thing. It's just joyful. And just like cu the curiosity, leaving leading with joy and curiosity. That's awesome. Well

30:20 Eva I love that. Yeah.

30:20 Eva More of that.

30:31 V Yes. Yep.

30:32 Eva It's a good way to spend your days.

30:33 Pamala Yeah, absolutely. For sure. Okay. Well, thank you so, so much. that's all for today's episode of You Know Too Much. Thank you very much, V. Now we know way too much about fanfiction.

30:43 V Thank you.

30:50 Eva Yes, if you enjoyed this episode, how could you not? Please subscribe, leave us a glowing, shining, five star review, share it with someone who loves it, and then maybe you can create some fanfic of your own. explore more episodes, behind the scenes content at you know too much dot media.

31:10 Pamala Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, V. That was awesome. I didn't know anything about fanfiction. I know it exists, but like I don't really know anything about it. So that was great. That was cool.

31:15 V Thank you.

31:15 Eva Thank you, V.

31:17 V Yay.

31:21 Eva I can't stop thinking about Dante's Inferno being fanfic.

31:21 V Thanks.

31:23 Pamala I dude, same. Then then you were like Shakespeare and the the Odyssey. I was like, holy shit, you're totally right.

31:29 Eva you're you're right. That's wild. It's wild.

31:36 Pamala So wild. my gosh.

31:39 Eva Work it