Twin Peaks

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Fandom
Name: Twin Peaks
Abbreviation(s):
Creator: David Lynch, Mark Frost
Date(s): 1990-1992
Medium: tv, film
Country of Origin: United States
External Links: wikipedia
imdb
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Twin Peaks was a cult TV series that ran for two seasons in the early 1990s, created by noted surrealist director David Lynch.

A film prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, was released in 1992. There were also a few spin-off books.

In 2014, it was announced that Twin Peaks would return as a Showtime limited series with many of the original cast members, premiering in May 2017.

Crossoverman describes "Twin Peaks": "It was soap opera melded with surrealist cinema. It was detective story weaved through a story of grief. It was an epic symphony, as Lynch put it, interrupted by other people's jingles. And it redefined television." [1]

Twin Peaks inspired several other "weird" (but more accessible) American television shows in the 1990s that developed fandoms of their own, including Northern Exposure and The X-Files.

Canon

The show spirals out from the murder of high-school homecoming queen, Laura Palmer, to encompass the entire small American logging town in which she lived. On the surface everything is as wholesome as cherry pie, underneath sex and drugs are just the beginning... Uncanny owls, talking logs, dwarfs and giants, mysterious lodges, evil lurking in the woods, Lynch didn't hold a lot back.

The cast was huge, but fandom mostly focuses on FBI agent Dale Cooper, aka "Coop", a rationalist who also employs Tibetan philosophy to solve his cases, his fellow agent and forensics expert, Albert Rosenfield, the local sheriff, Harry S. Truman, and the school girl, Audrey Horne, who quickly falls in love with Coop and gets embroiled in the investigation in an attempt to impress him.

Fandom

Twin Peaks was extremely popular when it first showed and has retained a loyal fanbase over the intervening two decades. Most fannish activity is in the discussion of the various mysteries of the show, however, rather than creating fanworks. The main creative activities are fanfiction, vidding and icon making.

After its 2017 continuation Twin Peaks: The Return, the fandom has resurfaced.

Additionally, new fans have discovered the show in recent years due to the internet and word of mouth, plus its availability on a number of streaming services including CBS All Access, Hulu, and Netflix.

Fanfiction

A Twin Peaks author X-parrot wrote, "For the love of cherry pie, why is no one writing me Twin Peaks fic? Okay, so the series is going on 15 years old, all but passed into media oblivion, and the fan-writers have long since migrated to other series, leaving behind only stories fossilized in now inaccessible print zines, since their time was but the dawning of the Internet. But still. We're talking one of the worst cliffhangers ever inflicted on fen, with no canonical closure ever granted. I need fic. I crave it." [2]

Yuletide, where the fandom is a perennial request, has thrown up a lot of high-quality stories since 2003. The much-delayed release of the second season of the series on DVD in 2007 also seems to have sparked a resurgence in interest in writing.

The great majority of fanfiction centres on Cooper.

The most common het pairing is Cooper/Audrey, which many fans loved but the show backed away from.

Slash was somewhat rarer, but Coop's pairing with Albert Rosenfield—fanonically gay—has a substantial and growing following. There's also some Cooper/Truman to be found, and a smattering of non-Coop slash pairings.

There's a little femslash, mainly featuring Laura. A common trope is fix-it fic for the second season finale.

Dale in the Lodge is another common theme.

There are also lots of stories set before canon. Some of these draw on the extra background from the various spin-offs, Coop's stint undercover in a gay bar being a popular bit of spin-off canon.

Crossovers with any investigative show are another common genre. The X-Files is particularly popular, perhaps fuelled by David Duchovny playing Denise Bryson, a transgender DEA agent in Twin Peaks.

Where to Find Fic

Some fanfiction has been written for the show, initially in printzines in the early 1990s (most of which is not archived online), and more recently online.

The BookhouseBoys Yahoo Groups mailing list was founded in 1999 as a venue for adult fanfiction, and the first Twin Peaks livejournal followed in 2001.

Bookhouse Boys was a slash archive for the Bookhouse Boys mailing list, with stories dating from 1999-2005; it went offline in 2012/13.

There is a little fanfiction at the Twin Peaks Online fansite. Fanfiction can also be found at Archive of Our Own, fanfiction.net, Silverlake and Witness List. Recs have appeared at Crack Van, which has a very detailed overview by Laughing Academy.

Notable Fanworks

Fanzines

Vidding

Vidding is an important fannish activity.

Art Gallery

Communities

Livejournal

Yahoo groups

Dreamwidth

  • twinpeaks -- an "anything goes" Twin Peaks community

Meta

Other Resources

References

  1. ^ Twenty Years of Twin Peaks (accessed 10 October 2011)
  2. ^ Twin Peaks fic (May 25, 2005, accessed 10 October 2011)
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