Fan Fiction Oral History Project with Eruthros

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Fan Fiction Oral History Project with Eruthros
Interviewer:	Andrea Horbinski
Interviewee:	Eruthros
Date(s):	July 18, 2012
Medium:	audio, print transcript
Fandom(s):
External Links:	Fiction Oral History Project with Eruthros
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Fan Fiction Oral History Project with Eruthros was conducted in 2012 by Andrea Horbinski and archived at the University of Iowa Libraries.

This interview's medium is audio (length: 1:28:48), and it has a written 66-page transcript.

It was part of the series: Fan Fiction Oral History Project also referred to as "a Fiction and Internet Memory Research Project," "the Fiction and Internet Memory Program," and "Fan Fiction and Internet Memory."

The interviews conducted for this project were used for the book by Abigail De Kosnik called Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom.

Some Topics Discussed

• Due South
• joining the Due South mailing lists at fourteen, and lying about her age
• people combine their sexual thoughts and fanworks along side their mundane ones today, much more so than in the old days, greater visibility and comfort
• the difficulties of all the small, very segregated archives and encampments of fans
• The Ray Wars
• Babylon 5 and the effects of JMS's interactions with fans
• Harry Potter
• closed canons, closed possibilities
• kink_bingo
• their Yuletide vid with 190 fandoms, adding the M*A*S*H kissing scene in after the vid was completed
• Avatar: The Last Airbender, ship-baiting, ship wars
• Legend of Korra
• SurveyFail and bad academia
• Textual Poachers and the mistakes it makes in assuming a fan-hive brain, the OTW doing the same things regarding fans
• that perhaps the "arrogance" and hubris of the OTW founders helped them get the project off the ground

Excerpts

Um, it's sort of hard for me to figure out how I got into online fandom in particular. Like I remember I wrote drawer fic when I was really young, for Battlestar Galactica and things, I mean it was epic and awful. Um—I was like eight, and then I looked at some fan things on the Internet where there was fan fiction, like I remember looking at Star Wars forums and things like that, but none of them really clicked for me. And in fact, I found fan fiction on those Star Wars forums and thought it was totally awful and boring, because it was all things that I wasn't interested in at all. And like, it was canon romance stuff, and that was not really why I was there. And then, I sort of stumbled into some sort of online fandom—I think it might have been Due South first—and the Due South mailing list at the time and archive at the time combined all the bits you know, it was like a gen, slash, het, G-rated to NC-17 archive. So like, I don't know, thirty seconds after I found the archive, I found slash fandom (laughs) and decided that was pretty awesome. And I wanted to be there. And I had a history for a long time of getting into fandoms right when they were about to have horrible things happen— so I actually know when that was, because I got into

Due South fandom like two weeks before the Ray Wars.

So I went and I followed everyone's recs lists [for Avatar: The Last Airbender] and I googled for recs lists and I read everywhere and I read so much bad fan fiction and so much character bashing. And a bunch of it was good, but it was just sort of like, you had a fifty-fifty chance of, you know, getting several paragraphs down in the fan fic that you were reading and suddenly finding people who would say, "This character who's not in the pairing that I like is a horrible evil person," especially the woman, you know? So, I totally see where people's ship war battle scars come from. Because it—everything I read was like, Wow, that looks like it was an awful time, I'm glad I was not there for that. But for me it was all on Dreamwidth, and then like, fanart, and the fanart part of the fandom had also been less ship warry than the fan fic part of the fandom anyway.