This Nickscast are entering the spooky woods, going beneath the surface to see what's really going on in the weird world of Twin Peaks fandom! Why did it get a revival? Are there really a lot of Twin Peaks fans? We'll get the fans-eye view (and no backwards talking) on this week's episode!

Next week, we’ll be jacking-in to our new deck and diving into the world of fans of Cyberpunk!

## Episode outline

### Fandom Facts

> There's likely as much mystery surrounding the fandom as there is surrounding the show.>> — T

**Origins:**

Twin Peaks was a cult TV series that ran for two seasons in the early 1990s created by David Lynch. It received a film prequel in 1992 (_Fire Walk With Me_), and will have a revival this month on Showtime. The story begins around the murder of a high-school homecoming queen and quickly changes to... something different entirely.

**Fandom Demographics:**

Hard to estimate size: The Twin Peaks festival has about 7000 followers on Twitter, and the Twin Peaks subreddit has about 24000 subscribers.

Looking at [IMDB](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098936/ratings), the majority are people between ages 30-44, skewing towards male. Looking at the IMDB data, there are 120 000 ratings for Twin Peaks. To get a sense of scale, _Batman Begins_ has about 1 million ratings (as does Avatar), Disney's _the Lion King_ has about 700 000, and _the X-files_ has about 160 000.

**Changes in Fandom:**

Interest in the fandom has remained relatively constant (relative to the peak) [according to Google Trends](https://trends.google.ca/trends/explore?date=all&q=twin%20peaks) with some spikes since the announcement of a revival [in October 2014](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Peaks_(2017_TV_series)#Announcement).

One of the largest fan festivals, the [Twin Peaks Festival](https://www.twinpeaksfest.com/), has attendance capped at about 200 people, though previously attendance was less than 100 people, typically. Starting in about 2012 it started to sell out, indicating there is some more recent interest in the show.

> The first year I went it took, I think, over a month for the tickets to sell out. This year, it took less than a day.>> — Matt**Around the world:**

Fans from around the world: mostly North America, but also [UK, Spain, Germany, Poland, Italy, Japan, Russia, Brazil](https://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/peaks-freaks-how-the-most-devoted-twin-peaks-fans-are-prepping-for-its-return)

> When you go to the [Twin Peaks] Fest they give you a pamphlet with the names of all the attendees and the countries they're from.>> — Matt

**Related fandoms:**

X-files, Northern Exposure

**Fanfics:**

> 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.>> — [Fanlore: Twin Peaks](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Twin_Peaks)

Archive of our own has only about 450 fanfics, and Fanfiction.net also has a fairly small contingent at about 180.

> Some of the fanzines that they [Fanlore] referenced were just strictly fanfic and at least two of them were like one-hundred fifty plus page fanfic novels.>> — Z

> The only fanfic we ever featured on our show was a slashfic between Cooper and Truman.>> — Matt

> My favourite little bit from the Fanlore article is "a common trope is 'fix it' fic for the second season finale".>> — G

Worth noting is that David Lynch loves reading people fan theories though!

### [Last episode's](http://fanthropological.com/e/28-transfans/) Famous Last Words

**Z**: David