Eli Cugini

So I was also a fanfiction.net guy a little later than Ashley.

I think I came to it when I was like 12, 13.

I started reading and writing fanfiction on fanfiction.net and did that for about four years.

And I was very into the Hunger Games fandom, and then I branched into other fandoms as well.

Glee, when that started, and HouseMD as well, which I got into in my later teens.

Very much so, yeah.

Hi, happy to be here.

I talk about some of this in the article I wrote.

One of the main things I have noticed is that fanfiction adaptations and romances are not exactly the same thing.

There are obviously fanfiction adaptations that aren't romance, but it is the most common form for that kind of adaptation to take.

The explosion of romance post-pandemic has really affected how fanfiction is seen in the mainstream.

I worked as a bookseller from like 2019 to 2022.

Oh, so you've seen probably a huge shift, yeah.

Massive shift, yeah.

Like at the start of that, when people came in and they wanted romance novels, which were often more marketed towards like women like my mother's age, we'd often have to specifically order them in.

In the relatively short time I spent bookselling, we went to having like a full big table of romance in the front.

The book covers were kind of drawn up to attract a younger audience.

and that was very much due to the explosion of book talk fan fiction adaptation is very popular in that space i wouldn't go a week without my friend lena who is very involved in fan culture and knows various big writers being like hey did you know that book is actually this kind of fan fiction reskinned uh someone else once pointed to a ya book that i will not name

with a Black girl protagonist, came up to me and, like, whispered, that's race-swapped Jungkook fanfiction from BTS.

Stop.