The History of Xena Fan Fiction on the Internet

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Title: The History of Xena Fan Fiction on the Internet (also "The History of Xena Fan Fiction on the Net")
Creator: Lunacy
Date(s): 1998
Medium: online in two places
Fandom:
Topic: early Xena: Warrior Princess fandom
External Links: The History Of Xena Fan Fiction On The Internet, Archived version
bibliotecaxff XWP
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

The History of Xena Fan Fiction on the Internet is 6516 word fanwork by Lunacy. It is part essay, article, and timeline.

The article has MANY internal links to sites and individual fics. See the original essay for them. The article also includes a table/graph of fic types from June 1996 to January 1998.

The focus is early Xena: Warrior Princess fandom.

A similar article is A Cyber History of the Online Xena Community: Part I -- September 1995 To June 1996.

Parts

  • Introduction
  • What Is Fan Fiction?
  • Origins of Xena Fan Fiction
  • Fan Fiction Grows Up
  • Newer Trends and Developments In Fan Fiction
  • The Future of Xena Fan Ficton
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Biography

Some Fics and Sites Linked and Described

Excerpts

The TV series XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS premiered in the United States in September 1995. Universal's XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS NETFORUM opened the next month as an online venue through which fans could meet and talk about the show. By November of that year the alt.tv.xena discussion group had also become available. It was through these two online meeting places that viewers first began sharing their fan fiction. With the early NetForum posts no longer available, it's impossible to confirm which was the first piece of XWP fan fiction ever posted, but by the Spring of 1996, it was already common to see on the NetForum at least one or two new fanfic posts each week.

Throughout this first full year of the fandom, fan fiction became increasingly more popular as did the fans who wrote it. Visitor, Dancyer McCoy, Mlocket, Deanlu, Anon, Wishes, Enginerd and Tim Wellman among others became familiar names to NetForum regulars who would anxiously log into the site searching for that next story installment or just to see Wishes and Tim posting one brilliant piece of fanfic after another in their nightly wars with trolls. I, myself, fondly remember Anon's wonderful CHILDHOOD'S END as the NetForum title which first got me hooked on fanfic. Anon and these other early fanfic writers were soon attaining a new level of recognition as the fandom's appetite for fanfic continued to grow. Inspired by the character of Gabrielle, Xenites started referring to these writers as "bards" and a whole new class of celebrity was born in the Xenaverse.

During this period, one major disadvantage of posting fanfic both on the NetForum and the alt.tv.xena discussion group was that older posts quickly disappeared and, in the case of the NetForum, permanently became unavailable after a while. Unfortunately, many early fanfic efforts were lost because of this, but two significant events in 1996 would help to ensure that fanfic became a more permanent part of the Xenaverse, paving the way for the popularity fanfic enjoys today. In June 1996 TOM'S XENA PAGE premiered on the Web. Managed by Tom Simpson, this site quickly became the first major fanfic archive in the Xenaverse.

1996 also saw a growing awareness among fans of the subtext, which is now such an ingrained part of the fandom. The focus of many heated discussions during the series' first year, the subtext nevertheless soon gave birth to a genre within the fanfic known as alternative or alt fiction. These were stories which added a romantic element to the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle, depicting them as lovers or potential lovers. Shared at first exclusively through private mailing lists, alt. fiction emerged into the fandom at large in the Fall of 1996 with the premier of Dax's OBSESSION page and the release of alt. classics like her own LIFE FROM DEATH and Bat Morda's BROKEN ARROW. Inspired by the show's subtext, alt fiction would quickly become a favorite with many Xenites, helping to legitimize that view of the show within the fandom and encouraging an understanding among fans that helped to eliminate much of the early dissent. Consisting at first primarily of first-time stories, alt fiction now offers a rich variety of fiction and has been the catalyst for many of the genres which developed after it.

Mel/Janice fanfic was the precursor of yet another genre which emerged in 1997 - uber fanfic. "Uber" is a German term that literally means "over" but which is used in academia to refer to the fundamental essence of a concept or an idea or a character. An Uber-Xena story is one which takes the essence of the characters in XWP and places these in another time, another place, another reality. The TV series itself in fact provided us with its own uber-Xena episode in the THE XENA SCROLLS (34/210). A story involving the characters of Mel and Janice *is* an Uber-Xena story because these characters retain essential qualities of the original Xena and Gabrielle while existing in another time (1940's). In an Uber-Xena story, the characters do not have to be mirror images of the originals they are based on - both physically and spiritually there could be differences but again, the essence of the originals must be there. Taking Mel and Janice as examples once again - Mel is very different from Xena as is Janice from Gabrielle, but three things define them as Uber representations: Mel and Janice resemble their ancestors physically, they are identified as being descendants of the warrior and bard, and they share the same type of bond. The Xena and Gab-like characters in an uber-Xena story generally resemble the originals although they don't have to look exactly like them. In most uber-Xena stories they are presented as either descendants of the warrior and bard or reincarnations, but, again, these are not prerequisites. Suffice it to say that if you are a fan of the TV series, the characters in an uber-Xena story will be familiar to you even if they aren't exactly Xena and/or Gabrielle.

In February 1998, no longer enamored with the series and because she had other commitments to fulfill, Xenos announced the closing of the XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS FAN FICTION INDEX. From the short-term crisis that followed, as fanfic readers scrambled to fill the void, not one but three new indexes emerged. Shadowfen turned her own personal database into SHADOWFEN'S XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS FAN FICTION INDEX, making available also what has become one of the most popular What's New pages in the Xenaverse. Three NetForum regulars, Del_kaidin, Absinthe and CN Winters organized a collaborative effort which would give birth to the ULTIMATE FANFIC DIRECTORY, featuring a number of helpful new subject indexes. With Xenos' approval, Bardseye and Xenabat unveiled the third index which was, in fact, a reworked version of Xenos' original under their management now and renamed THE XENAVERSE CODEX.

This is an addendum to the article THE HISTORY OF XENA FAN FICTION ON THE NET appearing in WHOOSH #25, Oct. 1998.

The chronological information I originally reported in that article for the uber genre was in fact wrong. Since the writing of that article I've become aware of a couple of other stories which alter that uber chronology. Bat's IS THERE A DOCTOR ON THE DIG was of course the first Mel/Janice tale and thus an uber, but even prior to this story some writers had already visited the uber concept. Over in the HERCULES fandom in January 1997, a writer named Terra Chang had posted a story named A MEETING OF CHANCE featuring modern-day versions of Hercules, Iolus, Xena and Gabrielle. That same month, the weekend after XENA SCROLLS first aired on TV, A Xenite named Darkone released the story WARRIOR'S HEART on a private mailing list. With the uber-Gabrielle as a rock dancer and the uber-Xena as her bodyguard, the story was publicly available on the Web by February 1997. "Uber" as a fanfic term was not being used as of yet but in the months ahead as more Xenites were inspired to write stories featuring versions of Xena and Gabrielle other than the originals, the term, first coined by Kym Tayborn from WHOOSH, became popular. Bards Miss and Aisa began posting an uber named GET YOUR KICKS ON ROUTE 66 which unfortunately was never finished but in July 1997 we got Bongo Bear's THE HITCH HIKER, which paired an architect and a military historian - and by the end of that summer we had three of the fandom's most beloved uber classics online, Della Street's western TOWARD THE SUNSET, Nene Adam's Victorian detective mystery BLACK BY GASLIGHT and the gritty modern-day spy thriller SURFACING by Paul Seely & Jennifer Garza. The uber genre was here to stay!

References

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