Interview: XenaVirgin
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Interview: XenaVirgin |
| Interviewer: | Gigi Kiersten |
| Interviewee: | XenaVirgin |
| Date(s): | March 25, 2015 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | The Devil Wears Prada, Babylon 5, Xena |
| External Links: | page one: Interview: XenaVirgin, Archived version page two: Interview: XenaVirgin, Archived version page three: Interview: XenaVirgin, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
XenaVirgin is a 2015 interview at Fannishery.
XenaVirgin is a The Devil Wears Prada, Xena, Babylon 5 fan.
Introduction
If you are in the small, but very active ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ fandom, one name that you will continually see pop up time and time again is the name ‘XenaVirgin’. In a course of seven years, XenaVirgin went from being a little unknown femslash author to becoming a major BNF in not only the overall femslash community, but in ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ fandom as well.
XenaVirgin is a very prolific and popular femslash author, she is also responsible for painstakingly and meticulously archiving and tracking femslash stories on her various excel worksheets that she shares with the overall femslash community. Along with creating the excel worksheets, she is also the creator and the moderator of the very popular ‘Devil Wears Prada Femslash Fanfic’ group on Yahoo, and has moderated more fanfic fests and challenges than one can shake a stick at.
Excerpts
So when was your first foray into femslash?
Truthfully, A very bad little fic I wrote when I was 11. I placed myself in the Battlestar world and while I was too young for actual romance I was fixated on a familial relationship with my favorite female character Athena.
It was actually a Creative Writing assignment. Our teacher gave us a sheet with a picture of a spaceship landing and the opening sentence of “I Never thought it could happen to me…
As to adult fandom. I’d place that starting with Babylon 5. I followed it slavishly and totally fell in love with Commander Ivanova (Totes weirds me out that Claudia Christian is now a dear friend, heh.) And totally shipped Susan and Talia.
And then I found my first and truest home. Xena in 2003, two years after the end of the show. But I am definitely a Xenite to my core, and heavily involved in the fandom online and 3D with Conventions and Fests etc.
To answer the femslash question. It was definitely the 10,000 Xena/Gabrielle fics I read that brought me along quite nicely.
So you have been involved in conventions? What conventions have you been a part of?
Well I helped with Claudia Con, as mentioned above. And I attended every official Xena Convention in Los Angeles (Except last year when it wasn’t financially possible.) since 2005. I helped with the development and set up of the Fan Parties now held at the end of the Convention for the past 5 years.
I’m also part of the Xenafest group here in England. The fests are fan gatherings rather than conventions proper. But we raise a boatload of cash for charity twice a year.
So speaking of Devil Wears Prada how and when did you get into the fandom?
Ahhh, yet another forced conversion. LOL!
Okay. From Xena I got heavily into Janeway/Seven fic, loved the dynamic of the older younger women and well adored Janeway and Seven as a couple.Some of my J/7 buddies started reading, and writing DWP.
I’d seen the film and hadn’t been very taken with it, I felt it was disjointed and I really didn’t like Andy. It actually turned out that the copy of the DVD my friend had was a pirate and had been edited in the most bizarre way. So when I saw the proper version I was pleasantly surprised.
Anyway, Some friends suggested STRONGLY that I would like Mirandy. And well I have a rather perverse, stubborn psychology, and the more people talk something up the more I dig my heels in and won;t try it. Go figure. lol
Then, God bless my bestie Beep (You might know her as Absederian) came for a visit from Germany and happened to bring a printed out copy of truth & measure by Telanu. She left it on the coffee table and badgered me until I finally caved and picked it up. HOLY MOTHER OF MOUNTAINS!!! was my basic reaction.
I call it a real Simchat Torah story. (On Simchat Torah we read the last chapter of the Torah scroll, rewind it and read the first chapter in the same service to start the new cycle of readings.) I finished it in one night and literally immediately turned back to page one and started to read it again.
Beepster then pointed me at some of the best DWP fics extant at the time (2009). And I was off into a new mania. I will say that Mirandy is in a dead heat with XenaGabriele for my OTP.
So it’s been almost a decade since The original ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ movie has been released and it’s been seven years since you came into the fandom. You yourself has spearheaded a lot of efforts to keep ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ fandom alive when any other movie fandom would have faded out. How did you get into doing that?
To be honest, I’m not quite sure. LOL I’m somewhat effusive when I fangirl. And I do try to always leave feedback on stories I read. I know a couple of DWP writers who were surprised by my sudden enthusiastic reviews and have been told by two of them that my enthusiasm sort of rekindle their own and they then wrote a few more stories in the fandom.
And then there was my spreadsheet.
When I was reading Xena fics, I created a very truncated spreadsheet to keep track of fics I’d read and to rate them for good writing or interesting storyline, so that my Lady Wife Jane could just glance at the sheet and only read the stories I’d given a good rating to and not bother with the dross.
After my illness in 2008, I’ve suffered a permanent problem with my memory due to the meds I was on. So I continued creating spreadsheets for my new fandoms in J/7 and Gelphie/Wicked. But now I added a little review synopsis to help my memory along. Vaxen asked to post up my J/7 sheet on her site and it’s still there, woefully out of date, but there.
I did the same thing with DWP, but because of the demise of geocities and the loss of some of my favourite Xena works, I also started to actually harvest the stories en masse so I wouldn’t lose them. I keep them on a dedicated external hard drive.I often mentioned my sheet when people asked me to help them find fics and so I shared it in a Yahoo group and on FB.
With all the changes going on in the ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ fandom, where do you see the fandom going in the future?
I think it will depend on some obvious factors, like new material from a film. And oddly enough on a factor I don’t think anyone could have foreseen.
The severe divisions and homophobia in the Once Upon A Time Fandom has actually led to a strange influx of fangirls into DWP. They’re kind of shell shocked from the vitriol and bullying in OUaT against Swan Queen. Many are looking for a fandom with good writing and a calm and supportive atmosphere and have turned up in DWP.
In its infancy, several of the best DWP writers started to write in the Swan Queen fandom and many of their fans are following them backwards into their previous fandoms to find good work. Which I find really interesting because my journey has often been in the opposite direction, following good writers from Xena to J/7 to Mirandy to SQ.