Interview: amycarey
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Interview: amycarey |
| Interviewer: | Gigi Kiersten |
| Interviewee: | amycarey |
| Date(s): | June 8, 2015 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | Once Upon a Time |
| External Links: | page one: Interview: amycarey, Archived version page two: Interview: amycarey, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
amycarey is a 2015 interview at Fannishery.
amycarey is a Once Upon a Time fan.
Introduction
Amycarey is without a doubt one of the leading authors in the one of the largest femslash ships in fandom, Swan Queen or Regina Mills/Emma Swan from The ABC Show, ‘Once Upon A Time’. Sexy, sometimes hilarious, intriguing, and always heartwarming, her fics over the last four years have diffidently become a fandom staple.
Excerpts
So did you first start off writing femslash? Or did that come later?
No, that came later. I was a fairly indiscriminate Harry Potter shipper – mostly het (Draco/Ginny and Ron/Hermione) and some deeply embarrassing slash.
I did ship Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil.
I think I wrote one little fic about them – and a lot of Lavender POV where she had a massive crush on Parvati that was not reciprocated (very much a case of art imitating life, that one).
What initially attracted you to Once Upon A Time, and then eventually on to Emma Swan/Regina Mills aka Swan Queen.
So I went into OuaT knowing there was a massive femmeslash following and I was at a point where basically everything I wanted to read was about queer ladies getting happy endings. So I binge-watched the first season and saw the SQ pretty much immediately – pretty much because I was looking for it – and then kept watching.
I plotted out my first fic before I’d read all that much in the fandom – but as I wrote, I started reading pretty much everything on A03 I could get my hands on.
There’s so much potential in the pairing and so many tropes that I love.
It really ticked every box for me in terms of a relationship I could root for.
Like, you’ve got this amazing gradual development of a relationship from hatred to giving each other happy endings (I’ve always loved the slap-slap-kiss trope), and the family aspect, which I will always love writing about and reading about. And these two wonderfully flawed and engaging characters.
Swan Queen ship has a love/hate relationship with the series creators, writers and cast of the show. How has that relationship between the Swan Queen fans and the show effected your writing as a whole?
It hasn’t, really? I’m actually kind of delighted with the way Regina and Emma’s has developed on the show in a lot of ways – it feels like a really natural growth. Would I like them to realise they are in love? Yes. But I have fic for that. I didn’t get into the fandom thinking this was endgame.
I guess, for me, I’m more concerned at the poor treatment of non-white characters by the creators and the lack of diversity in general – rather than the fact that there is no Swan Queen.
Some of the messages the show puts across are worrying to me. I know there’s a lot of mishandling of Swan Queen shippers, both past and present, but I try to avoid interviews, twitter accounts etc. that might be dispiriting.
Your most popular Swan Queen fic was Down The Rabbit Hole. What was your inspiration for that fic?
Initially it came from a prompt and some ensuing discussion about 20 somethings living in NYC. I was in the process of finishing ‘Regina (or the Evil Stepmother’) which is a regency AU, and, while fun, I was missing the ease of writing modern stuff.
Then I accidentally took heavy-duty pain meds instead of panadol and wrote 2000 words. And Emma ended up at a children’s bookshop.
It was a very strange start but it worked out nicely.
What are the things that you are not proud of as a writer?
So there’s some stuff in my writing I still cringe over – I’ve used some kind of toxic tropes before and then there’s some stuff that just feels ludicrously fluffy. I think I have a tendency to write the easy way out of problems and plot is something that I really do struggle with. The popularity of a couple of my fics in particular just kind of embarrasses me – but I don’t know how justified my embarrassment is.