Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Amy D

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Amy
Interviewer:	Franzeska Dickson
Interviewee:	Amy D
Date(s):	May 25, 2012
Medium:	audio recording
Fandom(s):
External Links:	Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Amy D
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In 2012, Amy D was interviewed at MediaWest as part of the Media Fandom Oral History Project.

Length: 53:26. A written transcript is available.

For more information about the origins of this interview, where it is housed, contact information, suggestions regarding future interviewee candidates, and how to become volunteer interviewer, see the Media Fandom Oral History Project page.

Topics Discussed

• her fannish beginnings
• her fannish platform choice
• attending a Highlander con

Excerpts

I think the very first thing I was a fan of, before I even knew fandom existed, was High Mountain Rangers. Robert Conrad, and his sons. And that was just a fun show to watch. Of course, I didn't realize fandom existed yet. That was 1992, when I was in college. And a friend of mine, first she introduced me to the TV show Highlander. And, yeah. And then she dragged me into the computer lab one day and said, "Okay, you're paying like twenty bucks a year and you never use this." And, yeah. That got me sucked into Usenet, and message boards, and it was just kind of downhill from there. [Usenet] was kind of like, like the earliest versions of bulletin boards. You could go there and type in whatever you wanted and would show you a mailing list, an electronic mailing list for that. And it was just, Yahoo Groups is very similar to Usenet, I find.

I don't see the point of slash, but you know, that's me... You know what, when I go looking for fic, I'm just looking for, basically, what would be on the TV set. Whatever else they're doing outside of the TV set. If the character is married, ok; if the character is married in the story, that's fine. My thing with slash is, not so much, I don't think, I have something against homosexuals. My problem is, they put two people together where there's no possible way they would be like that. But slash, in general, I don't – Methos from Highlander. The man's five thousand years old. I'm fairly certain he's probably, every conceivable way, and then some. I don't have a problem with that. I didn't have a problem with Darius. You know, there's a lot of people. But then other people, they are so obviously heterosexual, and then you put them as – no. It's just like I don't get it . I don't see the appeal.

I've written some Highlander fic, some X-Men fic, Numb3rs, I've written with a woman, we just call ourselves The Evil Twins. A little bit of Hawaii Five-0. So. But we do it just for fun. Sometimes it gets posted, sometimes not. Usually [when I post my fic] it's been fanfic.net. Because, you know, it's the easiest place to go.

I bought a zine that included mention of a convention. And then through the Highlander, that's the first I heard of them. And the Highlander cons, I found out through the mailing list. And I went to, I was in college, I had time. Not a lot of money, but I had time. So I went to three, four Highlander cons. The Highlander cons were once a year in Denver. And then they had more that came along afterwards, but, you know, after I graduated from college, it's a little harder then. So, yeah, I went to the three in Denver, and I went another one in Washington DC about five years after the last one I'd been to. They were just lots of fun. [They actually were fan-run cons ] though they did have the stars show up. Which was very nice, because, you know, they worked very well to answer questions, or explain how the TV show was put together. Stuff like, if I watch another TV show, it's like, "Oh, I know what they're doing," because I'd heard about it through, you know, they had good guest stars, very nice, very nice, very accommodating people. Lovely, lovely people. Very nice, very calm.

I was a great fan of Susan Garrett, who passed on last year. She was one of the few who actually, one of the few fanfic writers who actually got her work, actually got paid to write basically fanfic, because she wrote novels in the Forever Knight universe that was published with Forever Knight. It was called Imitations of... Imitations of Mortality, I think was the title. And so she came up with the character of Dorian, the archivist, and he was supposed to go around and interview all the vampires in the Forever Knight universe. And this was her creation. And it was very well-written, and so I truly enjoyed her work.

There aren't a whole lot. I'm not specifically looking for specific people; if I got through and I read a whatever, a blurb and I like it, ok, I read it. I know, between myself and my Evil Twin people look for our stuff, which is flattering. We even actually have fans, which is really cool. It's like, "Oh, I read your stuff, I really like it!" "Oh. Thank you." So, it's a little weird, but.

I don't look for specific people, I look for specific things. Like I'm looking for certain characters. I read one story that was, I read one story in the Numb3rs universe that was very good because they stayed very true to the characters. Now, I'm all for, you know, creating things that happened outside of the show, and just something to get in to. But if your characters act completely different as they would be on the show, I have a problem with that, because that's not the character.

So I'm not really particularly looking for a specific writer, I was looking for a specific situation. Something like that.

I think with remakes, [Hawaii Five-O] one was actually – from everything I've heard, they went out of their way to make it faithful to the original. Whereas with some other remakes, it's like they take the characters, they take the character names, and some other things, and put it in a wholly separate area, and do wholly separate things. And wonder why it fails. You have no idea you're ignoring what made it popular in the first place. I saw a commercial for Land of the Lost, with Will Farrell, and, ok, granted, Land of the Lost was mid-seventies, late seventies, very cheesy [laughter]. I remember watching it as a kid, I liked it, it was cheesy. It wasn't a comedy by any stretch of the imagination, but that's what they made it. That's why it tanked, because it's not what people watched. So I think when you have a decent remake, it's because whoever it is was faithful to the original. I mean, they will do things like, the man who plays Duke, the sergeant, the older sergeant with the. He is the son of one of original actors on the original show. Now I can't remember which actor, but he is the son of one of the original actors on the show. And the character is named after another. They'll do, like little things that they put in that say, ok yeah. You have to be, you have to understand why it's popular in the first place for it to be able to remake it. That's why I think a lot of remakes have just completely crashed and burned.