Silvermoon Interview with FernWithy
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| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Silvermoon Interview with FernWithy |
| Interviewer: | Helen Vader |
| Interviewee: | FernWithy |
| Date(s): | early 2000s |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | Star Wars |
| External Links: | "interview was here". Archived from the original on 2008-02-17. |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
FernWithy was interviewed for the website Silvermoon.
See Silvermoon Interview Series.
Some Excerpts
Why did you choose your pen name?
It's a long and kind of dull story. I'd been working on a fanfic involving a hobbit girl named "Fern Withypoll." She never really materialized (though a re-named version did better). One night I was working on my college work online, and got sick of being IM'd under my real name – stupid me, I hadn't figured out that I could just turn it off yet – so I made up a new screen name and just grabbed Fern's name as a handle because it was up there; it had to be shortened to FernWithy. I was using that screen-name when I started posting fanfic to SW sites, and it just stuck. Now, I'm kind of used to being Fern.
When did you start writing fanfiction?
When I was thirteen, some friends and I started writing the next generation of Star Wars, with Luke and Camie's daughter (my character), Han and Leia's daughter, the Emperor's grand-daughter, Han's much-younger sister, and Biggs Darklighter's niece. I didn't know that anyone else did it, and the story is mercifully lost. I started writing it sincerely with Quantum Leap fanfic (under my real name) around the time that series was cancelled (1993?), in my early 20s, and I realized what a huge group of fans actually participated.
Would you agree that fanfiction is a genre dominated by women, and if so, why do you think it's so?
I think it's not as dominated by women as it once was – there are some fine male authors out there – but largely, yes, it's a women's branch of fandom. I think it's because the professional fiction is so completely centered on the adolescent male mindset, and fan fiction helps to compensate for it. Leia Organa was so fully betrayed in Shadows of the Empire that I refused to read any pro SW fiction for a long time, and still don't enjoy it much (though the prequel stuff is 100% improved). I mean, come on... a villain who competes with the heroes by being sexually irresistable to any female? Puh-lease. And all these reprisals of a battle that was already won at the end (yet another Imperial bad dude, another rise of the Sith, more smugglers in trouble with more Hutts, and of course the ever-popular even bigger and badder superweapon) – it's pure gameplaying, which some girls like, but which is largely a boys' domain. I think most adults (male or female) like different things – the deeper thematic issues of the fairy tale – and women have felt more welcome writing about it than men have. (Maybe because we have a few centuries of memory of doing unappreciated and unpaid work, and they don't.)
This is a site devoted to antagonists. Could you reveal us your favourite Mr. Bad Guy?
I don't like bad guys, per se. I find them interesting only insofar as they are redeemable, which is why my vote always goes to Darth Vader. :)