The Darth Maul Estrogen Brigade Interview with Siubhan

Interviews by Fans
Title:	The Darth Maul Estrogen Brigade Interview with Siubhan
Interviewer:	Kristiina
Interviewee:	Siubhan
Date(s):	December 18, 1999
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Darth Maul
External Links:	interview is here, Archived version
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Siubhan was interviewed for The Darth Maul Estrogen Brigade.

Some Excerpts

I 'm a slasher at heart. I really like watching two beautiful men together. And Obi-Wan and Maul are the two most beautiful men in TPM (in my not so humble opinion). Besides, they're both apprentices, they're both dumped on by their masters, but they're so totally opposite in personality that it's funny to make them a couple. So it's a combination of being funny and being pretty.

I was heavily into Voyager fanfic before switching to Star Wars fanfic. Before that, I'd written a couple of really awful pieces of Next Gen fanfic. The Voyager stuff I wrote was either Chakotay/Paris slash, or extremely silly (or sometimes both). My first Star Wars fanfic was a short pre-slash Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan piece.

Radical feminist--you know, that term has been misused so much that I made a conscious decision to use it with pride. Radical means "to the roots." So a radical feminist is simply someone who thinks that the only way to make effective change is to dig to the roots of the problem and work from there. We can't just pass a few laws that say "Oh, and women get these rights now too," we need to dig deep and change society. Being a radical feminist does *not* mean that you support anti-porn censorship. It does *not* mean that you think women are better than men. It does *not* mean that you think women and men will never be able to get along, so you'd better protect women from men. It means that you think that the world can be changed for the better. As for the Star Trek fan, I should probably take that out. I finally stopped watching Voyager this season. But for about 5 years, I was heavily involved in Trek fandom, so that really defined who I was. I was active in some fan clubs, drew a comic strip, wrote fanfic, did a newsletter. But I'm recovered now.

It was also made harder by the fact that Maul barely had any screen time in TPM. We got three lines out of him, a few minutes of him standing around, and then a really cool fight scene. That's not enough to get a good sense of exactly what the character's all about. I mean, we learn that he's incredibly focused on the job, and we figure that he must spend a lot of time training to be that good with a double-bladed lightsaber, but that's all. I mean, Sidious leads a double life. Does Maul? Does Maul have a public persona, like Palpatine does? Does he have a day job? Does he associate with other people? Does he have sex? What's he like when he's not on duty? Or is he always on duty? We don't know any of this, so I had to make a lot up and hope that it seemed consistent with what we saw on screen.

I did put the sex as a separate part of the story, for people who didn't want to read it. I also think that keeping it as part of the narrative flow would have ruined the pacing of the story. I learned how to write male/male sex from a gay male friend of mine. I loaned him a slash zine of mine, and he read it and told me, "I can tell this was written by women." I asked him to show me how, and he pointed out all the mistakes in the sex scenes--all the things that just didn't work when two men had sex. So when I started writing my own sex scenes, I'd have him look them over for me, give me tips, tell me what was working and what wasn't. It was really helpful.