The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive Interview with Flamedancer77

Interviews by Fans
Title:	The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive Interview with Flamedancer77
Interviewer:	The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
Interviewee:	Flamedancer77
Date(s):	September 6, 2005
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	X-Men
External Links:	the interview is here, Archived version
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The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive Interview with Flamedancer77 was conducted in 2005.

Other Interviews in the Series

See The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive Interview Series.

Some Excerpts

My ‘writing’ started before I ever put pen to paper. As a child (as most do, I’m sure) I used to create worlds in my head and populate them with all manner of people and creatures. Inevitably, some of them would have powers and abilities beyond that of mortal men, and the established worlds of fantasy, sci-fi and of superheroes and villains eventually drew me like the proverbial moth. The first time I actually wrote a story was in fifth grade, and I haven’t stopped since. I’ve actually won awards at the local county fair several times for short stories (original of course) and once for a poem. As for fan fiction, like I assume many people do, I often imagined ‘what next?’ or ‘what if this had happened differently?’ when watching movies or TV shows, books being a bit more ‘sacred’ for some reason I don’t fully understand myself. Still, it was actually only several years ago that I dared to start writing a piece of fan fiction when I became obsessed with the TV show Witchblade. That story grew into a monstrous, multi-fandom saga which I am still working on. I read plenty of fan fiction online whenever I got the chance, though it was only about a year and a half ago that I found fanfiction.net and decided to try my hand at actually letting people read what I had written. There I befriended Jenn (harimad-corlath) after reading and reviewing a WR story of hers. She told me about WRFA and the wrbeta mailing list (for which I will be eternally grateful), which I absolutely loved from day one. It wasn’t long until I tried writing a WR story, and I’ve been doing so ever since. The pen name FlameDancer77 comes from an original character from the aforementioned saga: Mara, who has the title Flame Dancer among the Dragons. She was one of my first OCs, and remains one of my favorites. And the ‘77’ is from the year I was born, 1977. It was actually my pen name on FFN first and I figured I should just keep one name for all my online writing, but that account on FFN was closed and I’m now LadyV77 there. But I figured I was ‘established’ here as FlameDancer77 already, so I made no attempt to change it.

I used to worship the X-Men cartoon of the early 90s. My two favorite characters were (in order) Rogue and Wolverine. Admittedly, I never thought of Rogue and Wolvie as a couple back then, but I thought they made a good team. Rogue was from the South (like my maternal grandmother) and had spunk and what I thought was one of the coolest powers ever. That she permanently had super-strength and flight in addition to being able to copy others’ powers elevated her above any other hero, the fact that she had once been a ‘bad guy’ only made her more intriguing. Wolverine was feral and had knives in his hands… perfection. A modern day ‘lone knight’ type of character with animalistic tendencies and his own code of honor. When I first saw the movie, I was a bit disappointed that Rogue was so different from the character I knew and loved, but the chemistry and deep friendship between she and Wolverine more than made up for it in the end. In my opinion the connection between them was more believable than the main characters in most romance movies nowadays. Then X2 came around and the idiots who made the movie didn’t play with that as much, which of course made me seek out fan fiction that did. I thoroughly enjoyed reading other people’s views on the pairing, and decided why not try it out. Once I started, I fell in love all over again with the many facets of both characters’ personalities and was irrevocably hooked.

I’ve been lucky in that I haven’t received much in the way of negative feedback, except for a couple people on FFN who say things like “Rogue and Wolverine together are gross” even though they say they like my writing style or a certain aspect of the story or what-have-you. One person was really annoying me for awhile because she read and reviewed every Rogue/Wolverine story I posted (which were all labeled as such, by the way) and would say that she thought WR was wrong, even though she did have nice things to say about the stories. I couldn’t help thinking every time “then why are you reading them?” And then, on my recent story, “Half Asleep” I had someone tell me it was a lovely story but that writing about right after the first movie (the situation of Logan having left the mansion and Rogue behind) five years after the fact was lame. To which of course I internally ranted about fandoms that have been around for decades (Star Wars and Star Trek for example) and people continuing to write stories about them. As for numbers, that depends if we’re counting WIP or not. On WRFA (combined with feedback received on wrbeta), for finished story it would be a tie between “Marie’s List” and “Candy or Claws” with 7 a piece. Including WIP, it would be my story “The Darkholme Legacy” with a current tally of 10. On FFN, completed WR story would be “Marie’s List” with 11; “The Darkholme Legacy” again leaps out in front if WIPs are included with a running total of 98. If we’re talking any fandom, my completed multi-chapter story on FFN entitled “Child of the Sun” had a grand total of well over a hundred were it not for the unfortunate circumstance of having to repost as I was nearing the end.