The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive Interview with Gersemi

Interviews by Fans
Title:	The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive Interview with Gersemi
Interviewer:	The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
Interviewee:	Gersemi
Date(s):	February 20, 2007
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 Gersemi was conducted in 2007.

Other Interviews in the Series

See The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive Interview Series.

Some Excerpts

I started writing fanfiction way back when, I think I was about 12 or 13, so that was a good ten years ago. I had been writing short original pieces on and off before that, but I didn’t discover fanfiction until then. The first piece I ever wrote was a sort of crossover between Anne Rice’s ‘Vampire Chronicles’ and a horrible Mary-Sue inspired by Michael Turner’s ‘Witchblade’ (yeah, I know – don’t ask). I never published it, though, mostly because it was left unfinished, it was completely in German, and well, let’s face it, it was really awful. It was followed by a not-so-short Stargate thing, that wasn’t much better, so it never saw the light of day either. A short while later, I got into the Buffy fandom, and I started writing for it in English, and I found that I can write more creatively in English than in my native German. At that time, most of my stories were smut. For a couple of years, Buffy was really the only fandom I was really involved with.

I have also written quite a number of Harry Potter fics, mostly Snape-centred Mary-Sue stuff. A short time later, I discovered X-Men. :)

Gersemi is the name of the LARP character I have been playing since 2002. Since then, Gersemi has been my screen name in most of the forums etc. that I frequent. The character was named after the Nordic goddess of beauty; the name means ‘precious’ or ‘jewel’.

I have been reading comics since forever, and have always been a semi-fan of the X-Men comics even though I didn’t seriously follow them. Most of the screen versions of popular comic books I’d seen were truly awful, but the reviews I read for X-Men were really good, and so I decided to give it a shot. And well, it was the best screen adaptation I had seen so far. Shortly after, I wrote a short Logan/Rogue story, but it was never finished. Mostly written to see if the shoe fit, and back then it didn’t.

I think the relationship between Logan and Rogue, as it was shown in X1, held so much potential, much more than any of the others. I never bought into the Logan/Jean thing as it was portrayed there. Besides, I have a thing for older men, and being only 16 myself when X1 came out, I could totally relate to why Rogue felt attracted to Logan. Plus, they’re such incredibly troubled people, and yet (or because of that?) they instantly had this connection.

After watching X2 a few times too many, the ship really hit me, but I didn’t start writing until early in 2006 while waiting for X3, and didn’t publish until after X3 came out. The first thing I seriously wrote for L/R was “Guise Will Be Guise”, which came out as the first part of the Façades series. After X2, the possibilities for Logan and Rogue were endless, and I wanted to have my fair share of exploring those possibilities.

As much as I love the movies, in respect to the relationship between Logan and Rogue I find X3 sorely lacking. So while I may take a lot of inspiration from the movies, I like to bend a few facts, shape them to my liking. And while X3 offered a very beautiful L/R scene, I feel that they didn’t really get into the why’s and how’s of Rogue’s decision. On top of that, I started delving into the Comicverse, so a lot of my inspiration (mainly about Rogue’s character) comes from there, and so my stories more often than not can not be put into the Movieverse category. AUs offer tons of possibilities. You can put the characters, with all their quirks and faults, into a completely different scenario, but the attraction still works. They still work. Some of the best X-Men (not only L/R) fanfiction I have read has been AU.