Femslash For Fans  

See description of first Birds of Prey show with North and BG. Ficmail2004 was one of my original invitees to be on that show, but she didn't find out until less than 24 hours after airing. Since I had really hoped to speak with her, I'm making an exception by doing this tiny Wednesday show. Consider this an additional fifteen minutes to the October 29th show. Anybody who wishes to contact Ficmail2004 about her story Doppelganger can reach her at hawkbehere@yahoo.com

All right, so it lasted only thirteen episodes, nowhere near as long as Smallville, the show whose success on The WB helped spawn it. And maybe it wasn't the critics' favorite that year. And I suppose many of the main characters were just a bit different from their comic-book counterparts. None of that ever stopped Birds of Prey fans from their undying devotion to Oracle and Huntress. You think Batman and Robin had something going on? That's nothing compared to the subtexty relationship between mentor Barbara Gordon and protege Helena Kyle. (No, not Bertinelli, Kyle. Just go with it.) And if perhaps the writing wasn't always great, that just means there are plenty of fan fiction authors out there who took up the challenge, sought to do better than the source material that inspired them - and succeeded. We'll be talking to two of them this night - North, who wrote stories like "Poison" and "Strain" that drew extra inspiration from the show's comic-book roots, and BG, author of the massive "Elemental" series and a writer whose work reflected the knowledge that Harley Quinn was much more than a ruthless sociopath. We'll talk to them about the show, about the comics, and about why the romance between a super-powered crime fighter and a paraplegic computers genius has endured for so long. Also, be sure to check out my November 4th interview with fellow BoP author Ficmail2004, who wanted to be a part of this show but only found out about it a few hours too late.

Normally I don't devote two full episodes of this program to a single fandom. Certainly I don't normally do it in the same month. In the wake of the October 1st discussion of Nikki & Nora, however, we're taking one more spin around the New Orleans city block on October 22nd for a very special occasion. On this show I'll be talking with the three people that N&N fans associate with the show most - creator/writer Nancylee Myatt and stars Christina Cox and Liz Vassey. It's going to be an unusual show in more ways than one. Not only will it be the first time I've interviewed actual celebrities for my show instead of fan authors, not only will the show run longer than sixty minutes, but it will also be the first time where every single question will have been asked prior to airing. Due to scheduling conflicts that prevent all three of my guests from appearing in person, the entire interview has been conducted via email, and their answers will be read over the air by devoted N&N fans. Those questions aren't just from me, either - most of them are from the fans themselves. And to top it all off, my guests have expressed a willingness to answer questions about other projects. That means television programs like CSI, Blood Ties, Defying Gravity, and South of Nowhere are all on the table. So be sure to tune in - there's no telling what you might find out about your favorite pairing.

Even after being canceled a few years ago, Disney's Kim Possible continues to be one of the busiest and most popular fandoms in American animation today. A successful combination of action and comedy with a healthy dose of female empowerment, the animated series eventually attracted a devoted audience far wider than just the target demographic of 8- to 13-year-olds. Not since Gargoyles in the mid-1990s has a Disney program had a fan following with almost as many adult fans as children. And of course, since adults are much more likely to begin 'shipping romantic pairings than children are, it wasn't long before main characters Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable fell in love in thousands of fanfics. Naturally plenty of alternate pairings followed, but none captured people's hearts, or provoked such controversy and debate, like the good girl/bad girl femslash pairing of Kim and nemesis Shego. Since 2004 dozens of fanfic authors (including, I'm proud to say, yours truly) have helped Kim/Shego, quickly dubbed "Kigo", grow from just another niche pairing to the second-biggest couple in the fandom. We'll talk to three of them tonight - King in Yellow, author of the ongoing episodic Best Enemies series; Sobriety, writer of such recent classics as "Most Wanted" and "Best Sidekick Possible"; and TempestDash, who wrote "A Period of Silence" and the will-they-won't-they "Possibility Engine".

We'll be taking a trip back in time to one of the first, greatest canon lesbian pairings on network television - Willow/Tara from the WB's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". It was all the way back during the 1999-2000 season when we first were charmed by Tara Maclay in "Hush", when we first fell in love along with Willow Rosenberg in "New Moon Rising". A year later we cheered when they shared their first onscreen kiss in "The Body". And a year after that the righteous fury poured forth when Tara was - well, you know. We'll be talking about those days with two of the most prolific Willow/Tara authors out there, the collaborative team known as the Rainbow Writers. We'll discuss their sizable body of work, including "The Circle Series", "Safe in her Arms", and what the future holds for their readers.

In the first of a two-part series on unlikely femslash successes, we'll discuss Nikki & Nora, the biggest femslash TV pairing that was never on TV. Featuring two lead actresses as New Orleans police detectives who are partners in the bedroom as well as in the squadroom, N&N inevitably attracted a great deal of attention from the gay & lesbian media when UPN announced the pilot. That saved N&N from obscurity when UPN chose not to pick the pilot up for a full series. Rather than being consigned to oblivion, N&N took advantage of the Internet by releasing the pilot onto the Web, where it has been seen by hundreds of thousands of fans. One of those is the author Silk, who wrote the ongoing "Trouble" series about the intrepid detectives played by Liz Vassey and Christina Cox. We'll talk to her about how a single 40-minute episode motivated her to author a series of successful, well-written stories which have lived on even longer than UPN itself.