Femslash For Fans  

If you watch soap operas, then you know how couples are so rarely allowed to remain together for long. Certainly that was true of Bianca Montgomery from "All My Children". It wasn't easy for the first prominent lesbian in daytime soaps, as she lost girlfriends to repressive parents, psychopathic aunts, cancer-stricken mothers, and one's inability to make up their own damn mind. It wasn't easy for her femslash fans either. Yes, they got that lesbian wedding eventually. It was just hard to enjoy it when the fiancee - you know, the one we barely knew - had kissed a guy only the night before. (Seriously, was ANYBODY happy with that storyline?) Well, Bianca may have loved and lost and lost again at the hands of professional writers (and those darn sponsors), but over the years she was also given a "happily ever after" by hundreds of unpaid but devoted fan fiction authors. And three of the best will be on my show tonight. We'll be discussing Bianca's entire romantic history, but focusing on the three most prominent women in her love life. QQSuited has written volumes about the Bianca/Maggie relationship after they departed Pine Valley for Paris. A.M. Glass wrote the "Dear Miranda" series about the enduring love of an older Bianca and Lena reunited. And Dreiser rolled up her sleeves and created what AMC should have but didn't - the story of how Bianca and Reese fell in love.

If you're like me, you probably didn't detect a whole lot of subtext when watching the sitcom "The Facts of Life", because it was only the early 1980s, homosexuality wasn't exactly acceptable subject matter for a show about teenage girls, and, well, you were seven years old. Even if you were seven, though, you were probably still like every guy on that show - you found Blair Warner irresistible. As you grew older, however, you discovered that some women found her irresistible as well. And the idea of a Blair/Jo Polniaczek romantic pairing even more so. Whether it's because you see them as the ultimate butch/femme couple, or because of the "opposites attract" thing, or just because they seemed to work together so well in spite of the apparent differences, Jo/Blair continues to be a popular source of Facts of Life fanfic - perhaps the only source these days - over twenty years after the show ended. Tonight we'll talk with two experienced Jo/Blair authors, Del Robertson and Misty Flores, about when they first saw the Jo/Blair friendship in a different light, the comparative appeal of Jo/Blair when they were teenagers vs. adults, whether or not Natalie or Tootie might one day get a femslash of their very own, and why they think a 25-year-old sitcom like Facts of Life continues to draw 'shippers even today - unlike, say, Mr. Belvedere.

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".