I’m Just Here for the Romy

I think Romy is a very interesting example of the “wish fulfillment” function of fanfiction. Because part of the mystique of that ship (no pun intended) is that they can’t touch, they can’t consummate their relationship . . . And fanfic is a way that fans can get them to touch, to work out that angst. I think that one of the staples of Romy fic is the sexual tension between the two, and how they resolve that; the push and pull between them. Sometimes these take place in epic, superheroic backdrops, sometimes in AUs, where they have no mutant powers and where the tension between them is born from other factors (such as already having significant others, or being enemies, or in illicit lines of work).

What draws you to AUs? Your stories aren’t a case of fanfiction filling what’s “between panels”; you tend to shift characters and relationships to entirely different settings, whether it’s a Strange Days–like world or another genre, like a Southern gothic procedural. Can you talk about AUs and how they play out in your imagination?

What I’ve always liked is world-building. One of my first large-scale writing projects was a fantasy trilogy called The Legend of Elu. Most of the fun I got from that was actually building the world, the kingdoms, the mythology, the theology, the languages, the history of that story. That definitely bled into my fanfic.

Now I tend to write canon stuff as one-shots, and novel-length stuff as AUs, because they give me more space to play with world-building. That was something I realised I enjoyed more when I wrote Threads. Writing all those little worlds in a series of one-shots felt too “small.” HoC was originally an expansion of the Threads tale Touch and Go, but it grew into something else, and since then, I’ve preferred to go the AU route for the longer-form stories. :)

We’re living in peak Romy times—I think we’re still reeling from the wedding! Let’s say you had the power to go back in time and drop a pin into an earlier moment in the Romy timeline that you felt truly represents what Romy means to you (which isn’t the same as when they’re happiest!). When and in what universe? Why this choice?

There are so many iconic moments from Romy’s past, but, for me personally, I always go back to their time in Valle Soleada (in X-Treme X-Men). That’s not because they’re happy per se, but because I think that that period was the perfect example of how great they worked together on every level, and was proof positive that they were a good match. I often say it, but I will say it again here, because it’s the truth, and y’all can fight me to the death over it—if there was a time they would’ve got married and I would’ve bought it 100%, it would’ve been in Valle Soleada.

On Tumblr, it seems a large contingent of Romy fans are women in their 30s who discovered Romy at a tender age, thanks to the animated series. This includes you and me! There are exceptions, of course. What’s it like for you to have been in the fandom from the early aughts? What changes in the fandom have you noticed between 2003 and 2018?

I really joined the fandom at an exciting time for Romy—they’d just got back together properly after all the turmoil of the Trial of Gambit. X-Treme X-Men was a treat for Romy fans, and Claremont wrote such a great dynamic between them. As fans we were all excited and happy and well-fed on all that Romy goodness.

So it was weird (not to mention disappointing) when the 2004 reboot happened, and Marvel did everything they could to tank Romy. Which is one thing, and I can stomach it if [it were] logically and well written, but it was just so terribly done that I think many of us just tapped out of the fandom completely. I’d say 2005–2018 were fallow years for the Romy fandom. Most (if not all) of the fan friends I made at that time completely left the fandom. For myself, as someone who enjoys writing AUs, it was the perfect time to branch out from writing in canon and fitting Romy into my own world.

Who are your influences? What writers do you feel a particular affinity for? Are there writers whom we might be surprised to discover informed your work, but you feel have, despite appearances?

I was heavily influenced by the dark, modern fairytales of Angela Carter about the time that I was writing Queen of Diamonds and Threads. She had a really magical way with words—her prose was lyrical, sensual, and unbelievably rich. She was a huge inspiration, but later I moved away from her tone, firstly because I felt I was doing a poor imitation of her, secondly because it wasn’t really appropriate for the direction I wanted to move my fics in, and lastly because I was becoming self-conscious of my insane verbosity and wanted to pare down my prose. That’s something I’m still working on!

At some point during the writing of House of Cards, I finally got round to reading Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I think it was Douglas Adams who convinced me to move away from Carter’s beautiful but too-flowery prose. I loved the way his narrative just sizzled. I’m bad at capturing that energy—but I do think that from HoC onwards, I’ve tried to learn to be more economical with my words—which is hard for a florid soul like mine. 

Threads—structurally at least—was influenced by Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, and later, by David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. 

Let’s say you can pair your fiction with other works of art—of all forms, films, paintings, music, etc.—as if you were pairing wines to foods. What other pieces of art might you say go along with yours?

Wow! OK—that’s hard. Threads I’d probably pair with Cloud Atlas (the book, not the film, which I haven’t yet watched). HoC—I don’t know that there’s any one thing I would pair it with, but you can bet a load of post-apocalyptic stuff was thrown into that stew, along with a bit of The Matrix and probably some Inception.

52 Pickup was influenced a lot by Asmus’s Gambit run, cos I really wanted to write a heist fic with Remy and Rogue rather than Remy and Joelle (who I freely admit kicked ass). But if I had to pair it with a piece of media, it’d be with the video game Remember Me, which dealt a lot with themes of how memories inform our identities, and the ethical concerns of having memories essentially become “documents” that are uploaded and shared digitally through the cloud.

This is a good segue to talk about high-low culture. We may not want to believe in a hierarchy of culture, but we can certainly talk about the differences between fanfiction and “regular fiction.” When you read fanfiction, do you approach it differently than you would regular fiction? Are your expectations for form, reading pleasure, or anything else different? If so, how so?

Interesting question! I don’t know whether I approach it differently per se, but I think that readers have different expectations of fanfic. Hopefully we all read “regular fiction” for the same reason we read fanfic—for pleasure. But I don’t think there’s really a binary between regular and fanfiction. I think both exist on a continuum. There is a lot of “regular fiction” (I prefer to call it “profic” or “professional fiction,” because I think that’s where the binary between the two exists) that is actually very close to fanfic, and vice versa. By that I mean that there is plenty of fanfic that is epic in scope, deals with serious themes, and might be considered “classics” if they weren’t fanfiction.

And there is also profic, like romance, that is more similar to fanfic in terms of the kind of functions that it serves. There is an illicit pleasure to reading romance—for example, it’s not the kind of thing you’d openly read in public! There’s a similarity between that and fanfic, and I think, as readers of fanfic, we anticipate some level of illicitness when we approach it—even if the illicitness is only in the format (i.e., it’s fanfiction!), not in the content.

Fun question: What role do you think explicit smut functions in a fic? How do you deal with smut in your work? There’s an interesting moment that’s not in HoC, in which you write about Gambit and Rogue’s first time having sex in his point of view. It’s a separate chapter that exists as its own entity on your fanfiction.net page. Notably, it is much more explicit than the scene in Rogue’s perspective. Can you talk a little bit about this decision?

Well, I do think that fanfic is a safe space for writers to explore their sexuality (and I think that’s a huge part of the reason why fic is looked down upon), and smut plays a significant role in that. And smut certainly plays a part in my own fics. HoC actually started out as a random smut scene that burgeoned into something far, far more. Generally, I do try to make the sex scenes have a purpose in the plot (’cos I’m kind of anal about plot structure!), but in the particular case of Slow Burn and the other HoC vignettes, those are more self-contained one-shots where I could explore things that I couldn’t explore in the main story. So I could indulge in the smut a bit more! And let’s be honest—Gambit’s dark sexuality makes it thrilling to write smut from his perspective—of course his “thoughts” are going to be more explicit! ;)

In House of Cards, it’s Rogue’s lone survival of the destruction of the mansion. In 52 Pickup, she is unmoored from her identity and history. In the remarkably grim Queen of Diamonds, trauma is everywhere: childhood abuse, Rogue and Gambit’s survival of Vargas. In each of these narratives, our heroes’ present isn’t much brighter, either. Can you talk about trauma in relation to your writing?

Absolutely, I believe that trauma is a driving force for my writing, and, I would posit, many writers would say the same. I have battled depression since I was 20 (probably younger, but that’s when I was diagnosed), and writing has always been a therapeutic exercise for me. Not merely as a form of escape, but as a way to articulate, understand, and release some of my own trauma—even though it is very different from the traumas Rogue and Gambit and other characters have gone through.

Rogue and Gambit have both had traumatic childhoods, and probably have issues around abandonment, among other things. In many ways, I relate to them because of the pain they must’ve endured at various points in their lives. As humans, we may not be able to relate to the traumas of being a superhero, but we can certainly relate to the traumas of being abandoned, of not fitting in, of failing, of despair, of being hated and scorned, of losing the people we love. These are universals—and they make us into what we are in the present. In the past, there are times I’ve hurt so bad, and my way of making sense of that is to  try and unpick and unravel that. Fanfic is a way for me to take a step back and look at that, examine it.

You portray Rogue and Gambit as the ultimate single children. They’re always solitary, often estranged. Their voices are deeply internal. A particularly striking moment is in Twist of Fate, when Rogue “adopts” Rachel Grey, another character known to be alone, despite having (complicated) siblings. I happen to know you have a sister and brother you’re close with—so can you talk about the solitude that runs through your work? Is there something true to life about that for you?

I come from a very close-knit family, and I have two siblings whom I am very close to. But as a person, in myself—I am solitary. It is hard for me to describe, but I have actually always felt estranged from the world. I have never felt like I truly fit in anywhere, or that others really understand me. So I suppose it is no surprise that estrangement is a theme in my writing. Loneliness and isolation are things I’ve constantly tried to come to terms with in the past; but there is also the need to belong, to connect with others.

I think, despite having a family, Gambit has always been very much aware that he is different; yet the LeBeaus took him in and loved him, and so his eventual exile was an extra kick in the teeth. He learned to stop trusting others and to be suspicious of those who would extend a helping hand. Rogue has always been isolated, but has always wanted to desperately to belong to something, to have the kind of family that Gambit had, big and warm and loving. Her isolation is self-imposed—a fear that getting too close to people emotionally might entail getting close to them physically—but I don’t think that stops her from wanting that closeness, deep down.

In a recent Tumblr Ask, you wrote: “One of the things that bugs me about [HoC] in retrospect is that [Rogue] is a more passive character—things happen around her, and she often has very little agency. . . . Writing 52PU was my ‘reply’ to HOC—to write a Rogue who was kickass and very much in control of her own destination, despite how damaged she was.” 

Have you found yourself “flipping the script” from one project to another in other ways? Did you find yourself flipping the script with Gambit’s character, in the same way you did with Rogue, at any point?

If I’ve ever flipped the script, I don’t think it’s ever been entirely a conscious decision until 52PU. The things that bother me now about QoD and the HoC series is that Rogue is more of the damsel in distress to Remy’s knight-in-shining-armour, and while that narrative has its place, it has become glaring to me. I wanted to write a narrative where they could both stymie and save one another equally.

In QoD, Rogue is a literal damsel in distress, and Remy has to save her. In HoC, while Mystique calls Rogue “one of her best operatives,” in fact, most of her successes are down to Gambit himself. After I wrote the series, that really irked me—thus resulting in Rogue being more empowered in 52PU.

About flipping Gambit’s character—that is an interesting thought, but I don’t know that it’s something I could do, mainly because I’ve always felt I’ve written Gambit as I see him—more or less anyway. The closest I’ve come to turning his character on its head was in 52PU, because there were so many times that Rogue outsmarted him and gave him a run for his money. This gave him less agency at times—but it felt far more satisfying because they had to learn to work with one another instead of against one another, and in the end the relationship between him and Anna felt earned.

You’ve intimated that writing in Gambit’s point of view interests you more—if in part because it allows you to explore his moral “grayness,” as opposed to Rogue’s straight-up heroism. I might be putting words in your mouth. Can you give us the breakdown of what it’s like for you to write in Gambit’s POV, and then in Rogue’s?

I’m naturally more drawn to moral greyness because I suppose it reflects my own character. Rogue is more altruistic and certainly more idealistic, which I find admirable but naive. I am not a very optimistic kind of person! Remy’s stance—pessimistic realism and cynicism—is definitely more the way I see the world. But he always has this streak of nobility that shines through all the more for the darkness in his character, and that makes him all the more attractive to write. Because of these reasons, I find it far easier—or rather, more natural—to write from Gambit’s POV.

Not to say that Rogue’s is hard, just that hers is a voice that isn’t quite my own. I wouldn’t say getting into her mental space is difficult per se—as a writer, I think you have to have some mental flexibility and empathy to allow yourself to walk in a character’s shoes. In a way, you “embody” the character. Their thoughts, their emotions, their motivations—they all become yours.

I suppose it’s a little bit like being an actor. Some characters’ roles are just more enjoyable than others. Give me Scott Summers, and I could probably write him but be bored to hell while doing it, lol. With Remy, though . . . it’s just fun all the way. ;)

Stay tuned for the third and final installment of my interview with Ludi, where we go meta and about her writing process and the Romy fandom. If you don’t follow her on Tumblr @ludi-ling, you’re missing out! You can also find her work in Archive of Our Own.

A few small things: Firstly, the trio oftop panels beautifully signals Rachel’s recovery in the gradualfading of her Hound marks. In each panel, the background grows less green, too.Nova’s grip fades. Yet Rachel is still small, still exceeded by a greaterpower, as seen by Jean’s shadow on her face.

What an interesting arrangement their bodies make in thebleed. Motherly, Jean hovers over Rachel, broken collar in hand. If they were Tetrispieces—Jean being the zigzag and Rachel the L—you know that Jean is the piecepropping up Rachel. Rachel’s body conforms to Jean’s, she’s on herknees. She’s thoroughly submissive.

In fact, with her red cape swung over her back, Rachel isnearly as visually abstract as a Tetris piece: a red rectangle topped by anorange ball. Though she’s back to her own self, she’s hardly a person thereader can see clearly. Maybe she can’tsee herself clearly, either. 

As with all things regarding Rachel Grey, all one can do issigh and say, “Poor Rachel.”

Thanks again, @secretlyasummers!

X-men Red #9 (2018)Pencils: Roge AntonioColors: Rain Beredo

I started writing Romy fanfiction in 2003. Most of that stuff was not actually posted on the internet (a lot of it was smut that was supposed to be anchored in a wider storyline that never got written). As for fanfic in general—I started writing it quite young. The first real piece of fanfic I wrote would have been for Sailor Moon, back in about 1994 (when I was 13). What spurred you to suddenly sit down and do it? Did you read other fanfiction, and realize, "I can do this," or did you do it solo, only to discover other people did the same? I was just so interested and, I supposed, immersed in the Sailor Moon world, and so in love with the characters (especially Sailor Mars) that I felt the urge to write further stories that were all my own, and that expanded the universe in some way.

At the time, I did not know the fanfiction itself existed as a phenomenon. I would not discover that until a few years later, about 1998, when I was obsessed with the video game Final Fantasy 7, and went looking for news and information on it online. I then discovered that fanfiction existed, and it was nice to know I wasn't alone—not that I was particularly embarrassed by the fact that I wrote fanfic at all. It just put a name to what I was doing. What is it about writing fanfiction that appeals to you, personally? It is the fact that I can flex my creative writing muscles and show my love of a certain world and characters at the same time. It is the fact that I can write meaningful and enjoyable fiction about these worlds that other people also find meaningful and enjoyable. It is the adding to that world, and the ability to improve upon, muse on, and fill the gaps in the original canon. It is the way it opens one up to a wider community, and even to make friends with fellow fans. What is the first piece you wrote—and is it available online or in the dustbin of history? Do you recall what inspired that first piece?

The first piece of fanfic I wrote was the Sailor Moon one—it was handwritten in a notebook, and I honestly can’t remember what it was called. Because it was handwritten, it was never typed up—it's never been posted online, since, by the time I was on the internet, I'd long lost interest in Sailor Moon. It may be around my house somewhere. I did look a few months ago, and alas, I couldn't track it down.

As for Romy—the first things I wrote for that were nameless scenes and not full, titled stories. They are definitely not online, unless they've now been inserted into wider fics. These would be from the Insurrection X-Men universe, that my sister and I created way back in 2003, with a plan to submit a comic to Marvel's now-defunct Epic imprint. The Insurrection universe was never completed, but what I wrote of it can be found on my old website at http://www.ludis-x-art.co.uk/fanfics/alternate/insurrection.html.

I'm not precisely sure of the chronology of your oeuvre, but for me, Rogue Psychology seems to be the moment you began working with a larger canvas and grappling with more complex character work and plotting. In comparison to some of the later long pieces, it seems less shapely, in that it's not quite a novel and not quite a multiparter with distinct sections (though it appears to). Am I onto something? Was RP a game-changer for you? Do you have any thoughts particular to the construction of RP?   Ah, so, Rogue Psychology was one of the fics in the X-Men Insurrection series. RP was basically a chapter from a wider story. The Insurrection series of fics (all written out of order) were my first attempt at putting together an entire AU world, which I only managed to fully realise in House of Cards, I think. So it's definitely not a novel and definitely not a multiparter, but several scenes that will never be strung together, because the rest of the story in-between is just not there (and, at this juncture, never will be, lol).

Thinking back on the Insurrection stuff, I think it was where the characters of Rogue and Gambit, and maybe just the X-Men universe at large, started to really gel for me. Things like Gambit's relationship to Sinister is one recurring theme in my stories that comes to mind. I feel bad about not completing it, because Insurrection was going to be where I wrote about how Remy progressed to being the Witness, but ... that never happened. You're best known for writing the House of Cards trilogy and 52 Pickup. Are there other works you're particularly proud of that you'd like people to read next? The work I'm next best proud of is Threads—but I know that it can be a demanding read for some, so I would say, if it doesn't work for you, don't force yourself to read it! ;)