Whoosh! looked at Xena: Warrior Princess fandom and decided the correct response was apparently to build a quasi-academic journal around it.
The site first went online on September 17, 1996 and became the home of the International Association of Xena Studies, usually shortened to IAXS.
The joke in the name never prevented the archive from becoming seriously substantial.
Whoosh! contains essays, episode guides, interviews, letters, convention reports, airing schedules, fandom history, fiction, media analysis, staff biographies, news archives, and issue-by-issue material going back into the period when Xena was still airing new episodes.
The site describes IAXS as a “quasi-literate, quasi-academic, quasi-fandom” excuse to write about the show and related strong female characters.
That is a joke with an extremely large bibliography attached.
Fandom before the platform swallowed it
One of the most valuable things about Whoosh! is that it preserves discussion from the moment rather than a later reconstruction of what fans supposedly cared about.
Issue archives contain episode reactions, arguments over characters, interviews with cast and production figures, fan theories, letters to the editor, and long-form analysis written while the television series was still culturally alive.
A 1997 issue, for example, included an interview with actor Kevin Smith alongside essays on feminism, character development, food in the Xenaverse, and why viewers connected with the show.
The archive also documents the surrounding online community.
One long article from 2000 examines the XENA Palace, a graphical chat environment launched in 1998 where fans moved avatars through themed rooms and talked in speech bubbles. Other sections preserve material from the official Xena website that later disappeared, including fictional archaeological dispatches tied to the show’s mythology.
That is the sort of secondary cultural debris that often vanishes first.
Whoosh! kept it.
The site explicitly presents itself as a living record of a period when Xena fandom helped people form friendships, communities, arguments, creative projects, and online identities around a television show before social media centralized those activities.
Modern fandom still does all of those things.
The difference is that Whoosh! owned its shelves.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes archives like this because fan culture is history too, and the most detailed records often survive on websites created by the fans themselves.
Whoosh! treated obsession like scholarship.
It accidentally produced scholarship in the process.