Anghraine

It feels a bit silly to measure time by fanfic, but according to AO3, it’s been over ten and a half years (!!!!!!!!!) since I finished First Impressions.

I’m just … it doesn’t feel recent, but it certainly doesn’t feel like that long, yet it was one of the last things I did in my all-Austen-fandom-all-the-time phase, before I jumped into SW fandom. And my earliest SW fics are ten years old now (somehow???).

But idk, it seems so strange.

Tagged: #my birthday is in ten days and i'm both looking forward to it and feeling a bit weird about it this year #idk i feel like i should be more ~accomplished at this point in my life #or more something #maybe because the things people point to as accomplishments whenever i mention it #are pretty far back too #in any case objective lengths of time just don't match up with how the passage of time feels and it's weird #might be different if my best friend were here (he was born 11 days after me) but we haven't seen each other for over a year #/sigh

My icon has grey eyes and black hair just for Tolkien :P

So. I generally dislike Tolkien fandom's "canonicity discourse" (yes, I'm doing it anyway) and the idea of imposing a specific ranking of texts. That said, it's occurred to me that one of the reasons I feel deeply out of step with Tolkien fandom is that The Silmarillion (as in, the published book, not the in-story accounts) is on a drastically different level of canonicity for me than basically everything else with JRR Tolkien's name on it.

I don't dislike The Silmarillion or anything. I quite enjoy it! But for me, it shows its age—not in ~a man of his time~ sense, but in an editorial sense. Christopher Tolkien did an enormous amount of spectacular editorial work over the course of his life and we are deeply indebted to him. But I think he did pretty clearly get better at it over time, and particularly at presenting his father's mass of notes and documents and so on in a way that makes the texts as accessible as possible. At the same time, in later texts, he clearly differentiates between actual words JRRT wrote (whether in the main body or in notes) and his (CT's) own understanding and explanations as JRRT's confidant and literary heir. I do give a lot of credence to Christopher Tolkien's understanding of his father's work, actually, and I deeply respect (and am grateful for) CT's efforts to carefully and clearly explain things like dates of composition (and how this can be determined), direct context, how a given point relates to his father's broader work, etc, throughout these texts.

(Tangent: Facebook keeps recommending defensive Jackson stans griping about how Christopher Tolkien just didn't get his father's work like Jackson did and was so horribly ungrateful to the filmmakers and such an inferior scholar blahblah for the crime of disliking the films. FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE!! I am not uncritical of Christopher Tolkien, and neither was Christopher Tolkien, but I think we owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to him. Also, even to me, his response to the films seemed harsh at the time, but at this point, I think he was pretty much right, anyway, and correctly judged the films' impact and reflection of pop culture understanding of JRRT's work.)

So what is my issue with the published Silmarillion?

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heckofabecca responded to this post:

:D

cosmiclattes said (on Feb 16th):

Yeah, I joined the LOK fandom… this year actually lol. ATLA was my favorite show when I was a kid and I wasn’t really willing to give LOK a chance and now that I am I’m trying to catch up on so much meta and stories. But Tarrlok is such an intense and fascinating character omg

I replied (on Feb 19th):

Oh, cool—welcome!! LOK has its flaws, but I am super fond of its high moments, and I think the sort of character arc highlights reel that Tarrlok gets from early in the show to his end is definitely one of them.

I also think “intense” is a really good word for him. Even at his most slippery and ambitious, there’s something intense and concentrated about him—he doesn’t do anything halfway, whether it’s good or terrible (Tarrlok: maybe my lie won’t be convincing enough … better electrocute myself to make sure!). And the turn in his character and his account of himself and Noatak makes so much look different in retrospect; it’s really interesting and rewarding IMO.

Tagged: #faaaave

dynadratina responded to my reply (on Feb 20th):

#i agree! #tarrlok is awesome

theantagonistfiles replied to the original ask (on Feb 28th):

*goes immediately to fanfiction.net to find the fic* HOLY CRAP IT'S AMAZINGLY WRITTEN THANK YOU DEAR AUTHOR

I'm taking a brief break from my dissertation to ... uh, amuse myself by figuring out my readers' ranking of my genderbending fics on AO3.

Rules I'm applying: 1) I'm only including fic verses that are collectively at least 2000 words long because, well, I do have to go back to the diss, 2) verses comprised of multiple fics are ranked according to either the popularity of the series as a whole or the most popular individual fic (depending on which is higher; not combining them because there's a lot of overlap), 3) I'm considering both bookmarks and kudos in my judgment—we'll see if it makes a difference, and 4) I'm ignoring everything with less than 30 kudos and 5 bookmarks.

1. First Impressions | 215 bookmarks | 876 kudos | genderbent characters: Elizabeth Bennet (-> Henry Bennet) and Fitzwilliam Darcy (-> Catherine Darcy)

This is a genderswapped retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in its original period (not really a true "what if"). All stats are specifically for the original (completed) 36k fic. It individually beats out every possible stat for every other fic in the series as well as the series as a whole. (Note: The overall series is 44k words long.)

2. Lucy Skywalker series | 163 bookmarks | 406 kudos (The Jedi and the Sith Lord) | genderbent characters: Luke Skywalker (-> Lucy Skywalker)

This is a genderbent AU that mostly, but not completely, sticks to the rails of canon until the end of the ESB timeline, at which point it swerves into the "real" AU. The Jedi and the Sith Lord is the sequel to The Imperial Menace/the ESB plot, and the third fic in the main series, focusing on the consequences of Vader capturing Lucy. It's technically completed at 70k, but only in the sense that it explores what happens to/with Lucy and Vader until the nature of her captivity fundamentally changes, and everything after that will be a separate fic but hasn't been written yet. Although none of the individual fics have as many bookmarks as the series as a whole, my #2, #3, and #4 most bookmarked genderbent fics are all for the Lucyverse. (Note: the overall series is 129k words long.)

3. Love, Pride & Delicacy | 25 bookmarks | 163 kudos | genderbent characters: Fitzwilliam Darcy (-> Catherine Darcy, for convenience)

This is an actual Elizabeth/f!Darcy "what if" femslash AU rather than a retelling, though a slow one—it's still early in the overall story at 25k. It's also placed in the original P&P setting. There is no wider series.

4. The Lady of Gondor | 25 bookmarks | 119 kudos (we also are daughters of the great) | genderbent characters: Faramir (-> Fíriel)

This is a deeply self-indulgent Aragorn/f!Faramir/Éowyn AU, though it's not only a WIP but split into different vaguely related fics (some of which are also WIPs!) about some aspect of the verse in relation to Fíriel. I think the norms of Gondor and Middle-earth make the gender change particularly significant (in some ways more than any other verse), so actual plot and relationship changes tend to be the focus. The kudos are for the specific linked fic, which is a WIP at nearly 5k and the most Éowyn-centric of them. (Note: the overall series is about 9.5k words long.)

5. The Edge of Darkness | 17 bookmarks | 106 kudos | genderbent characters: Tarrlok (-> Taraka)

This is a genderbent f!Tarrlok AU, though told entirely from Noatak/Amon's perspective, and to some extent more about the impact on him than on Taraka herself (though she's extremely important to the fic). Even more than that, the linked fic is focused on the effect of the change on their family dynamics as children, until teenage Noatak leaves her behind per canon. The fic can look like a retelling à la First Impressions, since the basic plot points don't change, but the larger series is on course to swerve into full "what if" territory as well. However, like First Impressions, these stats are all for the completed opening fic (18k) and not the longer WIP series (32k), which is temporarily paused at the point where 37-year-old Taraka openly identifies Amon as Noatak. CW: child abuse.

6. Blood and Fire | 16 bookmarks | 67 kudos | genderbent characters: Tarrlok (-> Taraka) and Noatak (-> Nataka)

This is a dark(er) AU of The Edge of Darkness in which Noatak/Amon is also genderbent, and the bloodbending siblings never separated. Taraka fled home with Nataka back in the day, they only grew closer (...too close), and although Taraka still ended up on the Republic City council, her true loyalty is to Amon. She promptly turns Korra over when Amon shows up, which is where the fic begins; it's told entirely through Korra's attempts to navigate her circumstances as a prisoner of the Equalists. CW: incest, complicated F/F/F dubcon??? emotional bonding kink with occasional violence yet little overt romance and no sex. I am what I am. The stats are for the completed (though deliberately ambiguous) main fic, which is 10k, and not the side fics or the series as a whole (13k).

7. The Queer Rogue One AU | 12 bookmarks | 57 kudos (the words we've both fallen under) | genderbent characters: Cassian Andor (-> Cassia Andor)

This is, on one level, a relatively straightforward genderbent!Cassian AU that is more or less complete at 13k. The underlying concepts are: a) what if my male fave was a hot lesbian and my ship was f/f and b) what if we headcanon every single member of the main team as queer in some capacity :D and c) the SW universe is so blatantly patriarchal in the films that it's a particularly interesting setting for exploring the effects of the gender change on someone like Cassia, a female revolutionary and spy :D :D. It's a little challenging to properly evaluate where it sits wrt stats because I revised the scattered, vaguely connected scraps of the universe into a single fic through both sentence-level revisions and significant additions, but that revision is only on Tumblr (where the link currently goes to, sorry) and my GoogleDrive, not AO3. It's not even a series in my heart! But it is on AO3. Evaluate as you will, but when I finally get around to converting the AO3 version to the correct format this may or may not change. For now this is where it goes by AO3 stats.

8. Daughters of Númenor series | 5 bookmarks | 33 kudos (the voices of the sea) | genderbent characters: all Númenórean throwbacks in LOTR, but specifically Aragorn (-> Aranor), Faramir (-> Míriel), Denethor (-> Andreth), and Imrahil (-> Imraphel)

As might be guessed, this is an AU where every Númenórean throwback mentioned in LOTR is genderbent (in the backstory, this also includes Ivriniel and Finduilas of Dol Amroth, who become Túrin, Prince of Dol Amroth, and Gwindor of Dol Amroth). It's Aranor/Míriel and definitely focused on them despite the broader change (where Arwen is a non-factor for the OT3 in The Lady of Gondor because she went to Valinor with Celebrían, she actually is present in Middle-earth in this series, though unfortunately very straight). While Fíriel in The Lady of Gondor was never expected to be a warrior and gets on reasonably well with Denethor, this AU is more about the broader effects—so even though we rarely see f!Denethor/Andreth, it's significant that she was a trailblazer as a female warrior, loremaster, and ultimately the first female ruler of Gondor, inadvertently laying a foundation that Aranor could build on later (which would have horrified Andreth herself!). The specific fic with the most kudos in the series, linked above, is a nearly 2k fic about the effect of Faramir's canonical visions on Míriel. (Note: the overall series is currently 3k words long.)

My best friend and I had an interesting, fairly wide-ranging conversation about the distinctions between adaptation, retellings, fanfiction, other forms of directly intertextual storytelling (à la Wide Sargasso Sea, Lavinia etc), covers (as in music), heavily illustrated editions of texts, collage, sampling, novelizations, ekphrasis generally, translation, and inspiration.

The distinctions here are mainly ones that he makes and I do not. For me, all of these things are on a spectrum or scatterplot of something like intertextuality. As I was saying on Tumblr the other day (re: fanfiction), I don’t actually think that most of these kinds of terminology reflect coherently defined art forms at all. They reflect norms, values, and conventions shaped by laws and corporations and other economic/cultural concerns, not any consistent system of understanding intertextuality more broadly.

This is a frequent point of disagreement between him and me, because he prefers to refine terms like these into … philosophical coherence, I guess? So he’ll say, well, I think of the term as more specifically meaning X, not Y, and that lets us examine the different approaches that X and Y take in a more systematic, artistically formal way. (As in the linked post, this is formal in the sense of form not as in propriety.)

And I’m like … it does, yes, but I don’t think that kind of re-definition corresponds to the meanings of those terms in actual usage. Narrowing the definitions imposes a coherence and logic to these distinctions that I don’t think actually exists. It’s more like a grab bag of imprecise, overlapping categories defined by values and customs and legal practice than anything they’re doing artistically.

Him: inconsistent laws and customs are kind of arbitrary and uninteresting in terms of theorizing categories of art, though.

Me: not to me, but anyway, I think the way we theorize art is very profoundly shaped by modern customs and laws to a degree we often can't even see, and words are defined by usage, not philosophical convenience.

(Yeah, we’re super fun at parties. But seriously, this is how we’ve talked since high school.)

Regardless, his theory is that adaptation is actually a narrower category of intertextual art than in casual (or academic) usage. His view is that an adaptation is an attempt to represent the actual source; there may be new material added, and some of the original material may be removed, but there is an effort to preserve not just character outlines or plot structure or elements of setting, but considerable amounts of the original source, usually in a different medium than the original. A re-telling, on the other hand, is a work that re-casts the source material into new language and sometimes generic (as in genre) form.

This is all according to him, not me. I think all storytelling of this kind = re-telling and that there is no hard line separating these approaches, just gradations of variance.

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The meme crossed my dash, so: top five things I completed in 2020!

In no particular order:

• For Legendarium Ladies April, an aesthetic post for my quasi-OFC Ithíriel, Elros’s wife in my headcanon
• Another one for their (canon) daughter Tindómiel, first princess of Númenor
• Another for Lothíriel of Dol Amroth (this one took some doing but was fun)
• One for her first cousin and my #1 Middle-earth fave, Faramir
• the gift of men, my Eldarion/Faramir+Éowyn’s daughter arranged-but-happy-marriage fic

I only just noticed that they’re all Tolkien! I had to do a ton of 16th/17th/18th-cent reading irl, though, so it was nice to get far away from all that.

Tagging: heget, heckofabecca, irresistible-revolution, garethsedwards, incognitajones, and tree—if you want!

It feels like I'm increasingly seeing posts that are like "a bold and daring thought: what if genre fiction actually is a lesser art form" and "fanfic really is cringe and shallow in a way original, or at least literary, fiction definitionally isn't, as a natural byproduct of the form."

I have many complaints about fandom trends, both generally and specific to certain fandoms. I have always had lots of complaints about these. But I hate this. I hate the snide, snappy versions of this especially, but I also hate the more earnest arguments about how this just naturally arises from the existence of magic or spaceships or the re-purposing of pre-existing characters. I hate the attempts to pass off nostalgia for ye olde SF/F + handwringing over the corruption of the youth/womenfolk/etc as somehow progressive. I hate framing the most absolutely conventionally pretentious arguments about why less "respectable" genres really truly deserve to be disrespected as revolutionary.

There are deeply ahistorical and short-sighted elements to this that I've ranted about before (most recently with regard to fanfic here), and trying to additionally suggest these ideas are dangerous and transgressive and simultaneously so obvious as to be above criticism is so nonsensical. If you want to talk in sweeping generalizations about how SF/F is trash and fanfic is trash, you can do that, but the demand to be welcomed for doing so in fandom spaces and that the entirely predictable result of people getting annoyed just shows how right you are and how defensive fandom is about their unsophisticated tastes is just raw entitlement and elitism. Upsetting people is not a vindication of your position.

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Silliness over AO3 stats:

The first part of my Lucy Skywalker series (a linked series of genderbent f!Luke fics) has always been the most popular of the main series. It's less so in kudos, but definitely leads in bookmarks (the first, The Adventures of Lucy Skywalker, has 48 bookmarks [ETA 3/24/2024: now 53], while the second, The Imperial Menace, has 20 [ETA: now 24]), and The Imperial Menace has way fewer hits, too.

I guess it’s a positive that The Imperial Menace has nearly as many kudos as Adventures does: 242 for The Imperial Menace [ETA: now 288] to Adventures’s 260 [ETA: now 323]) despite significantly fewer people reading it at all. But still. And I do think Adventures is much more flawed in some ways (The Imperial Menace has its problems, but different ones that bother me less). So I’ve been low-grade HMPH even though I hated writing 85% of The Imperial Menace.

BUUUUT

After years and years, I got a burst of inspiration to go back to working on the third fic in the main series, The Jedi and the Sith Lord, in early 2020 (which feels like a lifetime ago and, also, yesterday). And I’m a lot happier with it than with any of the other Lucy fics, and wrote a ton of it all at once (I think it had two chapters when I went back and it now has 20).

AND!!!! It has way more hits than The Imperial Menace even though it’s also a sequel (maybe because it has a clearer if very short summary—“Lucy emerges from carbon-freeze as the captive of Darth Vader”—and also splits off from canon in a much more significant way). But it has a bunch more kudos than Adventures (325 [ETA: now 405]), more bookmarks, probably three times as many comments [ETA: now 289 to 51, though both are affected by my responses], and it’s like … FOR ONCE the thing that I personally like best and worked hardest on is also the one that readers like the most! Yay! :D

…like I said, silliness, but it is nice to get that alignment happening on a fic that I care a lot about.

Tagged: #also the collective lucyverse fics are now over 100k thanks to 'the jedi and the sith lord's 67k(!) #which i'm ridiculously happy about

I reblogged prayers and proclamations, a section of my Jyn/f!Cassian fic originally posted on Tumblr on 9 May 2018, then a few days later on AO3.

In 2021, I added:

It’s weird to think this is some two and a half years old, but idk, I was feeling it again today. My girls!

Tagged: #i really should get the master fic all put together—i think it had extra bits

[ETA 3/20/2024: I actually did eventually revise and assemble the various pieces of the fic into a single, more or less coherent one, last year. I haven't backed it up on AO3 yet because I didn't want to delete the nice comments etc on the serialized version that I originally put up on AO3, and I think you're not supposed to duplicate fic there. Still figuring out how to preserve the final version!]