Three fannish links

This post is basically me just closing some tabs on a few fanworks that have come into my orbit over the past week or so.

First up, an absolutely glorious Raven Cycle fic by likeadeuce:

Irregular and Wild (The Class Participation Remix) (2454 words) by likeadeuce
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey III, Adam Parrish
Additional Tags: Remix, Shakespeare nerdery, Dead Welsh Kings, Pre-Canon, First Meetings, Meet-Cute
Summary:

“I participated in class twice this week because of you," said Ronan. "You’re gonna ruin my reputation.”

Gansey just smiled. “That’s what I do."

(I just love this so much: Gansey collecting friends through sheer earnest persistence! Shakespeare! these ridiculous teenagers and their ridiculous emotions!)

Next, a review which wandered across my Goodreads feed earlier today. When I read A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, it absolutely blew me away, but kind of left me speechless. It was so, so good, and spoke to me on so many levels that I was almost daunted at the prospect of putting how much it had resonated with me to words. Thankfully, this reviewer, bookswithchaima has done it all for me:

Through Mahit’s eyes, the novel moves us through the stark and painful internal realities of being a non-citizen, and longing to be acknowledged as a citizen. Mahit understood how much Teixcalaan demanded and how very little it gave back, just as acutely as she understood that there is danger in not belonging.

I’ve been an immigrant for three years, and it felt extraordinarily cathartic to find a story in which the narrator is stuck out here with me. Like Mahit, I’ve never been able to chase away the feeling that while this new world I’ve set up house in embraces me with one arm, it also pushes me away with the other. I’ve often felt that something essential within me has been loosened from its moorings, and it dangled outside me, always looking for a place to put down roots and always starved for light. Because, and to borrow some of Mahit’s words, I would never fully belong and I would never stop knowing it. Like Mahit, I’ve never forgotten the reasons why I left. I am a different person in every sense, and as far away from the me who left three years ago as a distant planet. I miss home, and I don’t miss it, and those two realities still chase circles inside my head. But there’s one growing certainty wedging itself inside me every day: once you leave, you can’t really go home again. Not all the way, anyway. No matter how hard you try. Once you leave, something is lost, and I don’t think you ever find it again.

I don't want to equate my own experiences of being a white Australian immigrant with the reviewer's experiences of being a north African immigrant: the European countries to which we have migrated perceive us very differently, and to pretend otherwise would be appropriative on my part. But what this review explains so perfectly is the thing I've been struggling to articulate for nearly two years since reading this book: this story just gets what it is to leave your home, to put down roots elsewhere while knowing doing so is fraught with difficulty, and to love the literature and pop culture of a hegemonic culture with the awareness that this love is tinged with a kind of complicity. Oh, what a perfect review of a perfect book! You can read the whole review here.

My final link is a months-old fanvid by sholio, which is essentially a love letter to the Netflix Marvel Defenders shows, but on another level a love letter to New York, or at least the kind of surreal New York which the Marvel superheroes inhabit. You can watch the vid here.