Beyond Selidor

Again, I've elected to roll the current snowflake_challenge prompt into today's open thread, since it's a fun prompting question:

Share a favourite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.



I always feel a bit weird doing these, because all my fandoms of the heart are fandoms-of-one, the sorts of things that I'd be lucky to get given as gifts for Yuletide, and they have potentially offputting elements (teenage protagonists, a writing style people will either love or hate, divisive relationship dynamics, and so on). So I can talk about why I love them forever, but assume that no one will take me up on the recommendation, or not be hooked by the same things that first hooked me. A lot of these canons are things that I've loved unstintingly for three decades; they're a part of me — they've seeped into my bones, into the story I tell about myself.

I've written a lot of primers/manifestos/gushing walls of emotion over the years!

( I've gathered a bunch behind the cut )

What about you? Feel free to link back to your own posts if you've already answered this prompt for Snowflake.

Today's snowflake_challenge is all about generating enthusiasm:

In your own space, write a promo, manifesto or primer for your fave character, ship or fandom.



I'm going to return to one of my oldest, dearest, most formative fandoms: the Pagan Chronicles books by Catherine Jinks, which I've been fannish about in one way or another for more than twenty-five years. This is, sadly, pretty much a fandom of one, but I feel it has potential because there are so many different aspects which might appeal to different people. It's got something to offer for those who like deeply loyal 'us against the world' types of relationships (whether romantic or platonic), it's got potential for a good antagonists-to allies-to (potentially) lovers ship, it's a fun canon if you like historical fiction (it's set in late twelfth/early thirteenth century Jerusalem and Languedoc), or if you like fiction dealing with religious controversies or minority religions. The third book is even a murder mystery/conspiracy thriller, if you like that sort of thing.

However, what I feel is the main selling point of the series, at least to me, is that it is, in its essence, a multigenerational story of a series of found family relationships with massive doses of emotional hurt/comfort.

( More about this book series )

I'm not really sure whether to describe this as a promo, primer or manifesto...

It's Friday evening, it is pouring with rain, and I've got the next two weeks off as annual leave, so I am very happy!

Before I dive into the final two questions on the fandom meme, I want to share a link to an SFF author panel that I shared yesterday, but which may have been missed given it was a long post about lots of other stuff.

The panel is a 'salon' with Malka Older, Annalee Newitz, Arkady Martine, Amal El-Mohtar, Karen Lord and Katie Mack. It ranges in topic from climate change, bureaucracy, regulation, the internet, privacy, and more. I could watch many of these people just read the phone book, so listening to them just revel in each other's words was wonderful (and honestly, what Amal El-Mohtar says around 30-32 minutes in just crystalised a lot of things that I've long been feeling and had never been able to articulate).

You can watch it here.

On to the questions!

( Days 19-20 )

I'm kind of delightedly amused that yesterday, on the tenth anniversary of Ed Balls Day, the New York Times wrote an in-depth article about this meme that will not die. I'm even more delightedly amused that, as per Yvette Cooper, he apparently made a cake to commemorate this important moment of internet history.

Today is the penultimate day of the thirty-day book meme:

29. A book that led you home

( My answer )

( The last day )

Good morning, and welcome to Day Four of the fandom meme:

D: What was the first thing you ever contributed to a fandom?

My answer to this depends on how you define 'a fandom'. Like most fannish adults, rewriting the endings of my favourite stories, or imagining I was a character in said stories was a major feature of my childhood. Indeed the fact that I a) had very poor hearing as a young child until I got grommets put in my ears to unblock the eustachian tubes and b) generally spent my time imagining I was a character from one of my favourite books doing all the things I did in my daily life meant that I was an extremely vague child who found it very difficult to focus on the words coming out of real-life people's mouths. Because I did this sort of thing for as long as I can remember (I have memories of myself as a three-year-old toddler pretending my doll was a character in a picture book I enjoyed at my childcare centre), it's impossible to name my first 'contribution' to fandom if we're counting childhood play as fannish activity.

If participation in fandom as a shared activity is how you're defining it, it would have been some time around the early 2000s, when I first dipped my toes into fan forums for two of my favourite book series: Bridgetothestars, a Philip Pullman fansite with its Republic of Heaven forum, and Obernewtyn.net, a fansite for Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn series. I made a couple of posts, but at the time was not very interested in the internet and mostly just wanted to be on my own reading books, so I drifted away until 2007, when a combination of intense situational depression, and living away from my support network forced me back online in a kind of desperation. Both sites welcomed me with open arms, and on the Republic of Heaven in particular I racked up a massive post count. Over the years I met most of the people on those sites in real life — the Obernetters were easier, as almost everyone on that site lived in Australia, whereas apart from lowercasename, all the Pullman fans lived in Europe or North America, so I didn't meet most of them until I moved to the UK. I wouldn't be able to track down my first 'contribution' to either site, but it would have been a post replying in some way to some discussion thread about either series.

If your definiation of fandom solely relates to fanworks posted online in shared spaces, that's easy: it's 'Bodies of Clay', the first fic I published on Ao3, back in 2012:

Bodies of Clay (3638 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 10/10
Fandom: Pagan Chronicles
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Isidore Orbus/Babylonne Kidrouk
Characters: Isidore Orbus, Babylonne Kidrouk
Summary:

Ten moments in Isidore and Babylonne's life together. Post Pagan's Daughter/Babylonne.

How would you define 'fannish activity'?

( The other days )

Today's topic is from geckoholic: talk about my favourite author or authors. For a bookworm like me, this is an impossible topic to narrow down - I have so many favourite authors, most of whom I like for a wide variety of reasons. I've limited myself here to just a handful.

If you asked me to name just one author as my favourite, I probably automatically say Philip Pullman. This isn't necessarily because I think he is the best author in the world, but because he is the author who (unintentionally) has written the books that have given me the most. Oh, I have always loved his turns of phrase, the page-turning intensity of his plots, and his vivid characters, and the themes of his books have spoken to me for close to two decades now, but my love for him goes beyond that. When I read Northern Lights for the first time, it was like a resounding thunderclap, as if I had been given words to explain something I'd never been able to articulate, as if my (twelve-year-old's) worldview had been condensed and distilled into a single novel. And, as the years went by, Philip Pullman's writing gave me a career as a reviewer, my first introduction to online fannish communities, and a vast, international gang of friends who have been there for me through some of the best and some of the worst times of my life.

I adore the writing of Kate Elliott because she writes epic fantasy with an eye, not to 'historical accuracy', but rather to how her imagined worlds function at every level - from the highest branches of the aristocracy to the artisans, farmers and merchants who keep things running. She is one of the rare epic fantasy writers who thinks both on a broad scale (the sweep of politics and history, the repercussions of a small event over a large period of time) and on a smaller, intimate level (the ripples of trauma and repeated mistakes within communities, families, couples). Her worlds feel lived-in in a way that I often feel is missing in more well-known, popular epic fantasy. She's the sort of writer who thinks about how characters pay for their possessions, what sorts of trade sustain large empires and small communities within them, what sort of family structures are common to particular societies - and how much scope is there for her individual characters to push back against various societal constraints. She's also responsible for one of my favourite characters of all time, Mai.

Mai is slightly edged out as my favourite fictional character by two other authors' creations. The first is Noviana Una, from Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy. McDougall is another of my favourite writers, not just because of Una, but because she writes about revolutions in a way that makes my heart sing. Her stories resonate with me, because, at their heart, they are about the dispossessed: escaped slaves, abused women, people marginalised by ethnicity or sexuality finding common cause, realising that they outnumber their oppressors, and, quietly, carefully, on their own terms, making revolution. That the revolution is run out of a never-destroyed Library of Alexandria by Una, an escaped-slave-turned-library-assistant is just the icing on the cake.

Given we're on the topic of dystopias (the world Romanitas is most definitely a dystopia, even if the series is marketed as alternate history), I'll also mention two of my other favourite writers of dystopias: Victor Kelleher and Gillian Rubinstein. These two are Australian writers whose dystopian works were popular during my childhood in the '90s. I've been singing the praises of this genre for a really long time, and it's hard to describe why I think it's so excellent in just a few words. I think I keep returning to these works because they reward rereads (and I have definitely reread them at least a hundred times - not an exaggeration), and they speak to a particularly Australian understanding of postapocalyptic living, to a readership who already has an uneasy relationship with a hostile land and is carrying very specific colonial baggage.

A couple of authors who I appreciate specifically for their beautiful use of language: Ursula Le Guin and Emily St. John Mandel. It's not that these writers aren't telling incredible stories and exploring really complicated ideas: they are. It's just that their words resonate, but in a quiet way, like a stone dropped in still water. I love Le Guin's Earthsea books, particularly the later ones, which I feel helped me understand myself as a woman. I really love what they have to say about the power and magic of ordinary, everyday work - the kind of work that is endless, unacknowledged and unappreciated, but absolutely essential (Monica Furlong is another author who has a lot to say about this particular topic). Neither Le Guin nor St. John Mandel is a comforting writer, but I find myself returning to their books again and again to give myself a sense of hope.

I would be remiss to leave this post without at least mentioning Catherine Jinks, who showed me that you could write powerful, meaningful, thoughtful work that is aimed at teenage readers, upends conventional, popular understanding of historical events, and is utterly hilarious. Jinks also gave me Pagan Kidrouk, my favourite fictional character of all time, someone whose stories I've been reading for more than twenty years, and which are the first books I reach for as comfort reading.

I could go on and on and on here, but I'll stop at this point before things get ridiculous. I think it's fairly clear that I like different authors for different reasons, but it's hard for something to be my favourite unless it provokes a great intensity of emotion - and sustains this intensity of emotion over repeated rereads, over a period of many years. While I can appreciate the craft of writing in an abstract way, I need to be made to feel things, intensely, and think things, intensely, for the writing to make any kind of impression beyond the time spent reading it.

I'm still taking requests for this meme. You can do so here on Dreamwidth or here on Livejournal.