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.

The current snowflake_challenge is one that I always find incredibly stressful: I don't really collect fannish merch (other than ... physical books? Dreamwidth icons?), and I'm completely incapable of taking decent photos of anything that isn't a) a tree or b) a body of water.



So, with that disclaimer out of the way, here is the prompt:

In your own space, post the results of your fandom scavenger hunt. earch in your current space, whether brick-and-mortar or digital. Post a picture or description of something that is or represents:

1. A favorite character
2. Something that makes you laugh
3. A bookshelf
4. A game or hobby you enjoy
5. Something you find comforting
6. A TV show or movie you hope more people will watch
7. A piece of clothing you love
8. A thing from an old fandom
9. A thing from a new fandom

My photos can be found on Instagram. Edited to add that the bad-quality photos were stressing me out so much that I deleted the whole photoset from Instagram, so the link here will no longer work. The descriptions of the photos remain below.

I have merged several categories.

1. A favourite character — Noviana Una from Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy. This is the back of a t shirt which is possibly the only piece of fannish merch I own, a quote from McDougall's book referencing Una. (A picture McDougall drew of her own character, plus this quote, forms my default Dreamwidth icon.)

2. and 3. Something that makes me laugh + a bookshelf — a small portion of the Terry Pratchett section of our bookshelves. This is only a small portion of our collection as a whole — my copies are all still at my mum's place in Australia, and many of Matthias's copies are still in Germany. At some point, we will have all the copies in the one place and may have to discard the duplicates.

4. and 5. A game or hobby I enjoy + something I find comforting — swimming swimming swimming. I am, as I have said many times, half woman half ocean. Swimming is the only thing that stills the sea inside.

6. A TV show or movie I wish more people would watch — Babylon Berlin

7. A thing from an old fandom — the final lines of Northern Lights, the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. This isn't my oldest fandom, but it was my first experience of fandom as an online community, and the HDM forum I joined still remains my gold standard for online fannish spaces. It was the perfect welcome and introduction to fandom-as-shared activity.

8. A thing from a new fandom — the extant books from Pat Barker's Briseis-centric Iliad retelling trilogy.

I read three more short stories yesterday. All are free and online at the Tor.com website.

( Short fiction )

Via nyctanthes and a couple of others in my circle, I discovered this fun set of fandom-related questions created by squidgiepdx. The idea is that you answer one question a day for the first twenty days of June, and that's obviously not going to happen in my case, so instead I will answer them in batches until I've done the lot.

I should also preface this by saying that a lot of the questions apply to an approach to fandom that's very different to my own — for various reasons I gravitate towards tiny fandoms, and once I'm fannish about something those feelings never switch off, so 'being in fandom' for me tends to be a) a solitary activity and b) a permanent state of being in which new fandoms are added, but they never replace old fandoms.

( Days 1-3 )

( The other days )

'That was what it was always for—?' said Sulien, his voice roughened and thick. 'That's what we were for, to do that for him?'
'Una had dropped with a shudder into Varius' arms, resting there with her eyes shut, as if she'd just crawled out of freezing water. She reached for Sulien's shoulder, and whispered, 'It's over now.'
'I could have killed him and not even hesitated,' Sulien said. 'This is worse.'
'No,' cried Maralah bitterly, 'no, it's far better than he deserves.'
'It was already there,' said Una, slowly. 'You could see that, couldn't you? He was doing it to himself. All we did was ... finish it.'
'Rome will be safe,' said Makaria, though her face looked pinched and paled. 'The war will end. Remember that, if it's difficult to bear.
Sulien nodded and muttered unevenly. 'Let's get away from him.'

— Sophia McDougall, Savage City

For context, this is the moment in a dystopian, alternate history trilogy in which a ragtag resistance army of abuse-surviving women, people who escaped from slavery, people of colour, and other dispossessed people defeat a crazed racist, rapist emperor (whose only experience with leadership prior to illegitimately taking power was to run one Olympic Games) who started a global war as a form of distraction, and has an arsenal of terrifying weapons.

Lest you think the metaphor is a bit heavy-handed, this book was published in 2011!

It's Day Twenty-One of the fandom meme:

U: Three favorite characters from three different fandoms, and why they’re your favorites.

I have a lot of favourite characters, so limiting myself to three is hard.

I love Noviana Una from Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy. She is my default icon on Ao3 and Dreamwidth, and I wrote a gushing post about her for another meme a while ago. Rather than write everything out again, I'll put what I wrote about Una in that other post behind a cut, because it explains why she's my favourite ... at length.

( A lot of words about Una )

The second character I'll list here is Mai, from Kate Elliott's Crossroads series. I've spoken a bit about her in an earlier post for this meme, and I also wrote about her at length in an older post for another meme. Again, I'll repost what I wrote behind the cut:

( More on Mai )

And the final character I will talk about is my beloved Pagan Kidrouk, the narrator of the first three of Catherine Jinks's wonderful Pagan Chronicles books, who is probably my favourite fictional character of all time. Weirdly, I don't think I've actually ever written down all my thoughts about him and why he is my favourite, but in brief: he is a dispossessed refugee who has to make a life for himself in a land where he knows no one (in his case, he is a Christian Arab who leaves Jerusalem in the twelfth century and ends up living in Languedoc), he is a literate person in a world where most people he encounters do not know how to read, he is traumatised and alone and has to build his own found family, and he uses words as his strength and weapons to make sense of situations where he is frequently at a massive disadvantage, and, slowly, over the years, he builds a new home for himself in the strange land in which he ends up.

Generally, for characters to be my favourites, they need to be at least one of these things:

Immigrants or refugees who find a new home and a sense of home and belonging in other people

Women whose heroism lies in their talents at quiet, unglamorous, unnoticed 'women's work'

Women who almost always read situations correctly and know the right actions to take, but whose advice is often ignored

Characters who are soft-hearted and sentimental and dismissed as being weak because of this

Characters who are hyper-observant of other people's moods, bodies, behaviour, reactions and perceptions out of grim necessity, for the sake of their own survival

Competent, maternal older women

Women who have survived trauma and reacted in certain ways which I find hard to summarise/articulate here

( The other days )

Thirty Day Book Meme Day 2: Best bargain.

This was a tricky one, as I've not only bought lots of books at discounted prices over the years, but also spent a decade working as a book reviewer, which meant that I was both given books for free, and paid money to talk about them. So obviously all the books I reviewed during that time were, in some sense, a bargain. For this reason, I've chosen to interpret this question as asking not just which book I got for the cheapest price, but how much it gave back to me in terms of meaning, rereads, and enjoyment.

When interpreted in this way, the answer can be no other than Romanitas by McDougallSophia. My editor was in the habit of going through the haul of books sent to the newspaper by various publishers, allocating some to the reviewers who covered that particular genre, and leaving out the rest in the staff tearoom for anyone to take. Romanitas fell in that latter category — my editor didn't think it looked good enough to review, so it was left out for anyone to claim for free. I read the book cover summary — a dystopian setting where the Roman Empire never fell, but rather spread to encompass most of the world — and read the first chapter (the funeral of the Emperor's brother and sister-in-law from the perspective of their grieving teenage son, awkward at the media circus surrounding his life and lonely against the weight of his own imperial inheritance), and then the second (a furious escaped slave fights for her life and that of her condemned prisoner brother), and realised I was hopelessly hooked. (It was also the first time I really understood shipping, because my first reaction, upon being introduced to the two point-of-view characters in those opening chapters, was 'I adore you both. Now kiss.')

I ended up devouring the book, and went on to review both its follow ups (thus acquiring them for free from the publisher as well), writing most of the fanfic on Ao3 that exists for this series (I think the other stuff was written for me as a Yuletide gift), and even ending up as something of a friend of the author, on the strength of being basically the only person who ever talked about these books online. (longvision is my long-defunct Romanitas trilogy fanblog, which I set up shortly after reading the first book.)

Noviana Una, the escaped slave character, ended up being my second favourite fictional character of all time — she's the person in my default icon, and I rather daggily had a T shirt printed with the words that are the title of this blog post, so as you can see I'm a hopeless obsessive about this series, and about this character in particular.

In other words, in terms of what this book — and series — has given me over the past twelve years, it was far and away the best bargain I've ever acquired!

( The other days )

This was initially going to be a comment on dhampyresa's blog, but it occurred to me that I spend way too much time bouncing around the internet, trying to convince people to read the Romanitas trilogy, and it would be nice to have one post about it that I can refer back to on later occasions. So consider this a rather flaily, incoherent primer.

It helps, I think, if you understand something about my tastes in stories. I will read or watch just about any iteration of story that engages with ideas of power, privilege and dispossession: who has power, and why, and who is dispossessed by that power, and why. But I need the stories to do something more: they need to place the blame for inequality and dispossession where it truly lies, on an institutional level, and on individuals within such institutions. The stories need to centre the dispossessed, although it's an added bonus if they consider the various ways in which power, empire and privilege corrupt and dehumanise those who benefit from them. And they need to show that the strength of the dispossessed lies in them finding common ground, making common cause, dismantling the systems that oppress them, supporting one another, carving out spaces in which they are able to safely assert their humanity.

It's for this reason that I keep returning to the Pagan Chronicles by Catherine Jinks, the works of John Marsden, Galax Arena by Gillian Rubinstein and the other powerful, formative books of my childhood. It's for this reason that shows like Pretty Little Liars, Orphan Black, Avatar: The Last Airbender and Orange Is The New Black have resonated so strongly with me. In various ways, they explore these vital ideas. Their characters are the dispossessed, whether they be Christian Arab squires thrown into exile by the Third Crusade (or the Cathar heretic daughter of said squires, traumatised by the politics of thirteenth-century Languedoc), teenage resistance fighters, children stolen off the streets to artificially extend the lives of the super-rich, bullied teenage girls, clones whose creators view them as patented scientific material, or the inhabitants of a women's prison. Over and over again such stories show their dispossessed central characters banding together, supporting one another, and insisting on their own autonomy and humanity in the face of those who refuse to acknowledge it.

This is the backdrop against which my love for the Romanitas trilogy should be understood.

( Cut for non-detailed discussion of slavery, empire and colonialism )

I hope that helps at least in laying out the reasons why this series works for me. I love it. I hope that other people love it too.

I made a whirlwind trip to London on Friday, as I was attending a course on book conservation at this library. I really enjoyed it as it was hands-on, practical training. The organisers had damaged some books beforehand (all the librarians attending winced at this) and then taught us how to repair the various torn pages, broken spines and peeling covers. My favourite aspect of library work is the sense of making order out of chaos, of tidying things up into organised categories, so I think that book repair is going to suit me very well.

It was an interesting bunch of people attending - I'm used to courses at Cambridge, where everyone works in academic libraries, but everyone on this course worked at museums, cathedral libraries, stately homes and so on. I was the only one who didn't manage a special collection in some way, although one of the three libraries in which I work does have a large number of rare books.

I'd never been to Middle Temple before, but it's a pretty cool part of London, filled with odd little winding passageways and hidden old buildings. The library itself was very interesting, although there wasn't much time to explore it.

On Saturday morning I actually managed to have a Skype session with all of my four sisters. Mim, the oldest, was visiting our father, stepmother and other three sisters, and we had set up the session so that I could see Maud, the newest sister, in person. As it turned out, our other two sisters, Kitty and Nell, popped in and out of the conversation as well. Maud herself is super cute (although she looks disturbingly like a shrunken version of my dad), and it's a real shame that I'm not going to be able to see her in person until at least September next year. That Skype conversation was the first time all of my sisters and I have been 'in the same place' since Nell's baptism in 2008. This is, I suppose, one of the unavoidable side effects of being an immigrant.

There are a few fanworks and other pieces of writing making me very happy at the moment.

This short story by Rachel Swirsky retells the early parts of the Iliad from Iphigenia's point of view. This is exactly the kind of Iliad I like - one that's all about the women and their relationships, is filled with anger at what the men around them do to them, and doesn't paint Achilles in a good light. You should definitely read it, although be aware that it includes depictions of violence, murder and an extremely misogynistic society.

This story by notbecauseofvictories is basically the story I'm searching for every time I read: the interaction between human and non-human characters, in which each is overwhelmed and slightly unable to comprehend the other's nature. It's called 'Ten Things Gabriel Finds Fascinating About Humanity' and I highly recommend it.

There are some great Vividcon vids starting to emerge. My favourites so far are 'Bones' (Luther) by gwyn and 'Fembots' (multifandom) by Grammarwoman.

Also, I just noticed that someone finally wrote Romanitas fanfic, which makes me so unbelievably happy. It's by a_la_greque, and is Marcus-centric.

I hope you are all having marvellous weekends.

Life is a bit crazy at the moment. For the past couple of weeks, my supervisor and I have been discussing the final stages of my PhD, and yesterday we had a meeting where we sorted out four potential examiners. (I need two examiners, one from within my department and one from another university, but I need to nominate two potential people for each examination slot.) I've written my abstract and am at the point where I need to inform the university of my intention to submit...in September! I am both terrified and relieved to have got this far. But this means the next few months are going to be extremely sleepless.

I have had huge numbers of tabs open for weeks and weeks and weeks (and even resorted to emailing links to myself in order to close some tabs), just waiting for me to have the time to do a linkpost. I don't really have time, but I want to get these out there before too much time passes, so here they are.

I finally dusted off my Romanitas blog and posted the next of my commentaries. This one's for Romanitas Chapter 5, 'White and Silver'. I also wrote a fairly negative review of Juliet E. McKenna's Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution series on my Wordpress review blog:

I’m sad to say that the series just doesn’t work, or at least it doesn’t work for me. The problem is partly one of characterisation (I find all the characters clichéd collections of tropes rather than engaging human beings), but really one of believability. The problem is that the whole revolution is too easy.

This is an old post by sophiamcdougall about London, but it's so wonderful that you need to read it anyway.

Australian YA author Melina Marchetta is someone I really admire. She's constantly pushing herself in terms of what she writes, and is thoughtful and articulate about her writing and that of other people. This interview with blogger Jo at Wear The Old Coat is characteristically excellent:

I don’t believe that writing for and about young people is a public service. The problem about role models is that some people may believe a good female role model is someone who doesn’t have sex as a teenager at school. Other people may believe that a good role model is someone who challenges the establishment. Or someone who works hard and gets into university. Or someone who doesn’t have to go to university or college to succeed. I don’t think of role models or teaching lessons when I’m creating character. If I did have a secret wish of what I’d like to come out of my writing, it’s that someone feels less lonely. Or someone feels more connected. Or someone questions the status quo.

Another author very dear to my heart is kateelliott. I've mentioned before that I'm deeply interested in people on the margins of history, people who led fulfilling, happy and interesting lives, but whose stories were never recorded because the Powers That Be didn't view those people's activities as being important. Elliott is an author after my own heart. She puts such marginal people front and centre in her medieval (and nineteenth-century) inflected worlds. Her interviews and blog posts make it clear that this is a deliberate choice. If you're not reading her already, this latest offering might tempt you:

I am not, by the way, a monarchist nor do I yearn for the halcyon days of yore with a secret reactionary bent to my heart. The idea that epic fantasy is by nature a “conservative” subgenre is, I think, based not only on an incomplete reading of the texts but also on an understanding of the medieval or early modern eras that comes from outdated historiography.

I don’t doubt specific works can be reactionary or conservative (depending on how you define those words), but more often than not I suspect–although I can’t prove–that if a work defaults to ideas about social order that map to what I call the Victorian Middle Ages or the Hollywood Middle Ages, it has more to do with sloppy world-building in the sense of using unexamined and outmoded assumptions about “the past” as a guide. I really think that to characterize the subgenre so generally is to not understand the variety seen within the form and to not understand that the simplistic and popular views of how people “were” and “thought” in the past are often at best provisional and incomplete and at worst outright wrong.

Historian Judith Bennett calls this the “Wretched Abyss” Theory, the idea that the European Middle Ages were a wretched abyss from which we modern women/people have luckily escaped. It’s one of the founding myths of modern feminism as well as the modern world. Me, I want to live now, with internet, antibiotics, and that nice intensive care nursery that saved my premature twins. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t also responsible to depict a more nuanced and accurate representation of “a past” as it was lived and experienced as a dynamic and changing span.

And now, for a complete change of subject, have a link to a post about Oideas Gael, the Modern Irish language school where I've spent a couple of happy summers. It really captures the heart of the little village and the classes. I was sorry to hear from the post, however, that Biddy's (one of the three pubs in the Glen), has closed down. Its wall had a sign promising 'ól agus ceol', which is really all you could possibly want in a pub...

Love, Joy, Feminism is pretty much my favourite blog these days. It's written by Libby Anne, who grew up in an abusive fundamentalist subculture in the US, but broke away as an adult. She is an articulate, unflinching and persistent critic of the culture in which she grew up, and this makes her dangerous to those who promote that subculture as a way of life. If you feel up to it, I highly recommend her most recent series of posts, which are on homeschooling and its potential to exacerbate abuse and neglect. You can tell how rattled Libby Anne's posts are making some people, as she's receiving a huge backlash from the (so-called) Homeschool Legal Defence Association (an organisation that believes children have no rights, parents have complete ownership over their children and that any regulation beyond parents informing the state of their intention to homeschool is an infringement on parents' freedoms). I highly recommend reading everything Libby Anne writes.

Still on the topic of homeschooling, here is a post by Jon Bois about his homeschooling experience as a child in rural Georgia in the '90s.

Check out this TED talk about changing the way we talk about abuse and harassment. The gist of it is that men (are the perpetrators in not all, but most cases of abuse and harassment) should be told that being bystanders to abuse and harassment is a failure of leadership - that if they are in positions of authority or relative power, and they do nothing to investigate, discourage or stop abuse and harassment, they are failing as leaders.

Finally, have a read of Maureen Johnson's post about genderflipped YA book covers.

Well, wow. It's been a really, really long time since I've posted here, and I'm sorry about that. For some reason, I just haven't been feeling the blogging vibe for a while. It's frustrating, because I have all these things I want to talk about, and yet can't quite manage to put pen to paper (or, you know, fingers to keyboard).

It's autumn with a vengeance now in Cambridge, which is my favourite time of the year. I love the way the trees look, the colour of the sky, the feel of the air, the clothes I can wear after putting them away during summer, the feeling of being snuggled up inside under a blanket or running through frosty fields as the mist rises from the river. However, along with the weather came the dreaded freshers' flu, which, although I am not a first-year, I caught. I'm still not entirely better. Last week, I was all about the coughing fits, and they still haven't gone away completely. I haven't been able to run since last Wednesday.

In the time since I posted last, I went to the other Cambridge to give a paper at a conference in Harvard. It was my first time in the States since 1999, and my first time to Boston. The conference was like an amazing reunion - I'd met most of the North American Celticists either at summer school in Dublin last year, or at the International Celtic Congress in Maynooth that followed it, so now we have a tendency to go to the same conferences in order to catch up. Cambridge itself - and the Harvard campus - was gorgeous. My paper was well received, and for the first time in a conference, a whole bunch of people wanted to talk to me afterwards, which I think was a good sign. After the conference, I caught up briefly with romen_dreamer and her husband N, who are both sraffies. I'd never met them in person before (I've not met many of the North American sraffies) and we had a great time while they showed me around Cambridge.

Once I got back to MY Cambridge, I was thrown straight away into teaching and research. I sent my supervisor my entire first chapter at the end of last week, and we met about it this week. She made some helpful comments, but, more importantly, she told me she thought I was close to finishing. You cannot imagine how happy that made me. I haven't believed in my ability to finish this PhD for a long time, and it was nice to be told the end was in sight.

I'm finding teaching both more difficult, but more rewarding than I expected. I had a fantastic group seminar today with the third-year students which I found particularly enjoyable. Their essays were such a joy to read, and they made me think about my own research in different terms too. I still sometimes feel like I could be better, but I guess I'm learning too.

I've been thinking for a while that I really need to revive my Romanitas blog. I stopped posting there because the chapter recaps I was doing became too difficult, because I think I got too obsessed with writing them like perfect, self-contained little essays. I think it was the literature student in me. But the whole point about Romanitas is that it made me read with the delirious, devouring joy with which I read as a child. What I feel about that series is so deep and personal and emotional. How could I hope to convey it with a series of dry essays? In other words, I'm going to go back to doing the chapter recaps, but with more of an emphasis on my own emotional reaction to them. More Mark Reads, I guess.

I've got a few other long-term plans for my review blog, but I might talk about them later. Right now, I've got a dinner to cook!