Beyond Selidor

It's the last sunshine_challenge prompt today: violet. The challenge mods are encouraging participants to use this prompt as a way to offer [things to] others to bring a little sunshine into their lives.

I can't make graphics or vids, and I can't reliably write fic on the spot (unless it's for one of my tiny book fandoms-of-one, which I suspect is an unlikely thing for anyone to request).

But what I can do is cheerlead, comment, and essentially provide a lot of enthusiasm. (Seriously, every Yuletide I set myself the goal of commenting on at least 50-70 fics in the main collection, and at least 20 in Madness, and I generally do so.) And so what I am offering is this: comment with a link to one fanwork (art, fic, vid, fanmix, graphics, whatever you choose) that you are especially proud of, and I will leave you a comment either on Ao3 or Dreamwidth. It doesn't have to be a fanwork you produced for sunshine_challenge (you don't have to be participating in the challenge at all), just something you made and feel happy about.

Obviously it will be easier for me to make a substantive comment if I am familiar with the fandom, but I will do my best even if it's not something I know much about. Likewise, I will be quicker at commenting on visual fanworks, or shorter fics than on 100,000-word epics, but if the latter is what you want to share with me, I will comment eventually!

Today's post title is brought to you by the lyrics of this excellent song:



A quick update on 28th July

I am overwhelmed with the response to this offer, and I am definitely looking forward to reading (and commenting on) all your fic, but it might be some days before I get to it. If you haven't had a response from me yet, it's definitely going to happen, but it may not be before the weekend. I will update this post again when I've commented on everyone's fics.

Today's sunshine_challenge prompt is 'blue,' and I am going to use this prompt as an excuse to talk about some of my favourite accounts over on the blue hellsite, Twitter. I can only take Twitter in small doses, but one of the bright spots over there is the proliferation of bot accounts. By this I do not mean 'vectors of political disinformation,' but rather Twitter accounts focused on one specific thing (photos of animals, poetry quotations, etc), automated and tweeting out batches of content at specific intervals. My favourites of these include:

BirdPerHour: bird photos, every hour
sapphobot: quotes from fragments of Sappho's poetry
boschbot: fragments of images from Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights painting
bitsofjupiter and bitsofsaturn: fragments of photos of these two planets
midsomerplots: a hilarious Midsomer Murders plot generator
BestiaryBot: mashups taken from medieval bestiaries
arnarleir: a Skaldic poetry bot

Do any of you have comparable Twitter accounts that you enjoy?

*

In other, non-Sunshine Challenge news, goodbyebird has set up a comm on Dreamwidth for The Old Guard. It's the_old_guard — go over and join/subscribe if you're interested!

I have just spent the past half-hour writing an absolute wall of text at morbane in relation to Galax Arena — it's as if writing fic for that fandom after so long unlocked the torrent of feelings I have about that book, and specifically those two characters. It's nice to return to fandoms-of-the-heart, that's for sure.

I hope all of you have lovely weekends!

I'm midway through my long, long (five-day) weekend, and things are going well. Matthias and I went out for a nice walk to Madingley, during which time we saw cows, horses, alpacas, lots of flat wheatfields, dramatic skies, and, apparently, a plague of crows and ravens. (Photoset here.) Madingley is only 6km outside Cambridge, but that is still the furthest I've been from home since January.

Normally I save my roundup of TV/films viewed until the end of the month, but I feel it's necessary to gush right now about the excellent The Old Guard, a Charlize Theron action film which has just been released on Netflix. It's based on a graphic novel (which I'm now fruitlessly trying to track down in physical format), and is about a team of immortals who (in the film at least) have spent centuries working as mercenaries for various wars, conflicts and causes — and the evil pharmaceutical company which is hunting them. If such things matter to you in media (these matter to me), there are multiple non-white characters, and one m/m couple, all of whom survive to the end of the film. It's received pretty mixed reviews, but I loved it.



Now, on to my latest offering for sunshine_challenge. This prompt is 'yellow,' and I have admit I cheated a bit and treated both fluorescent light, and the reflected light of celestial bodies, as being yellowish in colour when they're really nothing of the kind.

I'd been meaning for ages to revisit Galax Arena, Gillian Rubinstein's extraordinary 1990s dystopian YA novel (see this post on my reviews blog where I rave about Australian YA novels of that era, including Galax Arena), and in particular my beloved Presh. She is a character that exists very much in the margins of canon, more talked about by others than giving voice to her own experiences, and she has always haunted me. I first read this book when I was nine or ten years old, and it was the first time I realised that I didn't have to like a book's narrator, even if the author clearly intended for me to do so — and that instead I could latch onto a story's antagonists, and make up my own stories about them if the book didn't give me what I wanted. I've been in love with Presh (and, to a lesser extent, with Allyman, and with the tense, sad, grim relationship between the two of them) ever since.

I tried to write about her eight years ago in Of Moons, Birds and Monsters, and this new fic in many ways represents an ongoing conversation with myself, and with that earlier story.

The Light of Unfamiliar Stars, Reflected (1378 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Galax-Arena Series - Gillian Rubinstein
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Allan 'Allyman' Manne/Presh
Characters: Presh, Allan 'Allyman' Manne
Additional Tags: Pre-Canon
Summary:

Nothing remained but her own feet, and eyes, and hands — the strength and certainty of her own small body. Here, she was on surer ground. She danced through the air, and learnt the span and shape of her new world.

This is the story of how Presh survives her earliest years in the Galax Arena.

This fic was written for the 2020 Sunshine Challenge, to the prompt of 'yellow'.

In an attempt to distract myself from stressing about Australian politics (namely the nailbitingly close Eden-Monaro by-election;* Australia being what it is, I know the outgoing MP in this electorate, and went to school with his son), I decided to attempt to do the sunshine_challenge this year. You can see all the prompts as they are revealed by clicking on the image above.

The first prompt is 'red,' whose first fannish association for me is always the song 'All Systems Red' by Calexico. This is the most explicitly, overtly, specifically political of the band's most explicitly political album, Garden Ruin — the entire album is a heartwrenching, despairing cri de coeur about what it felt like to be USian during the Bush (as in Dubya) era. I identified a lot with the sentiment of the album as an Australian in my early twenties, protesting horrors on the other side of the world to a government that closed its ears to our cries. Looking back on the album with the distance of more than a decade, the entire attitude and mood of it is more problematic that I was perhaps prepared to acknowledge at the time: the idea that wars are things that happen far away, that there are no obvious horrors closer to home beyond the horror of those far-off wars being committed 'in your name,' and that the grief and despair you feel at watching those wars unfold on a TV screen are the feelings that should be centred.

With that caveat, though, I still love this album deeply, and this song I love with a fervent intensity. I have always loved thematically linked concept albums, and song lyrics that do something interesting, and Garden Ruin was the first album since Massive Attack's Mezzanine with lyrics I really felt I could sink my teeth into. It gave voice to the exact feeling of lost innocence and idealism, the realisation that moral right and self-righteous protest meant nothing and were merely twigs to shore up against our ruin, swept easily away — all those feelings that permeated my late teens and early twenties. The song is a kind of resigned howling scream of grief, lent that rare kind of eloquent lyrical clarity which only appears when the lyricist is writing with barely controlled fury.

That I should pick up this prompt, and write about this song, on 4th July is entirely by coincidence.



Also, the live version is just gorgeous.



*In the time it's taken me to write this post, the votes in Eden-Monaro have come in, and AntonyGreenABC has called it for Labor, and I can breathe easy.