2020 Fannish Year in Review
Jan. 6th, 2021 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tabacoychanelLet’s start with Yuletide, where I received a stupendously well-written Locked Tomb fic featuring my favorite disaster bisexuals Palamedes and Camilla rocking some god-level banter pre-canon: A Beginner’s Guide to Locked Tomb Mysteries by lonelywalker (3k), as well as a delightful treat about Jo/Laurie reconnecting in New York (Little Women 1994): New Day by Missy (400 words).
Locked Tomb was one of the big Yuletide fandoms this year (38 fics i think) and I was beyond thrilled. I think I read them all?? My favorites:
publish or die by intrikate88 (4k) | An epistolary fic centered on Cam & Pal solving a MYSTERY? Sign me the fuck up. It’s an ensemble piece too ft. Abigail, Magnus, Dulcinea. And it really earns that “rigorous publication standards” tag lmao.
Excerpt from Book 22 (lost) of The Noniad by Ortus Nigenad, Cavalier Secondary of the Ninth House by oliviacirce (2k) | Exactly what it says on the tin! Somebody went and wrote a good chunk of Ortus’s unpublished magnum opus and it is A TRIUMPH of storytelling. Half the fun is the framing device of the overworked future!archivist who “discovers” the lost manuscript lol.
ill tidings (no comfort, no joy) by leiascully (3k) | aka the Mercymorn character study that wrecked me. Guys I don’t even care for Mercy as a character but this is incandescently good, and it grapples with the central theme of the Locked Tomb books which is how simultaneously pure and fucked-up the cavalier/necromancer bond is. High, high rec.
Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead by Isis (4k) | An Abigail-centric fic set in the interstices of Harrow the Ninth aka How Abby Figured Out What Was Going On.
Non nobis, Domine by Mainland (6k) | Silas & Colum (well Silas/Colum if you squint) through the years. This pairing is not exactly rainbows and unicorns—we know it’s gonna end badly—but this? This hurt me badly. "I used to worry," Colum said slowly, "what you would do if you were faced by an enemy you hadn't let yourself prepare for." "In that daydream, did you often picture yourself as the one standing in my way?" "I would not,” Colum heaved a sigh, "I am an unbroken vow." Also can we talk about how the life expectancy of Eighth House cavaliers is approximately 35 or thereabouts??? Because hovering in the background of this story is Silas’s dad’s cav and she’s indisposed 99% of the time ‘cause the Master Templar drains her so often. If the Eighth House doesn’t scare you shitless, it jolly well should.
Onwards to the non-Locked-Tomb fic Yuletide recs:
Sense & Sensibility | The More Loving One by DaisyNinjaGirl (5k) | Canon-divergence AU where Elinor marries Colonel Brandon, Edward Ferrars marries Lucy Steele, and Marianne yeets off to Scotland where she is living her best life as a piano teacher. This story feels so textured—in 5k I got a sense of the daily rhythm of village life, and even of Elinor’s relationships with Marianne and Lucy, who hardly appear in it at all. I went so far as to rec it for The Rec Center, which is the first time I’ve ever felt moved to do that—I think this is the kind of fic that would fall right in the wheelhouse of the median Rec Center reader (who I postulate, based on zero data, is older and more omnifannish—as in, fannish by disposition rather than fannish about a specific media property). It’s such an exceedingly generous fic, in the sense that your soul will feel enlarged upon reading it.
Billy Elliot | Homefires by alby-mangroves (4k) | I remember very little about the plot of Billy Elliot but it doesn’t even matter? What a pitch-perfect evocation of the setting (working-class Northern England during the 1984 miners’ strike) and the dialogue is to die for and the ending gave me ALL the warm and fuzzies.
14th c. RPF | honi soit qui mal y pense by betony (2k) | listen i know next to nothing about Edward the Black Prince or Joan of Kent but i will read anything betony writes and the way they write historical RPF with a magical/supernatural bent is peerless.
The Borgias | In the Bleak Midwinter by yeats (2k) | Cesare/Lucrezia seeking shelter from a snowstorm and being mistaken by the castellan for a newlywed couple with a baby?? Love it, love that this fic leans into the messed-up-ness of this family instead of away from it.
Ocean’s 8 | Singing When We’re Winning by meretricula (Debbie/Lou 3k) | Nobody does “aw shit i caught feelings for my best friend” getting-together-fic like meretricula does. I think I was clutching my abdomen from giggling too hard the whole time I was reading this.
Jupiter Ascending | Breathe Me In by captainellie (1k) | A Jupiter/Caine pwp that does a lot of interesting things with the dom/sub dynamics—it’s femdom and it’s really hot obvs but I found myself chewing over the character work more than the actual sex.
Ethan of Athos | What is Man, That Thou Art Mindful of Him? by hellseries (2k) | Ethan/Terrence Cee, post-canon. I never thought about the day-to-day aspects of Terrence adjusting to his new life after he makes the irrevocable decision to immigrate to Athos, but this fic frames the whole adjustment in terms of SCIENCE and it’s perfect.
Uprooted | Woodsmoke on the Wind by taywen (22k) | I enjoy Sarkan/Solya and I actively ship Sarkan/Agnieszka, so what could be better than Solya/Sarkan/Agnieszka ot3? This is set at the Kralian court and the court-intrigue was never my favorite part of Uprooted but I liked how this fic was all about polyamory negotiations and Idiots to Lovers (Agnieszka is not an idiot but the two men sure are).
The Eagle of the Ninth | Aere Perennius by alby-mangrove (4k) | Marcus/Esca get-together fic postcanon! They bought a house together! They’re best friends! Why aren’t they banging yet! This is so soft and careful; it captures not only the tone but the cadence of Sutcliff’s prose.
The Mummy | I.O.U. by GwendolynGrace (13k) | Ardeth/Jonathan, which is a pairing I had never hitherto even considered but one of my favorite things about Yuletide is the reliable crop of high-quality fics you get for evergreen fandoms like The Mummy. This was fantastic. The Jonathan-voice was spot-on and I like that Jonathan’s shortcomings aren’t downplayed—yes he is a coward and dilettante—but he’s also genuinely knowledgeable about Egyptian history and culture, and he really does have feelings for Ardeth (which is why he keeps angling for the latter to serve as his guide every he returns to Egypt to go on a wild goose chase in the desert lol).
As far as what I wrote for Yuletide, I wrote a short (1k) Charlie’s Angel (2019) fic about Sabina & Jane talking Elena through her first solo mission. Tbh the thing I’m proudest of is the setup. The execution …could have been better. My recipient was wonderful and left a lovely comment but I mean, I thought seriously about 1) defaulting because i posted this puppy literally 30 min before the deadline and 2) orphaning it at some point during the anon period, which would’ve been A Bad Look but i just feel terrible for being a victim of my own procrastinating tendencies. Sometimes it works out well! Last year I wrote a fic for Doom (2005) which I am quite proud of, and I slid in right under the wire with that one too. But I cannot shake the feeling that this fic deserved better than me. What I was trying to get across with it is this: Back whenmysticalmuddle and I watched the film together she said something that really stuck with me: “main antagonist: bosley. background antagonists: the entire male race.” And that’s it that’s the movie. It connects the dots between the small daily indignities of being a woman to the bigger villainous designs of the men who run the world (and the McGuffin is just a convenient way of showing this). I just wanted our girls to have clever banter, and do some problem-solving each in their own inimitable way, maybe hint at OT3 but that didn’t make it into the fic. It came out pretty unpolished but I think I had a good idea I just didn’t have time to execute it? Lesson learned for next year. This is only the third year I have done Yuletide! I defaulted the first time I tried, back in the mists of time (2010) and was not aware there was a global amnesty in place starting 2013-ish. I was more or less strong-armed into participating in 2018 by meretricula who dragged me out to dim sum (yes she had to force-feed me dim sum too, can you imagine??? isn’t she terrible??) and then she beguiled me into signing up for Yuletide. Whereupon I promptly matched with her and had a grand time. This was three Yuletides ago. I have to admit that a lot of the fun is lurking in comms like ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
coaltide to see what kind of tea is brewing on any given day, because I am a voracious consumer of secondhand drama (for firsthand drama I have a low tolerance). But since Yuletide is the biggest exchange, it exemplifies for me the spirit of fandom-as-gift-economy, and that’s something that means a lot to me.
I started out the year watching Netflix’s Locke & Key (2020), which my husband had previously watched but he rewatched with me (my husband’s idea of “watching” a show is putting it on in the background while napping). It’s not a good show but I wasn’t watching it ‘cause I thought it’d be good, I watched it because the fine folks on the Consanguinamory Discord server told me the siblings were shippable. And they were! I wrote a short fic, more because “3k outsider POV” is my sweet spot as a writer than because I cared about the canon, and I have to say I have not thought about this show again since.
On the recommendation of the Consanguinamory server I also watched both seasons of The Gifted (2017), which is a X-men spinoff set in some nebulous unspecified timeline. The things I do for the promise of shippable siblings! I wrote a 17k fic, which was the longest thing I’d ever written at that point. And it was uneven—I reread it recently and the rough portions really stood out to me—but by god am I glad I did it. It proved to me that i could, in fact, write a longish thing. And I could definitely see where my weaknesses were (action scenes? pfttt). I also was chuffed by the amount of feedback I got that was just “I wish this story had been about mutant superpowers rather than two teenagers having messy feelings.” Fair enough my dude.
In March we went into lockdown and me and hubby binged all five seasons of Leverage (2008)—an insanely good show that was also perfect for escapism purposes. Y’all know about hubby’s habit of falling asleep on the couch; so when he did that it wasn’t a big deal because he might miss an episode but it’s an episodic show—there are season-long arcs but it’s not actually one long story, the way prestige dramas these days tend to be. In every ep there’s a heist—our mains are thieves—but Robin-Hood-type thieves who are out to take the rich and powerful down a notch (“We pick up where the law leaves off”). For a show that was made a decade ago it sure is awfully prescient. And every! Single! Ep! Ends on a hopeful note. It was the injection of optimism we needed. I think, for me, the best part of this show is the competency porn; it’s how the technology of the headpieces enables them to coach each other in their own areas of expertise (Hardison teaches Eliot how to hack, Eliot teaches Sophie how to talk genuinely to a kid, Parker teaches Hardison to case a joint and lift ID cards, Sophie teaches Parker how to human, Nate teaches Sophie how to outbluff hucksters, Sophie teaches Hardison how to do wine tastings, Hardison teaches Parker & Eliot both on two separate occasions how to defuse a computer-detonated bomb, the entire team teaches Nate how not to be an ass to his ex). And the OT3. The OT3 is the beating heart of this show (sorry Nate & Sophie you're great). I ship it to pieces. There’s no question of work-life balance because their coworkers are their family; the boundaries between friends/family/coworkers are blurred and that’s my jam.
In June I wrote two fics for Jonrya Week. Jon/Arya is my longest-running ship and ASOIAF is my forever fandom and before 2018 (when I started doing Yuletide) everything I’d posted to AO3 was Jonrya, so this was a sandbox I’m pretty comfortable in. The fics themselves were fine—one pwp and one daemon AU (3k outsider pov is my bread&butter lol)—-the daemon AU is a better story than the PWP—but that’s not the important thing! The important thing is I metmysticalmuddle, who also writes Jonrya! You ever meet someone and within 5 minutes you vibe so well together that it’s like you’ve known them forever? That was us, instant kindred spirits. It’s so exhilarating to have a friend with whom I have not only loads of shared interests, but who is older than me in writing years (even though she’s much younger in actual years!) and takes the craft seriously and hashes out problems with me. mysticalmuddle is, upon reflection, most of the reason I wrote so much this year. She encouraged me to tackle the Jonrya regency AU that’s been knocking about in my brain for a while, which is now unfinished at 18k, which is officially the longest thing I’ve written ever and it’s not even halfway done. And when I beta her stuff I learn so much. What a blessing she is.
witcherology who is a Jonsa shipper recc'd me a 100k Jonsa fic which I read, and duly left kudos on because that's what civilized people do--they pick up their dog poop and leave kudos on fics they read. Then a rando from the internet comes along and combs through the kudos counter of said Jonsa fic, recognizes my AO3 handle, tracks me down on tumblr where I have an entirely different handle, and leaves this absolutely unhinged message. (It also bugged me because it's counterproductive?? Just on a pragmatic level I wish this person had spent all this energy on writing their own Jonrya fic if they object to my writing so much.) And that was not the end of it! This anon apparently decided to camp out in my inbox:
And this kept happening until I turned off anon asks:
Onto happier topics! One of the great joys of this year is getting into Locked Tomb fandom withcafemassolit, who furnished me a copy of Harrow the Ninth about a month before its publication date (look, I do not question her procurement methods). I had adored Gideon the Ninth and she had begrudgingly enjoyed it, but we were both united in our admiration for Harrow and she has been sending me an endless parade of delightful fanart/memes/meta since. I have since read a good deal of Locked Tomb fic--basically everything Sixth- or Eighth-house centric I have read at least once--and dragged mysticalmuddle into the fandom too, so well done all around lads. I've lately joined The People's Tomb discord server but I'm still acclimating myself over there; it's a bit overwhelming when you first jump in and it's a rapid conversational patter that flies by you and you don't know anybody. A lot of Locked Tomb writers on ao3 apparently congregate there so I thought I'd give it a whirl. (cafemassolit is also a blessing for other reasons, eg. the ludicrous number of care packages she sends me full of bounty like mooncake earrings! Dinosaur-shaped cookie cutters! My husband, eating a ginger snap cookie K sent us: "Why do you get so many parcels?" Me: "Because I have lovely friends." Him: "Wish I got mystery parcels from Europe." Me: "Your parents sent us a five-liter jug of olive oil because America apparently cannot be trusted to manufacture 'real' olive oil.")
I watched The Old Guard (2020) twice, once with bts!sister and once withmysticalmuddle Enjoyed the hell out of it both times, and now #myimmortalfamily is a tumblr tag that I have. (I have two sisters, bts!sister and cat!sister. bts!sister also likes other bands like ateez, exo, black pink but she’s suuuuper plugged into the kpop scene and is on record saying things like “pfttt i don’t listen to english-language music”.)
I finally watched The Untamed (2019) withmeretricula (this being her second pass). stultiloquentia joined us for the final few eps. This show was bonkers fucking yonkers. I mean, I knew it was going in, via fandom osmosis, and also because bts!sister got into the fandom last year and has been nattering at me about it ever since. It’s a show that will reach into your ribcage and scrape your id raw. I watched it with Chinese subtitles bc the English translations bothered me, which meant I had to look at the screen, which meant I had to video call meretricula instead of just texting her as we watched, which ran us into a thicket of problems with spotty internet etc. It was worth it. It took a dozen episodes to definitively hook me—everyone tells you the first 2 eps make zero sense and it’s 100% true. I had read maybe half the novel it’s based on prior to giving up, and forgotten most of the plot points, but on review it does seem the novel has both a different structure (the flashbacks aren’t all clumped into one long 30-episode flashback) and a different tone: It feels like WWX’s actions are more morally ambiguous in the book, and homophobia is a thing (in the show it’s not a thing at all), and JGY has more depth (i didn’t get to see most of JGY’s book-machinations because I dnf’d the novel about halfway through). I heartily wish that I could have been more fannish about this show, but it just didn’t hit the “fannish engagement” spot for me. Even though I cared a lot about (some) (JGY rights!!!) aspects of canon, and meretricula has got thousands of recs at her fingertips, and the quality of the writing in this fandom, i s2g you could read a cql fic every day for the rest of your life and never have to read a bad one. I find myself plotting to abduct some of these writers and make them write for my other fandoms.
La Casa de Papel (2017), all four currently extant seasons. This is hands-down my favorite new canon that I consumed in 2020. I even rewatched a few episodes, which I rarely do with TV shows. It’s an ensemble piece and it’s about a heist at the Spanish Royal Mint (well, S1-2 are; in S3-4 they hit up the Bank of Spain because go big or go home right?). In English the show is translated as Money Heist which kind of misses the point because the Mint that they’re hijacking? It’s literally a house of paper. Money isn’t real. It represents real obligations between people, sure, but money itself is fake. It’s not that I, an atomized individual, go out and earn this bag of $ by the sweat of my brow and then the government comes along and taxes it from me; without the government there is no money. Without a functioning society to confer value on it, money is worthless—it’s just paper. Now do y’all see why I glommed onto this show so hard? It’s a wildly popular show, especially internationally—I see a lot of tumblr edits subtitled in Greek or Portuguese or Thai—and is it a good show? Probs not but it’s addictive af. There are a lot of subplots that go nowhere, that are designed to build tension but don’t advance the plot at all, and that’s a fair criticism. But even when the plot doesn’t move a single centimeter there’s character work being done. Whenever I see one-star reviews of this show that bemoan how “the plot is nonsensical, it’s not a heist it’s a soap opera” I have the urge to reply “bro why tf do you think I watch it?” I do have mixed feelings about how attached I got to Actual Rapist Berlin—not because I don’t think rapists can’t make compelling main characters, China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station featured one—but if you give the rapist’s victim(s) zero screentime to react or process the trauma, it sure does feels gross. The camera is also beyond male gaze-y, clearly there are only straight men in this writer’s room. So is it problematique? Yes. Am I rolling around in this dumpster methodically reading every fic in the Berlermo tag? Also yes. Yes yes I know S1-2 were a perfectly contained heist story and there was no need to go and shoot three more (less tightly written, much messier) seasons but by god am I grateful they did. These latter seasons gave us Palermo, and SOY EL SUDACA QUE VINO A REPATRIAR EL ORO QUE USTEDES SAQUEARON, HIJO DE PUTA is still my fave line from this entire show (me, frantically textingwitcherology: “What’s a sudaca???”). S1-2 were proof of concept for the idea that you cannot plan a perfect heist: you can account for every contingency save the messiness of the human heart. S3-4 are straight up anti-capitalist propaganda and I’m so here for it. I do think Alicia is thematically the most interesting new character, because my headcanon is that Raquel joins the resistance for love of Sergio, and Alicia joins la resistencia out of cold calculation (because she personally has gotten screwed over by The System). I don’t mean to say that Raquel doesn’t believe in the cause; just that it was her love for Sergio that opened up the space to reevaluate “who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.” The other day I casually asked my husband if he was familiar with “Bella Ciao” and he sang the whole damn song for me and he never remembers the lyrics to anything so I guess we can assume they are teaching all the kiddos to be revolutionaries over in Italy. :D
Locked Tomb was one of the big Yuletide fandoms this year (38 fics i think) and I was beyond thrilled. I think I read them all?? My favorites:
publish or die by intrikate88 (4k) | An epistolary fic centered on Cam & Pal solving a MYSTERY? Sign me the fuck up. It’s an ensemble piece too ft. Abigail, Magnus, Dulcinea. And it really earns that “rigorous publication standards” tag lmao.
Excerpt from Book 22 (lost) of The Noniad by Ortus Nigenad, Cavalier Secondary of the Ninth House by oliviacirce (2k) | Exactly what it says on the tin! Somebody went and wrote a good chunk of Ortus’s unpublished magnum opus and it is A TRIUMPH of storytelling. Half the fun is the framing device of the overworked future!archivist who “discovers” the lost manuscript lol.
ill tidings (no comfort, no joy) by leiascully (3k) | aka the Mercymorn character study that wrecked me. Guys I don’t even care for Mercy as a character but this is incandescently good, and it grapples with the central theme of the Locked Tomb books which is how simultaneously pure and fucked-up the cavalier/necromancer bond is. High, high rec.
Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead by Isis (4k) | An Abigail-centric fic set in the interstices of Harrow the Ninth aka How Abby Figured Out What Was Going On.
Non nobis, Domine by Mainland (6k) | Silas & Colum (well Silas/Colum if you squint) through the years. This pairing is not exactly rainbows and unicorns—we know it’s gonna end badly—but this? This hurt me badly. "I used to worry," Colum said slowly, "what you would do if you were faced by an enemy you hadn't let yourself prepare for." "In that daydream, did you often picture yourself as the one standing in my way?" "I would not,” Colum heaved a sigh, "I am an unbroken vow." Also can we talk about how the life expectancy of Eighth House cavaliers is approximately 35 or thereabouts??? Because hovering in the background of this story is Silas’s dad’s cav and she’s indisposed 99% of the time ‘cause the Master Templar drains her so often. If the Eighth House doesn’t scare you shitless, it jolly well should.
Onwards to the non-Locked-Tomb fic Yuletide recs:
Sense & Sensibility | The More Loving One by DaisyNinjaGirl (5k) | Canon-divergence AU where Elinor marries Colonel Brandon, Edward Ferrars marries Lucy Steele, and Marianne yeets off to Scotland where she is living her best life as a piano teacher. This story feels so textured—in 5k I got a sense of the daily rhythm of village life, and even of Elinor’s relationships with Marianne and Lucy, who hardly appear in it at all. I went so far as to rec it for The Rec Center, which is the first time I’ve ever felt moved to do that—I think this is the kind of fic that would fall right in the wheelhouse of the median Rec Center reader (who I postulate, based on zero data, is older and more omnifannish—as in, fannish by disposition rather than fannish about a specific media property). It’s such an exceedingly generous fic, in the sense that your soul will feel enlarged upon reading it.
Billy Elliot | Homefires by alby-mangroves (4k) | I remember very little about the plot of Billy Elliot but it doesn’t even matter? What a pitch-perfect evocation of the setting (working-class Northern England during the 1984 miners’ strike) and the dialogue is to die for and the ending gave me ALL the warm and fuzzies.
14th c. RPF | honi soit qui mal y pense by betony (2k) | listen i know next to nothing about Edward the Black Prince or Joan of Kent but i will read anything betony writes and the way they write historical RPF with a magical/supernatural bent is peerless.
The Borgias | In the Bleak Midwinter by yeats (2k) | Cesare/Lucrezia seeking shelter from a snowstorm and being mistaken by the castellan for a newlywed couple with a baby?? Love it, love that this fic leans into the messed-up-ness of this family instead of away from it.
Ocean’s 8 | Singing When We’re Winning by meretricula (Debbie/Lou 3k) | Nobody does “aw shit i caught feelings for my best friend” getting-together-fic like meretricula does. I think I was clutching my abdomen from giggling too hard the whole time I was reading this.
Jupiter Ascending | Breathe Me In by captainellie (1k) | A Jupiter/Caine pwp that does a lot of interesting things with the dom/sub dynamics—it’s femdom and it’s really hot obvs but I found myself chewing over the character work more than the actual sex.
Ethan of Athos | What is Man, That Thou Art Mindful of Him? by hellseries (2k) | Ethan/Terrence Cee, post-canon. I never thought about the day-to-day aspects of Terrence adjusting to his new life after he makes the irrevocable decision to immigrate to Athos, but this fic frames the whole adjustment in terms of SCIENCE and it’s perfect.
Uprooted | Woodsmoke on the Wind by taywen (22k) | I enjoy Sarkan/Solya and I actively ship Sarkan/Agnieszka, so what could be better than Solya/Sarkan/Agnieszka ot3? This is set at the Kralian court and the court-intrigue was never my favorite part of Uprooted but I liked how this fic was all about polyamory negotiations and Idiots to Lovers (Agnieszka is not an idiot but the two men sure are).
The Eagle of the Ninth | Aere Perennius by alby-mangrove (4k) | Marcus/Esca get-together fic postcanon! They bought a house together! They’re best friends! Why aren’t they banging yet! This is so soft and careful; it captures not only the tone but the cadence of Sutcliff’s prose.
The Mummy | I.O.U. by GwendolynGrace (13k) | Ardeth/Jonathan, which is a pairing I had never hitherto even considered but one of my favorite things about Yuletide is the reliable crop of high-quality fics you get for evergreen fandoms like The Mummy. This was fantastic. The Jonathan-voice was spot-on and I like that Jonathan’s shortcomings aren’t downplayed—yes he is a coward and dilettante—but he’s also genuinely knowledgeable about Egyptian history and culture, and he really does have feelings for Ardeth (which is why he keeps angling for the latter to serve as his guide every he returns to Egypt to go on a wild goose chase in the desert lol).
As far as what I wrote for Yuletide, I wrote a short (1k) Charlie’s Angel (2019) fic about Sabina & Jane talking Elena through her first solo mission. Tbh the thing I’m proudest of is the setup. The execution …could have been better. My recipient was wonderful and left a lovely comment but I mean, I thought seriously about 1) defaulting because i posted this puppy literally 30 min before the deadline and 2) orphaning it at some point during the anon period, which would’ve been A Bad Look but i just feel terrible for being a victim of my own procrastinating tendencies. Sometimes it works out well! Last year I wrote a fic for Doom (2005) which I am quite proud of, and I slid in right under the wire with that one too. But I cannot shake the feeling that this fic deserved better than me. What I was trying to get across with it is this: Back when
mysticalmuddle and I watched the film together she said something that really stuck with me: “main antagonist: bosley. background antagonists: the entire male race.” And that’s it that’s the movie. It connects the dots between the small daily indignities of being a woman to the bigger villainous designs of the men who run the world (and the McGuffin is just a convenient way of showing this). I just wanted our girls to have clever banter, and do some problem-solving each in their own inimitable way, maybe hint at OT3 but that didn’t make it into the fic. It came out pretty unpolished but I think I had a good idea I just didn’t have time to execute it? Lesson learned for next year. This is only the third year I have done Yuletide! I defaulted the first time I tried, back in the mists of time (2010) and was not aware there was a global amnesty in place starting 2013-ish. I was more or less strong-armed into participating in 2018 by meretricula who dragged me out to dim sum (yes she had to force-feed me dim sum too, can you imagine??? isn’t she terrible??) and then she beguiled me into signing up for Yuletide. Whereupon I promptly matched with her and had a grand time. This was three Yuletides ago. I have to admit that a lot of the fun is lurking in comms like coaltide to see what kind of tea is brewing on any given day, because I am a voracious consumer of secondhand drama (for firsthand drama I have a low tolerance). But since Yuletide is the biggest exchange, it exemplifies for me the spirit of fandom-as-gift-economy, and that’s something that means a lot to me.2020 Fannish Year in Review
According to AO3 I wrote 50k words this year which is…more words than I wrote in the previous 9 years I’ve had an Ao3 account??? It doesn’t feel like I wrote a lot, because I mostly wasn’t writing in fandoms I was actively participating in (as in, regularly consuming fic/edits/meta/vids/headcanons/whatnot). So my fan production and fan consumption bore little relation to each other and that was weird.I started out the year watching Netflix’s Locke & Key (2020), which my husband had previously watched but he rewatched with me (my husband’s idea of “watching” a show is putting it on in the background while napping). It’s not a good show but I wasn’t watching it ‘cause I thought it’d be good, I watched it because the fine folks on the Consanguinamory Discord server told me the siblings were shippable. And they were! I wrote a short fic, more because “3k outsider POV” is my sweet spot as a writer than because I cared about the canon, and I have to say I have not thought about this show again since.
On the recommendation of the Consanguinamory server I also watched both seasons of The Gifted (2017), which is a X-men spinoff set in some nebulous unspecified timeline. The things I do for the promise of shippable siblings! I wrote a 17k fic, which was the longest thing I’d ever written at that point. And it was uneven—I reread it recently and the rough portions really stood out to me—but by god am I glad I did it. It proved to me that i could, in fact, write a longish thing. And I could definitely see where my weaknesses were (action scenes? pfttt). I also was chuffed by the amount of feedback I got that was just “I wish this story had been about mutant superpowers rather than two teenagers having messy feelings.” Fair enough my dude.
In March we went into lockdown and me and hubby binged all five seasons of Leverage (2008)—an insanely good show that was also perfect for escapism purposes. Y’all know about hubby’s habit of falling asleep on the couch; so when he did that it wasn’t a big deal because he might miss an episode but it’s an episodic show—there are season-long arcs but it’s not actually one long story, the way prestige dramas these days tend to be. In every ep there’s a heist—our mains are thieves—but Robin-Hood-type thieves who are out to take the rich and powerful down a notch (“We pick up where the law leaves off”). For a show that was made a decade ago it sure is awfully prescient. And every! Single! Ep! Ends on a hopeful note. It was the injection of optimism we needed. I think, for me, the best part of this show is the competency porn; it’s how the technology of the headpieces enables them to coach each other in their own areas of expertise (Hardison teaches Eliot how to hack, Eliot teaches Sophie how to talk genuinely to a kid, Parker teaches Hardison to case a joint and lift ID cards, Sophie teaches Parker how to human, Nate teaches Sophie how to outbluff hucksters, Sophie teaches Hardison how to do wine tastings, Hardison teaches Parker & Eliot both on two separate occasions how to defuse a computer-detonated bomb, the entire team teaches Nate how not to be an ass to his ex). And the OT3. The OT3 is the beating heart of this show (sorry Nate & Sophie you're great). I ship it to pieces. There’s no question of work-life balance because their coworkers are their family; the boundaries between friends/family/coworkers are blurred and that’s my jam.
In June I wrote two fics for Jonrya Week. Jon/Arya is my longest-running ship and ASOIAF is my forever fandom and before 2018 (when I started doing Yuletide) everything I’d posted to AO3 was Jonrya, so this was a sandbox I’m pretty comfortable in. The fics themselves were fine—one pwp and one daemon AU (3k outsider pov is my bread&butter lol)—-the daemon AU is a better story than the PWP—but that’s not the important thing! The important thing is I met
mysticalmuddle, who also writes Jonrya! You ever meet someone and within 5 minutes you vibe so well together that it’s like you’ve known them forever? That was us, instant kindred spirits. It’s so exhilarating to have a friend with whom I have not only loads of shared interests, but who is older than me in writing years (even though she’s much younger in actual years!) and takes the craft seriously and hashes out problems with me. mysticalmuddle is, upon reflection, most of the reason I wrote so much this year. She encouraged me to tackle the Jonrya regency AU that’s been knocking about in my brain for a while, which is now unfinished at 18k, which is officially the longest thing I’ve written ever and it’s not even halfway done. And when I beta her stuff I learn so much. What a blessing she is.Ok but the wildest thing that happened to me this year, that I’m going to write about here because it is Jonrya-related is I got anon hate on tumblr! I was upset at the time but now I am just confused. Because usually anon hate is trying to elicit some kind of reaction from you? For the anon’s amusement? Or if you’re a blog with a lot of followers they just flame you for attention. I am not a blog with a lot of followers, and I did not give amusing answers. For context: in ASOIAF the most popular ship (by tumblr and AO3 stats) is Jon/Sansa. It’s a ship that the rest of the fandom holds in disdain, for reasons that aren’t important. What’s important for our purposes is that it’s very uncommon for someone to multiship Jon/Sansa and Jon/Arya; it's just Not Done. (By contrast nobody bats an eye if you multiship Jon/Arya and Gendry/Arya, or Sansa/Margaery and Dany/Sansa).
To recap what happened here: This anon is not mad because I wrote for the wrong ship. They mad because I
kudos'd the wrong fic, which is something they could only have known if they went digging for this information by combing through the kudos counter at the bottom of the offending fic.
witcherology who is a Jonsa shipper recc'd me a 100k Jonsa fic which I read, and duly left kudos on because that's what civilized people do--they pick up their dog poop and leave kudos on fics they read. Then a rando from the internet comes along and combs through the kudos counter of said Jonsa fic, recognizes my AO3 handle, tracks me down on tumblr where I have an entirely different handle, and leaves this absolutely unhinged message. (It also bugged me because it's counterproductive?? Just on a pragmatic level I wish this person had spent all this energy on writing their own Jonrya fic if they object to my writing so much.) And that was not the end of it! This anon apparently decided to camp out in my inbox:And this kept happening until I turned off anon asks:
Onto happier topics! One of the great joys of this year is getting into Locked Tomb fandom with
cafemassolit, who furnished me a copy of Harrow the Ninth about a month before its publication date (look, I do not question her procurement methods). I had adored Gideon the Ninth and she had begrudgingly enjoyed it, but we were both united in our admiration for Harrow and she has been sending me an endless parade of delightful fanart/memes/meta since. I have since read a good deal of Locked Tomb fic--basically everything Sixth- or Eighth-house centric I have read at least once--and dragged mysticalmuddle into the fandom too, so well done all around lads. I've lately joined The People's Tomb discord server but I'm still acclimating myself over there; it's a bit overwhelming when you first jump in and it's a rapid conversational patter that flies by you and you don't know anybody. A lot of Locked Tomb writers on ao3 apparently congregate there so I thought I'd give it a whirl. (cafemassolit is also a blessing for other reasons, eg. the ludicrous number of care packages she sends me full of bounty like mooncake earrings! Dinosaur-shaped cookie cutters! My husband, eating a ginger snap cookie K sent us: "Why do you get so many parcels?" Me: "Because I have lovely friends." Him: "Wish I got mystery parcels from Europe." Me: "Your parents sent us a five-liter jug of olive oil because America apparently cannot be trusted to manufacture 'real' olive oil.")I watched The Old Guard (2020) twice, once with bts!sister and once with
mysticalmuddle Enjoyed the hell out of it both times, and now #myimmortalfamily is a tumblr tag that I have. (I have two sisters, bts!sister and cat!sister. bts!sister also likes other bands like ateez, exo, black pink but she’s suuuuper plugged into the kpop scene and is on record saying things like “pfttt i don’t listen to english-language music”.)I finally watched The Untamed (2019) with
meretricula (this being her second pass). stultiloquentia joined us for the final few eps. This show was bonkers fucking yonkers. I mean, I knew it was going in, via fandom osmosis, and also because bts!sister got into the fandom last year and has been nattering at me about it ever since. It’s a show that will reach into your ribcage and scrape your id raw. I watched it with Chinese subtitles bc the English translations bothered me, which meant I had to look at the screen, which meant I had to video call meretricula instead of just texting her as we watched, which ran us into a thicket of problems with spotty internet etc. It was worth it. It took a dozen episodes to definitively hook me—everyone tells you the first 2 eps make zero sense and it’s 100% true. I had read maybe half the novel it’s based on prior to giving up, and forgotten most of the plot points, but on review it does seem the novel has both a different structure (the flashbacks aren’t all clumped into one long 30-episode flashback) and a different tone: It feels like WWX’s actions are more morally ambiguous in the book, and homophobia is a thing (in the show it’s not a thing at all), and JGY has more depth (i didn’t get to see most of JGY’s book-machinations because I dnf’d the novel about halfway through). I heartily wish that I could have been more fannish about this show, but it just didn’t hit the “fannish engagement” spot for me. Even though I cared a lot about (some) (JGY rights!!!) aspects of canon, and meretricula has got thousands of recs at her fingertips, and the quality of the writing in this fandom, i s2g you could read a cql fic every day for the rest of your life and never have to read a bad one. I find myself plotting to abduct some of these writers and make them write for my other fandoms.La Casa de Papel (2017), all four currently extant seasons. This is hands-down my favorite new canon that I consumed in 2020. I even rewatched a few episodes, which I rarely do with TV shows. It’s an ensemble piece and it’s about a heist at the Spanish Royal Mint (well, S1-2 are; in S3-4 they hit up the Bank of Spain because go big or go home right?). In English the show is translated as Money Heist which kind of misses the point because the Mint that they’re hijacking? It’s literally a house of paper. Money isn’t real. It represents real obligations between people, sure, but money itself is fake. It’s not that I, an atomized individual, go out and earn this bag of $ by the sweat of my brow and then the government comes along and taxes it from me; without the government there is no money. Without a functioning society to confer value on it, money is worthless—it’s just paper. Now do y’all see why I glommed onto this show so hard? It’s a wildly popular show, especially internationally—I see a lot of tumblr edits subtitled in Greek or Portuguese or Thai—and is it a good show? Probs not but it’s addictive af. There are a lot of subplots that go nowhere, that are designed to build tension but don’t advance the plot at all, and that’s a fair criticism. But even when the plot doesn’t move a single centimeter there’s character work being done. Whenever I see one-star reviews of this show that bemoan how “the plot is nonsensical, it’s not a heist it’s a soap opera” I have the urge to reply “bro why tf do you think I watch it?” I do have mixed feelings about how attached I got to Actual Rapist Berlin—not because I don’t think rapists can’t make compelling main characters, China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station featured one—but if you give the rapist’s victim(s) zero screentime to react or process the trauma, it sure does feels gross. The camera is also beyond male gaze-y, clearly there are only straight men in this writer’s room. So is it problematique? Yes. Am I rolling around in this dumpster methodically reading every fic in the Berlermo tag? Also yes. Yes yes I know S1-2 were a perfectly contained heist story and there was no need to go and shoot three more (less tightly written, much messier) seasons but by god am I grateful they did. These latter seasons gave us Palermo, and SOY EL SUDACA QUE VINO A REPATRIAR EL ORO QUE USTEDES SAQUEARON, HIJO DE PUTA is still my fave line from this entire show (me, frantically texting
witcherology: “What’s a sudaca???”). S1-2 were proof of concept for the idea that you cannot plan a perfect heist: you can account for every contingency save the messiness of the human heart. S3-4 are straight up anti-capitalist propaganda and I’m so here for it. I do think Alicia is thematically the most interesting new character, because my headcanon is that Raquel joins the resistance for love of Sergio, and Alicia joins la resistencia out of cold calculation (because she personally has gotten screwed over by The System). I don’t mean to say that Raquel doesn’t believe in the cause; just that it was her love for Sergio that opened up the space to reevaluate “who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.” The other day I casually asked my husband if he was familiar with “Bella Ciao” and he sang the whole damn song for me and he never remembers the lyrics to anything so I guess we can assume they are teaching all the kiddos to be revolutionaries over in Italy. :D
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Date: 2021-01-07 03:05 am (UTC)I'm now laughing really hard that I was worried Declan/Ronan might scare you off.
Sounds like you had a great year! I finished Harrow the Ninth literally hours before Yuletide went up and I think I only got through the very shortest fics but i have a bunch of stuff bookmarked because I do enjoy that fandom.
ETA: Also
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Date: 2021-01-07 03:15 am (UTC)lmao i may have understated the extent to which it did not bother me
isn't stultiloquentia so lovely and such a great resource on all things untamed???
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Date: 2021-01-07 04:08 am (UTC)It's mostly about WWX's face for me, to be honest, and also Wen Qing and Wen Ning who I vocally referred to as 'the two cuties who deserved better!!!' But I also dig Yanli and Jiang Cheng and his nephew (one of the Jins?) who I just call Princeling. There was -- perhaps a bit too much plot that didn't revolve around these characters for my taste, but I do understand that there is an incentive in Cdramas to pad things out!
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Date: 2021-01-07 03:36 am (UTC)I have to admit that a lot of the fun is lurking in comms like [community profile] coaltide to see what kind of tea is brewing on any given day, because I am a voracious consumer of secondhand drama (for firsthand drama I have a low tolerance).
All of this! :P
It was neat to see your history with Yuletide (and that apparently you came back to it the same year I wrote my first thing for Yuletide as a treat). I do find the orphan/permanent anon option sort of a soothing backup plan to have, though I've never yet been seriously tempted in that direction with anything I posted. But, just, like it's nice to know there's an 'escape plan' ?
I wrote 50k words this year
Holy cow, that's a novel! Congrats! <3
(my husband’s idea of “watching” a show is putting it on in the background while napping).
Heh! (My husband's idea of watching a how is fast-forwarding through the part where people talk, unless it's in a foreign language that he's trying to learn.)
I've seen Leverage rec'd a bunch and even watched the first episode, which confirmed that I could probably like it, but (at least at the time) it wasn't streaming anywhere I had access to, so I basically just put it on the list of "shows I might check out at some future point if they come to Netflix". (Instead I watched a bunch of Person of Interest and then a bunch of White Collar, although the latter was mostly K's chaos's fault :P)
Also wow, your Tumblr anon hate adventure is WILD -- I'm really sorry you had to deal with this unhinged individual. But also, WHAT. Fandom is a strange, strange place these days.
and duly left kudos on because that's what civilized people do--they pick up their dog poop and leave kudos on fics they read.
Hee at this parallel!
Randomly, it's really neat that you can Do Fandom with your siblings! (My brother and I do sometimes have discussions about canons, like, we're both huge The Simpsons fans, but he is not fannish, so it's just on the level of discussion of the thing.)
The other day I casually asked my husband if he was familiar with “Bella Ciao” and he sang the whole damn song for me
I don't remember ALL the lyrics, but I would absolutely attempt to sing the part I do remember to you if you asked me that question. (This would be a very bad thing.) O learned to play it at some point -- I think he got it in Italian class and then looked up the sheet music? -- and I would keep trying to sing it, so he stopped. But it's just a really rousing song!
(I can also do the first stanza + chorus of Bandiera Rossa XD I think I learned it from my grandmother? Definitely not in my high school Italian class, although Signora N was amused that I knew it.)
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Date: 2021-01-23 07:48 am (UTC)i think you would really enjoy Leverage if/when you get around to it!
t's really neat that you can Do Fandom with your siblings
hahaha it's more than that, i was actually personally responsible for inducting bts!sister into tranformative fandom back when she was a wee thing. in 2012-13 or thereabouts i had to bodily drag her out of the pit of voles and onto ao3, which was still in its infancy at its time. now she reads like 200k in fic per week and has basically stopped reading published books unless they're by Cassie Clare or Sarah J Maas, so have i created a monster? you decide ;-)
like it's nice to know there's an 'escape plan'
people still delete their fics though. that's what saddens me. and they're always the good fics (i suppose i would not go back to check on *bad* fics, so there's some survivorship bias). and you can't stop them, its their fic their choice, but i wish i knew why they didn't avail themselves of the orphaning option? i wish i knew what impelled them to take the thing down, was it they just couldn't stand the thought of the thing still existing out there for people to potentially read?
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Date: 2021-01-23 07:19 pm (UTC)Heh, I'm glad to hear O and I are not alone in this blindspot! (I mean, the rest of my Italian verb conjugation is rusty, too, but I can at least remember a few of the forms...)
B has awfully high linguistic standards
I don't know even that it's high standards so much as some inability to grasp that certain things he can do are not automatic/universal? Like, he will cheerfully and technically-honestly claim that he learned French in school - yeah, in Belgium, where it's one of the two major languages and he was surrounded by it all his life and have family members (cousins) who speak it as their first language. But even more, he'll read us some phrase in German and be like: ":D?" -- and the number of times I've had to remind him, "We do not understand this word. We do not SPEAK GERMAN" is legitimately hilarious -- a lot of the vocabulary is close enough to his native Dutch that apparently his brain just goes, "oh, this can just be triangulated without any knowledge of German" and he keeps being surprised that the rest of us can't do it. Like it's become a running gag at this point. (He also likes to claim that he doesn't speak German before going on to hold fluent conversations in German with Germans, often without being aware of it. Never a dull moment, I tell ya. XD)
i had to bodily drag her out of the pit of voles and onto ao3, which was still in its infancy at its time. now she reads like 200k in fic per week and has basically stopped reading published books unless they're by Cassie Clare or Sarah J Maas, so have i created a monster?
You have possibly created a monster, but rescuing someone from FF.n but throwing them the spar of nascent AO3 still sounds like the only thing you could have done. So good job, you!
was it they just couldn't stand the thought of the thing still existing out there for people to potentially read?
I guess so... I mean, I understand it in cases where people have gone pro and want to cut ties with the fanfic world, or are trying to completely erase a former identity... But it's very sad. (I need to get in the habit of saving my favorite fics instead of living on in the blithe assumption that they will always be there for me...)