The Elderling Academic

[elderlingacademic]

Update

So, tumblr just saw fit to tell me that this blog is now nine years old, which is... wild and strange to me. It's been a long time since I've been on it, and some of the posts are still getting notes, so I thought I'd stop by with a catch-up on how things are.

So:

I've finished my PhD. The process was bad enough to make my mental health plummet to previously unseen depths (for me, anyway), which is why I dropped off the face of this earth blog. I managed to pass with technical corrections only, which is a huge achievement that I think one day I might figure out how to feel about, but it's too soon right now.

My mum has read it, and thought it was very good - I'm hoping sometime (it's gonna be years, but) to be able to reread it with a clear head and appreciate it. Same with Realm of the Elderlings, honestly.

End of PhD meant some big life changes, some of which I'm still in the middle of. I live in a different city now, and I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with my life, because academia is no longer the answer.

I guess for the last year since I finished I've been wanting to post something about this but trying to work out how, and I think that the core of it is this: it is okay for things to not work out how you expected. If you are neck-deep in academia right not, it is not the whole world, I promise you. I finished my PhD, but I seriously considered quitting, and I still don't think that would have been the wrong decision. (Neither was carrying on. They were both acceptable options, no matter how fraught I felt about them at the time).

We are taught to view our lives like a kind of funnel - we start with a plethora of options, and then we narrow down further and further until we specialise (oh we might have other unrelated hobbies, but the core of it is Our Thing). But that's not how that works, that's not how any of this works at all. The world is wide. I can choose anything now. I mean, most of the things I've thought of so far I don't actually want to do for various reasons, but I know myself well enough to know that I'll figure it out eventually. If I just let it simmer in the back of my head, and give it time. You don't have to know the answer; in a way, you are the answer, if that makes any kind of sense.

I stuck with the job that I picked up part time to fund my PhD, and took it full time. It's definitely not a forever option, but it was a blessing to be in a new city, strangely liberated from the PhD that took up eight years of my life (and the general academia that took up the majority of my whole life before then), and doing something I already knew how to do. It's helping rebuild my confidence, and I know that whatever come next is going to be something I can make something of.

I hope that's not so rambly as to be incoherent; regardless, I'm glad I wrote it. I do still see asks on this account, so if you ever have any queries about academia (not the technical side, but what it feels like to get through sometimes), let me know. I can't promise quick answers, but I'll try to answer most things.

I hope you are all well, and thank you for the notes that remind me this blog still exists - a testament to the love and enthusiasm I had for this project at the start, and that I still hope to rediscover some day.

[mxactivist]

Danny Holt CITP MBCS talks about their experiences of using IT as a non-binary person and how not including everyone harms both the individu

Danny Holt on UK government guidance for collecting and recording gender and titles, among other things, and written from a nonbinary perspective. It's informative and reassuring to know that the guidance is good, even if sometimes in individual cases it isn't followed very well!

[ironic-points-of-light-deactiva]

Lord of the Rings was published in the fifties, and largely written in the forties. Tolkien’s opinions on society and morality and technology are at some points genuinely more conservative than what I’m comfortable with. And yet, the more I think about it, the more sure I am that Tolkien actually deconstructs most of the clichéd fantasy tropes he supposedly originates. Some examples.

The long-lost heir is not the hero, he’s a side character who deliberately uses himself as a decoy.

The real hero actually fails in his quest, his goodness and determination and willpower utterly fail in the face of evil, and the world is saved by a series seemingly unrelated good deeds.

The central conflict is not between destroying the world and preserving it. An age of the world will come to an end, and many great and beautiful things will perish, whether the heroes win or lose. The past may have been glorious, but preserving it is impossible, and returning to it is impossible, time has passed and the world has moved on. The king returns, but the elves are gone and magic fades from the very substance of Middle Earth. The goal is not to preserve the status quo, the goal is the chance to rebuild something on the ruins.

Killing the main villain seems to instantly solve the problem, eradicate all enemies and fix the world, except it doesn’t, not wholly, since the scouring of the Shire still has to happen.

Also, the hero gets no real reward, and what he gets, he cannot really enjoy. He is hurt by his ordeal, and never fully recovers.

There is a team of heroes, a classic adventuring party, except the Fellowship is together for less one sixth of the series. The Fellowship is intact from the Council of Elrond to Gandalf’s death, four chapters. The remaining eight are together until Boromir’s death, an additional six chapters. This is nothing compared to LOTR’s length of sixty-one chapters, if I count correctly.

Tolkien is not classic high fantasy. If you actually think about it, there is very little magic. The hobbits’ stealth is not magical, most elven wonders are not unambigously magical, wizards are extremely rare, and even Gandalf hardly uses magic if you compare him to the average DnD wizard. Most magic is indistinguishable from craft, there is no clear difference between a magic armor and a very good armor, between magic bread and very good bread, between magical healing and competent first-aid plus a few kind words.

TLDR: Stop praising recent fantasy for deconstructing Tolkien if they’re “deconstructing” something Tolkien has never actually constructed.

[lazy-polyglot]

Friendly reminder - you’re not a full time professional athlete. you’re not a fashion icon. you’re not supposed to be perfect. Shitty grades happen and it doesn’t mean you’re not smart. So if you’re trying to balance studying, working, volunteering, exercising, learning languages, and expect to be a perfect multilingual Victoria Secret model with straight As, a job, and volunteer time, as well as being a good friend and making time for yourself, you’re gonna have a massive breakdown and fail. You don’t have to be perfect. Navigating into academia is hard. Nobody is asking you to be perfect. Results matter, sure, but effort is important and valuable as well. You’re learning. 

[transformativeworksandcultures]

TWC 30 (September 15, 2019)

Vol 29 (2019): General Issue published

Editorial

TWC Editor, In defense of revision

Theory

AC. Lee Harrington, Animal fans: Toward a multispecies fan studies

Hannah E. Dahlberg-Dodd, The author in the postinternet age

Sebastian F. K. Svegaard, Toward an integration of musicological methods into fan video studies

Erica Lyn Massey,  Borderland literature, female pleasure, and the slash fic phenomenon

Andrew Crome, Considering eighteenth-century prophecy as transformative work

Leah Steuer, Structural affects of soap opera fan correspondence, 1970s–80s

Praxis

Gayle S. Stever, Fan studies in psychology: A road less traveled

Jessica Ethel Tompkins, Is gender just a costume? An exploratory study of crossplay

Olympia Kiriakou, Big name fandom and the (inevitable) failure of Disflix

Xianwei Wu, Hierarchy within female ACG fandom in China

Angela L. Florschuetz, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” canonicity, and audience participation

Alice Margaret Kelly, Fan fiction as feminist citation: Lesbian (para)textuality in chainofclovers’s “Done with the Compass, Done with the Chart” (2017)

Symposium

Xiqing Zheng, Survival and migration patterns of Chinese online media fandoms

Effie Sapuridis, Gendered Fairy Tale Heroics: Ginny Weasley in The Source

Cody T. Havard, Introducing Sport Rivalry Man, protector of positive fan behavior

Martyna Szczepaniak, Death in Marvel

Cody T. Havard, Rhema D. Fuller, Timothy D. Ryan, Frederick G. Grieve, Using the Marvel Cinematic Universe to build a defined research line

Review

Abby Waysdorf, “Framing fan fiction: Literary and social practices in fan fiction communities,” by Kristina Busse

Wikanda Promkhuntong, “Chinese stardom in participatory cyberculture,” by Dorothy Wai Sim Lau

[cathexys]

Not sure what my favoriters are: it’s probably a split between animals AS fans and Gawain and Green Knight as fannish…

[dragonspiritblog]

Art by Lindsey Burcar

[coolcurrybooks-deactivated20230]

A sequel to my “adult fantasy books by authors that aren’t straight white men,” this time for sci-fi!

These are probably skewed more towards modern authors and books, but that’s because I tend to read newer stuff, not because only men or only white people wrote sci-fi in the past. 

Authors and books below the cut, including links to Goodreads. I’m not providing trigger warnings (if I make the post too long Tumblr starts freaking out about it), but you can use the search function on Goodreads reviews to find more specifics.

Keep reading

[dimetrodone]

I like the classification of “Hard vs Soft magic systems” in fantasy only because I can say that Game of Thrones has softer magic system then Fairly Odd Parents

[grundlegitch]

GoT magic: plot armor, special effects fiasco

Fairly Odd Parents magic: has consequences, is limited in power and the time in which it is available to a given non-magical creature, is utterly neutral and entirely dependent on the wishes of the user

[brandnewleaves]

Just a little note of encouragement to say that you do NOT have to follow a straight and narrow path in your education in order to succeed. I fucking hate when people look down on others who have dropped out, are taking a break, are coming back after a while, or are on other non-traditional paths. Like, if you’re getting your GED? Good for you! If you’re older and are in classes with people half your age? I commend your resilience! If you can’t handle any sort of school right now for whatever reason? That’s perfectly okay! The idea that education should be cookie-cutter and that everyone can and should finish in the same amount of time is unhealthy, and frankly… wrong. Do not shame people for where they are on their academic journey. We already feel enough of that internally. Just cheer us on. If this applies to you, I love you and I’m proud of you. Keep going. 

[karnsteinreview]

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

The Priory of the Orange Tree on Goodreads

Release Year: 2019

Format I Read: ebook

Length: 848 pages

Genres: high fantasy

LGBT Rep: sapphic (I’m assuming lesbian) pov character, lesbian love interest/major character, gay man pov character

Spoiler-Free Review: 

Ho-ly crap my dudes, I finally did it. I finally finished this absolute unit of book, and guess what? I really loved it a lot. This is exactly a book I’ve wanted for forever. A really killer high fantasy epic that also just happens to be really gay at times.

The main romance in the book is a f/f slow burn (yes, an honest to god lesbian slow burn), and I went in pretty much only knowing that, not even knowing who. At times I was definitely Sherlocking every single female character trying to figure out who the gays were, and I was pretty sure I knew who they were pretty on, but it takes a while for it to get going. When it does though…they sure do go, huh?

There is also an older gay male point of view character who’s gayness is pretty important to his story and motives, though (and this is a slight spoiler but it comes up pretty early on) the love of his life died some time before the story began.

This is a long, long book, and the Gays have issues throughout, some of it stemming somehow from them being gay or from their gay relationship conflicting against the society. Even with that, once their relationship really starts, there isn’t much in the way of outright homophobia. It’s hard to explain exactly, but there is the sense that being gay isn’t normal or completely accepted in the society, but also the relationship is pretty accepted once it gets kicked off. And the one plot issue that comes from someone trying to stop the relationship still doesn’t really stem from it being a gay relationship. It’s hard for me to explain further without going into spoilers.  

But yeah, the gayness isn’t hidden by any means, but it also isn’t always in focus. It interweaves with the plot for sure, but the central plot isn’t about it by any means. It’s very much a high fantasy story with a high fantasy plot, and it just so happens that the main romance is f/f.

Synopsis: Honestly there is so much going on that I’m not sure how to set it up, so I’m just going to copy and paste the official synopsis from goodreads:

“The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction–but assassins are getting closer to her door. Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic. Across the dark sea, Tané has trained all her life to be a dragonrider, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel. Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.”

The Good: You get the sense of the threat of homophobia without ever actually having to face it. The romance is cute and is the opposite of rushed. All of the definitely defined gay characters feel like fully fleshed out characters. They have motives. They have good and bad qualities, and aren’t perfect but also are never demonized. They do good and bad things. Dare I say, they are treated like actual people?

What Might Hinder You from Reading It: You are utterly intimidated by the size of the book. It’s really hefty. You don’t like high fantasy. You don’t like dragons. You don’t like monarchy stories (which I often don’t but I still liked this).

Would I Recommend It?: YES. YES MY GOD YES.

Now for the Spoilers: 

Keep reading

[elderlingacademic]

Methods of Study

This has been said before in a few different ways, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about: “you have to study in the way that works for you” is a true statement, but it’s also true if you add on the end “and it doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else”.

I’ve been working on my PhD thesis forever for a long while and I distinctly remember being very pleased about getting to the end of a redraft of a chapter and saying to someone that it had a lot of formatting to sort out as well as notes on it to add things or change things, but I was pleased and moving on to the next chapter; and she said (quite politely) that wouldn’t it be better if I got all of that done in one go, then that chapter would be completely finished and I wouldn’t have to go back to it?

And I had to explain that, well, yes, that would be a lovely idea, but it isn’t practical for me.

For almost exactly the same reasons, I abruptly changed my plans this summer to do a 1k-a-day push for a set number of weeks until I had reached my wordcount goal (or decided to adjust my plans). I got to my goal, and told someone in a multi-person conversation how many thousands of words I’d got to. And someone else said, “And are they good words?”

And I fumbled a little and said something like “well, that wasn’t really the point of the exercise” and changed the subject, feeling a tad hurt.

I am a perfectionist. When I write, I want it to be perfect. I am not capable of making it perfect, so I don’t write.

The solution to this is to forgive myself. To deliberately write rough drafts. To say “formatting is for later”. To allow myself to leave notes in my work that say “expand here” or “find quote” or “citation???” and come back to them, so that I don’t spiral into getting it perfect now and end up, four hours later, only one sentence complete if that. To say the words “you can’t edit a blank page” over and over to myself as I refuse to look back at the work that I’ve done and see the mistakes until I’ve got a chunk of emotional distance from it.

If I could pick how I worked, I would do all the formatting and citing and expansions as I went along, building a beautifully chronologically-written thesis and always knowing that, when I have finished a section, it is completely finished (at least for that draft). 

But that isn’t how I work. I work in a hodgepodge, in a series of variably desperate attempts to get myself to focus and concentrate, to just do something it’s okay it doesn’t have to be everything it can be anything and I won’t even use the word “enough” except very, very carefully because it’s the kind of word that can come back to bite me (next time, perhaps, when my maximum capacity is much lower). 

I will get this thesis finished this way.

It’s not going to be pretty, but my job isn’t to make it pretty.

It’s not going to be easy, but I’m already doing everything I can to make it easier.

It’s not going to be the same every day because some days I need to not leave my house and some days I really need to leave my house and some days I chug through nearly two thousand words and others I get to a hundred and then stop with a sense of immense relief and sometimes I wander off and write about the process on tumblr until I feel like I’ve got a grip on it again.

But I will get this thesis finished this way. 

Because this is my work, and I can only do it my way.

And if you work the same way as me or in one of the hundreds of other, totally different ways, it’s important that you know that your method of working is for your benefit, not the approval or aesthetics of others. 

Yesterday I studied. Today I am studying. I will be studying next week and the week after and the month after that and next year. 

And I will get my thesis finished.

[differentdragons]

A Memoir By Lady Trent - series, illust. Todd Lockwood, 2013-2016

[iskastudiies]

pro tip: set realistic goals!!!!!!!

i’ve noticed that i always include so many unrealistic goals in my daily to-do list. while it would be ideal to accomplish so many goals at once, sometimes it’s just not possible to do all of these at once. and even if i already did my best to accomplish a lot and some extra tasks are not really due for the day, i would still end up disappointed and mad at myself. that’s why it’s important to really consider all of your tasks. know your priorities. don’t take up too much that you can’t handle. don’t ever forget to give yourself a pat on the back for finishing even just one task. reward yourself, i’m proud of you!

[absynthe--minded]

also before we accuse Tolkien of being morally simplistic and overly black and white in his storytelling, maybe consider that a truly just war - a war where all the fighting and the loss meant something, where the victors won and it could be uncomplicatedly celebrated and the state of the world was actively improved, was… how do I put this?

something of an escapist fantasy for a guy who watched his friends die in the Great War and who survived the Somme aka “Pointless Bullshit: This Time With Chemical Weapons”??

JRR Tolkien was not a perfect man and I don’t want anyone to think I’m arguing that, but this basic criticism of his works annoys me to no end because 1. they do know he wasn’t trying to apply real-world moral complexity to his stories for a reason, right? and 2. despite this, he was DEEPLY uncomfortable with portraying the orcs as a faceless mass of sadistic bad things with no redeeming qualities

[eruscreaminginthedistance]

I’m actually discussing this in my dissertation, and there’s a great quote from Andrew Lynch’s essay “Archaism, Nostalgia and the Tennysonian War” found in the book: ‘Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages’.

“Tolkien… consciously wielded archaism as an anti-modernist cultural weapon. The insistent archaism of the battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings reveals his cultural campaign to restore a sense of heroic potential to English life” (p. 81)

“Generally speaking, Tolkien’s narrative can be seen as a way of ‘getting over’ the war” (p. 82)

There’s a really good point to be made that after the first World War and then the second, came a wave of nostalgia for a simpler, more honourable past. Tolkien was part of that wave and it’s very important to note that his somewhat simplistic portrayal of ‘good vs evil’ on the field of battle is reactionary to this harrowing personal and cultural experience. Much like the other motifs in LOTR, the presentation of war compounds into a lament for a dying world, or at least the death of heroic ideals.

I am contentious over Lynch’s assertion that such an act was conscious, but one of the main themes of LOTR is the death of an age and the remembrance of a more heroic past and I think this applies both to the in-universe characters and to Tolkien himself. War in LOTR is certainly not allegorical of Tolkien’s own experiences, but I think that OP’s right, in that Tolkien was - to an extent - escaping to a heroic past and, in his own distaste for war, turned it into an “ideological symbol” (as Lynch puts it).

Lynch even goes on to say that the theme of LOTR’s warring isn’t “good vs evil” but “medieval vs modern”.

“One side [medieval] led by Aragorn and advised by Gandalf, fights a ‘medieval’ war of named volunteers and pledged faith, while the bad side is ‘modern’, with its nameless conscripts, machines and slaves” (p. 87). 

And Tolkien himself acknowledges the nuance of more realistic war: “In real life they [the Orcs] are on both sides, of course” (Letters, 82), but he was writing in the style of a romance, in which aesthetic and moral goodness is only given to one side.

There’s a lot more I could say about Tolkien and his portrayal of war but I’ll just leave it at this: stop saying it’s over-simplistic.

[absynthe--minded]

see I didn’t have any of my books in front of me when I made this post but basically all of this

I blame the Jackson films for their oversimplification of the end-of-the-Third-Age conflict, because that definitely changed how the fandom as a whole viewed Tolkien’s works; at the same time, another commenter in this thread points out that Alan Lee drew a Moria-based orc woman tending to her baby as concept art, and I love that wholeheartedly. (The Jackson films’ view on war and how it clashes with Tolkien’s own is something I’d like to write about myself, tbh)

[krakenartificer]

This is a fascinating take to me, because the simplistic good-vs-evil heroic narrative was always a simplification. As Tolkien says, the orcs are on both sides. And the heroes are on both sides. The guy on the other side of the battlefield is just trying to survive and protect his family, same as you, and the propaganda saying he’s an orc has always been a lie.   We’re getting a little better now about complex villains and ambiguous narratives, but it’s less comfortable, and less glorious, and induces a lot less straightforward feelings.  Which is basically what the new era of Men is.  The fourth age is less comfortable and less straightforward.  And it’s a good thing to be able to imagine our opponents complexly.  But it’s also fair to mourn the loss of the certainty and stability we used to have.  And I am here for reading LOTR as the final love-letter to that black-and-white worldview.

[animatedamerican]

There is a particular speech pattern that recurs here and there in LOTR, a very casual, decidedly contemporary-sounding form of dialogue. We hear it primarily from three types of people: (1) hobbits of the Shire, with variations according to their respective social classes; (2) most of the locals in Bree …

… and (3) very nearly all of the orcs we hear talking amongst themselves.

In the middle of Merry and Pippin’s horrific captivity in Rohan, in the middle of Sam’s desperate attempt to rescue Frodo in Minas Morgul, in the middle of the exhausting forced march across Mordor, we get the repeated reminder that a lot of these faceless sadistic bad guys are just … common people. Specifically, common soldiers. They talk like common soldiers: they bicker, they complain and commiserate about their commanding officers, they get uneasy about how the war is going and how much they’re not being told, they daydream about what they’ll maybe do when the war’s over.

The Nazgul king, Saruman, the Mouth of Sauron – they talk like antagonists in an epic, and so do most of the people they interact with. But the orcs? With a few notable exceptions, the orcs talk much more like the hobbits than almost anyone else talks like either of them. Which is to say, like regular people.

This is absolutely not an accident, and it says something that it’s there even in the deliberately oversimplified “good vs evil” war Tolkien was writing.

[deehellcat]

All of this, and I’ll just toss in that that last part about how orcs and hobbits talk could tie in to a headcanon that came to me the other day while reading another post: it might be a bit of circumstantial evidence in favor of the theory that orcs and hobbits share some common ancestry. Yes, hobbits are assumed in canon to be related to humans in some way, and we know orcs’ ancestors were humans corrupted by Morgoth, but that’s not enough to explain why Frodo and Sam can survive Mordor so (relatively) well. Tolkien says hobbits just sort of appeared, nobody knows their exact origins, so it’s not implausible that their forebears might have been early experimental subjects of the first Dark Lord, and tossed when they didn’t turn out quite as he expected. 

[saccharinescorpion]

so this is an extremely cool resource

the JSTOR article by Catherine Halley

a list of series at Reveal Digital

[joolshallie]

What NOT to do in freshers week

so a lot of you will be starting uni or college soon! here are a few things NOT to do in your first few weeks:

Don’t hide in your room - this one is obvious but it needs to be said! As soon as you’ve moved in and anyone that came with you has left then get out of your room and meet new people!

Do not miss intro lectures. I know you don’t actually learn anything in a lot of these type of lectures, but they’re a great chance to socialise and meet the people on your course for the first time. 

Don’t think you have to be best mates with people you meet in freshers - friendships change a lot and that is 100% normal!

Don’t be that person on the night out - aka don’t go get blackout drunk and need looking after. In freshers week you don’t really know people, so you want to stay in control and aware in order to stay safe and have fun!

Don’t get deep into your overdraft in freshers (if you can help it), it can be tempting to buy everything and anything - but really try and get used to budgeting early on in term.

Don’t stress about work - in my freshers week I was given some essay titles and a huge reading list before the term had officially started. My advice is to just ignore all of it and enjoy yourself until lectures properly start.

Don’t say yes to everything. It can be tempting to say yes to every social engagement/offer, club or society, night out etc. While it is important to get stuck in and involved in extra-curriculars and making friends, it is important not to go mad on this. Take time for yourself too, as you have to get through an entire term of uni after freshers - so don’t burn out in the first week (although you’ll probably get freshers flu regardless!) Saying no to some things can also save you some money (as nights out and costs for societies can add up to a lot!)

Don’t worry about who to live with in 2nd year during freshers! At a lot of unis you move out of halls after first year, and people generally start looking for houses towards the end of first term (Nov/Dec). This seems very soon, but don’t panic and rush it. 

Don’t buy books brand new - a lot of older students sell second hand books cheap, and a lot of uni libraries are well stocked. Ask older students what they think it’s worth buying and what to not bother with.

Do not forget to register with a GP in your uni town - you never know when you might need to go to the doctors!

Don’t forget to register to VOTE in your new city. Students can be registered at their home address and in their uni town (as long as you only vote once in each election). This is very important with the threat of a general election in the UK at the moment (eek!)

Don’t think you are the only one who is homesick. Everyone is in the same boat and missing home. It is so common for people to think they’re the only one and put up a front of being totally fine. Give someone at home a call, have a catch up and a bit of a cry.

And last but not least, don’t steal milk - it’s never nice to have a milk thief in your flat or halls, so don’t take it (or any other food or cooking equipment without asking!!)

[coolcurrybooks-deactivated20230]

I’ve done some Twitter threads on this topic, so thought it might be nice to do a Tumblr post too. One of my pet peeves is when people act like adult fantasy (or sci-fi for that matter) is just a straight white dude thing and that diversity only exists in young adult fantasy. That’s such a disservice to all the authors of marginalized identities currently writing adult fantasy!

Authors and books below the cut, including links to Goodreads. I’m not providing trigger warnings (if I make the post too long Tumblr starts freaking out about it), but you can use the search function on Goodreads reviews to find more specifics. 

Keep reading