In Memoriam: A joint tribute to KitsunebiUK from Adrianners and themayflynans
This post has been published simultaneously by themayflynans on Tumblr and Adrianners on Dreamwidth.
We are very sorry to bring the news that @kitsunebi-uk, known to her friends as Linda, passed away unexpectedly last week. Her family has asked that those wishing to honor Linda’s memory donate to Leicester South Foodbank’s fundraising campaign. The Chuffed platform requests an optional tip instead of subtracting its operating costs as fees from donations, so 100% of funds raised will go directly to the food bank.
We’d like to share some memories of Linda in this post, and invite others who knew her to do so as well.
@adrianners
I first met Linda when curiosity drove me to click on a Victuuri cowboy AU of over 300k words, posted all at once as a complete work. My initial thoughts were, “It’s a what AU? It’s how long?” Little did I know. Three days of near-nonstop reading later, I left a totally incoherent squeal of a comment on the final chapter somewhere around two in the morning. We began to connect over Tumblr, chatting about our writing projects, work, classic Doctor Who, and, of course, Yuri on Ice. Linda was kind, thoughtful, and always encouraging. Her historical and artistic interests were boundless, and she continuously urged me to visit the UK, her adopted home, so I could handle medieval manuscripts closer to the spaces where they were made.
On New Year’s Day 2018, Linda messaged me to ask how she might go about writing a story set in medieval England. I’m not sure the torrent of information I let loose was helpful for anything but showing I was on board with the idea, but my suggestion of the 1390s as a particularly strife-filled setting seems to have stuck. Over the next weeks, we spoke about chivalric violence in literature and reality, the various forms late medieval public entertainment might take, and how to swear in Middle English. I gave a few more language pointers and thought that would be the extent of my involvement now that the story was taking shape. Once again, Linda surprised me. Along with @themayflynans as beta and @sheepskeleton-art as illustrator, I ended up joining the creative support team of All Our Yesterdays as a translator, rendering dialogue into a phonetic version of Late Middle English. It remains the strangest and most interesting thing I’ve ever done with my degree. Though Linda cheerfully kept me in the dark on any plot points that didn’t require translation, I could tell this was going to be yet another sweeping story that would take readers through the utmost joy and peril in turn before finally reaching a hopeful conclusion. I—very unfortunately, under the circumstances—haven’t made it all the way through AOY’s astounding one million words yet, but I look forward to the day when I reach that final sentence. I’m going to leave a comment when I get there. I don’t consider myself superstitious, but some things just feel like the right thing to do.
When you began one of Linda’s stories, you always knew there was sure to be music, food (complete with recipes in the chapter notes), and careful attention to a sense of place, even—perhaps especially—when the story was set somewhere she had never visited. I wish the world had been able to see the skills she honed on fanfiction come into bloom through her planned original novels.
I’m glad I was able to wish her well the last time we spoke. I’m disappointed that I didn’t do a better job of keeping in touch over the last few months.
Small as it is under the weight of everything else, I’m sad that we won’t get to talk about Ice Adolescence.
As I’ve sat with this horrible news for a week now, I keep coming back to a moment in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, a dream vision and one of Chaucer’s many struggles with the limits of poetry to communicate and console. In the poem, the dreamer encounters a grieving knight, who explains that he is miserable because he lost his queen in a game of chess against Fortune. The metaphor could not be more obvious (the knight is even lamenting his lady’s death in clear terms before the dreamer approaches him), and yet the dreamer misunderstands and misunderstands until the knight finally says, “She is dead!” to which the dreamer replies, “No! … Is that your loss? By God, it is a pity!” (ll. 1309-10) And that’s the end. There’s nothing more to be said. The knight leaves for home; the dreamer wakes and resolves to make his dream into a poem. When we tackled this poem in Chaucer grad seminar, my professor paraphrased the dreamer’s response in its 21st-century equivalent: “Dude. That sucks.” Despite the 1,300 lines that came before, words are inadequate in a blunt confrontation with the reality of grief. What can you say but that?
Dude. This sucks.
I feel very lucky to have known Linda. Please hold her family in your thoughts, especially as the pandemic is keeping them apart, in many cases across the Atlantic.
@themayflynans
I met Linda in 2017, two months after I watched Yuri On Ice for the first time. I was still on the stratospheric high of it when I stumbled upon her debut work—complete, pristine, and accompanied by gorgeously conceived art—The Other Side of Sunset. Like Adrianners, I read it nonstop for two or three consecutive days, bawling my eyes out for much of it, but in awe at how much of it I felt I’d actually lived through, and how much I’d learned: intellectually—so much about the Old West, and about ranching and cowboys—and about human nature: our capacity to love and hurt, and to hurt those we love; about grieving; and also, quite remarkably, about our capacity to forgive. It didn’t matter that it was about characters from a figure-skating anime. KitsunebiUK’s Yuuri and Victor were real people. They were more. I reached out to her less than a day after I finished reading, and we struck up a correspondence—and eventually a deep if improbable friendship—that would continue until her last day.
But actually, it did matter that it was those two characters in particular. Anyone who spoke to Linda knew that there was something about Yuri On Ice that inspired her like nothing else had—we all share that adoration of the smart and passionate storytelling, the economical characterization, and the vision of love as a bond of mutual support and respect found in Yuri On Ice and very few other works of art. But for Linda, it had awakened the writer in her after decades of dormancy, and within three years—much of the time through a debilitating but elusive illness—she wrote two million words exploring every facet of Yuuri and Victor’s unbreakable bond across time and space. Whether she imagined them as cowboys or as scientists, as Ancient Greeks or as knights, Linda skillfully told the spellbinding story of Yuuri and Victor falling in love, over, and over, and over again, with devotion and grace.
And every time she did, you cried: many times of happiness, mostly of sadness. She did not particularly relish in angst, but she was also utterly unafraid to make Yuuri and Victor bust their asses to deserve their happy ending (which she always gave them). You were also utterly transported. You learned so much. Linda researched for months—spent money on books and actual recipe-testing—to give her small but devoted readership an immersive experience whenever they picked up her work. She supported fandom artists—@iruuctiv, @min-min-minnie, and @sheepskeleton-art—by paying them their commission rates for their work. And she put it all into the world for free, a gift in every way.
It was my pleasure and profound honor to be Linda’s editor for her final work, All Our Yesterdays, which only wrapped up posting on AO3 in December 2019. It took her over a year and a half of daily work—and she wrote fast—from its conception as “Once upon a time, there was Sir Victor” to the final edit. Seeing the story come together was magic. I felt incredulous at the prospect of my own feedback being of value to her, and, at first, I was reluctant to be too critical, as I was a relatively inexperienced editor at the time. But as the year progressed, my confidence rose as I realized how much she already respected me as a reader and a thinker, which meant the world to me. In my life outside of fandom, I am in the early stages of a career in trade publishing, and I consider All Our Yesterdays to have been my first big, serious editorial project. It was beautiful collaborative work, with the inimitable Adrianners and sheepskeleton in tow as resident medievalist/Late Middle English translator and illustrator, respectively. It was a work of food and music and love and chivalry and light. It was a work about time.
Time is a main theme across Linda’s stories. Some are about how time wears us down. In others, time is a tool. In others yet, it is a salve. The epigraph of All Our Yesterdays, a story featuring time travel, is an excerpt from the song “Turn, Turn, Turn” by The Byrds, based on the well-known passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes. At many points throughout the story, characters make decisions about whether to tamper with time—sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t, in moments of varying impulsivity and grey morality. The ultimate conclusion is that the past should not be changed. This was a major developmental edit on my part. The original ending—which Linda mentions in some of her responses to readers’ comments—laid out the potential for Doctor Who-esque cavorting through spacetime by our heroes. But that’s not what the story is about, and that ending contradicted its core message—it would be dangerous to alter the natural course of time. All things should be left to run their course, no matter how hard it is to grapple with the passage of time and the inevitability of tragedy: “To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven.”
Linda was an older fan, but still quite young at 48. She seemed to have so much time ahead of her, even while struggling with her health. She was writing her first book intended for trade publication, planned as the first in a complex and imaginative fantasy series called The Game Masters about (in a wild and cruel twist of irony that only the real world can provide) life after death. Its two main protagonists, modelled after Yuuri and Victor, would have fallen in love. She was a mother and had been a teacher at one time, but, like so many renowned figures, she could have become a celebrated author later in life. I firmly believe this, and I struggle, now, with my conviction that life should be left to run its course if we are ever given the power to change it. It’s not fair. She gave so much and did not live to see her investment bear the enormous returns that she deserved.
And yet: Grief is also a prominent theme in Linda’s work. It is a necessary feeling for us to experience, in all of its mundanity and pain. It only exists because of the passage of time. When we come out of it, whether through struggle or reprieve, we are on the other side of a sunset. It is a new day.
As Adrianners says, please keep Linda’s family in your thoughts at such a difficult moment, and I urge you to take the time to reach out to your own loved ones.
