Ok extra context from your friendly neighborhood Master's Degree holding archivist:
Archives are "curated" according to what's called a "collection policy". That means a policy that dictates what you collect; usually along a theme. For example at the university I used to work at the collection policy was to collect archival material pertaining to the local area and its history/important figures. At the historic home I currently work at, the collection policy covers materials pertaining to the person who lived at the house.
AO3 collects fan works and original writing. That's it. That's how they "curate". They don't allow a copy paste of published works (for legal reasons) and they don't allow commissioned works (for legal reasons) . Everything else that falls under fan works and original writing is part of their collection policy. Everything. That's how archives work.
Librarian for 6+ years with an archival background, the entire premise of the initial argument is laughably untrue anyway.
Like yeah, a master's in library science is a prerequisite for most existing library/archival jobs, but any ham-and-egger who wants to start their own archive is allowed to do that, there's no High Council of Archivists who's going to swing by to check your credentials and shut you down if you're not properly licensed. The creators of the archive are highly qualified with the academic credentials to back it up, but even if they weren't Oakly would still be wrong.
Now, I am going to, obviously, default to the archivists, librarians, and people who specialize in archives and conservation work, so definitely listen to them!! I will instead share a practical example of why AO3 is so important, and how it impacts fandom studies research.
As a fandom studies scholar with an PhD in English (fandom studies, Manga / anime, and SF specialties), I send (or third, technically?) all these points, and will also add that part of why AO3 is so important is because its overarching group, the OTW, has a PHYSICAL ARCHIVE collaboration preserving fan materials at some universities.
For example, my University, The University of Iowa, is the home to multiple collections, one of which is an official partnership with the OTW. You don't have to be a student to come visit and request to see materials, or to have them scanned. This resource is UNHEARD OF when it comes to fan studies and media studies. I just went to Special Collections yesterday and got to check out some vintage Trigun Doujinshi! Star Wars Han/Luke zines from the 1970s, saved by a fan, Ming Wattne, from being thrown out by George Lucas himself! (She also turned her house into a zine library, for anyone curious.) Buffy gen Giles-centric h/c zines! One of Frank Miller's first comics!! All of these things are "fan materials," which is why they are in the collection, as over-affen-geil mentioned.
And it wouldn't exist without the efforts of archivists and people with degrees devoting their life's work to keeping the memories of fans of the past alive. People need to understand that the OTW and its founders, along with the archivists, scholars and librarians who are working with them, are doing INCREDIBLY important work for the conservation of media fandom, both online and in person.
But also! Seconding pitviperofdoom's reply as well — you don't need a university to make your own personal archive. You can make your own archive if you want!! No one is stopping you! Follow your heart!
This is not to derail, of course, but as someone who was quite literally just talking about why AO3 matters with my students yesterday, I couldn't help but chime in to add that, yes, there's also a physical aspect to AO3 that most people have no idea about, which I think is pretty cool.
can i ask some very broad writing advice questions? how do you develop the depth in your writing? how do you make it all come together?
i read your fic beneath the killing instinct recently and really enjoyed it, especially for its brevity. you gave us so much in under a thousand words and every word feels perfectly placed. and in that fic you move through so many different modes- the switches between "you" and "hayden", touching here and there in space and time, between internal and external dialogue- and it all works so well together, it coheres. there's an arc to what beliefs hayden grows what he believes and what he feels and what he does and then this passage as a perfect fulcrum
But it's Shane; Hayden has thrown himself onto men's fists for Shane; Hayden has shed the blood of other men for Shane; Hayden has torn not only his own body but the shockingly frail bodies of others for the bonds of men. "Okay. Um, that's cool, dude."
like fuck. wow. that's it!! reading that felt like the view when you crest a hill and suddenly there's horizon. its such a clear snapshot of his internal landscape and the kind of violence that underpins hayden's unspeakably mundane penned in sports guy life. (and jackie saying "You need to fix yourself before you come upstairs." damn!!! loadbearing fix there. loadbearing yourself.) and it just all comes together, you can just feel him grappling with the revelation, feel it all sliding towards that killer last line. form and content united
great fic!! the kind of fic i love reading and skills i want to achieve in my writing but have no idea how to. everything i write feels shallow, for lack of a better word. there's no hill cresting moment, just this like, sheet pan dinner of a bunch of events i threw together. when i read it back the characters are just sort of moving between story beats and saying things. lots of reacting to developments And Thens. its inescapably checklisty and overliteral and tonally uneven. pacing wise i constantly find myself spending too much on less-relevant details and scenes and when i sit down to edit longer pieces the beginning and the end don't feel like part of the same animal. and its okay, its functional, but it doesnt hold the things i find most beautiful about writing. i'm trying to read and write and notice more but it feels like practicing darts in the dark
so yeah. i guess what i'm asking is- what's your process when you put it all together? what kind of questions are you asking yourself as you write? do you have any advice for someone who struggles to write with the bigger picture?
this is such a lovely question!! and thank you for liking my fic!! and thanks for being patient as it took me a little while to answer this! this is an extremely long answer: take what works and leave the rest.
so – I know exactly the feeling you're talking about, and I also use similar language to talk about it – I've always called it "grasping in the dark." I get that feeling whenever I'm trying to tackle some new writing skill that's totally out of my wheelhouse, and it's almost always a little bit miserable in the moment but in retrospect extremely productive.
(for example, in terms of tonal consistency, my pattern was that I could start off a story with a strong voice/tone/idea and then I absolutely for love or money could not sustain it through the whole piece. I still struggle with the project management part of finishing long fic, but...that's actually one of the things I'm currently working on. my AO3 is an archive of my attempts to learn how to be consistent in a variety of ways, actually!)
the things that helped me start to figure this out fall into two categories – concrete, material stuff, and writing stuff.
writing questions first:
I will note that the questions I ask for fanfic are sometimes different than the questions I ask for original fic.
for fanfic, always, the starting question: what is the absolute most possible fun (or, if not fun, what is the most possible satisfaction) I could have (/get) exploring this moment, this character, this voice?
my questions are typically highly contextual. so, context for Heated Rivalry – I spent several years experimenting with highly maximalist prose, and am still working on original projects with cacophonous, clashing voices. I wanted a rest from those projects in my fanfic. I also grew up with Japanese-American family (like, my cousins and I were given the same Japanese workbooks as kids – it's not my background or my heritage language, and my cousins while not fluent speak more Japanese than I do now as I speak essentially none, but we were and are very close). I found myself thinking of the typically spare qualities of Japanese literature vs. the more familiar maximalist qualities of Russian literature vs. the "muscular prose" of typical American literature. (I'm afraid my main relationship to Canadian literature is Marian Engel's singular Bear. but Canadian literature tends towards an American quality.) I was also quite interested in the adaptation of the books to the TV show, and how essentially the exact same information was given in such vastly different ways – I've never seen an adaptation like that before.
thus, for HR:
how does each character's cultural background shape the way their narrative voice interacts with language?
what is the least amount of information the audience can be given for the fanfic to work, given the narrative position?
how can the visual language of TV be "translated" to the page? (I'm often interested in how the visual or audio cues of another medium can be "translated" to text, so this isn't specific to HR, but it's part of where the Hayden/you came from.)
as far as the architecture of this particular Hayden piece goes, I didn't put that "horizon" in it especially purposefully, to be honest! however, I read/write a lot of poetry and theater, and you've pointed out that it's structured with a volta – a turn. this kind of penultimate revelation is very typical of both of these other genres, so my guess is that the structure came naturally because I've internalized it from poems and plays.
thank you again for your extremely kind and close reading, by the way!
concrete ~art practice~ stuff:
so, I gotta be real, I got a full ride to a creative writing MFA
that said, I do not think you need an MFA to make beautiful or interesting or powerful work!
what my MFA gave me – but which MFAs very often do not give people – was a couple of years I knew had to be dedicated to writing, a group of mentor writers who took me seriously and taught me to read my own work as literature, and a community of fellows
fandom also has the infrastructure to give us these communities :^)
in fact, I was very lucky to start out in fandom when this kind of community was much more common!
most of my friendships (especially tumblr friends) are based in a mutual excitement about art and art-making. a community of friends whose work you can't wait to read and whose writing makes you excited is a huge help in learning to write work you're excited about!
even when it felt artificial and I didn't know where the projects were going, I started building in structured conversations and projects about writing and art into my weekly routine with anyone who was down to do it, with anyone of whatever level of art-making. I was always skeptical about what the fuck I was doing but I never, ever, ever regretted it! (ex: joined a punk band; joined a summer-long experimental translation project; joined a metal band; started running events at a local venue; co-founded a lit journal; built the website for another lit journal; taught a writing class at the local library – just whatever I could do, I said yes to).
easiest, biggest thing: I have a weekly writing group that I started by just asking my friends to hang out with me during a 3-hour period that I was free. we don't workshop anything, though I suppose we could; we are all working on quite different projects – we just write together! (the very first thing I ever did of this kind was join the now-defunct @antidiogenes IRC chat, which now lives on as a Discord server! that chat changed my life, and contributed significantly to getting into my MFA program by teaching me how to take writing seriously by observing artists who did so.)
another thing, for me – figuring out how to write in a way that is sustainable for me; part of my tonal inconsistency was simply running out of juice. learning more about what times of day I have the most energy, how long I can write at a time before I need to disentangle myself (about 45 minutes or I'll go into ultra-mode where I stop blinking or drinking water, no good), and my natural section length before I run out of energy (about 700-1000 words) have all helped me figure out how to pace myself.
in fact, the fic you read is pretty short for me! the reason I am writing little bursts of HR fanfic is because I'm working on long original projects and on finishing long fanfics I started before I became disabled, and I find that working on little fics I can dash off and post in one shot is a good outlet that keeps me motivated. I don't have to worry about plot or long-term character growth or any of the complicated stuff: I can just focus on the language. (perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that I was a poet first.) so if you can find out what keeps you going, that will help you sustain your tonal consistency as well!
if you want to talk about plotting, I am happy to, but my plots are typically, like, crazy. my fanfic plots are less crazy than my original fic plots but I am not writing especially normal plots, on AO3 or anywhere. if you've only read my HR fic you wouldn't know but, um, trust me. I think it's okay if plots are "and then, and then, and then," though – life is "and then, and then, and then." honestly, it's all in the framing. if the POV doesn't treat it as "and then, and then, and then," then it isn't – or if the POV character DOES treat it that way, then I've learned something about the POV. as long as that's what you wanted me to learn, we're good. if it's not, then change it until it tells me what you want me to know :^)
hello locked tomblr! i was at the tamsyn muir event in oxford - here are my notes
i've tried to group them thematically rather than chronologically, and to point out spoilers when i can. there are some parts that i missed/didn't hear correctly - i would appreciate it if others at the event correct me :D
Key takeaways
Alecto is still being written! Muir was reluctant to say a year, so it will probably be more than that
Alecto won’t be written in a Biblical style, and there will be multiple POVs. It will mostly be told from Harrow’s POV (I hope I heard that right)
Muir loves the idea of a TLT videogame
Muir’s not yet done with Floralinda
Q&A: Alecto when?
(putting this first because I know you want to know!)
Alecto is not yet finished
Reason why:
Muir was already slated to write another book before Alecto (Floralinda, I think)
Floralinda took longer than expected
Muir also suffered from health issues
Muir was about to say Alecto would come out in a year, but was reluctant. It will be soon. It will be before she dies.
Once Alecto gets to the editor, it will be fast-tracked. There will be few advance reader copies
And Alecto will not be 2 books, do not fret!
Publishing journey for the Locked Tomb Series
TL;DR – Muir got published because she had good contacts
George R. R. Martin was Tamsyn Muir’s mentor at Clarion
Muir took what she described as the ‘traditional route’ into publishing
She spent around 3 years publishing short stories
Then she got contacted by an agent for a novel
Muir acknowledges that routes into publishing are not like that now
Sometimes, fanfiction writers are approached – Muir doesn’t approve as that ruins the hobby, it adds a financial incentive and makes people do it for a career rather than for fun.
Muir wouldn’t do anything differently
We joked a bit about an agent who remarked on the ‘sisterly relationship’ between characters in Muir’s manuscript
Advice for aspiring authors
Send stuff to an agent regardless of where you are
Work in the industry
There was a bit of discussion on self-publishing – it doesn’t suit Muir personally, but it’s a good route for someone with the energy to be their own editor, advertiser, etc.
Q&A: something about being a successful writer (sorry I forgot)
Basically, getting successful requires having good connections
Videogame Influence on Locked Tomb Series
Muir is a big fan of the emergent narrative that videogames afford
Muir worked for Disney and wrote videogame scripts before GtN. There’s an insane House of Mouse script archived somewhere, which Muir wrote.
Novel writing is very different from videogame writing.
In a videogame, you have to fully flesh out the in-game universe and provide enough choices and points of interest for players
This taught Muir to be in-depth when writing her novel universes…
…which particularly influenced her to write tonnes of AUs for the Locked Tomb series
There are two versions of Nona, for example: one which is what’s really happening, and one which is Nona’s POV
Q&A: did the videogame influence help Muir to write so confusingly in the Locked Tomb series?
Muir strongly cites Umineko as a key influence
This is a perfect example of a slow reveal, like in the Locked Tomb books
Muir doesn’t strictly plan her reveals (e.g., on the second reread, the reader finds this out), but she does love a slow reveal and works hard to make close reading rewarding for the reader
Tamsyn Muir would love for the Locked Tomb series to be adapted into a videogame!!
A funny story was told where Muir got approached by a gacha game company… which didn’t come to anything
POV voice shifts in the Locked Tomb series
A key reason for the books being so different is that Muir didn’t want to write the same thing again – she gets ‘easily bored’
She focussed on the sentence links of each character – Gideon’s sentence links are very different from Harrow’s
Vocabulary also played a key role (again, compare Gideon and Harrow)
The second person narrative in HtN was planned for a while, the tricky thing was convincing publishers to accept it
Muir has an HtN draft somewhere, 50% written, that’s in third person
POV in Alecto the Ninth: It will not be written in a biblical style
There will be different POVs
Q&A: Book inspiration for writing in the second person?
Muir notes that she didn’t write in perfect second person – it was actually first person
She will always turn to On a Winter’s Night a Traveller
And this is another videogame inspiration
She mentioned Homestuck then said don’t mention Homestuck so…
The theme of memory in the Locked Tomb series
Memory as a result of love, and memories which are a source of pain
This is a key theme in HtN – note how memory affected Harrow throughout the book
It’s also going to be a key theme in Alecto
Muir is using memory as horror
The horror of not being able to trust yourself and to know what is real
She’s drawing on her own experiences of being schizophrenic
Magic systems in the Locked Tomb series
Muir wasn’t actually a big fan of necromancy before writing TLT
She found it too passive in Dungeons & Dragons
She wanted an active magic system, something unintuitive that required hard work and study to learn
She also wanted a magic system to be gross!
TLT magic system was described as “telekinesis with meat”
Worldbuilding in the Locked Tomb series
Q&A: what was Muir’s worldbuilding starting point/seed?
Muir struggled to find this out. There’s no magic formula
Creative writing can’t be taught, only practiced
For GtN, she wanted a story about duty, and duty vs freedom
She wanted the story to be about two young women
Gideon was originally a cop/fireman
For Muir, worldbuilding is there to serve the plot. She does not worldbuild for worldbuilding’s sake
Everything in Muir’s books is there to serve the plot
Would the TLT protagonists make a good DnD party?
Absolutely not!
Although Camilla and Palamedes would be fine
There was some joking around about how Muir and her friends tried to play as Gideon and Harrow in DnD and it didn’t work out
Genre merging in the Locked Tomb series
Muir identified her blend of comedy and horror as unique to Kiwi fiction
She used Peter Jackson’s early films before the Lord of the Rings as an example
For Muir, science fiction and fantasy are merged – it only really feels like science if you do hard sci-fi
Muir grew up with Star Wars, so it felt natural to set her fantasy world in space
The genre merging created publishing problems
Publishers want an easy comparison to other books to make it sell, but there was nothing like Gideon the Ninth
We joked a bit about TLT being compared with Dune
Q&A: now that TLT books are out, has Muir noticed any very similar books that GtN etc. are being compared to?
Not really.
Muir sees the most similarities with people who know her and have had similar influences
An example is A. K. Markwood
Another book that seemed very similar is ‘Dawn Hound by Necksy Strownack’ another New Zealand author (I did a quick google and I think this is the Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach?)
Comedy and Humour in the Locked Tomb series
Muir’s advice for aspiring writers is not to write humour to appeal to everyone, as you’ll please no one. Stay true to yourself.
Muir writes plenty of humour into her manuscripts, which are often cut away during editing
Q&A: memes that didn’t make it: (note: I struggled to catch what was being said under all the laughter and I am also woefully uncultured – many of these are me transcribing as best as I can. Do correct me if I’m wrong!)
Mr Bones’ Wild Ride
Emperish meme
Horse Plinko (this got referred to a lot!)
Harrow calling Ianthe the ‘God of Thot’ in HtN
And many more
Muir mused about whether she will dial back the humour in later work, or whether she will go full throttle as she doesn’t care anymore
Writing process for short stories vs books
Muir sees her short story days as mostly behind her, although she is getting one published soon (as we are aware!)
With short stories, you only have time for one thing, whilst with a novella, you have time for plot and subplot
Short stories are great to practise your technical writing skills
Muir personally would not turn her short stories into novels – she wants to do something new
Q&A: The planning process for the Locked Tomb series
Muir had already planned the whole story before writing GtN
GtN and HtN are the question arcs
NtN and AtN are the answering arcs
Muir really enjoyed writing a New Zealand story
Lesbians as epic heroes in the Locked Tomb series
Muir doesn’t see this as jarring – why can’t epics have lesbians in them?
All epics want you do to is die gloriously
You can do anything after that
Q&A: Epic influences on the Locked Tomb series
The Iliad. It all comes back to Homer, and the Iliad.
There was some insightful discussion on how the Locked Tomb world codifies its past. In a sense, it’s stuck in time. There’s no golden period to hark back to.
The discussion then turned to the idea of the hero, and what a hero should be.
This is heavily explored in Gideon the Ninth, which centres around Harrow failing to prevent Gideon from being the hero
Add lesbian to anything
Muir would love to see a lesbian Hunger Games
Floralinda vs Gideon and Harrow
“Floralinda blows” – Tamsyn Muir
Floralinda is a supervillain story about a ‘bad girl who gets worse’
Muir has written/is planning to write more on Floralinda
Q&A: Advice for writing characters who suck?
Just let them be shit, go hard first and don’t hold back
Take a sin, take a virtue
All of Muir’s characters, in some way, are a ‘fuck up’
Catholic imagery in the Locked Tomb series and Catholicism in general
Q&A: was it difficult to link lesbians with Catholicism in the Locked Tomb series?
It felt good for Muir, a lesbian Catholic
And also very fun!
Q&A: who’s the hottest saint?
In the TLT universe: Valancy!
In the real world: Saint Barbara
This sparked some light-hearted banter
Q&A: Meaningful names in the Locked Tomb series
Muir loves writing meaningful names that hide things in plain sight
Muir does not browse ‘Behind the Name’ lol
She has a ‘laundry list’ of names she likes which she’s accumulated throughout her life
Homer and ancient Greek influences played a key role
Also Biblical names
Changing names are highly important in the books, e.g., Gideon to Kiriona
Muir doesn’t mind if people sus out a character’s plot after immediately reading their names
Umineko inspiration
Lolita and the Locked Tomb series
Q&A: the audience member read Lolita at the same time as NtN. They were wondering if the similarities between the two were deliberate.
Muir loves Lolita and thinks that Nabokov is an expert in writing misery
Muir was open about being a child sexual abuse survivor. The influence of this is pervasive in her work.
There is a strong focus on relationships with authority people
Particularly in NtN, which contains sexual threats. This was hard for Muir to write.
Another example is the relationship between John and Alecto.
They are not a one on one comparison between Humbert and Lolita, but the theme of a man fashioning a girl into the perfect partner is there
Whether there is a sexual element in this will be answered in Alecto the Ninth
Muir explicitly does not want to include overt sexual violence in her work
Misogyny in the Locked Tomb series
Q&A: In the worldbuilding of the Locked Tomb series, how do you balance the misogyny that still exists (which is particularly obvious when John talks to/about Mercymorn) and the outward appearance/initial impression people get of the houses having gender equality (e.g., Abigail as head of the fifth, Jeannemary as a knight)?
This question had Muir wriggling in delight
The answer to this is addressed in Alecto
Why is John fucking up in the creation of his utopia?
Muir encourages readers to question what you, the reader, perceive as misogyny, versus what the characters perceive as misogyny.
Q&A: Cannibalism in the Locked Tomb series
Cannibalism is a metaphor for toxic love
Cannibalism of the soul is much more severe than cannibalism of the flesh
Link to Lolita
It’s eating someone’s life and personhood. A central theme in TLT is exploring love as something taken violently
Can you love someone without taking something from them? This is one of Muir’s favourite ideas
And, it’s not necessarily negative
Example of Camilla and Palamedes (spoiler for NtN!!)
They had to eat each other
Grappling with the question: Is love weightless?
Q&A: How much of their old selves are preserved in the Lyctors?
HtN spoilers!!
John didn’t simply wipe and rewrite them – if not, why are they trying to kill him?
John wanted his friends, so he tried to bring his friends back
Interesting implications for the two people he didn’t know well and only saw as cowrokers
BUT then the Lyctors are changed by their immortality and John
Q&A: What was it like to write immortality?
Muir acknowledges that she doesn’t do a perfect job, and that it’s actually impossible to actually write immortality – it will be too alien for the reader
But this links back to the theme of memory – how much can the Lyctors retain?
The Lyctors are heavily weighed down by time, Mercymorn in particular
Q&A: How long would Muir last in the TLT universe?
0.5 seconds
Muir doesn’t see herself as a necromancer or cavalier
Nor is she particularly aligned with any House
Q&A: Books that Muir is reading right now that she would recommend
(again, my poor listening skills and lack of culture limit me here!)
Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran
‘Payback for Malory Towers’
A.K. Markwood’s new book, the Seventh Banisher
Muir has advance access. AK is her friend.
Q&A: Books and media that influenced Muir as a child
She was a highly prolific reader as a child!
Obviously Animorphs
Weird Kiwi fantasy stories
Margaret Margey
She read a lot of David Eddings as a teenager and got annoyed at the role of women in the books
Gormandust was a key inspiration for TLT (I googled this and ‘Gormandust’ doesn’t exist, hopefully someone more in the know can help to translate my poor transcription!)
Grimmbolts was another influence (again, I probably didn’t hear this correctly)
Q&A: Warhammer inspiration
Muir didn’t get into Warhammer until after HtN. She loves it.
She has been approached to write for the Black Library but she had to decline as she had too much work
Q&A: What’s Muir going to do next?
Muir does not want to keep going back to TLT, she is happy to release it to the fanfiction writers once it’s done!
There are a couple more things in the TLT universe she may add
For example, there’s a big Harrow AU…
Muir wants to go back to videogames
But in her history, the projects she works on tend to fold
Muir is trying to write her own videogames and is slowly learning Python
A very good question about deconstruction was asked, but I missed it because I was too excited
Everyone was really lovely at the event! Cambridge folk, you have a lot to look forward to :))
it will forever be a little insane to me how ilya rozanov, born and raised in russian, total jock/party bro, father-is-police-brother-is-police guy, somehow has never had an ounce of internalized homophobia in his body. canonically just saw being bi as an extra opportunity for hot sex. started experimenting with guys at 16 and simply never questioned it. and like yeah he’s a top but it’s also so clear that he does not see being a bottom as a demeaning or less masculine thing in the slightest. this man goes on to wear leopard shirts and booty shorts and flicks his hands gayfully and makes gay jokes at his jock colleagues and being tender with other men is like second nature to him and He’s actually the one to makes the ‘oh are you scared of being gay?’ ‘cuz I thought you might be gay when you were sucking my dick’ jokes.
this man this mannnn i want to pick his brain apart with a tweezer
I believe this is because Ilya is already pretending to be someone he's not, so his sexual orientation doesn't stand out as something he should be specifically ashamed of. His dad's abusive, but he doesn't behave like a victim. His mom's gone, he doesn't grieve her openly. His brother's an asshole piece of shit who hates him, he doesn't retaliate. Ilya grows constricted in his own body. He hides himself well because he cannot let people have his vulnerability. He doesn't trust anybody to treat him with kindness. So everything about himself is something precious he must hoard; it's him against the world. His opinions are the best because they are his. He will ALWAYS question his family's actions and society's actions. Because they are, in many ways, the enemy. I interpret Ilya being comfortable with his identity being intertwined with his abusive childhood.
I believe so hard in David Hollander being a Polish Jew because the evidence based on the like four things we know about him is astounding (first name: David. Wódka. Reads the New Yorker. Joke for every occasion. And hes a civil service worker in finance) but that uh really throws some wild context on the everything. No nice men in Montreal
Yuna was the prototypical example of the “don’t marry a convert” joke ie David’s parents I think were pretty observant and shomer Shabbat and David absolutely was not planning to be but yuna sort of thought ok I can do some of the classes to appease everyone and got very very into it and is the most observant person in that family for her own sake. Real talk I think she ran a kosher kitchen and turned the tv off when shabbat fell until Shane got hockey moshiach discovered and They had To start making Concessions. Yuna wears one of those elegant watercolor silk tallit situations and has passed along her disapproval for instrumentation on Shabbat to her son, who ends up next to her in schul in the famous hookup suit from episode one like twice a year but they still manage to get really judgmental about people who daven in English or let their kids play animal crossing while rabbi Sarah gives the drosh. Yuna has perfected the art of rearranging half finished kugel containers at the nosh table during a shiva so she can get the most brutal gossip about the person who just died. she always says shaBAT shalOM and David says gut shabbes! Shane didn’t actually ever properly get bar mitzvah’d due to hockey but she knows she could have planned a better one than any of the recent disasters she’s been to. She’s already been inquiring of Rabbi Sarah if there are free days for a wedding ceremony just for reasons. Somehow she’s become head of the ottowa chevra kadisha and five old men called moyshe are trying to bribe her with walnut rugelach so she’ll get them a good spot after they croak
I have this thing where I haven’t set any of my fanfics to private on AO3 despite relatively compelling reasons to do so because of a vague set of instincts - these values are NOT well-thought-out, but they are related to why I kept my blog publicly accessible for so long:
right to lurk (IDK if anyone else calls it this but basically I think an internet with cool stuff on it should exist without users needing to make accounts)
vernacular literature should be as accessible as possible; fanfic and other amateur literature is an important archival & reflective tool in understanding ourselves and our society
my fanfic, in particular, is not “normal” and it’s important to me to hold the line for transgressive and experimental fiction in fandom in a kind of public way, so a) I can do for current 13-year-olds what interactive genre-defying Good Omens fanfic did for me, and b) when scouts come looking for the next EL James, there is at least some evidence of resistance to the commodification of our spaces
but I don’t know…maybe my next issue of my FAN NEWSLETTER will be about this, LOL
I know it's not playful of me but I'm sick of everyone calling all of these vampires women. the fact that they are not women is important due to Anne Rice's sublimated homosexual longing
of course I am only thinking about this because I spent some of my migraine time today working on my Harry Potter fanfic which is explicitly about 1) post-crisis radicalization & deradicalization & 2) the limitations of post-civil war reconciliation efforts and restorative justice when coercively enforced by state systems and like. you know. who wants to read that bullshit
The truth is that colonization, in its very essence, already appeared to be a great purveyor of psychiatric hospitals. Since 1954 we have drawn the attention of French and international psychiatrists in scientific works to the difficulty of “curing” a colonized subject correctly, in other words making him thoroughly fit into a social environment of the colonial type.
– The Wretched of the Earth, "Chapter V: Colonial War and Mental Disorders", Frantz Fanon
Quite a few months ago now, there was a conversation happening on this app about the popularity of 'therapyfic' in fandoms – i.e. fanworks that feature a character going to therapy or otherwise doing the mental work/using the vocabulary we associate with modern psychotherapy – and what the creative impetus behind such works could be. What is the fantasy here? What is the catharsis being achieved?
Now, the draw is clearly a fix-it one, but I would argue it is narrow and assimilationist in scope. It is concerned primarily with taking unruly characters and rendering them safe and legible to the modern reader, a reader that is, given fandom’s dominant demographic, likely white, middle-class/upper-middle-class, educated, and Western. Therapyfic aims to fix canon and achieve a happy ending, not through changes to the material conditions laid out in the text, but by changing the character’s emotional and cognitive response to these conditions, or in other words, making them "fit into the social environment of the colonial type."
For example, you’ll see fans insisting that XYZ Naruto character should be in therapy, but CBT won’t fix the trauma of being a child soldier, not being a child soldier will. Rather than investigate the systems of power that shape these imaginary worlds and explore ways to dismantle them, therapyfic instead arms its protagonists with the tools necessary to conform and flourish within their bounds.
And you see this across fandoms! If a canon’s original setting doesn’t support the existence of therapy, an in-universe analogue will be invented in the fanon – see, Star Wars ‘Mind Healers’ or ‘Halls of Mandos/Gardens of Lorien’ in Silm/Tolkien fandom. These narrative devices take the place of a modern therapist and magically churn out characters that are rehabilitated and well-adjusted – i.e. they think, react, and feel in ways that make sense to the audience. They no longer pose a threat to the fictional status quo or, more importantly, the audience’s comfort. They have been effectively neutered. Lobotomized. The Joker is gently inquiring if your boundaries have been violated, Sasuke has sagely forgiven his family’s state-sanctioned massacre, the Sons of Feanor have learned breathing techniques for the next time they’re seized by horrible flashbacks of all those innocent people they killed.
The primacy here is given to the character’s inner, affective world rather than the material one. The most important change that can happen is internally, and this internal change then acts upon the external world rather than the other way around – its redemption fics that feature a former antagonist who now uses therapyspeak to tell everyone how he feels really very bad about everything he did without making a single, tangible move towards reparation, and if any of his (female) victims refuse to forgive him, then they are unreasonable, vindictive, and mean-spirited; its traumatized characters receiving therapy and realizing the orphan-crushing machine that killed all their friends wasn’t so bad, actually, and they were misguided to try and destroy it; its characters that are threatening and angry and illegible being rendered docile and comfortable.
The impulse here is deeply neoliberal in nature – hyper-individualistic, depoliticized, and rooted in imperial practice. It’s important to remember that not only is therapy not a magic cure-all, it’s also a practice that has historically been used to protect the status quo and suppress dissident elements in society. When we use it as the vehicle through which a fix-it is occuring in fics, it’s worth asking ourselves what role it’s playing in our narratives, whether we’re applying a band-aid to a gushing, arterial wound, and if we’re using therapy and modern psychobabble as a crutch to avoid asking deeper, possibly uncomfortable, questions about the source text.
(Obligatory Disclaimer: I do not think writing/reading therapyfic makes you a colonizer or in any way a bad person. I am known to enjoy a good therapyfic myself. Nor do I think this is in any way a definitive analysis. But we do Live In A Society, and it’s worth it to investigate our creative impulses and where they stem from. Thank you. Also a shout-out to @tobermoriansass who iirc had many cogent thoughts about exactly this subject and articulated them far better than I.)
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