The Tradëscan Codex

I left a comment on the Yuletide fandom promotion post advertising Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I'd also like to promote the other two fandoms I plan on nominating, The Illuminatus! Trilogy and That Guy With the Glasses, but I really don't have the least clue how to go about it. They're not easy fandoms to explain, exactly.

(All three fandoms are ones I made requests for last year, so my Dear Yulewriter Letter ought to be pretty easy to write this year. And whatever won't get written will qualify for the Some Day My Fic Will Come Challenge.)

In the meantime, I'm making last-minute edits to my fic_corner story. Stories are supposed to go live tomorrow, but there's still one participant who hasn't yet gotten a fic written for them, so if you can write something for Dreamdark series - Laini Taylor, Snow Eyes series - Stephanie A. Smith, Toaru Kagaku no Railgun | A Certain Scientific Railgun, or Ultra Maniac then go here; if you can write for Dark Is Rising Sequence – Susan Cooper then go here.

Looking at the fandoms, it looks like the fic_corner story written for me will be either Ender's Game or The A.I. Gang both of which would be awesome.

I had hoped to have completely finished Where the Heart Is by the time Yuletide assignments went out, but that's looking unlikely at this point. Although the antepenultimate chapter is mostly finished at this point, so hopefully I will get a chance to post it at least sometime in the next few weeks. I really do love those wacky incestuous kids. The sequel Where They Have to Take You In and prequel "One's Birthplace, Ratified by Memory" mostly just exist in my brain at this point. As does quite a bit of MCU fic, including a bunch of genderswap fic (Stephanie/Coulson, Toni/Natasha, Clint/girl!Thor) as well as sequels to The Caged Birds (including Coulson/Darcy, Tony/Pepper/Jane, and Bruce/Natasha fics).

 A Moment in Time (1273 words) by Alixtii
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Phineas and Ferb
Rating: Not Rated
Warning: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Vanessa Doofenshmirtz & Stacy Hirano, Isabella Garcia-Shapiro & Stacy Hirano
Characters: Stacy Hirano, Vanessa Doofenshmirtz, Isabella Garcia-Shapiro, Ginger Hirano, Milly (Phineas And Ferb), Gretchen (Phineas And Ferb), Candace Flynn, Perry (Phineas And Ferb)
Summary: When Stacy, Vanessa, and the Fireside Girls are the only ones not affected by Dr. Doofenshmirtz' freezinator, they must work together to save not only themselves, but the entire Tri-State Area.

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I signed up for Phineas and Ferb offering only female characters (I think it was Candance and Isabella?). It's a fandom which really frustrates me with how often it fails the Bechdel test, so it was really important for me to include as many female characters as possible and focus on their homosocial relationships. (wneleh asked for gen, even though I was really tempted to throw in some Stacy/Vanessa femslash, because guh.) My original plan was to write an angsty introspective fic split into three sections, with about 350 words each from Stacy's, Vanessa's, and Isabella's perspectives. But I quickly realized that their canon characterizations are so totally wrapped up in their relationships to the male characters on the show that I didn't really have anything to write about. Thus I decided to write a slightly more plotty fic (in that there's a problem which needs to be resolved) completely from Stacy's perspective in which all of the girls (except for Candace) have to work together, which allowed for the possibility of growth on Stacy's part and some nice bonding between Stacy and Vanessa and between Stacy and Isbella. 

In my profile, there is (and has been for years) at the very top, a quote from Roland Barthes about Parisian striptease: "Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked." It is given such a prominent place because I consider it in many ways to be my philosophy of ficwriting. I try to write in that same contradictory space in which Parisian striptease took place: presenting the female character for the reader’s desiring gaze without stripping them naked of their agency so that they become desexualized--for an object has no sex.

aris_tgd refers to "the dominant narrative of [. . .] fetish and [. . .] kink" as being the narrative "your bodies are thing which we are entitled to": having X as kink (in the original post, disability) means using X as an object of one's pleasure. This fantasy of entitlement exists in a similar contradiction: the woman's (or POC's or disabled person's or so on) agency undermines the entitlement by making access to their bodies their choice, while violent rape undermines it from the other direction (if one were truly entitled, force would not be necessarily). It is a truism that slash, of both the m/m and f/f varieties, is (among other things) a mechanism for exploring these types of power imbalances, often for the purposes of kink, without invoking the politics of heterosexuality.

Often, then, in fic as in society, the violence or implied threat of violence is shifted away, masked, sublimated. In the fics I cite in this post, my School of Lost Souls and wisdomeagle's Gather Paradise, this is the case. In my fic, Fred is entitled to River's body as part of a larger claim on River's body made by the Alliance, a claim whose logical endpoint we finally are shown in the movie Serenity and The R. Tam Sessions. In Ari's fic, the violence is similarly transferred to Wolfram & Hart, the demonic law firm which employs both Lilah Morgan and Fred Burkle, the two halves of the fic's pairing, at various points in the run of Angel. The characters in both fics do not have to resort to violence in order to assert their entitlement over the bodies of others, because all of the characters are already embedded in a system which systematically undermines their agency.

It is not coincidental that in both cases this nexus of power is aligned in opposition to the moral order of the canon universe; both the Alliance and Wolfram & Hart are the "bad guys." Both Ari's fic and my own thus become fics which not only depict sexual entitlement and enact a fantasy of sexual entitlement, they are also in some sense about sexual entitlement.

On the other hand, in my Narnia AU The iPhone of Queen Susuan the systemic nexus of power which affords the male protagoniost access to and control over his sister's body is aligned with the general moral order of the canon universe. Peter is entitled to Susan's body because their god has said so. Note that while I'm taking the dynamics to an extreme not seen in the canon text, I don't think I'm essentially changing them. Instead, I'm highlighting something that is already implicit in canon.

It would seem that imaginative resistance--the term philosophers of language use for the phenomenon wherein we find ourselves unwilling or even unable to imagine fictional worlds wherein the moral order is contrary to that which we believe holds in the actual world--would cause us to recognize Aslan as being evil in ordaining such an order, and Peter (and Lucy and Susan) as complicit for cooperating with it. (That would certainly be, say, Christopher Hitchens' analysis.) Insofar as this is the case, it seems that it should function as a satire.

And yet . . . it doesn't. It's not a fic about entitlement, simply a fic which depicts entitlement, enacts a fantasy of entitlement for the pleasure of the reader. It reads like an id fantasy of discipline and submission to discipline. There is, I think, a readerly construction of author's intent--the author-function--going on here: the reader intuits (and whether she is right or wrong is irrelevant so long as she follows the established conventions of her interpretative community) that the purpose of the fic is not to critique. This involves an examination of the plausible pscyhology of a community member: while it is not plausible to assume that Dean Swift really wanted to eat babies, it is much more plausible to assume that the idea of Peter spanking Susan might get an author hot. (Then again, maybe Jonny had a baby-eating kink. Who knows?) To say that a fic is "about" X is to say that we construct the author-function as havin depicted X for the precise purpose of making a statement about it; in "The iPhone of Queen Susan," this doesn't happen.

But as I've pointed out before, the real question is not whether the reader constructs the author as advocating (or at least not advocating against) a point of view. Insofar as this is what we are worried about as authors, we are shifting the focii of attention to ourselves and away from the suffering of the oppressed--we are more worried about looking sexist or racist or ablist than in acting sexist or racist or ablist. Instead, the question we must ask is: how is the story functioning within the community of its readership? Is it normalizing harmful behaviors, reinforcing damaging stereotypes, &c? The answers to these questions will rely as much on the character(s) of the readership(s) as on the content of the story. It is a matter of ethnography rather than literary criticism as such. The way Triumph of the Will or Birth of A Nation might function when shown to a contemporary sociology or history class is very different than how either film would have functioned in its original context, for example.

I've been accused in the past of being too trusting of fandom's ability to read fics critically in terms of sexual politics. It is a point well-taken: firstly, the generalizations I made about fandom's critical capacities two years ago aren't necessarily the same as I would make today; and secondly, obviously any of our understandings of "fandom" will be severely constrained, each of us having different and often strongly disparate experiences. Of course, neither is "fandom" synonymous with my readership, however. The question then becomes: how can I do my best to frame my stories in such a way trhat my own particular and unique readership receives them in the way which does the leat harm and the most good?

I think the advice that aris_tgd gives me in the comments to her post is probably the best solution:

I think that labeling these things as kink instead of as "how the world works" does help to change people's minds about the narrative. I mean, labeling "a man having sex with his wife even if she doesn't want to because that's what he's entitled to" as "spousal rape" instead of "how a marriage works" changes how we think about bodily autonomy and what marriage means. Labeling these as "constructed narratives for a particular kink" helps the reader realize that they are constructs.

ETA: It strikes me that it's probably important for me to point out that aris_tgd uses the term "label" instead of "warn" in the quote above. The distinction is important to me: what we're talking about is something an author uses to shape a reader's aesthetic experience, in the same we she uses the content of the story itself, not something which is imposed on the author regardless of what it may be she is trying to do. I'm thinking mainly in terms of AO3's tags, which a reader can also choose not to see if they don't want to be spoiled. (I have tags set not to display, for example.) I don't warn for story elements other than rape; I do, however, tag things in ways I consider to be accurate and appropriate, and I tend to be a maximalist rather than a minimalist in tagging (since even for someone who has tags set not to display, tags will still be a mechanism, via the sidebar, of finding new fic, so the more tags an author uses the more likely a reader will find her fic).

Re: juice817: [in audio_by_juice] Questions, I has them! I ended up in a m

My naive intuition is that podfic falls somewhere between remixing or otherwise writing fanfic of fanfic (which I most strongly maintain does not require permission) and archiving fic (which does, generally). Now while all the podfic meta I've ever read stresses the transformativeness of podfic, that's not necessarily at odds with my naive intuition. After all, I don't think I've ever heard anyone's describing OTW's mandate as including unlicensed audiobooks.

So I don't know.

And so, in the spirit of the original discussion post, a poll.

( the cut is behind the poll. no, wait. . . . )

From the OTW FAQ: "A transformative use is one that, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, 'adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the [source] with new expression, meaning, or message.' A story from Voldemort's perspective is transformative, so is a story about a pop star that illustrates something about current attitudes toward celebrity or sexuality."

Evaluate a genre's transformativity as a genre in whatever way makes sense to you, whether it is by singling out something you think is essential about that genre or by just taking all the fics you've read in a genre and taking their average transformativity.

Obviously the numbers you come up with will be somewhat arbitrary, and the whole process a bit overly schematic, but hopefully as an exercise it'll prove enlightening. If not, still a poll! Polls are fun! (Sorry for the lack of ticky boxes.)

The breakdown of my fic output by genre, as categorized at the AoOO:

( cut for images )

Apparently Google doesn't think the >1% of my output which is m/m (1.0852%, actually) is significant enough to display in the second graph.

It strikes me that looking at the percentage in terms of fics is kinda silly. Looking at the number of words I've written in each genre would be much more useful. But also more labor intensive.

( more images )

Gakked from likeadeuce and inlovewithnight.

Ask me either a broad [writing-related] question (i.e 'who is your cruelest character?', 'what is your most optimistic story?') or a specific question/request ('what world does ___ come from?', 'tell me about ___') and I will answer you. Or you can ask meta- questions like 'what was the inspiration for creating ____?'

Pretty much ask me anything about my fic and I'll ramble at you a bit.

Suzie at Echidne of the Snakes, on how Dollhouse is and isn't (and should and shouldn't be) feminist, here. (I think we may disagree on whether or not sex work is inherently anti-feminist--I don't think it is--but that obscures the more important point that, both in real life and on the show, the way sex work is actually conducted is pretty clearly immoral in almost all cases.)

cesare, on using sexually explicit RPF and FPF, particularly those involving some type of queerness, as a mechanism of critique and attack and mockery, here and here. And for the record, no, I would have no problem with people writing RPF about me even if the purpose was to slander me, and even if they leave it in places I'll probably see it. The fact that they wanted to attack me would sadden me, of course, if I found out about it, but the particular method they chose would be one I'd consider legitimate and valid and even sort of awesome; all the world's a text and we should feel free to remix it.

The first rule of RPF is, of course, that the characters we never write are never the real people (if your metaphysics allows for such a thing) they purport to be; in this context, the very idea of RPF as an attack is logically incoherent. Which is not to say that doing anything at all with the intent to hurt somebody (or the knowledge that it would hurt them) is an okay thing, or that the mere knowledge that someone else acted with that intent couldn't itself be hurtful, but that's a very different critique, and I've seen people specifically claiming that intent isn't relevant to the discussion they were trying to have.

yhlee, on "how to avoid the wind-up toy effect," dealing with issues of worldbuilding especially in science fiction and fantasy settings, here. At some point I'm going to write why I think what she writes there is a useful corrective to what I found problematic or wrong coming out of the Science and Magic panel at writercon, but for now I'll settle on just linking it.

From a WiP:

When Cameron returns, it's in the truck, with John and there's a large mass in the back covered by a canvas which Riley assumes is the remains of the T-101, to be destroyed later.

Cameron pulls off Riley's shirt and examines the bullet wound, a couple inches to the right of Riley's navel.[Poll #1342612]

Yesterday I notebooked 10.5 pages of the fpreg fic I told projectjulie about a few weeks ago, mostly while on the train to and from school. It's weird, because the actual events of the pregnancy sort of takes the place of the plot in your typical "character arc happens alongside plot arc" fic, and writing about Kennedy pregnant is very different than writing about her fighting vampires to keep them from getting the Holy McGuffin of Whatever which will do Something or Other and end the world. The story is really just about characters and relationships with the Hellmouth doing little more than making a cameo at the beginning to set things in motion.

And if the pregnancy is the plot, does that mean it has to cover nine months? I don't think so--most likely, I'll have the characters work out the relationship issues among themselves and then fast forward to the birth in some kind of epilogue-coda-ish thing. But really; I'm sailing blind here. It's much easier to know when our heroes have won and the story is finished when the villains are vanquished and the world is saved.

In a way, that's what is causing me so much difficulty with To Love in Hearts, too. I find I'm not really all that interested in deciding whatever the Sisterhood of the Jhe's new plan to end the world really is, wanting much more to focus on the true love story of Faith and Kennedy. I know what the Jhe will do at a critical point, and what the consequences will be, but I'm mostly content having Buffy in Europe fighting the Sisterhood while Faith and Kennedy are in Cleveland. Buffy doesn't have a character arc in this story (and I don't really see anyway to give her one) so there's really no point in dwelling on her actions.

But without the plotty story to structure the romantic one, I find myself flailing somewhat. At times it's a good thing, because it forces me to stretch myself and really think about the character dynamics. But sometimes they just need a little push, and when I find myself bending over backwards to get the Catholic priest in the story to give them that push, well, I don't know what it means.

But I'm having fun writing the fpreg story--which really needs a title--because I find that if I push in the write direction, I can get various things I've thought about the relationships and characters--and new things I'm just learning, despite having written with these characters in this 'verse for the last four or five years--to manifest them in powerful ways, and that's always a good thing.


. . .

Good luck to inlovewithnight on her thesis defense.

The question and answer meme which has been going around my flist as the "Buffy Interview" meme and related names, even though I think only one of the questions explicitly refers to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Mostly it's on my method and history as a fanfic writer.

1. What was the first story you ever wrote? What inspired you to write it? ( Answer )

2. Which of your stories received the best response? Why do you think that is? ( Read more... )

3. Which of your stories received a less favorable response than you expected. Why do you think that it? ( Read more... )

4. Which character do you enjoy writing the most? Why? ( Read more... )

5. Which character do you enjoy writing the least? Why? ( Read more... )

6. You wrote it and you loved it. Quote your favourite opening line. Quote your favorite closing line. Your favorite title. (Again, links to the stories are always welcome.) ( Read more... )

7. Do you identify with one pairing? If so do you tend to write mostly that pairing? When you don't- what inspires you to step off the beaten track. ( Read more... )

8. Do you re-read your fic? Why or why not? Do you have a favourite fic to re-read? ( Read more... )

9. Some writers find writing difficult. For others, it comes easily. Tell me about the experience of writing for you. How do you write? When? Where? Do you plot your stories or just start writing. Which of your stories was the easiest to write? Which was the hardest? ( Read more... )

10. How has the delivery of fanfic changed since you first started in fandom? Where did you first start posting? Do you have a web site? Do you maintain it? Did you belong to lists? Do you now? How do you find new fic to read? ( Read more... )

11. No shows = no inspiration. Let's face it, it's all been done, right? Or has it? How do you find inspiration in the Buffyverse? Do the comics help? Do you consider them canon? ( Read more... )

12. Feedback - how important is it to you? What sort of feedback do you like to receive? Do you leave feedback when you read? ( Read more... )

14. Do you write professionally? Did you before you started writing fanfic or did fanfic pave the way? ( Read more... )

15. Final thoughts. I am sure I missed something- talk to me.( Read more... )