Fandom Orienteer Challenge 2023
Aug. 2nd, 2023 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoIn Fealty to Apollo
Edmund Pevensie/Tom Riddle, 28k, Explicit
Written for the Fandom Orienteer Challenge this year (![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomorienteerchallenge), I’m so excited that this is finally public. Below, some thoughts on the fic and the experience.
I remember seeing the initial brainstorming of the FO challenge in a meme thread back in… early spring? Certainly before April, as that’s when the challenge opened for prompting. It was nice that the multifandom events community was interested in something other than an exchange, and I sort of put it out of mind other than to drop a few prompts into the mix (which I didn’t use! those were for other people to enjoy).
May 2023 came around and I found myself in a miserable spot with my writing. I’d done only exchanges for half a year. I loved those fics but I was tired of writing to another person’s likes—this was my longest stretch in fandom without primarily writing for myself. At the same time, I hadn’t worked in Harry Potter fandom in just about as long and wasn’t feeling great about the prospect of returning. So whenregshoe announced that they were hosting Write Every Day in May, I jumped—what better way to practice these skills? FO was the other half of the motivation: making a commitment to a specific prompt and word minimum gave me just enough external accountability.
I really loved both challenges. Writing a 20-30k fic isn’t an unknown hurdle for me, and neither is writing this pairing, but having a community of fellow authors aiming for the same goals was the right incentive. Needing to check in with WED daily forced me to sit for at least 15 minutes and write; being part of the FO discord kept me mindful of my editing schedule. That was another major factor in my decision to use FO rather than simply writing and posting the fic: I wanted to practice the mindfulness of allowing a project space to breathe after the draft is complete. The story didn’t change as a result of that space, but I noticed many more potential points of confusion and I feel that I did a better job cleaning up my phrasing than in past works. I won’t wait two months for every future project, but I can see the reasons for waiting a month!
The title of the piece comes from a line in the poem On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer. I was looking for a title for a different fic (the Another Country piece which became “Sans Merci”) when I stumbled across the poem, which describes the experience of learning how to appreciate something thanks to a new perspective on it (the Chapman translation of Homer, in this case).
Tom/Ed is a ship about that, for me. Both men (and for this fic, Tom as the POV character) love and crave magic: magic gave Tom power, and magic, through Narnia, gave Edmund belonging. The attraction to magic is clear and present in their characters. But Edmund doesn’t get to keep it—he’s forced back to the mundane world. (Let’s ignore the ending to The Last Battle.) Tom keeps hold of it in ways I would classify as self-harm; his inability to make peace with the mundane world means that he cannot accept himself and his place in it. He’s half Muggle, you know?
Edmund, in my Tom/Ed fics, is the Chapman: he translates between the magic and the mundane for Tom, allowing him to see that they can coexist, that they both have merits, that there is value to be found in reconciling these two worlds. He works as this translator because he must keenly feel that same dissatisfaction as Tom does, having been an ill-fitting, beastly little boy who was rescued from that discontent by a version of a portal fantasy. But Edmund’s journey is one of self-acceptance and the perils of striving for purely personal gain, whereas Tom’s journey is the mirror of that, demonstrating the consequences of failing to achieve that growth. If someone can be the Chapman translation for Tom, it must be a boy or man like him, who has empathy for how Tom could make the decisions that he does.
I also loved that the line chooses Apollo as the named god—relevant for his dominion over the arts, but also particularly relevant for the homoerotic symbolism. I’m partial to Ed/Bacchus as a ship, and I’m also partial to making Edmund a university professor for a career, so I let the two things + the poem inspire me to write him as a professor of the classics in this. He certainly appreciates the Apollo imagery. Is Tom the Apollo who is owed fealty? Is Edmund? I think it’s both of them, in their own ways. I think Tom kinks on Edmund being a king, and I think that Edmund, once he’s settled on someone as his person, feels a profound loyalty to them. Also, Tom always sees himself as a god.
The secondary relationship in the fic is Mrs. Cole & Tom Riddle, and though not tagged, I intentionally echoed the importance of that familial connection through the characters of Mrs. Hurley, Horace Slughorn, Aberforth Dumbledore, and all three of Edmund’s siblings. I adore Mrs. Cole—she’s a lush and neglectful, deeply suspicious of Tom and doubtless an imperfect caretaker for all of the orphans raised at Wool’s, but she is the closest that Tom gets as a parental figure. If the idea of the story is that Edmund helps Tom reconnect with his mundane roots, then Mrs. Cole symbolizes all of that mundanity. In turn, she shows him acceptance: she resents or distrusts his use of magic, but she does so in part for how she perceives that it’s harming him. She sees how he uses it to isolate himself. Mrs. Cole and the other mentors that Tom has had in this life encourage connection to other people—Aberforth reminds him that people miss him when he disappears, Mrs. Hurley writes to him, Horace tries to nurture his legitimate work. No one person can save Tom from himself, and that’s not the point. Instead, they form a picture of the life that he could have if he found healthy, stable ways of relating to other people. People care about him; he needs to learn how to accept that.
Edmund, meanwhile, models a different sort of disconnect. He has friends and family, and that contrast gives Tom something to be unsettled by. I particularly enjoyed writing Susan and Edmund as mirrors of one another; there are a few explicit and implicit comparisons between them in the fic. He’s doing better than Tom, no doubt. But there are still issues—coming back from Narnia has left its marks in the way he carefully preserved his bachelorhood and in the unhealed rifts between himself and Peter (and perhaps other family; I imagine many other such fights have taken place over the years). At one point, Tom uses an analogy to graphs to describe how Edmund and Mrs. Cole and Mrs. Hurley all draw together to tie him more firmly to this world. He says that they form a complete graph, with each pair of people in the larger set having a unique relationship with one another, so that it’s more difficult to destroy the overall network of connections. They all talk to one another. When Tom revisits his relationships with Mrs. Cole and Mrs. Hurley, it’s Edmund who comes running to help in a crisis. He’s the natural choice, as the fourth vertex of the graph.
The longer that they are in one another’s lives, the stronger these networks of family and friends will be. Yes, it’s a bit found family—but it’s also about how family connections keep you rooted to parts of yourself.
I’ve written this pairing three times before—I am delighted to be this ship’s most prolific author (for now). It’s a very good ship! But all this to say that the prior three times that I’ve taken on Tom and Edmund, the characters have been boys and young men. This makes sense. This is the time period during which they have the greatest overlap, as children in London during the second world war, and also the moment at which they’re each introduced to their universe’s magic. I like exploring that, clearly.
But I love middle-aged, 1970s Tom Riddle. I adore him. He’s so old for a man just beginning to start a political movement and dream up a war for personal power. He’s just come back from a decade of traveling abroad, with no definite network of support or sources of funding, and he’s restarting under a new name. HP canon is so loose on what this looked like that it’s allowed me to imagine dozens of miserable visions for this decade. I love my Tom-Riddle-the-radical, pamphleting Knockturn Alley in the dead of night, mimeographing his political tracts in some unlucky Newcastle library. I wanted this man to meet Edmund Pevensie.
Tom-Riddle-the-boy is handsome and charming and full of energy, as he’s still pretending to be a model orphan in front of most adults. In middle age, I can drop all that. He can be written as tired, flighty, and openly selfish. More than that, I can allow him to be awkward. What’s the purpose of impressing a one-night stand, anyway? And Edmund, in his middle age, is a different sort of exhausted: he’s lived so many more decades than he should’ve. What’s the point at pretending this is all new for him? He might as well go after what he wants; no need to be self-conscious about it.
Neither of them is flush with their first discoveries of magic. That, too, has lost its initial charm. Edmund gets to be desperate and a little mad about it, retreating into the role of the eccentric professor like Digory Kirke once had. Tom takes it as a given that it’s something he must hide. He’s frightened too many Muggles in the past. Their romance gives them a chance to rediscover what is appealing about magic and their past experiences with it, hopefully shaking them out of their routines.
I also wrote this fic in second person—if ever there is a fic in second person, know that I wrote the entire thing in sheer hedonistic joy. This is no exception.
Edmund Pevensie/Tom Riddle, 28k, Explicit
Written for the Fandom Orienteer Challenge this year (
fandomorienteerchallenge), I’m so excited that this is finally public. Below, some thoughts on the fic and the experience.I remember seeing the initial brainstorming of the FO challenge in a meme thread back in… early spring? Certainly before April, as that’s when the challenge opened for prompting. It was nice that the multifandom events community was interested in something other than an exchange, and I sort of put it out of mind other than to drop a few prompts into the mix (which I didn’t use! those were for other people to enjoy).
May 2023 came around and I found myself in a miserable spot with my writing. I’d done only exchanges for half a year. I loved those fics but I was tired of writing to another person’s likes—this was my longest stretch in fandom without primarily writing for myself. At the same time, I hadn’t worked in Harry Potter fandom in just about as long and wasn’t feeling great about the prospect of returning. So when
regshoe announced that they were hosting Write Every Day in May, I jumped—what better way to practice these skills? FO was the other half of the motivation: making a commitment to a specific prompt and word minimum gave me just enough external accountability. I really loved both challenges. Writing a 20-30k fic isn’t an unknown hurdle for me, and neither is writing this pairing, but having a community of fellow authors aiming for the same goals was the right incentive. Needing to check in with WED daily forced me to sit for at least 15 minutes and write; being part of the FO discord kept me mindful of my editing schedule. That was another major factor in my decision to use FO rather than simply writing and posting the fic: I wanted to practice the mindfulness of allowing a project space to breathe after the draft is complete. The story didn’t change as a result of that space, but I noticed many more potential points of confusion and I feel that I did a better job cleaning up my phrasing than in past works. I won’t wait two months for every future project, but I can see the reasons for waiting a month!
The title of the piece comes from a line in the poem On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer. I was looking for a title for a different fic (the Another Country piece which became “Sans Merci”) when I stumbled across the poem, which describes the experience of learning how to appreciate something thanks to a new perspective on it (the Chapman translation of Homer, in this case).
Tom/Ed is a ship about that, for me. Both men (and for this fic, Tom as the POV character) love and crave magic: magic gave Tom power, and magic, through Narnia, gave Edmund belonging. The attraction to magic is clear and present in their characters. But Edmund doesn’t get to keep it—he’s forced back to the mundane world. (Let’s ignore the ending to The Last Battle.) Tom keeps hold of it in ways I would classify as self-harm; his inability to make peace with the mundane world means that he cannot accept himself and his place in it. He’s half Muggle, you know?
Edmund, in my Tom/Ed fics, is the Chapman: he translates between the magic and the mundane for Tom, allowing him to see that they can coexist, that they both have merits, that there is value to be found in reconciling these two worlds. He works as this translator because he must keenly feel that same dissatisfaction as Tom does, having been an ill-fitting, beastly little boy who was rescued from that discontent by a version of a portal fantasy. But Edmund’s journey is one of self-acceptance and the perils of striving for purely personal gain, whereas Tom’s journey is the mirror of that, demonstrating the consequences of failing to achieve that growth. If someone can be the Chapman translation for Tom, it must be a boy or man like him, who has empathy for how Tom could make the decisions that he does.
I also loved that the line chooses Apollo as the named god—relevant for his dominion over the arts, but also particularly relevant for the homoerotic symbolism. I’m partial to Ed/Bacchus as a ship, and I’m also partial to making Edmund a university professor for a career, so I let the two things + the poem inspire me to write him as a professor of the classics in this. He certainly appreciates the Apollo imagery. Is Tom the Apollo who is owed fealty? Is Edmund? I think it’s both of them, in their own ways. I think Tom kinks on Edmund being a king, and I think that Edmund, once he’s settled on someone as his person, feels a profound loyalty to them. Also, Tom always sees himself as a god.
The secondary relationship in the fic is Mrs. Cole & Tom Riddle, and though not tagged, I intentionally echoed the importance of that familial connection through the characters of Mrs. Hurley, Horace Slughorn, Aberforth Dumbledore, and all three of Edmund’s siblings. I adore Mrs. Cole—she’s a lush and neglectful, deeply suspicious of Tom and doubtless an imperfect caretaker for all of the orphans raised at Wool’s, but she is the closest that Tom gets as a parental figure. If the idea of the story is that Edmund helps Tom reconnect with his mundane roots, then Mrs. Cole symbolizes all of that mundanity. In turn, she shows him acceptance: she resents or distrusts his use of magic, but she does so in part for how she perceives that it’s harming him. She sees how he uses it to isolate himself. Mrs. Cole and the other mentors that Tom has had in this life encourage connection to other people—Aberforth reminds him that people miss him when he disappears, Mrs. Hurley writes to him, Horace tries to nurture his legitimate work. No one person can save Tom from himself, and that’s not the point. Instead, they form a picture of the life that he could have if he found healthy, stable ways of relating to other people. People care about him; he needs to learn how to accept that.
Edmund, meanwhile, models a different sort of disconnect. He has friends and family, and that contrast gives Tom something to be unsettled by. I particularly enjoyed writing Susan and Edmund as mirrors of one another; there are a few explicit and implicit comparisons between them in the fic. He’s doing better than Tom, no doubt. But there are still issues—coming back from Narnia has left its marks in the way he carefully preserved his bachelorhood and in the unhealed rifts between himself and Peter (and perhaps other family; I imagine many other such fights have taken place over the years). At one point, Tom uses an analogy to graphs to describe how Edmund and Mrs. Cole and Mrs. Hurley all draw together to tie him more firmly to this world. He says that they form a complete graph, with each pair of people in the larger set having a unique relationship with one another, so that it’s more difficult to destroy the overall network of connections. They all talk to one another. When Tom revisits his relationships with Mrs. Cole and Mrs. Hurley, it’s Edmund who comes running to help in a crisis. He’s the natural choice, as the fourth vertex of the graph.
The longer that they are in one another’s lives, the stronger these networks of family and friends will be. Yes, it’s a bit found family—but it’s also about how family connections keep you rooted to parts of yourself.
I’ve written this pairing three times before—I am delighted to be this ship’s most prolific author (for now). It’s a very good ship! But all this to say that the prior three times that I’ve taken on Tom and Edmund, the characters have been boys and young men. This makes sense. This is the time period during which they have the greatest overlap, as children in London during the second world war, and also the moment at which they’re each introduced to their universe’s magic. I like exploring that, clearly.
But I love middle-aged, 1970s Tom Riddle. I adore him. He’s so old for a man just beginning to start a political movement and dream up a war for personal power. He’s just come back from a decade of traveling abroad, with no definite network of support or sources of funding, and he’s restarting under a new name. HP canon is so loose on what this looked like that it’s allowed me to imagine dozens of miserable visions for this decade. I love my Tom-Riddle-the-radical, pamphleting Knockturn Alley in the dead of night, mimeographing his political tracts in some unlucky Newcastle library. I wanted this man to meet Edmund Pevensie.
Tom-Riddle-the-boy is handsome and charming and full of energy, as he’s still pretending to be a model orphan in front of most adults. In middle age, I can drop all that. He can be written as tired, flighty, and openly selfish. More than that, I can allow him to be awkward. What’s the purpose of impressing a one-night stand, anyway? And Edmund, in his middle age, is a different sort of exhausted: he’s lived so many more decades than he should’ve. What’s the point at pretending this is all new for him? He might as well go after what he wants; no need to be self-conscious about it.
Neither of them is flush with their first discoveries of magic. That, too, has lost its initial charm. Edmund gets to be desperate and a little mad about it, retreating into the role of the eccentric professor like Digory Kirke once had. Tom takes it as a given that it’s something he must hide. He’s frightened too many Muggles in the past. Their romance gives them a chance to rediscover what is appealing about magic and their past experiences with it, hopefully shaking them out of their routines.
I also wrote this fic in second person—if ever there is a fic in second person, know that I wrote the entire thing in sheer hedonistic joy. This is no exception.
