phantomtomato

So many things to link today! First, two fics that I posted this week:

To the Cuckoo, a crossover between Howards End and A Room With a View

Would that I lay there, for The Poe Clan

It feels good to post those! I am so out of practice. I remember that posting got easier the more that I was doing it—less anxiety about the summary or title or tags, more confidence in judging when a project is good enough to ship. I am going to keep working on rebuilding the habit.

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I am a fan of a handful of YouTube video essayists. It’s not a big part of my entertainment—the publication rate for the people I watch has dropped to about one video per year, which is honestly more than reasonable when considering the amount of work that goes into producing these hour-plus videos. I watch about four long video essays a year.

I Don’t Know James Rolfe - Dan Olson

Reflecting on creative success and self-mythologies

Olson breaks down the career of one of YouTube’s biggest earlier stars, James Rolfe (The Angry Video Game Nerd), mostly through the lens of Rolfe’s self-published autobiography and a behind-the-scenes video tour of Rolfe’s recording space. This is an interestingly lo-fi premise for a YouTube takedown video. Rolfe has already had those made about him, eviscerating his business decisions and in particular focusing on a plagiarism scandal (that he has acknowledged and apologized for). Or I’ve seen people focus on Rolfe’s brand of gross-out juvenile humor, which might have been crassly funny in 2006 with his audience of mostly 13-24 year old men, but is now just kind of sad. These are both valid avenues of critique, and there are others as well, but they’ve been done before. Olson would be retreading old territory to focus on them.

The angle that he chose is so much more compelling to me because what he chooses to interrogate is not whether Rolfe’s videos are Good (he pretty easily dismisses them as bad), but what we can learn by thinking about their production. Olson is a self-identified gearhead when it comes to film equipment. He sticks on the bizarre choices that Rolfe has made in constructing the set where he records his videos: the cramped layout, the amateur camera mounts, etc. He contrasts that with standard professional practice. But as he goes along, he starts to bring in elements from the Rolfe autobiography, and you learn how Rolfe positions himself as very specifically a filmmaker, not a YouTuber. Olson’s dissection of this identity is worth watching if it sounds interesting—there’s a lot of work going into the visual representation of this argument through his shot composition.

The end result feels extremely personal. Olson doesn’t interrogate one of his YouTube peers without recognizing that the same critical lens must be applied to himself. He ends on that note in a gag sign-off, but to me, the theme was overwhelming throughout. What does it mean to have gone to film school and dreamed of your career in traditional filmmaking terms and reached success (financial stability, large audience, etc.), but on YouTube instead of in the movie industry? Olson and Rolfe are both old enough that YouTube didn’t exist when they were 18 and picking out college majors. They are not the current youngest generation of internet celebrities, who could have envisioned their career goals in terms of follower counts and specific platforms. They were inspired by examples from a fundamentally different format.

Rolfe seemingly continues to define himself against the old ways. He makes films, never mind that his features are posted directly to YouTube and are not the main attraction of his channel. Olson… it’s not as clear, except that he’s aware of this tension and recognizes himself as a YouTuber. But is that in addition to being a filmmaker? If he allows it for himself and not Rolfe, what does he see as the distinguishing factors? I don’t think he should have presented an answer to those questions, so I’m glad that he didn’t—it would invite unnecessary drama into what is much more interesting as an open question about the myths we construct around ourselves.

I have made progress on my Tibby/Cecil fic, though it feels slow—probably down to the research. I hit a few dead-ends during canon review and while looking at academic sources. Cecil is so uniformly described as shallow, judgmental, and nearly nothing else that I realized my job would be to invent a version of him nearly whole-cloth; I used to have the energy for that sort of thing and I wonder at my past self. How did I manage? (Across multiple stories is the answer, I think. It’s a much bigger challenge to do that work in a single short fic. Necessarily, I cannot answer every question.)

I plan to spend the weekend on finishing it up, in order to set the draft aside. I’ve got other fics I’d like to write as well!

raremaleslashex remains my favorite exchange on the calendar. I’ve spent all week looking at the nominations page. Signups can’t come soon enough.

So far in 2023, I have published fic for 11 unique fandoms (9 of them new-to-me), out of 18 total published fics. That hadn't been my writing goal—I think I originally intended something about learning to write plottier stories—but here we are, "picking up and writing for new fandoms" is my mode of existence for this year.

It's difficult to pick up a new fandom. For me, being "comfortable" writing in a fandom means something like being able to write a 5k fic without requiring a reference to the fandom's lore, setting, characters, etc. I wrote my second gift for 2023 Fandom Trumps Hate this month, for which my recipient requested Harry Potter, the one fandom I'd claim to feel comfortable with writing. Despite writing the requested ship for the first time in this fic, I felt perfectly fluent with the characters' feelings towards one another, where they were at various points in their timelines, and how the larger events of the series impacted each of them. In other words, nothing blocked me from being able to sit down and put words on the page—I didn't have to look up whether there were feasibility challenges to my chosen plot, or double-check in-universe rules for magic, or anything like that. No going back to canon! Canon is all efficiently indexed in my head.

To pick on some examples of canons less stuck in my mind: this year, I've checked how "My Mysterious Mademoiselle" handled French in descriptive prose (italicized), how many damned l's and t's are in Rickie Elliot (got it wrong on my first try for this post), the domains of the Greek/Roman god Bacchus, and where the fictional Welton Academy was supposed to have existed. I've spent hours rereading Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus narration, even though I consciously decided that I didn't want to write my Bartimaeus fic as a pastiche. I hunted down a text copy of "The Attic" through extracurricular means because the free audio version was too difficult to process as a reference source (also for character name spelling!). I had less choice for Another Country, and rewatched the movie-only scenes (with subtitles on) a number of times to figure out where Bennett's mother intended to honeymoon and when.

I'm typing this out in order to process how different the flow is between writing fic in a comfortable fandom and writing fic in a fandom that requires canon review. I enjoy both! But canon review is so exhausting, and by choosing writing projects this year which nearly all required canon review, I've written a lot less—both in raw word count and in the number of individual stories. I've been frustrated with what felt like my slowness, and I'm trying to contextualize that for myself. It's fine. I did a lot of new writing, if not in the ways I've previously defined new writing. I'm glad to have those fics.

But I also really miss being comfortable in a fandom. I don't think, as I did at the start of the year, that I'll be returning to HP as a primary interest. This sucks for a lot of emotional reasons, but after eight or nine months, I think I need to accept that reality. Which means I need to develop a new primary fandom (or set of) and write them, multiple times, until I get comfortable.

It's such a nice feeling to sit down on an empty weekend day and knock out a 3k fic that I enjoy. It's so fun to brainstorm a bunch of different plots within the same universe. I love having an OTP and re-imagining their love dozens of different ways. I'm really ready to settle for a while and stop jumping between so many fandoms.

Let's hope I stay strong and don't get too distracted by Trick-or-Treat and Yuletide.

1. Marking the end of Succession this week! ( Show Spoilers )
   
   Strong recommendation for anyone who can stomach television about miserable, unlikeable people. It's incredibly (and darkly) funny and has devastating emotional moments in addition to being one of the best-acted things I've seen in a while.


2. Also the end of Ted Lasso. ( Show Spoilers )
   
   I'm glad to have stuck it out to the end, but I struggle to recommend it. I feel like this is a show I won't ever think about having watched in another year.


3. There's this phenomenon that nearly always gets me to love a ship, when present, and that I always add to the ships I make up: The Gap, or the period of time in which parties in some pre-existing relationship are separated and undergo their own development experiences. Elsewhere on Dreamwidth there's been a revival of interest in a completed webcomic, Check Please!, which I haven't read—but the specific ship being talked about most is one wherein two characters who were friends and sexual partners as teens reunite as adults, one of them well underway in his career and the other getting a late start to it thanks to his struggle with addiction and mental health. It is fascinating. Not only have I enjoyed a great deal of this fic fandom-blind, but it's really helped me codify this trend. I reflected on parts of this a month ago when I posted about how I see Tom Riddle's life path over on tumblr, but that was really focused on a single character's journey. The Gap is about two of them together.
   
   It's in so many canon couples that I ship:
   
   • David Blaize and Frank Maddox spend time apart at the end of each of their two books together. The first gap gives David time to explore other friendships and the possibility of romance with a girl, but it's Frank's return to his side for a sweet bedside vigil which reaffirms their commitment to one another. The second gap gives David time to think about what he wants out of their lifelong commitment and decide on an asexual but romantic love, which he then gets up the strength to propose to Frank. This is personally unsatisfying to me, but I love the structure of the story and think the gaps work well to highlight the importance of the relationship, even if I think the asexuality bit should be retconned in fic!
   
   
   • Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt in In Memoriam are first separated when Henry leaves to serve in WWI, and their first reunion allows the commencement of their sexual relationship. The second separation, due to the circumstances of that war, allows Henry to emphasize his romantic commitment to Sidney when they come back together, something which had been uncertain during their first reunion.
   
   
   • Ralph Lanyon and Laurie Odell in The Charioteer have the very briefest moment of intimacy before Ralph is sent down from their school, and thus begins seven years of separation, with a delightfully tragic little fake-death at the start of their reunion. The Gap gives Laurie time to accept his homosexuality and start to ask himself what sort of partner he wants in life, and gives Ralph a chance to explore new sexual experiences with supportive/enthusiastic partners in safer circumstances. They don't have an easy time of coming back together, but their desire to learn about one another again helps them overcome those difficulties.
   
   There's so many more non-canon ships that I would explore this way: Oliver and Edward from The Fifth Form, Scaife and Verney in The Hill; I have written so many fics around this idea for all of my favorite pairings. The central division between the halves of my Tom Riddle and Edmund Pevensie WIP is a one-year gap—I can't help inserting them even in circumstances where I get to define the relationship!
   
   I love how The Gap gives characters an opportunity to be intimate strangers. They know parts of one another so dearly that they fall into unconscious patterns, making a meal that someone loves or cracking a joke that always used to land, and at the same time they're also uncomfortably aware that things have changed: the joke doesn't land, the friend suggests eating somewhere new and unfamiliar. They are forced to talk with one another and relearn what is appropriate and true, but the existing baseline of familiarity seeps in to shape and color those conversations. I crave the intimacy of asking awkward questions about how one's family is doing while lying naked in bed after sex, and the fear of being too physically comfortable with one another that pushes characters to wrap around to the other end and keep a distance that feels artificial for casual friends.
   
   I've known that I love this construct for a while, but I suppose I'm newly high on it again and thinking about the specific mechanisms which make it work for me. Now to determine how to highlight this in an exchange letter, mm?


4. I am dying for RMSE to open sign-ups. <3

We're a third of the way through the month and I've kept up with Write Every Day! I'm working on something with my favorite crossover ship, Tom Riddle/Edmund Pevensie. I've written them three times before, all five-figure-length fics, so it was a safe choice for getting back on the horse with writing fics outside of exchanges. What's new to me with this one is writing them as something other than children or young men—I've decided to take a look at how they might get along if thrown together in their forties, long after Edmund last leaves Narnia (and no, I don't keep to the canon of The Last Battle), when Tom is considering his path to becoming Voldemort. I've completely forgotten how to write a Tom Riddle who isn't deeply based on my years of development for his character; we'll see if I bother to make this story more accessible in editing.

I think I'll take a break from it either this weekend or when I'm on vacation for a few days next week. I've got a couple of pairing tags that I realized I could invent when I was thinking of raremaleslashex nominations. I don't want to get too distracted from my goal for this month (make a significant dent on a mid-length fic), but I can't really believe no one has done Bunny/Laurie from The Charioteer yet. I also edited my H/C treat this week and want to finish up editing on another outstanding gift soon.

My fic reading list this week was a grab bag:

1. From Be The First, this sweet canon revision based on a ghost story. Finding a written canon was a bit of an ordeal involving library genesis, but there's a free and legal reading of it on YouTube! It's a very good performance. Like many old ghost stories, it has a delightfully slashy undertone between the POV character (Stanley) and a teenage boy who is a friend's nephew (Derek). The fic author, SweetSorcery, gives Derek a little more comfort than he gets in canon, and sets up a promising future for him and Stanley.


2. Next, I revisited two of my favorite Raffles fic. The first, by hapaxlegomena, is lovely and hot (warning for underage sexual content) and full of delightful period details like Bunny's nightshirt and the first-person pastiche. I found this last year by browsing the "fagging" freeform on AO3, can you believe that? What a win for the use of uncanonized freeforms. Anyway, I find smutfic in historical fandoms to be difficult, there's an understandable amount of it which is focused on making something hot as the top priority, but I pretty much always want the historical details to also be of primary interest. I love how this one balances both.
   
   And the second, by delfina, is another Bunny/Raffles fic from their public school days, this one with lots of unfulfilled pining. The very best T-rated romance (in my opinion) makes each kiss feel as devastating and sexy as a sex scene, and these ones are just fantastic. I am wrecked by Raffles' clear and present want to go further, held back by his awareness of their currently-meaningful age difference. How much it hurts, to know that if they were both just a little older, none of that would matter!


3. Then, rounding out the week was kelly_chambliss's fun use of two Harry Potter background characters, Wilhelmina and Aberforth. Kelly writes Wil like nothing else, and Aberforth is a fave of mine, so I was so excited to have this one resurfaced by a new podfic adaptation. HP, for me, is a space to play with those blank slates—I'm terribly fond of Voldemort, who is blanker than he should be, and my own completely-blank project character, Nott Sr. I treasure the other authors doing the same.

I'm going to try having a weekly post here on DW. I would like to be more active, so collecting thoughts on a theme seems like the best choice. Let's see how it goes!

1. I finished a draft of my first Fandom Trumps Hate fic this week, which is a big relief! I think it needs some revisions, so I don't feel quite done with it yet, but having a first draft takes the pressure off. I've never offered an auction before, and it's both exciting and nerve-wracking.
2. My weekend goal is to title and post my Hurt/Comfort exchange treat. Posting deadline is still two weeks away, but I'm afraid that if I don't get this up eventually (it's been done for two weeks!) I will actually forget about it, lol.
3. Second weekend goal—if I don't go see my student's play on Sunday—is to start a just-for-me fic. I haven't written outside of exchanges so far this year! That needs to change. God, I am out of the habit.
4. My reading this past week has been all for Les Miserables, a fandom which I have never consumed, but which occasionally pulls me in because I love the dynamics of Enjolras/Grantaire. I love an unhappy ending. (I would have thought I'd like Javert/Valjean, but idk, the fic never clicked!) Multiple recs for arriviste pushed me over, and yeah, their work is good. I particularly liked un oubli profond, which is on the unhappier end of things, and come into my parlour on the (eventual) happier side. I also enjoyed The Lotus Drinker by Ark as an example of hurt/comfort—topical! I should use it as inspiration for my own H/C edits.
   I think I'm done with Les Mis for now, but it's an evergreen (blind) fandom, and I'm sure I'll revisit when I want to read about sad romances again.