Roads to Safe Places

I got to spend some time reading fanfic again, though could hardly make time for all the brilliant-looking Hoggywarty and rarepair winter exchange entries this year that look interesting - most of them do look so worthwhile! You creators have really outdone yourself this year, and the recipients must feel so lucky! Some hits from the ones I've gotten round to reading, most of you have probably already read them, but if you haven't: 

Fanfic: 
The Perfect Gift (Minerva McGonagall/Severus Snape, 8441 words, PG), which is a truly magical ghost story about a Christmas gift, a family curse, and these two rather private adult characters slowly and respectfully falling for each other. Read this, you will not be sorry.

Rest your Dream in My Dream (Minerva McGonagall/Severus Snape, 9k words, T/PG), is an excellent Minerva/Severus fanfic which tells a post-war story about how Minerva and Severus became a couple with flashbacks to relevant past interactions. You won't regret reading it if you haven't already!

and an honourable mention: Lit Match (Alecto Carrow/Lily Evans, ~2k words, R) by phantomanto , which is a very interesting take on this unusual pairing which they still manage to make work well.

Art:
Rejoicing (in the Greenhouse)- an illustration for an equally excellent fanfic (The Longest Night) set in a greenhouse.

Art for Reawakening - a delightful gifset illustrating the visitors to Severus' bedside illustrating the fic of the same title

What a good ending to last year and start to this one!

Title: The Great Spattergroit Lockdown of 2000

Title: Home, adrift
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 9597
Characters and/or Pairings: this is mostly a story about Severus and his father, but there is Severus Snape/Minerva McGonagall, past Severus Snape/Lucius Malfoy, Tobias Snape/Eileen Prince

Summary: Professor Snape was dead, and Severus was alone. He did not mind. He was adrift, unmoored. It was difficult to feel professorial in Cokeworth. It was difficult to feel anything but out of place. Not that he had ever fitted in. He walked up and down the high street for hours, not even getting suspicious looks from the other people. This was not an area where grown men in funny clothes walking up and down high street aimlessly in the middle of the day got funny looks. This was not the kind of place where people looked at one another at all.

Author's Notes: I did a thing. There were several things floating around my mind when writing this. Mostly how I think it is unfair that working class fathers seem to be portrayed as violent substance abusers more than middle class parents, and the fact that I can see Severus having developed his precocious and excellent Occlumency skills early on as a defence mechanism when dealing with an abusive Legilimens. Also how much of Severus's life is spent doing what other people tell him to. So, this happened. Thanks so much Crocky, for bearing with me.

( Read more... )

I'm usually late with recs and such, so scroll past if you have seen these already. 

1. Tigerbeatdown: "G. R. R. Martin is creepy" - putting into words what I've thought about the series for years. It's one of the series that I get as 24/7 kinkster Fantasy series, but not as mainstream Fantasy without the niche SSC context or a warning label. 

2. If you haven't updated your knowledge in 2009 what you learned about female reproductive anatomy at school is probably outdated and not as awesome as reality. 

3. McGonagall and Umbridge, a new piece by ~ehay. Her Minerva's cheekbones are as delightful as ever. 

4. If you haven't already, check out The Half-Life by *Sigune, a watercolour portrait of Snape. 

5. Though I'm not a Snarry fan I can recommend Cordiality and comfort of my new home, which has amazing light. 

6. ~LadyMacbeth1755 has the four heads of houses as silhouettes here. 

7. I'm late with this rec, but if you haven't already, drop everything and read In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning by atdelphi, which is hauntingly beautiful and powerful. 

Due to my exams and related stress I had completely forgotten that I actually submitted one of the prompts that I had been considering for minerva_fest .

And it has been claimed!

I'm more excited about this than I probably should be. Still. ♥

That's what I needed to read about after a day of filling in forms.

Title: Gone.
Artist: mothwing .
Rating: G.
Notes: an illustration of Crockywock's wonderful fanfics The Prince's Tale and The Silver Cat.
Summary: After Voldemort's defeat, Severus is released from both his debt and also from his connection to Lily, which is driven home by the fact that his patronus changed with his feelings for Minerva. The loss of his old patronus as well as the meaning of the new one cause very mixed feelings.

Click for full view.



This is also the first time that I drew both humans and animals without any kind of reference, not even the trusted artist's dummy. I also practised doing rooms here, and I'm quite happy with how they turned out. Severus' face and expression, on the other hand, really still need some work. I'm rather happy with the cat, though, even though I consciously avoided doing fur, because my attempts at following Jab's pointers were pretty catastrophic and need some more work.

That's part of what you said. It is not that simple. Fiction exists in the real world, and influences real-world people. This is not an issue of "some people" not being able to distinguish between fiction and reality. Even if everybody were able to do so, this would still be an issue. Language influences people. Fiction influences people - and not just those mythical creatures who can't distinguish between fiction and non-fiction accounts - and a strong version of my claim here is that no one can.

Your claim seems to be that since because fiction is fiction, it is somehow less harmful, because it can't be taken as seriously and it is not reality. But how much of what you write is fiction? What you write is informed by your real-world experiences, too. Are houses fictional? No. Is it fictional that people have heads and arms? No. Is it fictional that gay people exist? No. What else is fictional, what mirrors your own experience with gay characters? There is no way to draw the line, even for people who are very well capable of distinguishing fiction from reality.

The narratives you come across organise your thinking, and if you come across one particular narrative over and over again, it is difficult or even impossible not to have that part of your narrative enter your brain and become the definitive narrative. This is my problem with a majority writing a minority. M/M, as I am told, is a genre by and for straight women - it influences their narrative of what gay men are like.

It is common knowledge that advertising is fiction, and still it is as commonly known or suspected that advertising can have a very direct negative effect on the self-esteem of women. Fictional stories in which women are presented as flat characters only there for the gratification of men, like porn movies, are questionable, because they present men and women alike with scripts of sexuality that are unrealistic, but still change the narrative of what sex is "supposed to" work like. This is not conscious, no one sits down and goes, "Oh, I'd like to watch a movie in which women are objectified right now!". That, in parts, is the problem, and if this were what people are doing, this would be less problematic.

Now, with the stories written by straight women and informed by their experience as straight women which are about gay men, the problem I see is that they start replacing the narratives of and by gay men about gay men for the women who read these stories (simple because there are so many straight women who write these kinds of stories - from my experience, though this might be wrong, even more than queer women). There are, as it is, many negative stereotypes of gay men permeating the media which are influencing people's narratives of what a gay man is. This is another one that cannot ever be accurate. So yes, I believe that all stories written my people who are not a member of a minority about a minority are appropriative to some degree, and I believe that romance stories which strongly focus on an idealised version is especially appropriative.

What I want?
I want more self-reflection, self-awareness and critical thinking skills for both readers and writers.
I want people to examine their own reasons for writing what they are writing, and
I want readers to examine for what reason they are reading it.
I want genres about minorities to be dominated by those minorities instead of majorities - I want more original slash fiction about gay men to be written by gay men than by straight women.
I want the story of the minority people write about to be the definitive story.

I want you, herongale, to ask yourself, "why am I writing slash? What does it do for me that other genres don't? Why do I find the tales of two men together more interesting than others? Why is it ok for me to appropriate another person's experience for my own ends?"
And I want your readers to do the same.

I'm genuinely curious what people say here, by the way. I know that there are reasons that are therapeutic writing-related, but I am curious what other reasons there are.

And I am not saying to anyone that they are not allowed to write whatever they want, because of course they are, but I don't want them to get away with it easily if it seems that they are writing about an other without reflection of why they feel it is appropriate to do so.

I have been reading Fantasy written by English and American authors ever since I was fourteen. It is my favourite genre, and most of my favourite books are Fantasy books. This genre was my cure for sadness, loneliness, and boredom ever since I discovered it. And even though I love that genre and spend quite an amount of time defending its literary merits, most of the writers who do write Fantasy suck at the same thing, keep on sucking and make pots of money while doing so. Especially male writers are, when it comes to their few female characters, by and large, lazy, unapologetic morons uninterested in any kind of realism.

The only male Fantasy writers I can think of who manages believable female characters are Gregory Maguire and Terry Pratchett (and I'm grateful if any of you can point me towards others who manage to not fail). It never ceases to amaze me that it would be so bloody hard to write about human beings that, given that they easily comprise fifty percent of the population, one is certain to have interacted with at some point. Both do have strong female characters that are strong on their own terms without necessarily being eye-candy or supporters of male characters only. What is more depressing is that many female writers copy those parts of the genre that are hell-bent on turning female characters into brainless, decorative, supportive tokens (Anne McCaffrey ARFFF).

Even readers with a background in feminism seem so depressingly easily pleased and make a point of noting that there are female characters who are not decoration as soon as they are there at all. As long as these characters exist, as long as they do anything at all, writers get kudos for including "strong female characters". I think that term has been used so often it has been rendered meaningless. If they do feature "strong female characters", one or two strong female characters that are included for whatever reason are really not enough to tip the balance for the rest of the book. If, throughout the story, female characters are treated as decoration, pieces of flesh or house elves, even the most bad-ass female will not rectify the fail when it comes to the other characters (looking at you again, Anne McCaffrey).

And fandom, which in many cases easily offers a break from canon fails due to the creativeness of readers, is no help here. Judging by a rough look at numbers of fanfiction submissions by pairing especially with regards to Harry Potter, most female readers don't seem to care as long as there are ~* hawt *~ male characters they can write trivial, character-exploring fanfiction about that centres on one taking care of the emotional and sexual needs of the other. Only about male characters, mind, because "the female characters in that fandom are so uninteresting". A baffling excuse, given the creative self-confidence of fandom - fandoms that manage to write novel-length stories about characters that never spoke more than three sentences together in a novel ought not to have a problem with that and welcome the challenge. 

But apparently, characters tainted by femaleness are not worth writing or thinking about, because there are no interesting stories to tell about women that aren't about the fact that they are women in a male world, and because fetishizing male-on-male interaction is just "more interesting"/"my personal preference".

I wrote this for Crocky years ago, while she was on her Highland trip with her Chapel Choir. It is a silly little thing, now, and, like so many fics of that time, an AU, but I love it, nonetheless. There are, sadly, a lot of minor mistakes in it, I hope you don't mind too much.

Title: Stalking Severus Snape - A story in 25 receipts and shopping lists.
Pairings: Minerva/Severus.
Author's Note: I would like to apologise for any errors concerning Morrison's products or their prices if they are being portrayed inaccurately by this. I found it very hard to find accurate prices for the items I needed for the late nineties, or even which products they offered back then.
Summary: The items in this file were all retrieved while supervising the convicted and evicted Death Eater and Half-Blood Severus Snape, who was sentenced to the destruction of his wand and exile from the Wizarding community. He is being covertly supervised until his next hearing to ensure he is no longer a threat. See excerpts below.


( File no. 346a - Excerpts. )
 

Around 1 a.m. everything is a good idea, including making graphs of the most popular books used as an inspiration by fanfic-writers based on the number of fanfics written for those books on FF.net.

Here are the (fairly unsurprising) results:





I can't express how thankful I am that Discworld fics came in last, nor how appalled I am by the fact that there are so many DW ficcers in the first place. I don't know why, but for me, there is something extremely wrong and sacrilegious about the thought of people sitting down to write Vimes/Detritus cross-overs or whatever.
Although, considering how many fanfics there are for the Bible, I probably should not be surprised at the fact that they do exist.

Especially considering that there are 80 Minesweeper fics out there.

Anyway. Good night!