Fandom Snowflake 03 - Only by tooting our own horns can the composition can be heard

[silveradept]

In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator.

When your creative output (or rather, what you think of as your creative output) is so small, recommending your favorites is easier than it might be if you had a giant amount of possible works to choose from. It doesn't say a lot about the breadth of my fandom, though, unlike those who have a lot to choose from.

1. As a fantasy reader, primarily, I tend to key into dragons as a large part of my reading choices. Preferably dragons not in the one-dimensional Ultimate Evil forms. So the Enchanted Forest Chronicles (Wrede) are great for a young me to see that those stories exist (with bonus active princesses, invisible dusk-blooming chokevines, and wizards being melted with dish soap and water. Argelfaster.) and books like Seraphina and Shadow Scale (Hartman) successfully showing how living as a dragon in the human world is full of the sad experiences of discrimination.
   
   And then there's The Dragonriders of Pern, which at the time of reading it, seemed like a good fit for a dragon-loving child. It was because I liked it a a kid that I decided to go back through it and see how much I was looking at it with rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. As it turns out, a lot. So one of my recommendations is an ongoing giving-of-grief to The Dragonriders of Pern, because I can't change that I liked it as a kid, but I can go back to it and understand what it was I liked.
2. That is not to say that I think it's wrong to like problematic things. As our social consciousness expands, we look at things from our last and realize how far things have come from days when everyone assumed slaves were an essential part of a functioning society - at least now we try to hide it better. For all their faults, and those faults are legion, Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey advance the goal of a literate society by providing them with entertaining works to read.
   
   Being fannish, though, often means noticing details and their execution (or lack thereof). Being able to apply your own expertise to a story to make it better or to fix issues of Did Not Do The Research can help salvage an otherwise excellent fandom. So, number two is An analysis of the baseball scene in Twilight, pointing out as many ways as I could think of that proper baseball fans who are vampires would not be doing what the Cullens do (with extra care for Isabella Swan's life and health than the Cullens show).
   
   Speaking of baseball, the last two years I've been writing various essays about the game, its players, and some of the things that make it compelling and wonderful. The frame that helps give it coherence and scope has been a deck of Tarot cards with a baseball theme. Of the comments received on this series, the people reading certainly seem to enjoy them, which is nice to hear. They are all filed under the December Days: Baseball Tarot tag - please do look and comment. I love comments.
   
   So there's a sampling of the stuff that I do - it may not be your favored flavor, but it seems to be what I'm interested in writing.

Comments

[silveradept]

Fiction probably exists, but if the punishment delivered to Menolly for creating novel things while not being a Harper is typical, then fiction is spoken of only in hushed tones in dark corners, away from the ears of Harper and dragonrider alike.

Which could be what the Benden Weyrleader goes after, convinced of its existence, but never actually able to find - someone composing stories that aren't from Harpers.

[chordatesrock]

Well, that's a depressing thought. But I can't quite believe real people would react in that way.

(I mean, to be fair, I have that objection to a lot of canon!Pern...)

Can't think why F'lar would care about fiction. It seems beneath him to try to stamp it out, but irrelevant to prove its existence-- he doesn't seem to go around being curious about things that aren't politically or militarily useful...

Wait a minute. Have we ever seen F'lar have any feelings about anything that isn't either Lessa or his job? He used to be a womaniser, but evidently not anymore... he occasionally snarks, e.g. at F'nor about Canth eating a lot... and it's probably a mark of Anne's bad writing that I can't tell whether we're supposed to read him as a real workaholic who doesn't bother to have outside interests, or whether Anne just forgot to give him any. And other than that... he occasionally thinks mean, gossipy things about other people, and that's pretty much it.

[silveradept]

I think she was too busy making him the main character to show what he does in his downtime, or to give him downtime in the first place.

He might care about fiction for its ability to tell true things in the guise of a good story, and thus be chasing it in case it contained some sort of secret knowledge that isn't part of the Records.

[chordatesrock]

Oooh! So then he would be disappointed to find himself proven wrong... because every single story he investigates turns out to be true, *except* that fiction exists? Nothing fictional save the claim that there is some such thing as fiction?

That's meta, man!

[silveradept]

Sounds like a plot to me!

[chordatesrock]

Heh, it may be. I'd feel weird writing it, though. A fiction writer writing fiction where fiction is a fiction? (YO DAWG, I heard you like fiction so I made fiction fictional!) Particularly, a fiction writer writing something where fiction is basically the Holy Grail... I would feel like I was writing a paean to myself. That and I think that's a little too meta even for me.