Snowflake Challenge 0206 #14: Primers and Recommendations

[silveradept]

snowflake_challenge would like us to recommend to others a way in to finding a place in a fandom that we're already part of.

Challenge #14

Create a promo and/or rec list for someone new to a fandom.

The two of those things are quite different, I might note. The promo is about trying to get people into a fandom based on the strength of the canonical materials (whether the smart writing, the intricate plot, or the hotness of the actors), and the rec list is about getting people into a fandom (or at least the transformative fandom part) based on the fanworks that are available to someone. Neither of these methods are inherently wrong, but depending on your approach, someone might get into the fandom with radically different ideas of what the source material or the fandom is about. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, but approaching something from the fannish side might make you suspect there's more nuance and depth to the source material than there actually is.)

Anyway, since I am both not very good at collecting new fandoms and not very good at getting and remembering works in the fandoms I have, this would normally leave me in a pickle about what to do, except I have plenty of older fandoms and recommendations for you that will make up for my utter lack of newish fandoms for you to experience.

Let's start with book club. I hesitate to call it actual "deconstruction," because mostly it's quotations of book passages with opinions about things, and sometimes those opinions are tied to authorial craft, or to underlying philosophical matters, or other things where it might look like someone actually doing scholarly work with frameworks. You're welcome to your own opinion about whether it actually makes it to the level of being constructive or deconstructive, but you can look all the same. The Slacktiverse is the place to go, and I'm usually the primary post-poster there. If you want to dive right in immediately, I'm about to finish up the first book of Naomi Novik's Scholomance and go into the second, but there's plenty of other material available there, including the first run of the Dragonriders of Pern. The Director's Cut version is on AO3.

So, as I mentioned in an earlier post, the Dragonriders of Pern is a series where some people are here for the power fantasy of being mentally bonded with a great and powerful creature that throws fire against an invading horde, and therefore being at the very top of the social structure, universally adored, and with complete impunity to act in whatever way you deem appropriate. (Why? Because the author says so.) Some people are instead there for the sexual fantasy of not having to actually communicate your desires verbally, and instead can be swept along in waves of irresistible passion that happen on the regular. It does come with fettering in that none of them men will take you seriously when you say something, and that you have to always be in peak fuckability state or all the social power you can wield will disappear, since it was always related to how you can manipulate men to do what you want. If you end up trying to be powerful in your own right, and not through the largesse of a man, the narrative will find plenty of ways to destroy you, but if you're forewarned against that, you might still be able to beat it. Also, the author believes that only het people get the powerful dragons that put them at the top of the hierarchy. But you know, in that shambling wreck of sexual politics there's plenty of good fodder to make it better, or to write narratives about being swept along on the waves of passion, so, go for it.

If you're here, though, because you want to poke at political and social structures and then rewrite them so they work, make sense, or otherwise function on something other than authorial fiat, then the Dragonriders of Pern is a cornucopia. You'll have to jettison the authors' idea that Pern is a perfect agrarian and Randian paradise quickly for the practicality that it's settled into medieval-styled pastoral feudalism, with autocrats in the Lords and all real power settled in the dragonriders, but then you can get into the logistics of running a medieval manor, the guild system for crafts, the cult of the dragonriders, and all the rest. If you like getting elbows-deep in a world that is thoroughly rusted and only held together by authorial will, you'll love Pern.

(Because I've spent my million words on it, I have specific ideas about how Pern works, and how I would envision it working properly, with the pieces in place that the authors deliberately said weren't there, and other such practicalities. It probably means that my version of Pern is different than most Pern fans' version of it, and so while I'll still write for it, it's not necessarily at the top of my write or request list, because I'm not entirely certain that if I match with someone, we'll have the same vision, and that might make people unhappy to receive a gift in my Pern when they wanted theirs.)

Moving onward: Despite the flaws that it has, and there are plenty, I keep coming back to the world of Remnant and the Rooster Teeth property RWBY, because while Monty Oum hasn't been alive (dead far too soon) since the end of volume 3, the people who have succeeded him have done a good job at carrying forward the story that he had in mind. Remnant is good for people who like fairy tales and children's stories, in the sense of recognizing that just about all, if not all, of the characters in Remnant with a name and voice lines are based upon one of those public-domain characters. So it's not a mis-step to say that RWBY is about Red Riding Hood, Snow White, the Beauty from Beauty and the Beast, and Goldilocks fighting the Wicked Witch of the West and Cinderella, starting at the school that has The Wizard of Oz and the Good Witch of the North as the superintendent and the principal, respectively. The other team that gets focus is composed of Joan of Arc, Thor, Achilles, and Mulan, all of them gender-swapped from their source material. Things don't turn out as their source stories would go, but the hints are all there for you to puzzle out which story most of the main characters come from.

On the negative side, Rooster Teeth has been bounced around a fair amount, and also, they received deserved criticism for the actions of some of their other properties and people. That doesn't mean that RWBY is somehow above these criticisms, and it took them nine volumes before they felt comfortable having two characters actually confess their love for each other, despite having basically all but confirmed it in volumes previous. (The Beauty is a bit of a attraction magnet, actually, with one confirmed boyfriend in the past, one possible boyfriend in the present, one strongly-hinted F/F attraction (if not confirmed) from someone else to her, and her current girlfriend.)

What I'd recommend for someone getting into RWBY, though, is the equivalent of the Machete Order for Star Wars (That's Star Wars (A New Hope), Empire Strikes Back, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, Return of the Jedi, with Phantom Menace as a sort of free-floating gaiden story. Presumably, then you continue on into Force Awakens, Last Jedi, and Rise of Skywalker, all in their order, if you want to acknowledge the existence of the sequel trilogy.) and starting at Volume 4. 4 is the first post-Monty volume, yes, but it's also the one where a lot of the technical kinks have been worked out from the early volumes, and the Team RNJR/JNRR journey is a good way to get to know the principals of both teams, even though starting at 4 means that team RWBY is disbanded and won't reunite until much later. I'd start with 4, proceed through 5 and 6, so that the team gets back together, and some of the important information about what is going on is managed. It does spoil some of the mysteries of earlier volumes, yes, and provide answers to questions you don't know you needed yet, if you do it this way, but Atlas is a good stopping point for figuring out if you're actually invested enough in these characters and this story to proceed. If, after 4, 5, and 6, you want to continue, then go back and do 1, 2, and 3, so that you get the backstory of what's going on, and why I recommended starting at volume 4, then proceed into Atlas for volumes 7, 8, and 9. (And presumably 10, when it releases.) 9 is almost a gaiden story that you could skip if you wanted to stay on the main plot, but there's a lot of worldbuilding information in volume 9, as well as significant character actions (and showcasing certain characters' biggest flaws magnified at them), so it's not quite completely skippable. You could probably make an abridged version of it, though, for someone who is trying to speed their way through to get caught up.

Each volume, as a whole, is about the length of a longer movie, 2-3 hours, so it's definitely an evening's worth of watching if you choose to do it in a volume-at-once chunk. I think that's the best way of doing it, treating each volume as a long movie, but that means having to make time for it.

If you don't have time for that, but you still want to get your fairy tale on, there's a reason that Stephen Sondheim's Into The Woods is still a staple. Having watched both the version as a filmed stage play starring Bernadette Peters as the witch and the Disney movie version they made starring Meryl Streep as the witch, go with the Bernadette Peters one, if you can find it. The Disney version is shot like a movie, and flows like one, and I think it suffers for it. (No shade on the cast for the movie version, they're all entirely capable of hte roles they're playing.) That, and the character of the Narrator is fundamentally important to the story, and the movie version doesn't have a Narrator character, having found other ways to move the plot and ensure all the necessary actions happen. Because Into the Woods is, at its core, several fractured fairy tales all happening in the same setting, you need to have all the components of fairy tales present, and the filmed stage show version does a better job of looking and sounding like a fairy tale. (The songs are good, too, and are characteristically difficult Sondheim.) So if you ever have that urge of "what would happen if I threw all of these Grimm characters and others into the same situation, and let them interact with each other," then you'll enjoy Into The Woods.

Last out for promos and recs are two books by Sara Rees Brennan. The first is In Other Lands, which had several parts of it initially posted as "The Turn of the Story". Stick a genre-savvy kid from our world into a high fantasy kingdom with lots of humans and non-humans, and put him into the group that is charged with keeping the peace among all the others, and watch as he refuses to accept any and all conventions associated with this place, any "this is how it's always been done" explanation, and actively, continually, attempts to subvert the authority of everyone in charge of him, in service of doing things that actually work, instead of things that are imposed on others and then need to have regular invasions and military campaigns to enforce. The main character is also canonically bisexual, but that's more of a cherry on top to the amount of sheer chaos that he generates simply by refusing to accept anything that's supposedly a given or a tradition in the Borderlands. Snark abounds, the elves are a matriarchy with just as much disdain for their menfolk as out here has for women, and the main character is out to learn everything he can about everyone, especially when that knowledge will put him into life-threatening situations. (He usually doesn't realize that's what he's done until afterward.) Definitely for people who like seeing high fantasy tropes turned on their heads, and for people who really want their protagonists short, unathletic, and genuinely smart, but without appropriate outlets for that intelligence other than snark and chaos.

The second is Long Live Evil, which is an isekai narrative, with a cancer patient whisked away into the world of her sister's favorite novel. Two problems: one, the protagonist wasn't paying nearly enough attention to the narrative, even though she has some favorites, and two, the isekai has dumped her into the role of the chief villainess, shortly before she's due to be executed. From the very first "oh, fuck that noise," the new villainess sets out to keep herself alive and generally cause as much chaos as possible to the narrative (the second mostly unintentionally) as she can. And that's before she discovers that she's not the first person who's been sucked into the narrative this way. Contains show-stopping musical numbers performed for an audience that doesn't know there's been a musical made of their story, corrupting the supposedly-innocent (and finding out they're not actually all that innocent), having everything within your grasp and deciding not to go for it, and, of course, a sequel hook where it turns out everything you knew was wrong, and now you have to deal with the consequences of it. Highly recommended for people who like characters that look at their fate and go, "Nope," and then merrily go about saving their own asses without giving a damn what happens to the narrative because of it.

Hopefully that'll get you started on something new. And if not, well, I'm a trained recommender of things, so maybe the people at your local Knowledge Center will have something for you that's just right.

Comments

[teres]

That's a good set of recs, and the last two books seem like something I would enjoy, so I'll keep them in mind! (And I'd agree with your opinion of RWBY, from what I've picked up myself.)

For Pern, while I can't say if it's really a deconstruction, I would say that it's thorough enough to reach the underlying issues with Pern, and it's certainly focussed on digging out assumptions and such, so I think it meets the criteria for what you want to call it. (It's a bit more summary than I'm used to, but that's hardly an obstacle... and I'm rather long-winded myself, after all.) I've also had some fun looking through you and your readers trying to make sense of Pern's society.

(By the way, it seems that you've got spam.)