Hi Everyone,
Work has picked up for me! A mixed bag in all honesty.
Dayglo talking about Gideon the Ninth reminded me of the number of authors I follow(?) who emerged from the Homestuck fandom. Homestuck, the first fandom that I’ll admit to being in!
I don’t want to go on a whole spiel defending Homestuck because that would be admitting that I need to make such a speech to defend a creative property. God! Yes! It has its problems and its fans have their own problems and we’re all very satisfied with ourselves, aren’t we! (Just realized that I haven’t explained what Homestuck is for the truly unaware. It was an innovative multimedia webcomic that ran from 2009-2016, although there is an ongoing sequel and video game, I believe? I’ve stepped away).
Anyway, I’m going to be obnoxious in the other direction and say that you had to be there. It was electric! There was a real sense that Andrew Hussie (the author lmao) was following fandom and responding to it. We felt invested in a mutual act of creation. He would even commission fandom artists for certain art, video, or music projects in the comic. (In a weird, adult, hindsight, this probably walked the line of violating intellectual property law (not that I’m casting a particular judgement here on the value of such laws), but no one expected the scope and profitability of the ensuing project (and this reflected much of the internet culture at the time)). I’ve never participated with fandom to the same degree as I did then, and I’m not sure I ever will, given the specific intersections of social media platforms and the transient communities they create. In many ways, the fandom took what would have been an okay story and expanded it into a glorious, full-bodied world. Every fan story, drawing, or project created character and depth and dimension in areas where Hussie had neglected to do so, making the sum greater.
Look, fandom got so big that at one point there was an interview series of old (“old”) fandom authors. There were multiple annual writing and art challenges, exchanges, album releases, and fan spin-offs. Of course, everything was hosted on Tumblr because we were dumb and enthusiastic and what I said earlier about social media platforms creating communities and I wouldn’t even know how to find half of it now.
Thank goodness that the Archive of Our Own (Ao3) exists for literally this reason, its wise and benificent creators having seen the rise and fall of such communities time and time again.
Right so, the authors.
Tamsyn Muir, author of the Hugo- and Nebula-nominated Gideon the Ninth, is urbanAnchorite (t_ZM). urbanAnchorite is such a Homestuck name, let me tell you. I haven’t read Gideon the Ninth yet, but I have a hold at the library! Aside from uh, the whole everything, it’s been hard to get because there’s such a long waiting list.
All of her fics are truly hardcore fandom classics, but if forced to pick one, The Serendipity Gospels is what I’d recommend. There are gorgeous illustrations by Shelby Cragg (schellibie), who also illustrated Calliope’s drawings in the comic. This story ships Terezi/Gamzee as a crack pairing, but essentially inspired its cursed presence in canon. Homestuck touches on some really dark themes, but tonally leads more funny and absurd, and this story takes the premises and runs more seriously with them, given, of course, that some of the premises are still really silly. Gamzee is at military school but its military school for evil Juggalo aliens cultists. The fic is unfinished, but I believe you can find some more sketches and an outline for the direction they intended to continue if you poke around online.
Arkady Martine, author of Hugo Winner A Memory Called Empire, is byzantienne. I also haven’t read her book. Same situation as above, really. For her, I have to recommend The Nameless City.
Ray Roach, wrote After the Storm, a brilliant self-published novel that I just sped through for the second time. It deals with some rough themes and some erotic themes, as a heads up, but I love it as a gay exploration of a post-American civilization? You can very much tell that Roach was into Homestuck and also the Motorcity fandom. It seems like he’s planning on having it as part of a series, which I’m very excited for. Roach is roachpatrol, and wrote and drew for the fandom prodigiously. There’s so much that’s so good, but I’m going to rec Lost Teeth Like White Jewels, which was written in collaboration with urbanAnchorite. This fic is set in an AU where the hemocaste (the alien species - called trolls (lmao) - have a caste system that’s based on their rainbow spectrum of blood colors that maybe has some biological implications as well as sociological. There was a pretty good blog that explored the potential xenobiology) is flipped. This AU has 3 published pieces up on Ao3 and then a 4th that was taken down, but that I luckily have saved as a pdf ;)
Since it’s not really fair to share a fic that’s a collaboration, let me also share roachpatrol’s Desperation Song. I think roachpatrol’s Tumblr got taken down back when they were doing the anti-porn purges, but if you’re smart with your keywords you can find a drabble of a sequel through the Wayback Machine.
Finally, Jennifer Giesbrecht is Cephied_Variable. She’s upfront about having been a fanfic author, especially given that her twitter handle is the same as her Ao3 handle. Giesbrecht wrote The Monster of Elendhaven, which I did not like? Maybe it’s because I read it just before we entered lockdown and it’s a dark gay plague murder story. Hhhh, being harsh, I didn’t get much of a sense of purpose from the book, which ugh agh if I was an author I would be so mad to hear because what does that mean? But yes. Also I found the subject matter upsetting, but that’s fully a personal preference. Google tells me Giesbrecht assisted with the Homestuck sequel, which explains some of the sequel’s more mature tone, but I haven’t read it and am not interested in talking about it! On to fanfic! Check out Cities in Dust (shit let’s be hardboiled)
He’s not a published author, but I want to shout out paraTactician, who wrote weird and classic Homestuck fics like Strider’s Edge, which is a mashup with Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisted, and The Vienna Game, which does the same with William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Can you imagine? Just to give you a sense of what people were doing and what the rest of us were consuming.
There are probably more, and certainly there are other chart-topping published authors I could name who got their start in fanfiction, even if it was through different fandoms. This is just some of the first generation to admit to such, having culturally been helped by the protective legal environment Ao3 has created and the subsequent recognition by major media companies of the a marketing boon an involved fandom.
Oh wow oh god a lot of these fics are deeply referential and self-satisfied. Sometimes that’s nice! You feel like you’re in on something. Dayglo again was talking about how people pick up a digital accent of sorts, where you can tell where they spent their teenage years online. Some of that is also clear in a fanfiction author - what fandom they started with, at what time, and on what platform. That imprint also arises in their published fiction, where these authors have been letting their fandom narrative voice slip into their genre fiction. It’s funny to see the unaware exclaim at this “new” style. Of course, a similar thing happened with Fifty Shades of Grey, where people who were familiar saw some character reminiscent of, let’s say, the old Sonic communities in it, yes? (I know it’s a Twilight fanfiction, I’m just giving a reference to an older fandom that’s more widely recognized for containing an immense ammounts of very clunky erotica). And yet, some of Homestuck has slipped ubiquitously into internet vocabulary as a whole. The whole angry loveable grouch giving a quite unasked for lecture in all caps going like LISTEN UP CHUCKLEFUCKS IM GOING TO TEACH YOU ABOUT CRUSTACEANS etc did not arise with Homestuck, in fact that character’s trait was a parody of such a type, but I can’t help but think they enforced each other. Same with my,,, uh,, favorite method of punctuation,,, and all those obnoxious genderneutral hipster insults, like douchecanoe.
I finally finished reading The Fever by Wallace Shawn and am ready to talk about it. Did I sit down and get it done immediately before writing this newsletter? That I am not ready to talk about. It’s only 18 pages, but about 2 pages in it grabbed me and I read it furiously in one sitting.
I’ve found it very hard, recently, to read dystopian fiction. I’ve had enough, you know? But this, set in a quasi-past, as it is, I can handle, hard as it is. That makes it sound like it’s burdensome to read about bad things happening, as if there aren’t people experiencing it directly, as if that wasn’t worse. This is not a new discussion, regardless, regardless. The piece addresses that very same question, and does so in a much more smooth and sincere way than I’m doing here, makes it more digestable, although again that’s not the right word. I like the clear sincerity and the stream of conciousness. That tracks, given that this is a play, given that it’s meant to be performed in the home, for a small group, intimately.
In some ways, it’s very depressing to read of someone living through the same times as you, experiencing the same emotions, for it to have been in an unresolved past. In some ways, it’s comforting.
Wallace Shawn played Vizzini in The Princess Bride movie, did you know that?
Here’s the playlist. I’m very proud of this mix - I think I happened to capture a very specific vibe/emotion. Perhaps a soft, melancholy Saturday morning? But one in which you are comfortable. Anyway, let people know about me.
//gabriella