Snowflake Challenge: Days 1, 2, & 3
Jan. 11th, 2017 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokifanI know! I thought I wasn’t going to do it and then I was just like I WANNA I LOVE A BANDWAGON.
Day 1
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. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
I feel like these three together represent a lot of my fannish interests & obsessions.
Resting With The Enemy - hurt/comfort, forgiving oneself and others, recovering from the war
Utter Cockslut (A Worthy Cause) - limit-pushing kink within a loving established relationship, multishipping, D/s and assorted kinks
Dashing Heroics - snarky banter, Auror fic, getting each other on a deep level even if you’re really different
Day 2
In your own space, share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Something that impacted on your consciousness in a way that left its mark on your soul. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
The works of Diana Wynne Jones. She was a British author of children’s fantasy novels and a star beyond stars; she’s a huge and acknowledged influence on some of today’s best-loved novelists, like Neil Gaiman and Frances Hardringe. She was also incredibly original; her novels varied enormously in plot and character and world.
Her novel Charmed Life, which I discovered at the age of ten in my primary school classroom, is the reason I found a passion for fantasy novels specifically over other genres. Eight Days of Luke is a story about a boy named David with a horrible but not abusive family (who later turn out to be actually evil but that’s not the point that stuck with me). He meets a boy named Luke, who is a wicked, charming liar and a great friend to David because he says David rescued him from prison. Luke’s family (Mr Chew, Mr Wedding, Thor, the Frys) turn up to chase him and put him back in prison, and David and Luke explicitly connect over their not-evil-but-terribly-harsh families. And Luke of course is Loki. My favourite iteration. I’d discovered Loki already, via Myths of the Norsemen, and loved him. But Luke is special. And I did identify with both boys pretty hard over the family stuff.
The treatment of Luke is clear-eyed: he almost murders two young women by setting their office block on fire because David says he’s bored. Luke is amused, watching the fire, and it’s only David’s voice which makes him stop. But it’s compassionate. And where Diana Wynne Jones left “her mark on my soul” is in her influence over the way I think. It took me years to track down her novels in various random bookshops, but they were pretty key years: around ten to fifteen. (And a last few towards the age of nineteen.) She had this very sharp, direct, compassionate way of looking at people and the way they behave, and her take on people and relationships and the way they’re great or not has influenced me, in ways hard to pin down but profound.
Her novels are full of awful families, and several have protagonists or sympathetic secondary characters who behave in fairly awful ways too. But it’s not grimdark; it’s actual realism, in the reality of family dynamics, fantastic or fucked-up, and the way that people are selfish or cruel - but not all of them. Most people are doing their best, and people can change. And you see characters find their way and escape their circumstances, generally in rather quieter ways than you’d expect. ♥
She never did a “redemption arc” in the sense we mean it now. But she wrote a few characters who change their ways: Astrid, Nick, even Howl. And it’s really undramatic but it’s also work to change your habits and it’s no-nonsense and it’s lovely.
I’m going to get a Diana Wynne Jones tattoo pretty soon, fyi. It’s also a quote from a John Donne poem; said poem is beautiful yet misogynistic, but she repurposed it in a way that’s drawn the poison for me entirely - it’s a poem that basically says all beautiful women are liars. She used the poem as a spell in Howl’s Moving Castle, a book about a beautiful man who’s a liar and under this spell, and rescued by an honest, no-nonsense woman. Now the book is not one of my absolute favourites of hers, but I do love it passionately, and the quote helps me thank her for leading me to fantasy. It’s also the subject line I used when I posted about her death, and it’s become inextricably intertwined with the way I think about Diana Wynne Jones and her influence on me.
Teach me to hear the mermaids singing
Day 03
In your own space, set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
See here.
Day 1
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. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
I feel like these three together represent a lot of my fannish interests & obsessions.
Resting With The Enemy - hurt/comfort, forgiving oneself and others, recovering from the war
Utter Cockslut (A Worthy Cause) - limit-pushing kink within a loving established relationship, multishipping, D/s and assorted kinks
Dashing Heroics - snarky banter, Auror fic, getting each other on a deep level even if you’re really different
Day 2
In your own space, share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Something that impacted on your consciousness in a way that left its mark on your soul. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
The works of Diana Wynne Jones. She was a British author of children’s fantasy novels and a star beyond stars; she’s a huge and acknowledged influence on some of today’s best-loved novelists, like Neil Gaiman and Frances Hardringe. She was also incredibly original; her novels varied enormously in plot and character and world.
Her novel Charmed Life, which I discovered at the age of ten in my primary school classroom, is the reason I found a passion for fantasy novels specifically over other genres. Eight Days of Luke is a story about a boy named David with a horrible but not abusive family (who later turn out to be actually evil but that’s not the point that stuck with me). He meets a boy named Luke, who is a wicked, charming liar and a great friend to David because he says David rescued him from prison. Luke’s family (Mr Chew, Mr Wedding, Thor, the Frys) turn up to chase him and put him back in prison, and David and Luke explicitly connect over their not-evil-but-terribly-harsh families. And Luke of course is Loki. My favourite iteration. I’d discovered Loki already, via Myths of the Norsemen, and loved him. But Luke is special. And I did identify with both boys pretty hard over the family stuff.
The treatment of Luke is clear-eyed: he almost murders two young women by setting their office block on fire because David says he’s bored. Luke is amused, watching the fire, and it’s only David’s voice which makes him stop. But it’s compassionate. And where Diana Wynne Jones left “her mark on my soul” is in her influence over the way I think. It took me years to track down her novels in various random bookshops, but they were pretty key years: around ten to fifteen. (And a last few towards the age of nineteen.) She had this very sharp, direct, compassionate way of looking at people and the way they behave, and her take on people and relationships and the way they’re great or not has influenced me, in ways hard to pin down but profound.
Her novels are full of awful families, and several have protagonists or sympathetic secondary characters who behave in fairly awful ways too. But it’s not grimdark; it’s actual realism, in the reality of family dynamics, fantastic or fucked-up, and the way that people are selfish or cruel - but not all of them. Most people are doing their best, and people can change. And you see characters find their way and escape their circumstances, generally in rather quieter ways than you’d expect. ♥
She never did a “redemption arc” in the sense we mean it now. But she wrote a few characters who change their ways: Astrid, Nick, even Howl. And it’s really undramatic but it’s also work to change your habits and it’s no-nonsense and it’s lovely.
I’m going to get a Diana Wynne Jones tattoo pretty soon, fyi. It’s also a quote from a John Donne poem; said poem is beautiful yet misogynistic, but she repurposed it in a way that’s drawn the poison for me entirely - it’s a poem that basically says all beautiful women are liars. She used the poem as a spell in Howl’s Moving Castle, a book about a beautiful man who’s a liar and under this spell, and rescued by an honest, no-nonsense woman. Now the book is not one of my absolute favourites of hers, but I do love it passionately, and the quote helps me thank her for leading me to fantasy. It’s also the subject line I used when I posted about her death, and it’s become inextricably intertwined with the way I think about Diana Wynne Jones and her influence on me.
Teach me to hear the mermaids singing
Day 03
In your own space, set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
See here.