#I’m working sanitisation art too but it’s been hard to get right

[aeriona]

I have discovered that Fuzzy Ooze is very fun to draw.

He looks like a wet dog lmao. a wet dog plagued by the Horrors

[milky-maid-library]

Chapter 2: Dis aliter visum

Chapter Summary: Elizabeth wakes up in the Institute and learns quickly how they treat the patients with the help of new friends.

Please read these Warning tags: 18+, child abandonment, mentions of abuse, references to racism. Forced rehabilitation.

Notes: Dis aliter visum means “Fate had different plans” and this is a gift for @cursedcursingviking​

It was just darkness, a never ending black that Elizabeth was vaguely conscious to, wondering if she’d ever awaken. The sensation of floating was ruined as her body fell and kept falling, hitting her hard away on a uncomfortable mattress. A ripping breath of air tore her to sit up, sweat had soaked her skin, hair and the softness around her. Her palm pressed into her chest trying to control the painful stabs of her pounding heart. Eyes darted around the room, discovering she was no longer in the hospital. She was in a cubicle space. The bed she was sweating on was surrounded by three walls and a curtain, no roof… she swallowed down her hard before hesitantly climbing ontop the mattress and peering over the walls. She discovered a larger room, a grand hall almost. Rows of cubicles filled with single and bunk beds surrounded the area. She counted at least thirty cubicles that she could see.

All the beds were eerily empty, she was so alone, it felt cold. As she climbed down her mattress, she noticed the shapeless dress she was wearing and tennis shoes. The ugliest green puke colour, patterned with long sleeves and high neck buttons. And on her wrist was a shiny permanent metal wrist band with her name, date of birth and blood status carved into it. She felt unable to breathe, it was the middle of spring, it was starting to get hotter! Her fingers ripped open her neck collar, letting her breath.

And as she rolled up her sleeves the curtain ripped back to the image of a wrinkly faced nun….

“Good Morning,” she smiled cynically, her blue eyes icy cold, “Would you like some breakfast?”

She was something crossed between a Delores Umbridge and a testy crow.

Elizabeth was skeptical, scared and definitely fleetly looking for an escape. She couldn’t remember where they’d taken her except that it was a correctional facility. If she managed to look around for a exit it would be in her favour especially since she was sure she hadn’t eaten anything in the last twenty four hours almost.

“Come on now then girl,” the shrewd woman snapped and flicked her hand, “don’t dawdle.”

Elizabeth was quickly on her tail. Her thighs rubbed together and as she walked she knew right away that her underwear was not her own. It made her want to vomit. As the nun lead her out of the hall of beds, they trailed down a hall of doctor’s and nurses offices and rooms filled with kitchens, laundry rooms, art supplies and fake nurseries.

They passed a great symbol painted into the wall. A depiction of a pregnant woman cradling the Omega symbol in her arms while she wore a large smile and a blindfold to cover her eyes.

You and me too lady, Elizabeth inwardly smirked. It wasn’t hard to figure out she was in ‘Saint Selene’s School For Adolescent Omega’.

And then her heart fell when they passed a window. She could see outdoors. She did not see a single building other than the facilities; she saw a grand distance of trees and mountains…but that was not what took away her breath. A fence, a tall and long fence barred her in this place, the tops wrapped with barbed wire.

This place was just a pretty prison.

When she stopped and stared at the fence, she almost broke into sobs. The nun scolded her and tugged her away by her shoulder. She was currently dragged to twin doors and welcomed the vision of three massive tables where over a dozen girls sat and ate their food. They all suddenly stopped, all their loud chatter dying down to whispers and finger pointing.

The woman in the habit grinned at them all who stared at them, “Girls,” she announced shrilly, “I’d like to introduce a new member to our blessed home, Miss Elizabeth Hillard.”

Her claws unleashed her shoulder and gestured to the tables, a bowl of porridge seemed to miraculously sit in her hands, passing it to her, fuck I must be really drugged up, she didn’t always have that with her did she?

“Well then…” the nun said, “Why don’t you find a seat?” and walked off the moment Elizabeth looked for an empty space. As she paced down the aisles, not a single girl looked at her welcomingly. They gave her glares and whispers of “Her hair is so untamed, so un-omega.” And “She looks dirty and smells wild, bad omega, don’t talk to her.”

Elizabeth almost cried then and there when she noticed there was no one that was like her there. Only pale racist bitches….until she noticed a blonde girl, around her age, skinny as a rake curling her fingers for her to come closer.

“Hey new girl,” she laughed, “sit with us.”

By that point she didn’t care if she was alone, but the chance of an invite wouldn’t be ignored when she came to such an ominous place. When she sat beside the girl she understood that the other four with her were her friends.  

Chewing her lip, Elizabeth whispered to them, “Are...you all Omegas?”

Chatter of the other tables increased. The skinny girl cackled meanly and regarded to her and her friends, “Nah, Kylie’s an Alpha elf and Gen is a beta pixie and I’m an eleven fingered witch.” She smartly said wiggling her only ten digits. The other girls giggled and snickered crudely.

“Okay,” Elizabeth rolled her eyes and leant back to leave, “‘yes’ would’ve been suffice.” Before another girl piped up over the gossiping crowds.

“What’s got you so hot new girl?” she winked her green eyes and flickered her ginger hair, “Didn’t like the results?” w

Sitting back Elizabeth stirred her cold porridge, mumbling, “I was meant to be an Alpha. But I’m now just a stupid Omega.”

“Easy with the mean words there, new girl,” snapped the girl with a toothpick between her teeth, “Did you think we chose to be Omega?”

Ouch, she never really took in account of Omega’s opinions growing up, knowing they would be the lowest of the low; she just assumed they enjoyed the thought of making babies.

Elizabeth flinched, a new side-effect of being an omega she suspected, “Sorry…”

“Hey, we get it,” The skinny girl scratched her blonde head, “Besides from what we heard, your parents abandoned you here? Talk of the town in here with the gossiping sisters. So you’ll be spending time with us during the summer break while all the other girls go home.”

Elizabeth blinked. Her parents really had abandoned her? After all these years of supposed unconditional love, they sent her away because of a gene she couldn’t control. She rubbed her eyes before any tears could fall. she didn’t feel like looking like a weakling in front of these girls.

“How many stay behind?”

“Including you?” she replied automatically, “Six.”

“Kylie,” she said pointing at a girl who was cleaning her nails and, her lips looked unnaturally dark pink against her olive skin. Her smock was the only one that looked nice on her. It fitted. Everyone’s looked too loose of too tight…

“Gen,” she then gestured to the smallest girl in the group, she had a soft face and full cheeks, bright eyes surrounded by round glasses and appeared the most excited to meet her despite not speaking a single word. She was closest appearance to a black girl compared to Elizabeth, but her loose hair and lighter skin with European features had her sceptical.

“Chip,” the finger directed to the green-eyed winking redhead with a hooked nose.

“Pepper,” was the most intimidating presence. Her eyes were deeply set in, her face was hard and sculpted with a sharp jaw, her teeth might’ve been yellow but that didn’t take away the message her toothpick gave. Her biceps were visible enough beneath the dress, Elizabeth wonder where her other muscles would be and how the hell did she get them? Down from her cheek to her chin, crossing over her lips was a nasty scar. Her short black hair was a poor haircut but that didn’t take away the threatening look she had.

“and me, I’m Legs.”

Out of almost a hundred girls, six remained? The rest had homes and families who cared and loved them. And even though she had a home…they didn’t love her enough to allow her back…her home was now these cold walls and sanitised floors.

She took a bite of her porridge and had little strength to swallow it. They all laughed at her screwed-up face and Chip slapped the table. Chip, Pepper….Legs?

“Are those your real names?” she heaved before pushing the bowl away.

“Fuck no,” Pepper huffed, “but it’s what we call eachother.”

The smallest, Gen proclaimed happily, “After living here for so long we tend to get a nickname.”

The longer she listened, the more she truly felt the ideals of a prison being inflicted….bad food, nicknames, solitary, uniforms.

“How long have you all been here?” Elizabeth looked around the table seeing their curious glances. She held hope, maybe after the summer her parents would gather their senses, she could manage 3 months.

“I have been here the longest,” said Legs, “Turned twenty, four months ago and I was dropped off when I was around seven, that was when they took in this age group. Now little ones go to ‘Camp Neoma for youngling Omega youth’.”

Gen tugged her sleeve and told Elizabeth, “Chip and I were dropped off within weeks of eachother when we were ten, now we’re eighteen, Pepper who’s nineteen got here two years ago.”

Chip wrapped her thick arm around Kylie who rolled her eyes while she chuckled, “And none of us are leaving this place unless we are twenty-one or if our parents come back to take us in. Kylie will be the first to leave since she got here at fifteen and she’ll be turning twenty-one in three months.”

“Absolute abandonment,” Kylie grinned while the rest of them giggled. It seemed they were excited for her freedom, but it only laid heavy on her mind, how long am I going to be forced to stay here?

Her throat tightened while tears accidently fell from her lashes….absolute abandonment… her parents were already there. Within seconds she wiped them up and looked to the ceiling, attempting to rub her eye and pretend it was just dirt in her eyes.

“So small fry,” Pepper prodded her with her spoon, “How old are you?”

“I um…I turned nineteen a month ago.”

“Damn it,” Gen whined, “I’m still the youngest.”

Kylie pulled in the smallest Omega and laid a kiss on her forehead, a fine lip mark appeared between the girl’s eyes. She then started to braid her hair and fix her collar, like a big sister… or a girlfriend. They kissed again, but on the lips before Chip jabbed Gen in the side and gestured to the nerving nuns stalk around the tables. They glared like starved hawks. When Elizabeth turned to look she could feel the unpleasantness of the dresses they were all wearing.

“D-do we have to wear these?” Elizabeth squirmed, scratching the back of her neck and her arms. Her bracelet was incredibly cold against her skin and whenever she moved it stung. Her senses to the new life had increased and she loathed every second.

“Yep,” Legs said, laying back, “Don’t worry, you grow used to it.  I mean you don’t have to choose, and stress about what you’re going to wear.”

Elizabeth didn’t want to get used to it, she wanted cotton, denim jeans or at least her own fucking underwear.  She shuddered, who even dressed her?

“Kylie suffered the harshest,” Gen giggled into Kylie’s shoulder. Kylie was running her fingers through her hair, attempting a perfect part. The two were soft, and borderline nauseating for her, yet the Omega in her yearned for some part of being looked after in a relationship.

Elizabeth figured she hadn’t stayed long enough to earn a title, but doing the math, surely…why did they all have them but, “Why don’t you have a nickname?”

“Kylie is my nickname,” she smirked and held out her polished hands, “My real name is Hannah, but I used to watch the Kardashians and reality tv like TLC religiously girl,” she whispered while a nun walked passed Elizabeth, “I have the best fashion sense out of everyone here including those guards.”

Elizabeth saw the hate in all their eyes, as their friend Legs explained, “Don’t trust any of the nurses or doctors, those fuckers act nice, but shit depending on your plan you’ll find out what kind of concentration camp this is.”

By all they’d told her, she was sure this was an official prison and with the sight of the fence that sent her into chills she accepted and agreed this was a place of hell.

“So….Legs?” Elizabeth dragged.

“We call Saddie ‘Legs’ since she’s the fastest,” Chips jerked her head to the side, “she’s gotten out, beyond the fence.”

Remembering back to the height and threatening barbed wire atop, Elizabeth’s eyes widened, “You’ve gotten out!?”

“Escaped and caught,” Legs chuckled proudly, fluffing her hair.

“…eleven goddamn times,” Pepper smirked, and sighed with a grimacing smile, “All to see some dumb fucking Alpha at Portia’s Penitentiary for Male Adolescent Alpha’s.”

Elizabeth gawked and kept think about the fence, if they could help her get out...but suddenly her head was spinning around, “I didn’t know Alphas had an institute,” she mumbled. What if she was an Alpha she could’ve still been thrown into an institution if her parents didn’t support her.

“They mostly put the boys who’ve tried to rape from their incontrollable restraints of their hormones and immunity to the basic suppressants you can buy at the counter,” Kylie explained.

“Except Isaac!” Legs defended, “He’s never raped anyone…he just…gets uncontrollably kinky and horny. Like me.”

Elizabeth gawked.

“Nasty slut,” Chips teased poking her tongue at Legs.

Legs scoffed, “Bitch.”

“Girls!” befell a booming tone, a deep solemn voice that had the hairs on the back of Elizabeth’s neck rising, “I hope I’m not hearing foul language being said in front of our new resident.” Prisoner. His thick hand curled onto of her shoulder, heavy and solidly threatening. She bit her lip, don’t interact.

“Hey Doc H!” Legs laughed “Nah,” and threw him a low high-five, she wiped her nose and shrugged while she warranted, “We’re just laying down the rules to the new girl…Like curfew…”

C-curfew?!

“Oh really?” he hummed staring at her.

“Yeah, good ol’ eight o’clock curfew for a four o’clock rise.”

The doctor laughed his head tilting back a slight.

Four o’clock? What the fuck is this place, the military?! This is undoubtedly a prison, Jesus!

“How’s our new resident feeling?” he asked, smiling down at Elizabeth.

She turned and held him in a might glare, her viperous tongue spat “How every girl feels being forced into an asylum without her consent, trapped and imprisoned.”

His smile did not faulter and that was something powerful…it stabbed her in the chest. He was not easily tempted to anger? Maybe she’d have to find another pen…He blinked and nodded slowly, that sickening, stomach dropping grin still on his face.

The silence was cold and the other girls shared side glances, even the other tables fell quieter to listen in.

“Docter H, what have you been up to lately,” Pepper commented brightly, the layer of dimmed joy grew back, “we haven’t seen you for so long!”

“Yeah, well I’m happy to tell you that I’ll be hanging around you more often. Oh and I got you something,” he bent down and whispered, “but I’ll give them to you tonight before lights out.”

He said something into Pepper’s ear and left, a giant smile stretched onto her lips. Like the cat that got the cream.  

Walking away Elizabeth leant back in her chair with a relaxed sigh, “Finally,”

“What’s wrong,” Legs murmured, “You and Doc H got bad chemistry or something?”

“He’s the asshole that put me here…” Elizabeth hissed.

“If he’s just an asshole, god help us from the other nurses and doctors, feral dogs they are. Doc H is doing his job but at least he makes time to make us feel human instead of just ‘Omega breeding stock and future wives’. You can’t trust any of the doctors in here, but he’s the least threatening.”

Threatening?!

Suddenly a whistle blew ear splittingly. Within seconds everyone was picking up their plates and standing up, walking from their tables. Shoving away from the table the five girls of the group rose from their seats.

“C’mon,” Elizabeth felt a tap on her arm, “grubs over,” Legs grinned, “how’s your skills at washing clothes?”

She collected her own plate of food and followed the other girls to rows of bins to shove them into…

“It’s not that hard,” Elizabeth finally smiled, “You just chuck it into the washing machine and then the dryer.”

But when her new found friends started to all laugh together she felt a wind of dread…were they not washing clothes?

The steam of the hot water filled the air and entered every ladies lungs as the worked tiredly. The steam would creep up to the ceiling and slip out the cracks in the walls and the barely opened windows. Big bath tubs filled the room, water hot to touch. Drenched bedsheets, and uniforms were piled and soaked in the tubs. The soap was churned into the clothes and sheets with wooden dolly sticks that were heavy and hard to use. This was it….scrubbing clothes clean. Blisters becgan to form quickly onto Elizabeth’s soft hands. When one popped, she hissed in pain and barked with furious frustration, “Ugh mother fucker!”

The Nuns sitting down ‘supervising’ with canes by their sides were quick in action.

“Is something wrong Elizabeth?” The most patient questioned.

“Yea,” Elizabeth threw down the stirring tool and yelled, “This is fucking slave labour!” folding her arms defiantly she jerked her chin to the herself and the other girls who paused from their obedient actions, watching these events, “What’s next?” she wiped her sweaty face, “Cotton Picking?!”

“Miss Hillard!” gasped an older, intimidating nun who was red in the face and wide in the waist, “I would prefer you wouldn’t use such unladylike language in front of others.” She tapped the edge of the tub with her cane and stomped her foot, “This is standard Omega training, learning the basic training is essential for the life you will lead.” The cane was then poked at Elizabeths chest.

She slapped it away from as quickly as it dared settled, “Just because my chromosomes got meddled with, doesn’t mean I should hand wash. When I leave I plan to pay people to wash my clothes at the laundromat, like a normal person.”

Now Elizabeth could hear the girls around her make the same comments again, “bad omega”, “Disrespectful”, “Dirty”, “Lazy Omega”, “No one wants an Omega like her.”

And instead of feeling the senses to cry, she gritted her teeth and tightened her hands into fists. The nun mimicked her actions as she spat, “I will not tolerate your tone or disobedience. If you don’t wish to participate in today’s activities you can conduct hall duty.”

In the corner of her eye she could see Chips shaking her head while she mouthed the word “no”…But how could hall duty be worse than this? It’s just making sure people are not in the halls without passes and permission!

Hall duty? A blessing! Great heaven you are good! She would said confidently, “Anything but this…”

[sarasmallmanwrites]

A-Level Playing Field

Nobody wanted my opinion on this, but it’s hard growing up poor. 

1988. It’s that damp kind of evening outside, clouded by condensation on the single glazed windows, and the smoke from my Nan’s Benson and Hedges. We’ve just had tea – this is North, of course – and everything is accompanied by slices of springy bread heavily lacquered in ‘soft spread’. The gold foiled butter is, usually, saved for my grandad, who works at a fibreglass factory. It’s a very long way away (actually 3.7 miles) and he leaves on his bike every evening with three rounds of tinned ham sandwiches in his bag. Tonight, my mum is out until half nine, working in the care home in the next town, picking me up at ten-ish, depending on how fast she walks. My mum is 27. Five years out of a loveless marriage, living in a council house, she has no qualifications but is working for her City and Guilds and her English ‘O-Level’, GCSEs haven’t hit our vocabulary yet, and won’t until my second cousin Mark does his two years later.

Tonight is Thursday. Nan goes out on a Thursday, which means she will leave the house at half seven in a haze of Vitapoint, Elnett and Lily of the Valley, to play Bingo at the local club. I am being looked after by Alan, my mum’s younger brother, living at home, working in the Mill that overlooks the town below like a stern Victorian overseer. He’s always grumpy, stuck in a town that has no opportunities, and no visible exit. The eighties have been cruel to young, working-class men. The vehement cry of ‘get the fuck out’ hasn’t reached our town but will do in eight years time, on a wave of Britpop, New Labour, cigarettes, and alcohol.

My uncle looks to the television for nightly escape. Thursday is Blackadder, it’s Not The Nine O’Clock News, it’s Comic Strip, it’s A Bit of Fry and Laurie, it’s Red Dwarf, it’s shipwrecked and comatose, and me engrossed on the couch, not sipping mango juice, but milky tea (the North!), as my uncle laughs his head off in between cigarettes. My mum returns, smelling like TCP and the outside, with salty, vinegary chips, and we eat them as we walk the newly tarmacked paths under the orange street lights. I ask her what a goldfish shoal is. She tells me to shush.

I decided that weekend that I wanted to be funny. I mean I could make people laugh when I did my Cilla Black impression, so surely that was a start, and thank to Carry On films I was brilliant at ‘Infamy, Infamy!’, I knew this because my grandad (the cleverest man I knew) had told me so. Even though I was only in Junior One, I knew that you had to be taught how to be funny, that there was definitely some kind of class that you would have to take to learn it, because I had never really been a natural at anything; apart from whistling, which I did with gusto in shrill, high- pitched tones wherever I could.

I read a lot, especially the paper – particularly the Daily Mirror, which probably explains why I am always heavily weighted to the left, and not just because of my ineptitude in heels – and found out that Hugh Laurie, who is obviously the funniest man I have ever encountered, went to Cambridge and was in something called ‘The Footlights’. Then was it, I decided. I was going to go to Cambridge and join ‘The Footlights’ and be funny like Victoria Wood and Dawn French. I imagine ‘The Footlights’ to be a rag-tag theatrical group living on their wits, humour, and more importantly, Pot Noodles. I tell my Grandad that I want to go to Cambridge. He tells me not to be daft.

Now, when I think about it, wanting to go to Cambridge was not a preposterous idea for any child at the age of seven; you are at the start of your education journey. There is plenty of time to get better at things, to practice, to be coached, to improve yourself; but for a working-class girl, who would eventually be the first member of her family to go to university, I might as well have said that I wanted to fly to Mars on fairy wings. But, children who attend private schools are told from the age of four that Oxford or Cambridge are the end goals for their education, with any of the higher-performing Russell Group universities being something that they could settle for, at a push. I didn’t even know what a Russell Group University was until about three years ago, and why would I? For me, in my small artsy primary school with forty children across four year groups, a dismissive attitude towards formal English education, and a liberal fancy for devoting the whole of the summer term to the end of year show, this was not something that was even thought about. Oxford and Cambridge were places printed on the back of books, they weren’t places that you went to university. In fact, most of my primary school teachers hadn’t even been to university but received their qualifications at the local teacher training college; the only exception is a brown jumpered gentleman with a penchant for using cupboards as a disciplinary technique. 

We’ll skip forward a few years later, and high school is a vigorous mixing bowl of talents, it takes until at least year nine before anyone even notices who I am amongst the squall of kids churning about in KS3. Dinner is pink sausage meat wrapped in a translucent puff pastry duvet, a treat even on the hottest days when the fat sticks to your lips; and the terms pass in a haze of cheap cider (the kind that tastes like sick), the floral pout of Cherry Lypsyl, and Chris Evans on the Radio One Breakfast Show; who is hastily snoozed every morning before I smell the lukewarm coffee my mum has left by my bed before she goes to work.  At this point my mum is a newly qualified nurse at the hospice two towns over, her fingers raw from hand sanitiser, but with rolls of antiseptic scented micropore tape that I use for a cacophony of projects. She is on nights right now, spooning gravelly granules of instant coffee into a mug, blurry from sleep, I am cobbling together a mask out of old Cornflake packets, stuck together with nursing supplies and painted with nail varnish that went past its best around the same time as the Thompson Twins. It is 1995, and the country feels like it is on the cusp of something.  I don’t know what, but I’m looking forward to the Year 2000 because I will be fully grown. Well, nineteen.

But what about Oxbridge? Well, for starters, if you attend a state school you have to be so immediately impressive to your teachers that they discuss you in the staffroom. It’s not enough to be good at one particular thing, you have to excel across the board. You have to be so amazingly shiny, that even the most jaded teacher in the school cannot fail to be dazzled by your brightness. For state school kids, Oxbridge is not something that they suggest to the average 10 A*-C kids, it’s not something that they even dangle in front of 10 A*-B kids who are pretty good. At state school, you have to be exceptional for your teachers to even consider you as a candidate, and then you have to achieve enough A*s in your GCSEs that you might as well open a Planetarium. Even then, all they can really do is say ‘I think you could go to Oxford or Cambridge, you know’, or flag you up to the local authority careers service as ‘potential Oxbridge’. There is no Oxford Fast Track programme in state schools, even for exceptional kids.

In a recent social media fracas, one lady proclaimed that if you gave kids a level playing field then poor kids would always triumph because they were more resilient - all those Crispy Pancakes, surely? But for children from a working-class background, we’re not even on the playing field yet; we have to borrow trainers with non-marking soles, scrape around for a quid for the bus. By the time we get to the playing field, we have already been running around for half the day trying to get there, we miss the warm-up because we were late and, honestly, by this point, we’re just knackered because we’ve had to work so much harder just to get there in the first place.

The warm-up is a given to those whose parents have been able to pay for their education – they even get complimentary orange slices for afterwards, just for extra pep and vigour. There are Oxbridge prep classes, extracurricular activities slanted towards the Oxbridge admissions interviews, and chances to take unpaid internships during the summer using family connections. It’s not just that though... it’s little things like knowing it’s pronounced ‘Barkshire’, not Berkshire, it’s when you use a napkin, it’s spending a week skiing at Courchevel. It’s olives. 

In 1998, I don’t know any of these things and, even if I did, my accent with its flat vowels and its Lancashire intonation would give me away in a heartbeat, because I sound like I’ve fallen off a pit pony on my way back t’mill. Things change quickly though. My mum has a baby. A screaming, mewling little boy born during The Simpsons on a Friday evening in October. Now there is absolutely no money for luxuries, and when our TV gets nicked, we end up using the small portable from upstairs. My Nan lends me money here and there to get to college, but it only covers the bus fare, and the small endowment that I receive  - supposedly to cover driving lessons - gets swallowed up with everyday things that seventeen-year olds shouldn’t have to pay for. I’m working for 4 hours a week in Woolies too, £3.10 p/h to stand around the toy department in a slippery polyester blouse the colour of synthetic mint ice cream, before skulking off to the bookshop to spend that money on things for college.  Nothing fancy but, by this point, I am well on my way to being a ‘Funny Girl’, studying a raft of ‘arty-farty’ A-Levels and English thrown in for good measure. The Cambridge Footlights hardly crosses my mind anymore, because Oxford and Cambridge are reserved for the kids doing the hard sciences, maths, law, politics, things that you need a calculator for. You don’t get into Oxford with A-Levels in Theatre Studies, Media, and Performing Arts, despite what they tell you about diversity.

Oxford or Cambridge do not offer a typical British university experience, and how can teachers who have never passed through the rigorous and exhausting Oxbridge admissions procedure be expected to offer any kind of advantage to their gifted and talented students? If you are a working-class parent relying on underfunded, underpaid and overworked FE lecturers to help coach your child through this, then you are immediately on the backfoot compared to a child whose parents can afford private tutors, admissions booklets, and interview coaches. This is no reflection on sixth form teachers in FE establishments across the country, who do all they can to nurture the kids with Oxbridge potential, but when some classes haven’t received new textbooks for two years, where students are encouraged to photocopy their own materials to save costs, you can see where the class difference begins to draw attention to itself without the need for neon yellow highlighters.

My UCAS book arrived in September; an impressive, thinly papered tome with a glossy black and white cover, University Colleges and Admission Services stamped across it in orange. It smells like a cross between the Argos catalogue and a phone book, which I feel is rather apt given that it contains the codes of institutions and courses that will break me out of this godforsaken town: a cypher that I etch out on the application form in black biro.

London

Southampton

Buckinghamshire

Preston

Liverpool

Manchester.

I don’t want to go to any of the bottom three, of course, far too close to where I came from to be relevant.  My second cousin Mark’s stint at Sheffield Hallam seemed to be an excuse for his mum to visit his ‘digs’ once a month with catering sized tins of Nescafe, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t quite looking forward to edging the lid off with a knife and stabbing through that ridged foil. My mum writes a cheque out in her secondary modern handwriting, crossing her fingers that they won’t cash it until after payday.

The discrepancies between low-income working-class families and those with a better income also show here too - this can be something as simple as slow internet connection, not having a working laptop and doing work on smartphones, access to transport, costs for travel to visit universities. Things like this are not included when factoring in costs for students from low income. How can you visit all the different university campuses, with all the travel costs and maybe even overnight accommodation, when your parents can barely afford to keep the lights on? There was only one institution that I wanted to go to. London Institute, a glamourous collection of art colleges that included the London College of Fashion, Central St Martins, and, more importantly for me, The London College of Printing.  The competition was fierce, but I was shortlisted for an interview in the capital with a former editor of the Daily Mirror. My house was showered in happy expletives that day. Even in 1999, tickets from Wigan to London were over £50 for a pre-booked return. My mum cashed in all of her Clubcard points for the ticket. But, just for me, because she hadn’t bought enough milk to cover the cost of two tickets. However, I must have impressed Tony Delano in that office in Clerkenwell, because he gave me an amazingly lowball offer meaning that my A-level results became a terribly graded self-fulfilling prophecy.

Oxford is different from usual universities in that there are colleges, thirty-nine in total. You might have seen them on University Challenge – Balliol, Trinity, Emmanuel, Brasenose – or from reading the Wikipedia pages of any of our last three Prime Ministers, including the incumbent Boris Johnson, who graduated with a 2:1 in 1987. That’s the other thing – you don’t study something at Oxford, you read it – you don’t start your studies, you matriculate, for which you need a robe. Now, I have been told by helpful and obstinate alumni via social media that Matriculation Robes are £25, ex-hire. However, I have also been told by a current Oxford student that the robe cost is £50 minimum, and no-one would dare wear a secondhand robe as ‘everyone would know’. It’s immediately singling yourself out as a Weasley in a room filled with Malfoys.

The accommodation costs are comparable to London prices; however, this does not cover the Christmas break, which means everything needs to be packed up and stored. Not only do you pay for the storage, but you pay for the boxes too. Much to my disappointment, no-one nips out for a Pot Noodle either, students are expected to dine ‘in hall’ (again, more cost!) where you can choose between an informal and a formal sitting – where your gown is required. I imagine for a working-class kid attending Oxford or Cambridge is very much like cosplaying on a Harry Potter set, but without the magic of a bottomless purse. There are balls too at the end of each term, formal affairs with ticket prices over £50. Again, said the former alumni, you don’t have to go! It’s not obligatory!

But let me tell you a harsh reality. Nothing ostracises a poor kid more than not being able to join in because they can’t afford it. Nothing. And we might have great friends who would all chip in and pay for our ticket, or lend us the money, but there is something very working-class about not wanting people to know that we can’t afford it. Surely we should not be asking these young adults who have studied and worked against all odds, to have a second class university experience because they know their parents won’t be able to help. You can’t even get a job to supplement your income either; the majority of colleges stipulate this, and as someone who had to work two term-time jobs at a much less prestigious university to live (even with the glorious student overdrafts of pre-austerity Britain), this really hit home at how much I would have struggled financially if I had gone to either of these institutions.

Recently my daughter applied for university. We get in the car and visit a university each week, driving miles up and down and across the country. We fight over choices and analyse each course based on employability, and whether or not she would like it. The process is completed in clicks and feels much more clinical than twenty years earlier, but rather than heading into unchartered waters, I have a map. It might be old and tattered, but I have a much better idea of where we are going now. My daughter believes that the meritocracy is a lie, and she tells me this in sharp, pointed tones as we receive her A-level results on a rainy Thursday morning. She goes to University in September and spends the autumn sending me videos of the Minster, or tutorials on how to swear in Japanese. She is only the second person in our family to continue on to higher education. I don’t just mean in her generation. I mean in total. We are the exception, not the rule.

One of the first questions someone at Oxford was asked by a fellow student last year was ‘private or state’, she replied ‘private’ and was met with a smile. There was no need to ask who the state school entrant was, as she queried the partridge and asparagus served for dinner – ‘this chicken is tough. Is that grass?’- and arrived for the formal sitting with her gown covering a denim skirt and shimmery top underneath. Private school teaches these things, no desperate faux pas for Isobel or Jeremy, whereas state schools do not have the resources or the knowledge to run classes on etiquette for the small number of their students that make it through the intense application procedures. This is not saying that low-income children should be discouraged – not at all – instead, it is saying that there is something inherently wrong with the system. At private school, you are disappointed if you don’t get into Oxbridge, whereas the state school child who gets in is an extraordinary anomaly talked about for years in hushed tones of reverence by the faculty.

And this is the issue with saying that children are on a level playing field, that everyone is measured on their own merit; because it is not true. For children on very low incomes, the odds are unfairly stacked against them, and the issues such as 2020’s disastrous A-Level results just add more bricks to an already near-insurmountable wall.

[sparxwrites]

I would be incredibly interested to read what you were talking about in the tags of that ask/post~

#there’s a lot more i could write abouthow this is an emerging pattern in fan culture #and how what wasinitially meant to be a community free from content creators #is nowincreasingly becoming a community beholden to them and their approval#a community that operates within their oversight #and how people whouse fandom for what it was traditionally used for - as a sociallysubversive medium outside of mainstream control #are being penalisedfor refusing to sanitise their content and fall in line

Ihope you wanted an 8k essay about fan-creator interactions and whythey frequently end up being toxic for fans, creators, and also aboutfandom as an increasingly monetized and manipulated community, anon,because that’s what you’ve got.

Asa disclaimer, before we start: I am a linguist by training, not aneconomist, sociologist, or psychologist (though my discipline doescross over with the latter two in several places). This is written inan academic-ish style, but it’s largely based on my personalexperiences in fandom over the past ten years, the personalexperiences of the hundreds of friends and strangers that I’vetalked to or read essays by during that time, and a lot of personalresearch and reading. It’s not Word Of God, and I’m entirely opento people critiquing it, arguing with it, or elaborating on it –stuff like this is, I feel, something we need more dialogue about infandom spaces. With all that said…

Thesisstatement: Historically,fandom has very much operated on a “keep creators as far fromfandom as possible” basis, for some very excellent reasons. Withthe rise of social media contact, the gradual mainstreaming offandom, and increasingly fandom-aware creators and corporations, itis no longer possible to keep creators away from fandom. However, inthe rush to embrace creators into fandom, many of the hard-learnedlessons of fandoms past (and present) have been forgotten andignored. This, in combination with the increased monetization offandom and the exploitation of free fan labour by capitaliststructures, is a dangerous and potentially toxic combination. Whilstit’s not possible – and not desirable – to turn back the clock,fandom needs to carefully consider exactly whywe’re inviting creators into fandom space, how that should behandled, and how to mitigate the potential consequences of that.

Firstoff, there are a few pieces of terminology uses I want to make clear,and a few starting assumptions I want to detail, just so we’re allgoing into this from somewhat the same starting point:

When I say fandom here, I mean creative fandom – ie. writers, artists, graphics makers, cosplayers, and various others, along with the people who support them and interact with them in a variety of ways. There are other kinds of fandom, of course; notably casual fandom where someone simply enjoys a book / show / movie, or collative fandom, focused on collecting facts / statistics / comic editions / props. These types of fandom are not the ones I have experience with, however, and are also not entirely relevant given this discussion is specifically about creators in creative fandom.

I’m assuming that fandom is a space where people should be allowed to create whatever the hell they want, within the bounds of legality. That means if people want to write rape fic, draw art of extreme kinks, cosplay “problematic” characters, or ship unhealthy / abusive ships, they should be able to – without people going “think of the children!” or “you’re a Bad Person”. Debating whether this attitude is the right one is another conversation entirely; you can read more about why I take this stance in an essay I wrote a while back about ‘heavy’ kinks, and also in the purity politics tag on my personal blog – but if you fundamentally disagree with this stance, you’re probably going to disagree with this essay in general.

When I use “creator(s)” here, I’m talking about the people making the canon content – whether that’s an actor, a voice actor, a writer, a director / producer, a comic artist, a game development studio, a youtuber, whatever. When I use “fan(s)”, I’m primarily talking about individuals within creative fandom (ie. those who create fan content, and those who support them). Yes, some (if not most) fans are absolutely creators too, given fan content is just as valid and creative as ‘official’ content – but it is, linguistically, easier for me to use “creator” and “fan” rather than having to tie myself up in descriptive knots. Yes, there are areas of fandom that are primarily about curation rather than creation, and there are fans who simply enjoy the source material and don’t involve themselves in what they would consider “fandom” at all, and those are valid ways of interaction with the source material – but, as I mentioned above, that’s not the aspect of fan-creator interaction and fandom I’m talking about.

So,now we’ve got that out the way…

1.Fandom History, “Purity Politics”, and Censorship

Historically,mainstream media has not been kind to fandom – nor have mainstreamwebsites, or even primarily fandom-oriented websites for that matter.Fanfiction.net is notorious for having done a mass-deletionof “adult” works(though theirongoing policing of this is spotty at best and nonexistent at worst),and I remember them also having a list of authors who’d contactedthem and “asked” them not to host fic from their books / serieson the website. Livejournal also had severalmass deletions thatpartially targeted fan communities, especially communities producing“unacceptable” fanworks. Slash communities and the like wereoften specifically targeted, because the people pushing for thedeletions had homophobic agendas and considered queer fiction more“inappropriate” than heterosexual / gen fiction.

Thiswas, in some ways, the beginning of our current purity politicsepidemic – people campaigning against certain types of fanfic thatthey personally disliked or disagreed with under the banner of“protecting the children” – except, in these instances, it waspressure coming from outside fandoms rather than within them. AO3(and the Organization for Transformative Works’ associated effortstowards fandom archiving, fannish academia, and legal advocacy) wasfounded partiallyas a response to these deletionsand to the concept of “acceptable” versus “unacceptable”fanworks.

I’mnot gonna do a huge history lesson here, but if you want to read moreabout this, a little bit of googling will get you a long way (as willfollowing the links above). These events have been talked aboutextensively by people who were more involved in them than I was, andif you haven’t heard about them before, they’re worth readingabout. Fandom history is important, y’all.

WhatI’m getting at here is there’s a reason older fans / peoplewho’ve been in fandom a while have a good reason to be faintlyparanoid about creators coming into fan spaces, or being too aware ofthem. Specifically,fans who write “inappropriate” or “bad” fanworks –including adult or nsfw content, Real Person Fiction (rpf ) / RealPerson Slash (rps), slash or femslash, anything involving dark ormature themes such as sexual abuse, child abuse, incest, rape,domestic violence, etc. – have the most reason to be concerned.Backlash to the same degree as has happened in the past is a littlemore unusual, due to the mainstreaming of fandom and increased fansolidarity, but it still happens.

(Assomeone who’s both been in fandom for A While now and remembers theaftermath of the deletions (even though I didn’t have an LJ accountor write mature fanfic at the time) and writes “bad” fanworks, Ihave doubly good reason to be paranoid. Hence why I talk about this alot, and have Strong Opinions on it. Most of the other people I’vetalked to who have Strong Opinions on this tend to fall into thosetwo categories, too. If you’re not from these groups, then… maybeconsider, if you’re sitting there going, “yes, but Idon’t feel threatened by anyof this,” whyyou don’t feel threatened. Try to see it from our perspective.)

Inaddition to corporate / website efforts to stamp out fandom spaces ingeneral, and “undesirable”, non-mainstream, or subversive fanspaces specifically (including, again, gay / queer spaces, becausethat was considered “undesirable”), various authors and showsmade their own efforts. Anne Rice is notorious for her veryaggressive stance against fanfiction. Even JK Rowling, one of thefirst authors to publicly say she was okay with fanfic, has gone onrecord saying she objects to adult work involving HarryPotter characters – although“innocent” fics by “genuine fans” are okay, apparently.

Theshow Supernaturalhas had several entire episodesdedicated to taking the piss out of fandom in general – andfangirls specifically, caricaturing them as ditzy, obsessive, creepy,lonely, unlikeable, sex-obsessed – despite the fact that theirfandom is the only reason they’re still running. It’s all thesame usual, unpleasant stereotypes that get pulled up every timewomen, and especially teenage girls, become invested in or excited bya piece of media. A previous fandom of mine, the Yogscast, had ahistory of begging and / or outright stealing fanart from artists formerch, video use, or general promo stuff – but also decided to reada fairly ‘innocent’, fluffy fic on stream in order to mock boththe author and the fic (and in the process drove the author off theface of fandom internet, basically).

Again,we see fandom and fanworks being split into “acceptable” and“unacceptable” by content creators – people not actuallyinvolved in fandom, but feeling as though they have a kind ofownership over it, or say in it – based on mainstream mediastandards and their personal morals (and what they can monetizeversus what they can’t, though more on that later). And the reasonthey feel like they have any kind of ownership over fandom is veryoften that they are a creator, and they see fanworks as, in someways, “belonging” to them rather than just being a derivative oftheir work.

Creatorshave always struggled to understand that fandom is, primarily, forthe fans– not there as an expression of the fans’ heart-eyed adorationfor the creators, but as an expression of the fans’ creativity, oftheir ideas and enthusiasm for the work itself, and often of theirdissatisfactionwith the source material. Fandom is a space for the fans, butcreators often feel as though they should have some kind of say init, merely by merit of having created the source material.

Historically,this entitlement – valid or not, though I’m inclined towards not– has manifested itself as creators aggressively(and generally unsuccessfully) trying to stop the creation of fancontent based ontheir material. Which is a pretty terrible option, given it destroysfandoms and often leads to harassment and legal issues for fans.

Somewherebetween that and where we are now, we had creators realising therewas fuck-all they could do about fannish activities, given the sizeof the web and the determination of fans, and instead just did theirbest to ignore it all. This was, in my opinion, a pretty good courseof action. This was what tended to happen with fandom when I firstentered it – creators were aware of it, it occasionally got broughtup in interviews if a particularly dedicated reporter had discoveredit existed, and the creator usually laughed nervously and saidsomething to the effect of, “I know it’s out there but I tend toavoid it for legal / personal reasons”.

2.The Monetization of Fandom, and the Exploitation of Fan Labour

So,what changed between then and now? A lot, I think – including theemergence of a generation of new, fandom-savvy and tech-savvycreators, many of whom grew up in fandom (think Rebecca Sugar, AlexHirsch, the cast of Critical Role to a degree… others, probably,but those are the ones I’m aware of) knowing where to go to findfandom. Also, the rise of social media, and the increasing ease ofinteracting with fandom on a variety of platforms.

Asa creator, when you’ve got a bunch of people who love the thing youcreated, and are producing a bunch of derivative works from it, thatcan be very flattering! And people tend to react positively to theopportunity to interact one-on-one with a creator, which social mediaallows them to do, and again this positive feedback is veryflattering. Being in a fandom space for a creator is, at its mostshallow and cynical, an ego boost – you have a huge base of peoplewho all (usually) like a thing you’ve made, like you and thinkyou’ve very clever for having made it, and are (usually) eager tocreate things either based off of the thing you did, or even as adirect present for you.

There’salso the fact that fandom is now big enough to very successfullymonetize, and creators (and big businesses) are increasingly workingout how to do this successfully. This takes a lot of different forms:ever-growing conventions with ever-more dealer tables, more merch,subscription-based services (such as Geek & Sundry and Nerdist’sAlphaor Roosterteeth’s First,or even Twitch subscriptions), Youtube in general, Patreon /Kickstarter… and also, more insidiously, theuse of fandom as free labour.

Fandomhas alwaysbeen partially about labour,as anyone who’s ever made fanart or fanfic or manips or a podcastor… well, really anything, can attest to. Even being actively partof a community is, in some ways, labour. However, there’s adifference between free (and freely given) labour – writing a ficis hard work, true, but often it’s funtoo, and is done as a labour of love, as a form of play or relaxation– and exploited free labour.

Freelabour is the creation of fanart and fanfic and other art and objectsby fans, for fans. Free labour is labour done under the heading of“play” or “relaxation” or “a hobby”, something thecreator enjoys doing. Free labour is even fan-run websites, or fanscampaigning to get a show back on air, or doing other things thattraditionally PR and advertising managers would do except for free,of their own free will just because they love the source material.

Exploitedfree labour is Anime Expo, a 10,000 attendee strong for-profitconvention callingfor volunteer translators to do skilled labour for free.Exploited free labour is the Yogscast, a major Youtube network,askingfor free art from skilled fanartists, and repeatedly failing tocredit fanartists who’ve done commissions for them.Exploited free labour is Amanda Palmer raising $1.2 million onKickstarter, but solicitingfans of hers who were professional musicians to work for her for freebecause she “couldn’t afford to pay them”.Exploited free labour is Universal Studios solicitingFireflyfans to help market and promote the movie for free, and then sendingthem a cease-and-desist letter once the movie had been released.Exploited free labour is E.L. James getting FiftyShades of Grey published offthe back of reviewsand collaborative idea generation from hundreds of fellow fandommembers, butcompletely failing to acknowledge this. Exploited free labour isLiveJournal’s(thankfully failed) attempt to make a for-profit fanfiction sitewhere writers had to surrender copyright to the creators of canon.The examples go on, and on, and on.

Fandomhas gone from something small and rather community based – wherepeople didprovide skilled labour for free, because cons and such were organisedby the community for the community, because there wasn’t a lot ofmoney going round, because it was about fandom rather than profit,because they were recompensed for that free labour in non-monetaryways (including reputation and other social currencies) – tosomething monetized. Cons are run by businesses now, primarily, andorganised fan events are professional affairs where a lotof money changes hands. Corporations that try and equate the two arebeing deliberately manipulative.

Basically,fundamentally capitalist constructions like the kind we see incorporate-ized fandom deliberately invoke fandom’s history of giftculture in an attempt to scam fans out of free labour. The wholepoint of gift culture is that it is reciprocal– I create something for a friend or someone I like, and in returnthey create something for me (even if that creation is a review ofwhatever I created, or something more abstract than a tangiblereward). The whole point of capitalism is that it isn’treciprocal, or at least not in the same way – I provide a servicefor someone who is likely to be a complete stranger, and in returnthey give me money. When capitalism tries to wriggle out of the“giving me money” bit of their equation by appealing to the factthat, in a gift culture, I do things for “free”, it’s blatantbullshit quite frankly.

It’sblatant, deliberatebullshit, because the companies know exactly what they’re doing,and what they’re doing is devaluing and exploiting fan labour offthe back of fandom’s cultural traditions.

(Andbefore someone says, “but it is reciprocal! Creators make a thingfor us, and we make a thing for them,” I’m going to point outthat often fans have alreadyengaged with the capitalist modelto access the Creator Thing in the first place. Fans have paid forthe movie, book, TV show, or they’ve subscribed to the Twitchchannel, or the Patreon, or donated to the Kickstarter. The creatorsare already getting monetarily compensated for their work, becausemainstream creators work in the context of the capitalist model, notthe gift culture model. Therefore, the things the creators are makingcannotbe the reciprocal part of the gift culture, since that has alreadybeen bought.)

It’sone thing for me and a friend to organise a fanmeet for a fandomwe’re in, for free, where the meet is about meeting friends fromthe fandom and socialising. It’s another thing for, say, a companyrunning a convention that will be making tens of thousands, if nothundreds of thousands, of dollars of profit, to ask if I’llorganise thatfor free. That’s a dramatic (and somewhat unrealistic, though seethe translator thing above) example, but the point stands.

Capitalismtakes advantage of fandom’s innate gift culture, and itstraditional free exchange of ideas and fan collaboration, in moreinsidious ways, too. As thispaper (which youmay not be able to read in full if you don’t have institutionalaccess, but I can provide if you message me) notes, regarding a viralseries of videos on Youtube called Lonelygirl15that was one of the first new media fandoms:

[…] the team consciously used to theiradvantage the myth of the do-it-yourself (DIY) celebrity inherent toYouTube. […] YouTube’s ability to freely distribute content tomillions with little investment holds the promise to broadcastoneself to fame and fortune. As a result, hundreds of fans, with thehopes of becoming legitimate storytellers, created videos around theLG15world. Most hoped that mere mention of their work in the franchiseproper would open doors for them. In the process, the fans werewillingly generating value for the franchise. The team, on the otherhand, heavily regulated the boundaries of the LG15canon by actively marking fan fiction as ancillary and used copyrightclaims as ways to carefully manage community initiatives. Keeping thefans at arm’s length ran counter to their initial rhetoric ofcommunity-led collaborative storytelling and subsequently estrangedthe very community that had initially given them exposure.

[…] I argue that it is a form ofexploitation because the creative team mislead the fans into thinkingthat their participation would have a more meaningful impact on theshow proper. This intentional misleading was primarily to garner theattention of the mainstream media and grow the show into a robustfranchise. The team claimed to be experimenting with a new type ofstorytelling, a community-based narrative that embodied the generalspirit of co-authorship. They sold their show to fans as anunprecedented initiative that would blur the actor/producer and fandivide, a promise that did not actualize for many fans and wasfrequently curtailed by the creative team’s eagerness to protectthe artistic integrity of their show. Ultimately, the team’s goalof proving LG15 to be a financially viable initiative led them toconfine fan engagement within strictly defined parameters thatultimately undermined their initial rhetoric of community-ledstorytelling.

- “Exposingconvergence: YouTube, fan labour, and anxiety of cultural productionin Lonelygirl15” by Burcu S.Bakioğlu

This“business model” – in which fandom-savvy creators with a closeconnection to their fandom and a marketing-based knowledge of howfandom works string their fans along with ultimately empty dreams,whilst simultaneously holding them at a distasteful arm’s length –can be seen as echoes through somany new media fandoms, and avariety of traditional ones too. It’s the typical push-pull ofcreators who are hungry for the free advertising and labour fans canprovide, but who find fandom in all its queer, subversive,traditionally-female glory to be fundamentally distasteful.

(Fanartistsare, I think, the most vulnerable to this kind of exploitation.Fanfiction is often seen as undesirable (sometimes even within fandomspaces, but that’s another essay), but fanart? Provided it’s the“right” kind of fanart – ie. sfw, fairly canon-compliant,well-drawn, no implications of gay/trans stuff – then it’s verydesirable. Fanart contests,t-shirt or merch design contests, gif contests, are all fairlycommonplace. I’ve never heard of a fanfic equivalent.)

It’sa far more subtle form of monetization, but all the more dangerousfor it, especially because it lures fans into a false sense ofsecurity with the creator. They feel that the creator is on theirside, is “one of them”, is going to reciprocate the unpaid labourthey put in, actually “gets” fandom or is supportive of itsnon-mainstream and subversive endeavours… only to then bedisappointed, because inevitably the creator isn’t interested inanything other than maximising profit by manipulating their fanbase,and may actually find the fans they’re toying with activelydistasteful.

Youcan find a hugeamount of writing and research on these concepts via googling “freelabour fandom” or “fandom labour exploitation”, by the way, ifyou’re interested. This isn’t a concept I’ve just come up with– it’s something academics and business-people have been aware offor a long time, but hasn’t quite filtered down into general fandomconsciousness yet. The companies know about it, and are activelyusing it to their advantage, but fandom as a whole hasn’t quitesavvied up yet.

Whichis, I think, a large part of what I take issue with. Some people,after reading the above few paragraphs, will respond with, “So? Ilove [thing], I don’t mind my labour being used to support it andits creators.” However,some people will be going, “Holy shit,I didn’t realise that was a thing? That’s awful, even though I dothings for [thing], I don’t want to support the parent company / Ididn’t consent for my labour to be used like this.” Some of bothgroups, given the fact that the average age of people in fandom isskewing increasingly younger, will be twelve, or thirteen.

Thisis what I object to. Not necessarily that the labour is being used,but that there’s no informed consent to it (and also that it’soften used by the same people who mock fandom, or find it‘disgusting’, or have rather poor views of their fans). That it’smanipulative,very deliberately so. That it’s often couched in terms of it beinga moral obligation, a “labour of love”, a “volunteer position”,as “helping the community”, even when that’s evidently bullshitbecause the group trying to feed you that line is a business that isonly interested in fandom as a profit-making machine. That, often,it’s vulnerable fans – younger fans, poor fans, fans fromminority groups – being taken advantage of, deliberately andmanipulatively, by creators.

Fansare inherentlyvulnerable, for a variety of reasons (more on that later) due to thepower difference between them and content creators, and thatvulnerability is being exploited, often using the language of fandomto disguise the exploitation.

Howoften do creators run a “design a t-shirt / poster for us!”competition, where the artist gets paltry recompense (or none atall!) and often no credit for their work? How often do competitionTerms of Service end up having loopholes where the creators nowlegally own your work, in its entirety, forever, and you can’t doshit about it? Professionalfreelancers are aware of these kinds of things, and look for them incontracts – youraverage fan is not,however, and yet they are being used as (easily exploited, preciselybecausethey don’t have the experience professionals have) freelancers bycreators.

Asthisarticle regardingthe Amanda Palmer debacle above rather neatly puts it:

Ideally, you don’t even know you areworking at all. You think you are keeping up with friends, ornetworking, or saving the world, or jamming with the band. And youare. But you are also laboring for someone else’s benefit withoutgetting paid.

3.The Fan-Creator Power Imbalance and Fan Vulnerability

Let’sbe honest here: all of this manipulation is possible because fans,and fandom, are incrediblyvulnerable, on severaldifferent fronts – legally and financially, emotionally, and oftenin terms of age and experience. Though not allcreators take advantage of these vulnerabilities, it’sunfortunately not unusual.

Fansare primarily vulnerable legally. In general, the legalityof fanfiction and fanworksis super iffy,to the point Wikipedia has an entire article on it, and creatorsaren’t always happy that it’s being written (again, covered inthe Wiki article, and mentioned above as well). Fans also don’thave a great deal of legal protections– one of the reasons why AO3has a legal teamthat fights for fans and fandom – and what they do have has oftenbeen won by other fans who’ve fallen foul of copyright laws orcease-and-desist demands and fought back. Often though (but notalways), fans are young, and have neither the money nor the legalknowledge to fight back should a large corporation or dedicatedindividual creator with a beefy legal team decide to start legalproceedings against them.

Fansare also vulnerable because of their age and life experience.Increasingly, fandom is skewing younger and younger, which means manyfans (perhaps now even the majority) are underage. It issignificantly easier for creators to manipulate and use younger fansthan it is to do so with older fans. Even older fans, though, whohave more life experience, may not have relevantlife experience. A lot of fan writers and artists are hobbyists, notprofessional freelancers. “Tricks” by corporations such as dodgyterms of service or questionable phrasing in competition terms may beless noticeable to fans than they would be to professionals providingsimilar services. Fans may also not have the same tools asprofessionals when it comes to knowing how to deal with being takenadvantage of. Professional artists may have a standard procedure theyfollow when they discover their art has been plagiarised, or haveother professional artists they know as part of the community who canadvise them – fanartists are lucky if they have any such resource.

Fansare alsouniquely vulnerable with regards to interacting with contentcreators. There’s a power imbalance. This isn’t exactly the placefor discussions regarding (usually sexual) harassment / abuse of fansby creators, and I don’t want it to turn into one entirely, but…it happens. It happens a lot.A quick google search found me thisarticle listing anumber of scandals and allegations of sexual abuse or abuse of power,just regarding Youtubers,in the past year or so alone. Here’sa post from my personal blogsummarizing the multipleallegations of harassment levelled against the Yogscast, includingsome really rather serious ones, and the… frankly appallingresponse from the Yogs. That’s without even touching on theaccusations against more mainstream / Hollywood personalities thatcrop up every five seconds.

Thiskind of stuff happens a lot more than fandom would like toacknowledge. Creators hold power over fans, and sometimes – a lotof the time – they don’t use that power entirely for good.

Ofcourse, fans often enjoy having creators in fandom spaces – or,more accurately, enjoy having creators accessible. Fans want to benoticed by creators, have a personal relationship with them, meetthem, talk with them, share things with them. They often also wanttheir fandom pursuits, whatever those may be, to be validated. Theseare all perfectly normal things to want, especially from people youadmire and look up to. Hell, I would be a huge hypocrite if I triedto pretend I’ve never wanted to be friends with the creator of afandom I was in. I’m not here to rag on people for havingfantasies, or for looking up to creators – I’m here to point outthat people should be exercising caution along with those.

Becausethe issue is, a lotof people don’t feel safe with creators too far into the fandom.And some other people don’t see that as a reasonable boundary forthose people to have, or are too caught up in their “senpai noticeme” heart-eyes to care.

Beingon twitter is good, it makes creators approachable, you can tweet atthem and they might even respond – and sometimes it’s even a bitfunny if they admit they’ve gone looking for fanfic. But a creatordemonstrating a huge deal of internet savvy, having a tumblr blog,going on AO3? That’s enough to make a lot of people feel unsafecreating and sharing fanworks.

(Ifmonetization and exploitation is a particularly big issue forfanartists, then feeling unsafe is a particularly big issue forfanwriters. Not that fanartists never feel unsafe, especially if theyproduce “undesirable” content – but, for almost every creatorI’ve ever come across, whilst somefanart is acceptable, perhaps even desirable, fanfiction isunanimously “othered” in terms of fan crafts. Perhaps because,due to inherently needing a plot and the use of headcanons and havinga non-canon focus, it’s more threatening to the creator? I’m notsure and, again, that’s another issue. But for fic writers, eventhe most “harmless”, innocent, fluffy, G-rated gen fic risksscorn, humiliation, disapproval, or accusations of being “weird”or “creepy”. Those who write darker or more mature stuff, likemyself and many of my friends, have to deal with being aware thateven creators who take a “live and let live” approach to fanficwould likely be disgusted if they ever found our work. As I saidbefore: if you’re sitting here thinking “but I’mnot worried”, consider why.)

And,again, fandom is primarily forthe fans. We should beprotecting fans above and before creators.

Areally good way of doing that, whether protecting them from legalthreats, from having their labour exploited, or from creatorharassment, is to keep fandom separated from creators. Not entirelyseparate, not “buried in the depths of the web where no one canever find it” separate, but just… an acknowledgement that fandomis for fans, not creators. That fans deserve spaces they can putthings up for other fans to see, without being worried about theirwork being stumbled upon by creators or ‘upsetting creators’ –or, more unpleasantly, being mocked by creators, broadcast outside offandom spaces without their consent, or being judged according to anarbitrary, mainstream moral code.

Fundamentally,fans deserve a safe space. And when I use that word, I don’t mean“somewhere where no one will ever be triggered” or “somewherethat has been entirely morally sanitised” or “somewhere whereroving mobs of thirteen year olds get to dictate who is problematicor not”. A fandom safe space should be a space where people canpost what they want (within some reason) without fear of Big BrotherCreator watching, without fear of being mocked, without fear of beingtold they’re gross or disgusting or Wrong – and a space wherepeople can reasonably be expected to take ownership of their owncontent consumption, helped by stuff like content warnings orblacklists or AO3 tags.

Havingcreators there complicates that. It makes people worried, for a wholevariety of reasons. Something I said on a post a while back that isrelevant here: “Creative fandom, in terms of art and fic, issupposed to be an area of fandom without creator oversight – orwith very limited creator oversight. Feeling like you’re beingwatched, worrying that you might unintentionally offend, killscreativity.” Even if canon creators don’t intend to have anegative impact on fan spaces, or even want to join fan spaces inorder to interact with and please fans, they have an adverse effecton the safety and fandom-ness of the space.

Or,as out-there-on-the-maroon’sresponse to thatpost put it, probably better than I did:

This is something I’ve seen happen inreal time on the various official G&S [Geek and Sundry] discords.Initially fan-only spaces, they quickly started to welcome andexplicitly invite the cast and crew onto the discords. Which has itsbenefits and cool aspects, but also turns a fan-only private spaceinto a space watched by the creators, where the creators havepowerful voices of authority.

Suddenly any criticism or “I didn’tlike this part of this episode” comments became awkward orself-censored. Fanfic talk got dialed way back, hidden in privateDMs, or moved to separate private discords. Then there were clasheswith mods and other fans who were debating what was appropriate talknow that the cast were becoming members. It’s one thing to yell“omg I HATE [writer X]!” during a livestream of a tense episodewhen in a private discord, it’s another to do so in a channel wherethat writer frequently reads the chatlogs. Among fellow fans it’sunderstood that such talk is hyperbolic, but when the creators areright there chatting with you in a friendly way, it becomes risky.

[…] A large chunk of the “drama”that happens in these new media fandoms can be traced to there beingpoor separation of personal and private, be that a creator venting ontwitter and getting into fights with fans, fans sending explicitfanfic to a creator, or those “dramatic readings” at conventionswhere a room full of adults is invited to mock the un-edited writingsof a 15 year old. I’ve seen a lot of issues arise when someone, saya youtube star, rises to fame very quickly and is ill-prepared forputting up boundaries between themselves and their fans. (Mostyounger celebrities are actively discouraged from doing this,encouraged instead to be always available, always friendly, alwaysopen and personal with fans.)

Havingcreators engaging with fandom is not necessarily bad in and of itself– fans are excited to be noticed by their heroes, creators areexcited to hear from people who love them and the stuff they produce.It can be good, or at the very least not-bad. The issue is, though,that creative fandom is for fans, by fans, and there’s no intrinsicplace for creators in it, but creators are increasingly trying tomakespace for themselves in it anyways without understanding the effectthat has. That’s where the problem lies.

I’mnot suggesting we never ever let creators talk to their fans everagain. I’m just saying that we have sites like twitter for that –they don’t need to be coming onto tumblr, or browsing AO3, to haveconversations with fans. It should be up to fans to make the firstmove regarding contact, nine times out of ten, not the creators.

Creatorsdeserve spaces where they’re safe from being exposed to contentabout their characters that they don’t want to see or finddistasteful. Fans deserve spaces where they don’t have to worryabout the creator deciding they’ve seen stuff they don’t want toor stuff they find distasteful. The easiest and best way of doingthis is to make sure there are separate spaces for creators and fans– and that each side acknowledges, when they go into the other’sspace, they play by the rules of that space and don’t try toenforce their own. End of.

4.“Not MyCreators!”

Ifyour response to this has been, “Yes, okay, but mycreators are nice, though,” then consider: you’re probably notgoing to be in that fandom (or at least, not solely in that fandom)forever. You are eventually, inevitably, going to encounter a creatorwho isn’t nice. Your creator may also not be nice forever – it’snot unusual for creators to seem lovely and friendly and reallyinvolved in fandom, and then turn out to be a massive douchebag (seealso, Ridgedog and Sjin from the Yogscast).

Eventhe nicest creators can cause drama and conflict, too.  If they’reseen to endorse a particular headcanon that people start trying toimpose as canon, if they state “preferences” for fanworks thatpeople feel compelled to (or are forced by other fans to) obey, ifpeople think they’re playing favourites… it gets messy. And thelonger someone is seen as “the nicecreator”, the longer they’re up on that pedestal, the harder theyfall when they do the slightestthing wrong.

It’snot just fans that can suffer when creators get too close. In myprevious fandom, a fan that was jealous of the attention a creatorwas showing to another fan (ie. notto them) decided to start asmear campaign over it. They tried doxxing the creator in question,got several other people to threaten doxxing, started attacking otherfans (myself included) and sending death threats, and generallymanaged to really badly fuck up a whole number of involved parties’mental health. A similar thing happened with another creator in thesame fandom, where said fan is stillrunning a smear campaign against them. These are not isolatedincidents.

AsI mentioned in replyto a content creator I’m personally acquainted with, on one of my initial posts on this topic:

I think… regardless of how hard theytry to integrate, canon creators are Apart and Above fans. They can’tbe part of their own fandom in the way that fans are - howinsufferably arrogant they’d be if they were! - and they have anatural, inescapable power over the fans in the sense that their fansare inevitably going to look up to them and idolise them / put themon a pedestal. It makes things a little sticky for creators in thesense that they’re stuck as almost a god-figure, but also thattheir fans want to be friends with the Real Them - and, of course,either the creator keeps up the god-figure persona, stays on theirpedestal, and disappoints the fans who feel held at arm’s length;or they drop the god-figure persona, get off (or fall off) thepedestal, and disappoint the fans who feel angry and betrayed andupset that their idol is actually fallible and human (and hasopinions the fan disagrees with / is boring / is bigoted / isn’tfunny when they’re not performing / isn’t a role model ordesirable when they’re not pretended to be a god-figure). Damned ifyou do, damned if you don’t.

Fandom,especially younger fandom, has an idolatry issue when it comes tocreators – and it hurts people on both sides of the god-worshipperequation that that behaviour creates.

5.Conclusion…?

Isuppose, actually, that despite the thesis statement there are a fairfew different questions actually being asked in this essay: How okayare we – as a community of fans, regardless of the particularfandoms we call home – with censorship? How okay are we, or shouldwe be, with the commodification and monetisation of fandom by bothbig business and / or fans themselves? How okay are we withnon-fandom people and groups, whose aims and morals may not alignwith fandom’s, attempting to manipulate / change fandom and use itfor their own ends? How do we plan to protect our own?

Theseweren’t the questions  I expected to end up asking at the end ofthis essay but, here we are.

Iwould hope I’d made my personal positions on them clear. First andforemost, we should nottolerate censorship. Not fromwithin fandom, and not from without. We should alsonot tolerate manipulative attempts at monetisation by corporations –and should fight hard within our communities to preserve gift cultureand the fandom-as-play mentality that fandom is built on, despite therise of commissions-based fan interactions and Patreon / Kickstarterculture. We should fight hard, not to prevent fandom from changingper se, but to make sure we don’t lose our roots and principles.

Creators,by merit of being the people who create the media we love and engagewith so much, have power. A hugeamount of power. Maybe that’s legal power, maybe that’s the powerof a savvy and manipulative marketing department behind them. Maybethat’s the power conferred by being adored and idolised by a largenumber of fans, maybe that’s the power of having a twitter mob attheir control that will harass anyone they disagree with. Maybe thatpower is just older fans knowing how creators can turn on fans andfandoms, and being afraid to create things because “big brother iswatching”, regardless how benevolent that all-seeing eye is. Maybethat power is just having people feel it’s “polite” to “respectthe creator’s wishes” regarding what sort of fanwork can / shouldbe produced in that fandom.

Asthe old fandom term “Word of God” implies, creators are… well,the gods of their fandoms. That’s not necessarily a title theyearned (some creators are supershitty people, let’s be honest here), it might not even be a titlethey wanted(see also: Undertale, Homestuck, and other fandoms that suddenlyexploded), but it’s a title they have nonetheless.

Inthe end, this issue ties together a lot of things, I think – notjust creator involvement in fandom, not just censorship, not justmonetization, but purity politics, and the legality of fanworks, andhow to manage communities both online, and irl and the habit ofpeople to put creators they admire on a pedestal.

Howdo we, as a community, plan to self-organise, disseminate importantinformation, make decisions, and work as a united front in thefuture? Is that even possible – is fandom a fundamentallyanarchistic entity, unable to survive attempts to formalise it in anyform still recognisable as “fandom”; or, conversely, is fandomdoomed to dying and being subsumed by corporate manipulations if itdoes notformalise and organise, and work to protect its roots and the uniqueculture that has sprung from them?

I’mafraid I don’t really have the answers to those particularquestions, but… food for thought. I know I certainly think aboutthem a fair amount, and perhaps it’s time fandom in general starteddoing so too.

6. Fandom: The Next Generation

Whatdo we doabout all this, though?

Well,for starters, we educate both fandom and creators. There’s somegrassroots efforts to do this within fandom – professionalfreelancers making pushes to ensure people who offer commissionsprice their work correctly, and also checking through various contestterms of service and spreading the word if something’s dodgy, therecent pushback against censorship and purity politics within fandomspaces. Various fandoms on tumblr who know their creators often usetumblr, or check specific tags within it, have developed “private”tags for nsfw or shippy content, or fanfiction, to keep them awayfrom creators – either at the creators’ request, or of their ownvolition.

That’snot enough, though. We also need to educate creators.Even for those that grew up “geeky” or “nerdy” or “infandom”, they’re often talking primarily about the curative sideof fandom activities, not the creative. That side of fandom has verydifferent rules, social mores, and opinions to the creative side offandom. Creative fandom, essentially, needs to set out its stall forcreators – this is who we are, this is what we do, this is how youengage with us politely. We’re happy for you to come look at ourthings, if you want, but if you’re coming into ourspaces (ie. livejournal, tumblr, ao3) then don’t try to tell uswhat we can and can’t do, because we’renot doing this for you.Remember, when you interact with us in our spaces, you’re in ourterritory, and you should behave as such. Remember, we are acommunity, and if you try to take advantage of us or our vulnerablemembers, we will not tolerateit – even if you didn’treally realise that you were trying to take advantage.

Andhonestly? Some creators just need to remember to have basic goddamnmanners. Going on twitter to go “ewww I just read the creepiestfanfic about my book” and linking to it, or reading something outon stream without author permission, or telling part of your fanbasethey’re bad people because of how they choose to engage with yourmaterial… that’s just plain rude. We shouldn’t have to teachcreators how to be decent human beings. A remarkable number ofcreators fall short of this standard, honestly, and we need to stoptolerating it.

Ifthe creators aren’t dicks, then they’ll want to learn how to dobetter, both for themselves and also for their fandom. If they aren’tdicks, they won’t want to take advantage of their fandom, or farmthem for exploited labour. And, well, if they are dicks… that’s alittle harder, but it requires fandom as a community to stop keepingcreators on pedestals, to separate fandom from the creator of thesource material, and to be willing to occasionally kick someone’sass if need be. We’ve got to protect one another, is what I’mgetting at here.

Isuppose, if I have to end this essay with anything, it’s this:educate yourself.

Knowyour history – there are plenty of older fans on tumblr talkingabout their experiences, and plenty of blogs dedicated to it. OTW hasa huge number of resources for this, including their open-accessjournal for fan matters (TransformativeWorks and Cultures), theFanlorewiki, and the summaries of the legal activism they’ve done in agiven month for fandom in general and also specific fans. Livejournalis practically a treasure trove, with huge communities that gatheredand collated drama, wank, and general history and informationregarding fandom. Wikipedia, and the wider internet, also hasincreasing amounts of information on fandom history as fandom getspushed into the mainstream media spotlight.

Educateyourselves, educate others, and listen to people who’ve been infandom longer than you have been – though “listen” doesn’tmean “automatically agree with”. And, most importantly of all,look out for other fans. Help them, support them, protect them.Fandom’s something pretty special, after all. We’ve got to lookafter it for those that come after us.

[straykatfish]

Aerial perspective has nothing to do with dangling from a hang glider to make sketches. It’s about how tone and saturation bleed away with distance. Take a look at Turner’s Woman with a Tambourine (1840-50) – everything, including definition, loses substance and becomes less tangible as it retreats into the far distance.

Image from Bridgeman Education. Accessed 25 May 2020.

This exercise is aimed at developing that skill, using tone, saturation, and definition to indicate distance rather than, as in the previous exercise, explicit lines.

I had picked up a piece of wood while out exploring nooks and crannies in my garden that, until recently, only the wildlife knew about. It’s wonderfully plank-shaped with whatever aspect ratio a plank generally has, and after I’d cleaned it up a bit and removed a couple of lethal-looking screws, it revealed some interesting lines and shapes.

My brain made a deserted beach of it. Rocks on the edge of the water, the coastline fading away up towards the left with low hills or dunes building into that corner. The whole image is sepia and the sky a kind of burnt orange.

So, having not-so-subtly established a cognitive bias for the result so far:

I had no idea how acrylics and this untreated wood would behave but I assumed it would be very absorbent and that washes would sink into it, leaving only a hint of colour so I used this by building layers of wash to lighten, saturate, de-saturate, darken, and illuminate various areas as the developing image seemed to require. I used Payne’s Grey, Naples Yellow, titanium white, and burnt sienna.

While the result feels a little end-of-the-pier and in reality it is something of a cheap shot, taking less than an hour to produce, I’m actually quite pleased at how this seascape has rendered itself. I can even see a fairly convincing and completely unintentional wave. Totally fictitious and born of a plank. #PlankArt.

For something a little less populist, I thought I’d try my hand at the painting I’ve been calling Men in Hats, which is actually by Caspar David Freidrich who calls it Evening Landscape with Two Men (1830-1835). I’ve seen it before in passing but this time found it in a book I’m intending to review by Norbert Wolf (2107), a lovely little condensed trot through western landscape painting from Dieric Bouts the Elder’s 1465 St Christopher to David Hockney’s 1980 Nichols Canyon. My aim is to use the structure which nicely illustrates aerial perspective, but to interpret it so that it is less copy than ‘after’.

I had intended to subvert the original by using a different support and chose Duck Cotton because I had thought Bouts’s was on panel. It isn’t, it’s on canvas. I do like the challenge of a support like this though; it makes me use paint differently and that’s always interesting. I have prepared with transparent gesso a piece of support of non-standard dimensions but which fits just inside the edges of the A1 mount board to which it is stapled. It has folds and wrinkles in it so I may need to iron it when it’s dry. In the meantime I’ll make some sketches of the original, which is tiny at 10 x 12 1/4″. Scaling up will be another challenge.

Looking at the painting from images on screen, I can see a lot more detail in the dark foreground than is evident in the book. This makes the painting even more interesting – the men seem to be at the end of a footpath, or maybe it’s just exposed rock, at a high elevation with no sign of civilisation in the landscape stretching out beneath and beyond them. Who are they and what are they doing there? How far did they walk to reach that point? And what are those hats about? They add drama to the men’s silhouettes for sure; the whole composition would be a lesser thing entirely, in my view, without those horizontals sitting like the tops of two capital Ts. Wolf describes the painting as romantic and sentimental which is about as far from my interpretation as it’s possible to get, that being closer to an alien landscape than something cuddly and heart string pulling. Maybe this is my way in.

Today I’ve been making a few very quick sketches to see what I could pull out of the shapes in the original painting. the T shape interests me but didn’t really amount to much in a landscape which is what this exercise is primarily about. The first is, predictably, quite tight but by the second the flat tops and triangular necks (collars, I think) became more of a unit and the cloaks less defined.

Here on the left, I tried making them much smaller, almost symbolic, but then got distracted by the only topic of the day, COVID, and turned them into miscellaneous keyworkers before going back to the T idea.

On the left, making a less pronounced T, then giving it a kind of viral wrap led to bottles of hand sanitisers and on the right, there they are surrounded by dead virus that had been scrubby foliage in the original) with a landscape full of live virus in the air as well as on the ground symbolising the huge job still to be done to eradicate this disease.

My intention in the painting is not to make these bottles the main feature by giving them shape and labels beyond the silhouette, nor to make the virus explicit either, rather to use the shapes to glue the landscape together in a way that makes a more subtle statement. These may be famous last words but for better for worse, that painting will end up here!

I ironed it in situ, it being stapled to the card. Fortunately for me, the crease falls at the exact point I want one of the key horizontals. I wonder if wetting it first then stapling it (with more staples) would solve the problem. Not too wet, obviously, or that would make the card soggy and ineffective.

This is a foundation wash, a ‘dirty’ mix of titanium white, payne’s grey, and burnt sienna, with rather more of the grey towards the bottom. Already, I like the roughness of this and the way some of the colour disappears into the support.

This feels like progress. I need to add some light to the horizon, tone down but also define the mid ground, and add dark detail to the foreground. The mushroom cloud top right is where I forgot where my margins were, not a further commentary on the trouble we’re in. At least I hope not.

A few more wash layers, highlights subsequently muted, and some detail in the foreground using payne’s grey and alizarin crimson placed where the foliage is in the original but which I’m going to subtly re-cast as the corona virus. In the imaging material we see of this virus, it’s always ridiculously and disarmingly beautiful. Do I go down that route or give it what it deserves, something dull and insignificant as we all hope it will be in due course?

Meanwhile, I wonder if I’ve met the requirements of the task which is to portray aerial perspective using reduced focus, colour saturation, and temperature?Maybe not quite yet – some muting towards the horizon wouldn’t go amiss. But I think focus, saturation and temperature do indicate distance, especially with the sharpening up of the outlines around the bottles. I’ve also made a hard outline around the prominence(?) the two men in the original are standing on where Bouts has foliage to reflect more the 21st than the 19th century. I think that actually gives it a slightly surreal appearance and harks back to one of my earlier ideas of an alien landscape.

Not sure about the foliage in the foreground. I’d used titanium white to make marks I could wash with various muted colours to reflect the image of the virus, moving from its actual shape through small flowers to tumbleweed, which could reflect its eventual irrelevance but might be a commentary on how quickly some seem to have forgotten it lethal nature. It looks a bit cartoon-ish at the moment so I need to slap some pigment on down there to mute the white. The rest I’m leaving alone – thin wash moving to heavier pigment top to bottom.

Unless I’ve uploaded an older photo, this still needs some muting. Details though, I quite like these details:

  I’ve had to mute so much that I may have lost the foreground detail. I won’t use white next time, also I’ll iron the canvas before I start so there isn’t a crease in the middle. The one on the left though is helpfully describing linear perspective along with the line beneath it. Done, I think. Again, the feel of canvas and the behaviour of paint on its surface gives rise to a very different way of approaching a painting. This time I’ve used washes much more and avoided my usual blocky style. That feels useful. I’ve also, I believe, made a copy of an existing work my own by bending it to current circumstances.

  Wolf, N. 2017. Landscape Painting. Taschen Basic Art Series 2.0. Evening Landscape with Two Men is described and illustrated on pp 60-61.

Post script: my Men in Hats turns out to be a group called Men Without Hats whose claim to fame is a track called The Safety Dance, and if ever we needed that … It’s on YouTube here.

  Part 4, project 2, exercise 2 – aerial perspective Aerial perspective has nothing to do with dangling from a hang glider to make sketches. It's about how tone and saturation bleed away with distance.

[jeremystrele]

Artist Dawn Tan On Her Scary Start To Motherhood + Keeping Calm In The Time Of Corona

Artist Dawn Tan On Her Scary Start To Motherhood + Keeping Calm In The Time Of Corona

Family

Ashe Davenport

Photo – Sarah Collins.

Photo – Sarah Collins.

Photo – Sarah Collins.

Photo – Sarah Collins.

Photo – Sarah Collins.

Photo – Sarah Collins.

Photo – Sarah Collins.

Photo – Sarah Collins.

Photo – Sarah Collins.

Photo – Sarah Collins.

Photo – Sarah Collins.

Photo – Sarah Collins.

Photo – Sarah Collins.

Dawn Tan is sunshine in human form. One only needs to glance at her watercolours of Care Bears, croissants and Iced VoVos to figure that out. She makes things that make people happy. And very, very hungry.

Anything’s possible in Dawn’s world. Take for example, her yurt out the back of her Yarraville home, where she teaches art classes. It had been a dream of hers to build one, so that’s exactly what she did. She’s a dreamer and pragmatist, which, objectively speaking, is an unstoppable combination of things. When self-isolation became a reality only a few days ago, Dawn pivoted straight away to offering art resources and classes online to help cooped up kids and parents.

We spoke on the phone on a rainy weekday. Dawn was in her car outside a cafe, inside of which Darren and baby Louie were kindly buying us time. I was struck by her honesty, generosity and strength, both in general and regarding a truly messed up situation. 

Dawn Tan for PM.

How are you guys coping with this whole Corona business?

We’re trying to keep calm and carry on! I guess we’re just going with it day by day because who knows what’ll happen tomorrow? A lockdown for a month? You never know!

Despite the uncertainty, we’ve chosen not to panic buy, as we figured we won’t be building any toilet paper + tinned food forts for protection. Instead, we’re choosing to try and keep things as normal as possible for Louie. I believe kids pick up on their parents’ anxiety, so we’re trying our best not to get too carried away with all the inaccurate social media reporting and political arguments. We’re upping our game with our sanitising regime and I’ve been wiping every surface down. I feel like I’m 38 weeks pregnant again, when my one sole mission was to clean down the entire house Hazmat-suit style! Call me crazy, but I actually do love cleaning.

What’s your parenting mantra?

Go with it. That’s our take. Darren and I made a conscious decision not to read any parenting books or download any of the (parenting) apps. All babies and kids are so different. There’s no ‘one size fits all.’ We figured we’d just wing it, and deal with the poop when the poop hits the fan.

Has it hit the fan? 

Oh yeah. Several times. It’s been a pooplosion. Late last year in particular. There was a lot of crying from all involved. A huge amount of stress. Basically I was sent to a psych unit. It’s a long story.

We have time, if you feel like sharing it.

Well, Louie had severe eczema. He still does. It’s been tricky to manage. In spring last year, it was the worst it had ever been, because it was his first exposure to hay fever season. I couldn’t handle it. He was five months old and just always crying, always screaming, all day and night from all the pain. His onesies and sheets were often stained with blood from scratching. Darren and I slept on either side of him so that we could pin one of his hands each, to try and stop more irritation. We finally took him to emergency one night after his entire torso turned bright red. We were provided with a treatment plan, but it stopped working after two weeks. So we went back. And that’s when it all turned upside down.

How so?

I broke down in emergency and cried my eyeballs out. In addition to seeing Louie in so much pain, an immediate family member had just been diagnosed with cancer and another faced a job loss. Being so far from family, it was hard. Long story short, a social worker told me I had severe postnatal depression and anxiety. I was told it was okay that I couldn’t cope, but that it was normal for babies to scream and cry a lot. I was confused because I knew my normally happy baby was screaming because he was in pain, and yet I was told to accept it.

I was then recommended a night at the psychiatric ward, but I refused to be away from Louie, so we ended up staying with him while he was seen for his eczema. An MRI and scans were ordered, but I wasn’t sure why. We were stuck at the hospital for a week. Turns out, Louie’s MRI was to rule out head trauma. Child protection services even got involved!

HUH?! On what grounds?

I was asked if I’d hurt Louie by a social worker, who thought I’d said, ‘Yes.’ That was it. I had to be placed under supervision and could not be alone with Louie. I couldn’t even feed him in peace. All throughout the week, I was made to believe I had completely lost it. I kept questioning myself and wondering how I ever let it get that bad. There was so much self-blame. It broke me. I was ‘strongly encouraged’ to check into a mother and baby unit. We were told it would be nice and gentle, “like a sleep school.” So we went.

We were promised a calm and nurturing environment, a space where I could chat through my ‘problems’. But it was far from what was promised! Turns out, the unit was for mothers who had been deemed a danger to themselves or their babies. There were no locks on doors. You could tell, everything was ‘suicide-proof.’ We were checked on every hour during the day and even at night, a flashlight came poking in through the door hourly!

I was told admission was voluntary, but it felt like all my rights got taken away the moment I entered. There were words like “applying for leave” and warnings of what would happen if I didn’t return. Sleeping pills were prescribed to “calm my anxiety.”  So yeah, the poop hit the fan, and by that stage, it was flinging everywhere.

How did you get out?

Eventually Darren got quite firm and insisted we speak with the head psychiatrist sooner rather than later. I also spoke to the admissions doctor prior to that, which was when we discovered the grossly inaccurate report. It was stated on my file that I’d hurt Louie, despite all the scans and checks coming back clear. Of course I didn’t hurt him!

Miraculously, I was fast-tracked to see the psychiatrist. And after all of five minutes she could see there had been a huge error. I’d been misdiagnosed. Any new mum would have had a total meltdown given the situation I was in… Simply put, I was under a tremendous amount of pressure, stress and coupled with the lack of sleep, I turned into an emotional wreck at Emergency. We were told to go home right away as being at the unit would do more harm for me mentally. Soon after, Child Protection Services came visiting and ended up apologising for all that had happened. They explained this was the first time in over 20 years that a case had escalated as quickly as mine! Lucky me!

What was the aftermath like?

We’re in the process of making a formal complaint now. It’s a tonne of paperwork, but we have a letter of support from the head psychiatrist, which should be helpful. It’s not a nice thing to have on my file, especially given that I’m a teacher. We’re just trying to stay positive. It happened, and we can’t change it. It can only make us stronger. We’re just so grateful for the two nurses at the crisis unit who could tell something was amiss with my report and advocated to have me discharged. And for all the nurses and pediatricians who took such great care of Louie and supported us.

Has the experience changed the way you seek support now?

Going to or even driving by the hospital can be quite triggering, but we tell ourselves if we are there, that we are there for Louie. So he can seek the best medical help possible. Fear aside, I still believe in speaking up. I always have. That’s why I spoke up in the first place. I think it’s really important to acknowledge and share what you’re going through. Especially if you need help. Mental health is so important and I believe the first step to helping ourselves is to speak up. Darren and I have an open and honest relationship. We share when we’re frustrated or pissed off about something. We have conversations all day long.

‘This too shall pass’ is a thing parents say when things are hard. What are your thoughts on that?

I don’t like it. I know it ‘shall pass.’ Louie has lots of allergic reactions, some that have required ambulance rides to the hospital, and he still has severe eczema. He has flare ups almost every other week. Even a play with some tan bark or a walk on a mildly windy day can trigger an entire week’s worth of flare up. He’s never slept all that much from day dot. He’s a piglet who prefers cat naps and breastfeeds every few hours, 24/7. Needless to say, he’s never slept through the night. The one time he did, we thought Christmas had arrived! 

We count our blessings as we know we have it so good. We are so grateful that Louie is overall a healthy, happy and thriving baby. That said, some days are so hard. I cry my eyeballs out. Sometimes I even regret and question if I’ve ruined my life by becoming a Mum. Then I feel guilty that I’m not appreciating him more, and because I know not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to have kids.

Darren and I went through our own fertility journey with Endometriosis and tricky Fibroids. Louie’s our little miracle. So surely we should never ever feel frustrated about our new life as parents! But some days, it’s just so hard! People often tell me ‘This too shall pass’ but I see it as closing the door on what I’m feeling, and I don’t like that. Whether I’m having a good day or a bad day, I want to acknowledge it. I feel, to become better parents, I need to let my emotions out, accept them, then move on. There’s the good days and the bad. The ups and downs – It’s all part of parenting!

Family Favourites

Favourite at home family activity?

Snuggling in bed solving a Rubik’s cube – Louie’s favourite toy. Hah!

Sunday morning breakfast?

Pancakes with lots of berries and honey!

Go-to album?

We’re classical music nerds. We like old school jazz classics too, Etta James or Frank Sinatra.

From today, every Friday, Dawn will be releasing a FRIDAY FREEBIE FUN Art Lesson on her Instagram TV / Facebook page. Simple, easy to follow along videos for all ages. More great stuff will be released next week, and you can purchase art supplies from Dawn’s online store!

[flemberblog-blog]

Draft 9

I worry, a lot, that writing these things makes me look like an amateur. Like the charlatan I often feel. That perhaps I’m revealing too much about all the work, and how much editing, is going into this book. I’ve been calling this draft ‘Draft 9′, but to be honest, I’ve pretty much lost count by now.

HOWEVER

This feels like an important draft. It feels like all the other drafts have been leading here for a reason.

When I first started this book, many, many years ago, I assumed I knew how to write. Upon being informed that I, in fact, didn’t, I started looking for guidance. And a lot of the guidance confused me. There are certain basic rules for writing, the most cliched of which is ‘show don’t tell’, and all its many offshoots. ‘Never use the word ‘was’ when you’re describing something’ was one that stuck in my mind. And then, never describe things, instead describe the characters experiencing those things.

Thing is, all the fiction I read, great books by great authors, they all ignored those rules. Great clumps of exposition. Characters explaining things to each other. Was, was, was, endless wasses (wasii?). I found it really perplexing.

Still, I stuck to the rules. Rigidly. As soon as Flember was signed with DFB, and these editorial rounds began, I was aware I was stepping in with the professionals now, and keen to show what I knew. So these edits went on, and slowly, my story took shape. The plot, and the structure, and the language, we tackled it all, we polished it all, and very slowly Flember evolved into something closely resembling a proper book.

Something was missing though. I’d been feeling it for a while myself, but not quite recognised it. And it took my editors to spell it out.

In trying so hard to follow the rules, i’d completely lost my voice. All the flair and tone and the thrill of narrating which I had put into my first draft had all been chiselled away by the 8th. In trying so hard to get it ‘right’, I’d sanitised it all. This was supposed to be a funny book, not hilarious, but funny, and yet I couldn’t recall one single funny thing in it.

It was a revelation to me that I’d allowed myself to forget the point of all this. And that the book would suffer mightily for it. But it was important it happened, I think. Over the last few years I’ve learnt about my story’s structure, and worked hard to ensure it flows according to all the rules, and now I get to go back in and break them. With all the confidence of someone who knows, at least a little better, which can afford to be broken. This is the thrill of being an author, and what experienced authors know intuitively.

This, it has taken me this long to realise, is what creates books.

Sidenote: All this time editing has prevented me from working on the illustrations. But similarly, this feels to the book’s benefit. Another reason for the more recent editing rounds was to focus the book, to remove the overly flowerly language and the cul-de-sac ambles, and simplify it. Keep it moving, keep it purposeful. Every character earns their place, every chapter deserves to be there. This has really filtered through to the drawing part of my brain. That, and researching artists I like who work in very simple styles. I have a much clearer notion now of how I want the art in this book to look, and plan to lose a lot of the frills which otherwise would have crowded it.

[doctorwhonews]

Doctor Who - The War Doctor Vol 4: Casualties of War

Latest Review: Written by Guy Adams, Andrew Smith and Nicholas Briggs Produced by David Richardson Directed by Nicholas Briggs Big Finish Productions, 2017 Stars: John Hurt (The War Doctor), Louise Jameson (Leela), Jacqueline Pearce (Cardinal Ollistra), Joseph Kloska (Schandel), Julia Hills (Sera/Spokesperson), Mark Elstob (Editor/Old Man), Lizzie Roper (Rosata Laxter/High Minister), Chris Porter (Skaul/Freel), Alan David (Castellan Kanteer), Jane Slavin (Panopticon Guard Lintok), and Nicholas Briggs (Dalek Time Strategist/Daleks/Assault Team Leader) “I’m the stuff of nightmares! I’m a murderer, a warrior, a demon let loose in the time stream, a man who’s lost his conscience, his friends – even his name!” The War Doctor The latest – and possibly last – instalment in Big Finish’s The War Doctor saga, Casualties of War, has an unintentional poignant edge to it – it is the last Doctor Who-related work of the late, great Sir John Hurt. Hurt delivers such a lively, commanding, sometimes weary and at other times profound portrayal that it is hard to believe the owner of that distinctive, gravelly voice will no longer entertain us with his gift. As co-star Louise Jameson remarks in the CD extras, his voice is “perfect for audio … so full of character and a life lived!” Hurt clearly enjoyed doing drama on audio; he could project his wonderful voice and deliver some great oratory. Indeed, in an interview with BF supremo Nick Briggs (that is available as part of a tribute podcast that BF released not long after his death), Hurt talked about the advantages of radio drama over television and the theatre. “I love sound for a start,” he told Briggs. “I’ve always enjoyed voice work, I’ve always enjoyed doing radio, I think, because it’s very akin to film and less akin to stage … You can cut between this time, that time … You can play with it the same way you can in film but it’s more immediate. You have to have a sensibility for it, you have to hear it in your head, you have to know what your voice is sounding like and how it comes across.”  There is no doubt that Hurt was in his element in The War Doctor saga and in BF’s adaptation of HG Wells’ The Invisible Man. Despite Hurt’s dedication to his art, Casualties of War won’t ever be a tour de force, nor is it the best of BF’s four War Doctor volumes. However, it would be unfair to judge it too harshly in the context of Hurt’s passing. It is an entertaining collection, and it brings The War Doctor saga to a satisfactory, if somewhat predictable close. Just as the titles of the last couple of box sets reflected loose themes – eg the lengths to which Daleks and Time Lords alike would go to find an edge in Infernal Devices, and the machinations of third parties in Agents of Chaos – so Casualties of War explores the impact of the Time War on worlds, societies and even other realities unlucky enough to be caught in the crossfire. The war’s effects through time have been explored in other Doctor Who audios (notably the Eighth Doctor serial The Sontaran Ordeal) but this box set does a sterling job of putting the Time Lords, the Daleks and the listeners on the front line. Pretty Lies, the first of Volume 4’s tales, largely resumes from where Vol 3 concluded, with the Doctor and Time Lord War Council strategist Cardinal Ollistra (Jacqueline Pearce) on the run from the Daleks. In some respects, the story setting is reminiscent of an old Western – as a couple of strangers “mosey” into an isolated township on a remote frontier planet and inadvertently defend it against marauders. After crash landing on Beltox, the Doctor and Ollistra meet Schandel (Joseph Kloska), a time-travelling war correspondent. Schandel, with the aid of an AI conveniently called Editor (Mark Elstob), has anticipated their arrival and is aware of their roles in an impending Dalek attack on the human township of Fairgill. Reluctantly the Doctor and Ollistra must use their wits and Fairgill’s scant resources to buy themselves time and save as many lives as possible against an all-out Dalek assault. Throughout almost two decades of BF’s Doctor Who range, we’ve come across a few journalists and war correspondents in its serials (notably in Colditz and The Angel of Scutari). Whereas those characters were largely unlikeable and unheroic, Schandel is clearly naïve. In fact, given his unbridled enthusiasm upon meeting one of his idols – “the legendary Doctor”, “the greatest hero of the Time War” and an “inspiration” – it’s clear Schandel is more of a clueless, overexcited fanboy than a detached journalist. “I’m not normally this giddy!” he confesses to the Doctor. “I really am a bit of a fan!” There is no doubt that scribe Guy Adams has based Schandel on a variety of Doctor Who fans he’s met but he doesn’t let the character get too out of control. Adams uses Schandel to show, much to the Doctor’s chagrin, how truth can indeed be one of the first casualties of war and how the camera can sanitise war for the sake of entertainment. Indeed, the Doctor is horrified when his words are edited and presented in a context that make him out to be a hero (the one thing he insists he’s not). Adams devises a clever ruse at the climax which also ties in with his underlying commentary on the wartime role of the media. It’s not necessarily an original climax (indeed it’s very reminiscent of a ruse used to fool Pearce’s former persona Servalan in the Blake’s 7 TV episode The Harvest of Kairos) but it’s effective and dramatic. The second instalment, The Lady of Obsidian, sees the War Doctor and Cardinal Ollistra again on the front lines of the Time War, as the Time Lords make a stand at the planet Grend. While Ollistra seeks to amass a Gallifreyan time fleet to head off an impending Dalek strike force, the Doctor goes in search of the mysterious “Lady of Obsidian” to recruit her guerrilla faction which is attacking Dalek forces in the sector. It isn’t long before the Doctor realises the so-called “Lady” is in fact his former companion Leela (Louise Jameson). But this is a very changed Leela from the “savage” we knew in the classic era of Doctor Who and indeed in BF’s Gallifrey spin-off series. Her psyche has been scarred  –  both figuratively and literally – by the Time War. While Leela’s affliction – a “time wound” – is not entirely convincing to the listener (anyone else in her position would probably be driven mad by the condition), Louise Jameson turns in a persuasively tortured, anguished, confused and uncertain portrayal. In the subsequent tale, once restored of her faculties, Jameson portrays the naïve, instinctive and curious huntress that we’ve loved for more than 40 years. In the 2009-10 two-parter The End of Time, the Tenth Doctor spoke of other factions joining the Time War, including the “Could’ve Been King and his army of Meanwhiles and Neverweres”. Lady of Obsidian writer Andrew Smith delivers a variation on this one-off line, creating the Unlived, hostile beings from a rift in the space/time continuum. While the Unlived, led by the Gollum-like Skaul (Chris Porter), are described by Leela as an even greater threat than the Daleks, they are for the most part unconvincing and one-dimensional. It could be argued the Unlived are meant to be vague beings but that shouldn’t make them caricatures as well. Just as Pretty Lies borrows ideas from the Western trope, so The Lady of Obsidian draws heavily from space opera influences, notably Star Wars and Star Trek. This is evident in the dogfights in space between Dalek saucers and Battle TARDISes, the Doctor’s recruitment of a cocky former soldier-turned-smuggler, a guerrilla group that hides deep in a nebula (not unlike the Maquis in the Trek spin-off Deep Space Nine) and an “evil galactic empire” (the Daleks) intent on crushing all “non-Dalek life”. The final instalment – The Enigma Dimension – is also reminiscent of a Star Trek episode (particularly DS9’s opening episode Emissary). Like The Lady of Obsidian, Nicholas Briggs’ script foreshadows significant concepts in the modern Doctor Who TV series, principally the Dalek containment sphere (or void ship) which graced Torchwood One’s Canary Wharf HQ in Army of Ghosts/Doomsday. The Doctor, with the TARDIS back in his possession and Leela once more at his side, returns to Gallifrey, to be confronted with a potential threat: the extra-dimensional, non-linear Enigma, a life form unlike any he has encountered before. It is no coincidence that the Enigma arrives as reality on Gallifrey starts to shift; there are reports of “phantom Daleks” appearing in the Time Lord Capitol, portending an imminent invasion. Needless to say, the Daleks’ “prime objective” to win the Time War is more ambitious than mere conquest … Briggs – who again voices the Daleks, including their deep-throated Time Strategist – quite rightfully resists the temptation to end The War Doctor saga on a space opera tour de force. Instead, he delivers a script that is quite surreal, ethereal and (excuse the pun) enigmatic – but definitely not to the extent that the listener loses track of the story. Indeed, some of John Hurt’s best work inevitably comes to the fore in The Enigma Dimension, particularly in the climactic confrontation with the Time Strategist. Hurt’s performance is no doubt bolstered by close friend Jacqueline Pearce as Ollistra. As a reluctant sidekick or “helper” (her word for the Doctor’s erstwhile companions over many centuries), the cardinal is the perfect foil for the jaded, cranky War Doctor. No doubt due to her recent travels with the Doctor in Volumes 3 and 4, the character’s disposition has softened since she was first introduced in Only the Monstrous. She even shows signs of altruism. Ollistra passes off defending Grend as being a strategic advantage for Gallifrey that “by a pleasant coincidence … also happens to be the right thing to do”. However, she is also clearly shaken and emboldened enough by Beltox’s fate at the end of the Fairgill engagement to ensure that the Daleks do not repeat their atrocities in the Grend system. Ollistra’s ruthless, calculating streak really comes to the fore in the climax to The Enigma Dimension when, to the Doctor’s disgust, she seizes an opportunity to ultimately turn the Time War in the Time Lords’ favour. Again, Pearce’s performance cannot help but be compared to her Blake’s 7 alter ego Servalan;  regardless she is an outstanding actor. And while this volume has debunked my theory (first postulated in my review of Vol 2) that “the unhappy woman” (as Leela cheekily calls Ollistra) is not a Time War incarnation of former companion Romana, it is great that Pearce’s Ollistra will continue to be a foil in the forthcoming The Eighth Doctor – The Time War series. Aside from Hurt, Pearce and Jameson’s outstanding performances, Volume 4 of The War Doctor saga again provides great performances from some of Big Finish’s lesser known artistes – in particular, Julia Hills as Fairgill’s governor Sera and Lizzy Roper as smuggler Rosata Laxter – as well as excellent sound effects and incidental music from Howard Carter. In The Enigma Dimension, Carter’s blending of the iconic Dalek throbbing sound effect (which dates back to the pepperpots’ very first TV appearance in 1963-4) with the incidental track is particularly inspired and foreboding. It’s a masterstroke that Murray Gold has not even attempted in the modern TV series. While not as memorable as the first three volumes in The War Doctor saga, Casualties of War is nevertheless entertaining and there are plenty of striking moments and performances – not least from Hurt himself. His confrontation with the Time Strategist in the climactic moments of The Enigma Dimension is both humorous and sublime. One moment, the War Doctor is describing the Daleks’ extra-dimensional destructor beam as “startlingly imaginative … Does what it says on the tin, I expect. Hardly surprising from a race of tin cans!” The next he is waxing lyrical about what fear means to him and the Daleks: Perhaps I do fear ... Perhaps I do but not you yourselves. I fear what you can do. Yes, I fear that – the death, the pain, the suffering, the merciless, senseless destruction of … well, everything that isn’t you! Yes, I do fear that. But as for you, the Daleks fear powerlessness, defeat and in everything and everyone you ever encounter, you see your fear staring right back at you! Whilst Hurt’s dialogue is extremely well written by Briggs, it succeeds because of Hurt’s wonderful delivery. Some of his final words as the War Doctor are equally as memorable: We Time Lords have fought too long and too hard to be anything other than warriors … If the Daleks alone were to be destroyed, I think we would find someone else to fight now! I think that’s my real fear – that the war will never end! Sadly, with Hurt’s passing, such wonderful monologues and dialogue is gone forever. It can only be hoped the great man’s departure doesn’t entirely close the door on the War Doctor’s adventures. BF has announced that the next four volumes of the Eighth Doctor’s adventures will focus on the beginnings of the Time War, which should compensate for the vacuum The War Doctor series leaves. However, why couldn’t there be more volumes of The War Doctor in the long-term? Yes, John Hurt won’t be there, but the absences of the actors to play the first three Doctors and Christopher Eccleston’s self-imposed exile from all things Who have not stopped BF delivering further adventures for each of those incarnations. Hurt’s Doctor shouldn’t be an exception, particularly as Ollistra, Leela and Veklin (Beth Chalmers, who appeared in Vol 1 and also makes a cameo in Vol 4) could all play parts in future narratives. Hurt’s passing need not entirely mark the end of what has been a great series – and what better tribute could there be than to continue the adventures of a character whose artiste was so beloved by generations of viewers and who will even be long remembered by some Doctor Who fans as the noblest Doctor of them all? http://reviews.doctorwhonews.net/2017/06/doctor_who_the_war_doctor_vol_4_casualties_of_war.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr