#Personally I prefer analysis because it's easier for me than fanfiction prose writing

[miirshroom]

"Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure." - Cazaril, "Curse of Chalion" by Lois McMaster Bujold

"As the golden barbs inflicted eternal agony upon him, Midra held fast to Nanaya's entreaty: 'Endure.' The word was a curse." - Remembrance of the Lord of Frenzied Flame

Have been listening through "The Curse of Chalion" by Lois McMaster on audiobook. Early 2000's fantasy novel that I'd not encountered before, but has similar tone to Carol Berg's Rai-Kirah trilogy and Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy from around the same era. It was a slow burn on the fantastical elements but once they kicked off I'm finding some familiar themes around death magic in the way that it is applied in Elden Ring.

Like, I have a concept of the characteristics of a "ghost" from pop culture osmosis, and the prose here describes it well:

"Old lost souls…No god takes up a sundered soul. It is left to wander the world slowly losing its mindfulness of itself and fading into air. New ghosts first take the form they had in life, but in their despair and loneliness they cannot maintain it".

This recalls to me mostly the ways that "souls" are presented in Demon's Souls, actually, but it carries through to Elden Ring in the way that the most degraded form of the soul detaches and hovers in various places waiting to be collected. Or how the Spiritgraves in Shadow of the Erdtree are the fading ghosts of graves.

There's the titular curse of the Bastard god, which corrupts the royal family like the demi-gods are tainted by their great runes. Also bringing to mind that the Remembrance of Astel, the Naturalborn of the Void can be used to craft the "Bastard's Stars" flail. Another design feature of the Astel being the gold rings around its tail, suggesting a connection to the Golden Star that delivered the Elden Ring with all of its corrupting influence.

But the parallel that is hard to overlook is in the mechanics of the death magic. To cast a death curse always is to slay both victim and caster and have their souls carried away by a demon. Due to a conflict between two divine powers acting at the same time there is a half-finished assassination where a soul is prevented from leaving and manifests to all mundane appearances as a cancerous tumour in a person's body. Similarly, the double deaths of Ranni and Godwyn are half-completed and this is connected to the deathroot which spreads across the Lands Between like a cancer.

BUT, did I enjoy The Curse of Chalion? I liked about the first 3/4 of the book but have mixed feelings about the ending. On the one hand, it's interesting to see a protagonist who recognizes that being ignorant of the truth does not protect people from consequences and has a fairly quick turnaround on keeping his allies informed, even of the crazy supernatural stuff. And the curse is lifted in the end, which effectively amounts to lifting the influence of a god - cool.

On the other hand, there was a literal Deus Ex Machina required to accomplish this and the main character concludes that for at least the last 3 years of his life everything that he has suffered has been orchestrated by this god to fulfill a prophesy that will lift the curse. All he had to do was endure and keep devoted to the higher purpose and in the end he is miraculously cured of an ailment, gets the girl, and is advisor to a queen. It's the kind of contrived outcome that only makes sense where gods are real and take active interest - and the text makes a point that faith in the existence of gods is absolute (due to a guaranteed miracle that everyone gets at end of life that shows which of the 5 gods their soul has gone to). So it's instructive about how to imagine what theology would be like in a world where the gods and demons being debated are literally real and active. But the ending is a little less intuitively cathartic for observers living in a world that is not like that. So if intuition fails I try analysis.

"If the gods saw peoples' souls but not their bodies in mirror to the way people saw bodies but not souls it might explain why the gods were so careless of such things as appearance or other bodily functions. Such as pain? Was pain an illusion from the gods' point of view?" "Perhaps heaven was not a place but merely an angle of view. A vantage. A perspective" - Cazaril

The pain of the character is indeed an illusion from the point of view of the author writing the story. I can see the thoughts (soul) of this character on the page and I know from those thoughts that he has gruesome and painful scars, but I can't see his body so if he didn't keep thinking about them I could forget that they exist. I wonder if there is an intent to partially deconstruct faith in this story. Some of the theological musings at the end dance around the idea that it is easy to read stories as validating religious belief, because 'faithful' characters will always be objectively correct that there is an omniscient divine being - the author - who deals out trials and rewards, and to whom people are puppets pulled along on strings. And once a character grasps this new perspective how could they not be struck by an obsession to describe the experience to other characters? Resulting in a sudden change of personality and detachment from former desires?

The only remaining point of contention would be on whether that author is a benevolent god for giving life to these souls or malevolent demon for causing suffering (an in-universe debate in the Curse of Chalion between the 5-gods religion and 4-gods religion - which honors the 4 gods of the 4 Seasons but insists that the Bastard god of Unseason is a demon!). And speculations on how the gods themselves are made and what happens if they die.

"Death ripped a hole between the worlds…If a god died what kind of hole would it rip between earth and heaven?"

If "god" is the author then what happens upon "death of the author"? There is no more mediator between the imagination of the reader (heaven) and the author's text (earth). In short: fanfiction. One may imagine that characters freed from the hand of the author can find happiness. Or, it can be imagined that their illusory struggles continue. Otherwise, they simply return to non-existence.

[senadimell]

Fic writer tag game thing

I was tagged to do this by @rockymountainrattlesnake--you rock!

How many works do you have on a03?

5 at the moment. Someday I will finish the Martha Jones character study I’m working on...

What’s your total a03 word count?

107,733 officially, but one of those is an exerpt taken from a longer fic, which puts me at 105,782, and then we’d need to subtract out the poetry exerpts in Promises, so...

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

HA.

But I have Promises to Keep

The World in Ten Seconds

Growing Where Planted

Suspended Between Moments

Black and White are Also Colors

The order seems very logical.

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Pretty much always. Sometimes I forget and write back months later, but I get really enthusiastic when people like my work (I swear I will answer my inbox soon!) Most of my stuff involves some degree of character analysis, so I enjoy continuing that discussion in the comments. (And compliments make my day, not gonna lie.)

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

That would be The World in Ten Seconds, I think. Looking at my work (published and unpublished), it’s a lot easier to be angsty when I’m doing an analysis-focused piece, because those tend to be snapshots in time. Narrative stories tend to end on a more hopeful note.

What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

But I Have Promises to Keep by virtue of being finished. It’s not totally happy, but there’s a lot of catharsis in there.

Do you write crossovers? if so, what is the craziest one you’ve written?

Yes because my brain connects dots fast enough to make even a kangaroo court cringe. However, I haven’t published/finished any. I do have a Discworld/Doctor Who piece that’s a meditation on death, survivors, and moving on. The title will involve the word “Grandfathers.”

Then of course there’s the Q/Master epic enemies-to-lovers that I don’t have the guts to write.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

No! Very grateful for that. There was one awkward incident involving a commenter shaming non-commenters, but that’s behind us now.

Do you write smut? if so, what kind?

Nope.

Have you ever had a fic stolen? 

Not that I know of...? Seems unlikely TBH

Have you ever had a fic translated?

No.

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

well...there was that one Eragon set-in-Alegaesia OC epistolary back in high school...

What’s your all-time favourite ship?

hm hm hm hm. So I’ve found that I really like very very close platonic intimacy, except that sometimes looks like “you are the most important person in my life and I would die for you but we haven’t put a name to this thing we have and we don’t really kiss etc. but we might hold hands/cuddle/whatever and it doesn’t mean anything and I know random mundane things about you like your shoe size or soda preference (did I mention I would die for you?)” which sounds kind of like shipping? 

So I’d have to say Nine/Rose or angsty Ten/Rose, with an emphasis on healing (see: RockyMountainRattlesnake’s Polyergus, A Wretched Ark, Terminarch, V762CAS’s Than All the Blue in the World).

I usually stick more or less with canon in most fandoms--if it’s not there, I don’t/can’t imagine it happening since romance is kind of weird and foreign to me. I tend to go for established relationships rather than “will-they-won’t they” stuff (Tevye/Golde, Vimes/Sybil etc. Though if we’re going musicals, I do actually like Elphaba/Fiero. I’ve never read anything about it, though.)

OH! I forgot! I don’t know if this counts, but I’m obsessed with sixbeforelunch’s Vulcan OCs, T'Lin and Veral, in the Pi’maat series.

Also the very specific way Erik/Christine works in Antiquarianne’s Phantom of the Opera piece The Sum of Earthly Happiness.

What’s a wip that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish the Grandfathers piece...it’s Discworld-primary from a stylistic perspective, and uh...I am not Terry Pratchett. I want to finish it, but I’ve got to be in the zone (reading a lot of Discworld stuff to get a feel for the style) and have SO MUCH PATIENCE because mimicking him is like writing poetry, if poetry was an accepted form of forced confession to be read for ridicule on live TV.

What are your writing strengths?

Purple prose.

yes i know that’s not supposed to be a compliment

.

Seriously, though I do tend to wax fruity in my writing, and I have a lot of fun with it. I think I’m also pretty good at writing conversations and arguments.

What are your writing weaknesses?

hehehehe

kill your darlings.

Editing? Who is she?

Which is funny, because I also do that stupid thing where getting words-on-paper is more painful than drawing a fishhook out of the fish’s throat when it’s mangled deep in the flesh. Is it perfectionism? I don’t know. Not in the anxious sense, certainly, because I can’t be chuffed to do a line edit before publishing. It’s more like I have two modes:

“Susan mad Grandfather confused insert Wrinkle In Time reference exept Uriel weird out of context IT vs keys of Marius brains fight”

or

“He’d known what Jackie was going to pull before Rose even passed on the invite, and he went and acted like Rose’d saddled him with an old ticket stub fished from her pocket. Trifling. Something you tossed in the first bin you saw.   You think pretending it was only ever ‘her choice’ will wash away the guilt when you finally kill her?

That and...actually writing. Lost my mojo a while back and haven’t been able to get back into a routine since. Balancing life stuff and creative hobbies is a work in progress.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I think I generally would limit it to well-known exclamations or phrases for the most part. I’m familiar enough to use some Mandarin and not utterly fail, but I know I don’t have the rhythm or grace of a native speaker and it’s not something I have in mind to pursue right now.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Hm. Fortunately that is all tucked away in hand-written notebooks before I got perfection-scared off of writing past the 7th grade. I’ve been doing the whole fanfiction in my head consciously since 2nd grade, but the first stuff I think I wrote down was either Snape stuff or Eragon/Alagaesia stuff. Not exactly worldshaking.

What’s your favourite fic you’ve written?

The World in Ten Seconds! Gah, I’m so proud of that thing. Also I really adore Black and White are Also Colors, though some of my favorite bits aren’t published yet. That one’s a lot more idiosyncratic...a lot of infodumping about color and language and ideas in translation. I’ll probably get the next chapter of that up before I’m able to start working on Growing Where Planted.

Tagging (feel free to answer or not as you have desire or energy--also I’m sorry if I have misremembered your fic-writing tendencies or lack thereof) @pazithigallifreya​ @phoenixrisesoncemore​  @forever-food-and-fandoms​@loupettes @elialys  @onlycosmere​