#a bastard's carol

[neil-neil-orange-peel]

A Bastard's Carol: a work of fanfiction by scumbaganarchy 💣

Season's greetings, scumbags! I hope you're all having a pleasant day. I come bearing a gift (of a sort):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1we8qEVul2PTWFCtaVqyyXccVg8-xZBte/view?usp=sharing

A huge thank you to @viviangreeneart for the awesome art! ❤️ It turns out we should all definitely be making fake novel docs out of our fanfic. It's good for the soul.

Some pretentiousness about ABC below the cut.

Just over five years ago, a naiver version of me had the idea of writing a Young Ones/Rivyan parody of A Christmas Carol. She started actually writing for this idea in December 2019... and promptly discovered it was going to be a whole lot bigger than she'd anticipated. With one chapter posted before the big day, she decided to kick the rest into the new year.

That new year was 2020.

Yes, that 2020. Although, to be fair, what other one could I be talking about?

We'll skip all of that. None of us need to relive it.

One year, two or three lockdowns, and four indefensibly long chapters later, ABC was finally done and dusted in December 2020. It stood at around 60K words, making it by far the longest thing I'd ever written. I guess we all had to spend that empty time doing something, right?

Followers of this blog will have noticed, I'm sure, that I've never shut up about ABC since. Maybe you even rolled your eyes when you saw the title of this notification? Uh oh, she's going on about that old thing again...

Yep.

Look, I'm incredibly bad at hyping up my own work - self-deprecation is a bad habit, but a common one - and the more time that passes between who you were when you wrote something and who you are today, the harder being positive about it can get.

I was 18 when I wrote ABC. I had only gotten back into writing properly at 17. The whole work went through one major copy edit a year or so ago, when I knew a little more about writing - but I still didn't know as much then as I do now, and I suspect (and hope) the same will be true for a future version of myself when she looks back on my writing from this time.

All of this is to say, sometimes ABC reads to me as something written by somebody else. 18 year old me didn't write exactly the way I do now; she hadn't gotten the Bachelor of Arts cheat code boost that I have. But she was extremely passionate. She did love the bastards Rik and the gang created with all her heart. She'd also studied A Christmas Carol for her GCSEs only a couple of years previously, so she did at least understand the text she was taking a chainsaw to. I think all of this mattered. I think this gave ABC heart.

But what's my point in saying all of this (again)?

For a very long time, I've wanted but held back on commissioning an artist to draw me a cover. Well, no more. Truly, thank you ever so much to @viviangreeneart for indulging me and creating something fabulous for this old fic of mine. Thank you too to everyone who has ever commented on or kudos'ed ABC on ao3 over the years. It really does mean more to me than I can say.

Having dropped a new and flashy PDF decked out like an actual novel, here's the link to ABC on ao3, which will always be its home:

Merry Christmas, scumbags. Cliff bless us, Everyone!

[ravencromwell]

Rereading Dickens Christmas Carol for the first time in a long time. And the more I reread, the more it strikes me how seamlessly a queer reading could slip within these pages. Not an especially twee reading, wherein all Scrooge's troubles start and end with grief over Jacob Marley's death. For we know that Scrooge was a "Tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!" And we know that he and Marley were "two kindred spirits"

And perhaps that very fact makes the similarities to queer life, unintended as they most likely were by Mr. Dickens, achingly poignant to me. Scrooge is, we're told, "secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster." How much that resonates, for so many of us who shield our innermost selves but from a select group of friends. And we know that Scrooge and Marley were, at the very least, certainly that for one another. Scrooge is Marley's sole mourner; his sole executor and beneficiary; and even Dickens notes, "friend." How reminiscent is that of queer couples across history, estranged from their families?

Scrooge lives in a set of chambers that once belonged to Marley—clearly Dickens wanted us to believe Scrooge gave up his own dwellings after Marley's death to economize. But with only a flicker of change, those chambers become _their chambers, rented by Marley as the senior member of the couple. The place is so desolate Dickens notes "one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again." The perfect abode for two queer misers who wanted no one prying into their business.

Marley's name is still above the door of Scrooge's counting-house: a mark by which, no doubt, Dickens meant to convey Scrooge such a penny-pincher he couldn't bother to have it changed. But a thing can be both! mark of frugality to ludicrous excess and! mark of mourning. "sometimes," Dickens opines, "People new to the

business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him."

This is why "death of the author" matters so much, in expanding our interpretations of texts. It is vastly far from the lens Dickens would have intended. But, the idea of a ghost of queerness, so taboo in the society it could barely be glanced at sidewise in this tale that is all about the inexplicable and yet that lingers over everything becomes an astonishing lens through which to read this book. Thinking of Scrooge as a queer man, his "melancholy dinner at his usual melancholy tavern" becomes a eerie prefiguring of the hollowness of days spent by Isherwood's A Single Man. In this universe, little wonder Scrooge doubly hates mention of time with family, marriage, etc. when the precise nature of his grief is both unacknowledged and unacknowledgable.

And readings like this are vital, because the uncomfortable truth is, discrimination doesn't "discriminate between sinners and saints", to borrow a Miranda phrase. It is easy, in my liberal circles, to fight for queer people who hold "the good sorts of politics". But what about men like Michael Hess, culpable for supporting Reagan even as his contemptuous homophobia let the aids epidemic run rampant? How much harder is it to remember Michael had a partner? That he deserves empathy and compassion for being practically tarred and feathered out of the party upon his own aids diagnosis?

Expanding our imaginative universes to include queerness, not as redemptive panacea, but merely as one aspect of identity, personality, often in vicious conflict with others. Even! as we consider those stories equally worthy of being told feels vital if we're ever to truly express the complexity of what queer humanity looks like.

[marvelmaniac715]

Random thought that makes so much sense. They casted Curt Mega as Jim in VHS Christmas Carols, a character obsessed with his watch.

And do you know who else he played? Tinky, the Bastard of Time and Space…

@curtmega was this part of the casting process or just an incredible Christmas coincidence?

[starleska]

i simply had to upload this scene from The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause in which Jack Frost shamelessly flirts with a married woman. after he just tried hitting on her heavily pregnant, married daughter. oh, he's so desperate for affection it makes me sick 🙈❄️

[sword-in-a-hoard]

Netflix animated stuff i think you should watch pt. 3

(Part 1, Part 2)

Blue eye samurai

Pluto

Pokemon concierge

Ooku the inner chambers

Dungeon meshi

Blue period

Tekken bloodline

Lost song

Carole and Tuesday

Centaurworld

BNA

Great pretender

Nimona

Bastard!! Heavy metal dark fantasy

[bloodtwin]

i should probably make a post about when puck was in the guild since carol mentioned their toxic yuri on the dashboard. but consider: it makes my tummy hurt & i feel sad when i think about it.

should also make an actual, real post about when he worked at sharess' caress instead of just mentioning it once very casually out of nowhere.

[karniss-bg3]

A BG3 Christmas Carol

🎶On the twelfth day of Christmas my True Soul gave to me:

Twelve Karlachs Swinging

Eleven Shovels Swearing

Ten Tadpoles Squirming

Nine Volos Screaming

Eight Scratchs Fetching

Seven Gales a’casting

Six Wylls a'dancing

Five Owlbear Cuuuubs

Four Vamp Bites

Three Netherstones

Two Bhaal Spawns

And a Kar’niss preaching at meeeee! 🎶

[ruins-and-rewritez]

"The Bastard of the Barrel" Kaz's song, in my dream musical, would be eerily similar to Scrooge's introductory song in The Muppet Christmas Carol. As in its literally the ensemble singing about how scary and relentless he is with a killer beat to bop to in the background

[leporinelou]

tommy and carol i miss you all the time

[radiantlyrey]

Watching Doctor Who’s “A Christmas Carol.” I’m almost at the end, and I get to this bit:

Kazran: One last day with your beloved. Which day would you choose?

[A few beats as the Doctor looks slightly stricken, because of course he has to pick which day he will take River Song to Darillium and see her for the last time.]

Abigail: Christmas Day.

At which point I remember “The Husbands of River Song” and the day the Doctor finally takes River to Darillium.

Christmas Day.

[neil-neil-orange-peel]

Xmas Fanfic Plug Alert 🚨

Ho ho ho! 🎅 With it once again being the season of long, cold nights and shopping stress (and a bit of festive cheer, too, for the kids), I thought I'd take the opportunity to shamelessly plug this little old fanfic I once wrote and have since never shut up about:

After the deaths of his parents, Rick certainly isn't looking forward to Christmas this year. Nothing and no one can put him off his misery - not even Vyvyan, whose relationship with Rick has changed monumentally since the near-fatal bus crash. The house's only chance at a happy Christmas has somehow fallen into the hands of a certain imaginary friend. Hopefully, Fred knows what he's doing...

A Bastard's Carol is, unsurprisingly, a Young Ones parody of A Christmas Carol. Well, I say a Young Ones parody - there are characters from across the Rik 'n' Ade 'verse running amok in this. I wrote it in 2019/2020, a time period now an almost scary number of years away from us.

Don't get me wrong, ABC is by no means worthy of comparison with the work of the great Charles Dickens (or the work of the great Rik Mayall and the great Ade Edmondson, either). Yes, it is overwritten (why'd you think it ended up double the size of A Christmas Carol?); yes, it features too much interiority (Rick is one of my darlings okay); and, yes, maybe sticking to the five stave format, thus ensuring some of the chapters hit 15K, when I was writing for people whose attention spans meant they'd ditched traditional novels for fanfiction was a bit of a mistake (love you guys).

But that all being said...

It was written with love, and passion, and a quite large dollop of staying-up-'til-the-sun-rises-to-get-this-next-bit-finished-damnit. Despite its imperfections - and there are many - I am still proud of it. I wrote it for me, but I also wrote it for this fandom as it existed at the time. As I said above, 2019 was a while ago, especially in fandom terms (back in the B.C. years), and I'm sure most Young Ones fans on Tumblr now have new and vastly superior fanfic to get stuck into. I'm just offering ABC up to you this December as a ghost of scumbags past, if you like.

I know I've slagged it off a bit, but seriously: there's at least one person who read it and had their GCSE-fuelled hatred for A Christmas Carol somewhat overturned by it.

And it's got Rick and Vyv being gay. I probably should've started with that...

Happy Holidays! ❤️

[awigglycultist]

Starkid Show Bracket

Round 2

AVPM V AVPS

MAMD V Starship

Twisted V TTO

Firebringer V VHSCC

TGWDLM V Watcher World

Time Bastard V Killer Track

Black Friday V Yellow Jacket

WITW V Abstinence Camp

Here's where you can find round 1 if you want to see the exact results

[lab-gr0wn-lambs]

I'm obsessed with her

[mswyrr]

Fandom 🤝 Disney

Calling unrelated adults who met as adults siblings to put the kibosh on a ship they don't like

[capitalist-bastard-showdown]

Capitalist Bastard $howdown:

Round 1, Match 4

Directory

[hatchetfieldgirlbossbrawl]