#and it makes me want to read ttss even more

[gaytobymeres]

i dont want to do uni work i want to read tinker tailor soldier spy. and it's chucking it down outside which is perfect le carre weather imo.

[volkswagonblues]

for @elilim​, because we were talking about gold standard fanfics

Romance of the Age, nimmieamee (Harry Potter):

“Snape did his best to comfort her. He did not want to do this in the usual and boring way, which was sure to leave her limp and un-excited. He saw an opportunity to enflame and arouse her. So, instead of assuring her that her parents had not suffered and were probably in a better place, he ended up delivering a passionate and truly stirring oratory on the insignificance of Muggle transportation and the worthless, banal horror of hospital authorities who hungered for identification. It involved a great deal of sneering. This was not what Lily really wanted. She was rather desperately hoping for some assurance that her parents were in a better place.“

this is by nimmieamee, whom i ADORE. I don’t think she’s ever super famous in any fandom because none of her fics become huge fandom “blockbusters”, which is just proof that talent never gets the recognition it deserves and readers are morons. (I’m not normally this mean, but I do get like this when it comes to writers I really admire). I think she is basically the gold standard plot+style+characterization. Her prose is so fucking musical and clever; reading this after reading a lot of, idk, “normal” fanfic is like chugging Veuve Clicquot after sipping on toilet bowl water for a week.

Romance of the Age is just...everything that a fic should be and shouldn’t be. For one thing it’s HARD to read. The author uses a very neat stylistic device where characters’ names are intentionally withheld to be revealed later at the right moments, and it’s so incredibly smart on a plot and a thematic level. It’s a social satire about rich, bored people that uses your knowledge of HP canon as part of its arsenal to make a satire about rich, bored people. I read it about three times before I understood who all these people were, but everytime I come across a new turn of phrase, a new clever insight, a new way of thinking about an old thing. This is like the opposite of emotional candy. It’s dense and difficult and intellectually nourishing. 

I think the best way to read it, if you’re not up with all the details of HP canon, is to skim through the wiki articles for characters like Narcissa Malfoy, Lucius Malfoy, Regulus Black, and Walburga Black. Yes, it’s fic that has homework attached to it. I KNOW.

The Mountain King, mldavies (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy):

There was a secret second story in the Circus, as there is most places men work, or live, or do business: you might even call it a second society. The women of the Circus walked through the same door that the men did every morning, and came out the same door every night; they sat under the same ghostly lights and trod over the same grey floors. And yet when the shopkeepers and postmen and vagrants watched them coming in and out of the brick building they usually took no notice: “Secretaries,” they said, if they said anything. If they were feeling particularly lurid they imagined what might happen if someone captured one of those secretaries and tried to extract secret information from her, but they were really only interested in the especially beautiful girls, and there weren’t many of them passing through the Circus doors. When they did, the men watching perked up, and started spinning theories about spies, and double agents, and imagining, depending on their particular proclivities, Lauren Bacall or Rita Hayworth or Ingrid Bergman in a sleek dress and some kind of fur garment—they were men; they didn’t bother with these kinds of details—stealing state secrets and then doing unspeakable things, for reasons that didn’t really require explaining, as these narratives were only the morning or evening fantasies of middle-aged men with rather dull home lives.

So TTSS was a John Le Carrre book turned into a 2011 movie with Gary Oldman and John Hurt and also Tom Hardy. The chances are...slim that you’ve read this book or seen the film, but this is basically a novella that I constantly think about. I follow mldavies on twitter: she hosts a podcast and she’s basically a Real Novelist, and my god the difference is real. You can tell the second that you open up this fic that it was written as “lit fic” and not “fanfic”, and not to say that fic isn’t valuable, but there are tangible differences that have nothing to do with quality. Literally the length of the paragraphs and the way line breaks are set up tells you that the author was thinking about writing for the page and not the screen. 

Again, it’s everything that a fic should be and shouldn’t be. It expands the world of the film and the book by exploring the lives of the silent background characters, it uses your knowledge of canon as part of its DNA to tell a richer story that builds off a story that you know already. The prose is just...again, chugging Veuve Clicquot, you feel? 

(she also has a few HP and Marvel and Teen Wolf fics, if you want to read her style in a fandom you’re more familiar in. https://archiveofourown.org/works/23189122) 

Prince of Apple Towns, kvkindi (Marvel Cinematic Universe)

In California, it doesn't matter so much. California is like someone sanded the earth down, just came along with a neat hard edge and wiped out everything out, and started from scratch. A fresh clean world. The sunlight hits the ground at strange angles. The trees smell like trees from the Paleozoic. The sea isn't old like the sea off Long Island. There's no history to it. He saw a campus exhibit on Polynesian navigation. There were maps made out of twigs, maps that look like geometric figures. Wooden maps of ocean swells, from the Marshall Islands. Howard didn't know how to read them. He doesn't like this idea, that some knowledge is secret.

Okay, so I know you’re not a MCU fan, but again, this is an actual novel that has worked some strange feat of alchemy to far surpass the base metals that it was forged from. I don’t know if you need to even know anything about MCU or Howard Stark or the Iron Man movies to appreciate this novel about WW2 and the invention of the atomic bomb and the way that science has eclipsed man’s ability to control it. I don’t know what to say. I think I left a hysterical comment on it back in 2016 that was basically just me having a breakdown 

...i just checked. I left THREE (3) SUPER hysterical comments. Let me quote from one of them:

“I'm incapable of speech. The world is empty. Our future is only a gun's recoil of the past. I'm walking into the Atlantic and the only thing I'm leaving behind is a shadow on a wall and the scent of burning. From now on I will cease speaking. I will only communicate via notes written on bar napkins. These notes will only be mathematical equations of special relativity. My sole caloric intake will come from coffee and lemons.My hair smells like sea salt. I think I just broke my hand punching through a wall. I'm a broken husk of a woman. I'm going to conquer the world. Holy fuck, this fic.”

Yeah, basically. also, this fic only has 225 kudos and very little fandom footprint, which again - TALENT IS NEVER RECOGNISED. I”M MAD.

[theoldgods]

Sorry in advance for a long ask... What do you make of Jim's social class in Tinker Tailor the novel, and/or his standing in the Circus pecking order? He seems pretty well-off though not a blueblood, but then he ends up entirely dependent on Circus funds for his caravan-in-a-field setup. Smiley says 'In [Jim and Bill's] heyday together in the Circus... that distinction [of athlete vs. thinker] had all but evened out.' Do we know when their heyday was, and when Jim became a full scalphunter?

same anon who asked about TTSS – just wanted to say I followed you from your AO3 fic, all of which I adored :-)

Aw, thank you!! Glad you enjoyed it.

(Disclaimer for the below: a) I’m American, so my grip of the British class system is always a bit “eh” compared to that of actual Brits, and b) I actually still haven’t read A Legacy of Spies, so if for some reason anything directly related to Jim’s social class comes up there, I wouldn’t know it!)

We don’t get too too much on Jim’s background beyond the following:

[Here followed a biographical summary of surprising accuracy: … Lycee Lakanal in Paris, put down for Eton, never went there, Jesuit day-school Prague, two semesters Strasbourg, parents in European banking, small aristo, live apart]

and then a few paragraphs later

One reason why he joined so many clubs at Oxford was that after a messy education abroad he had no natural English contemporaries from school

and

Oh, I had an uncle, actually, with a place outside Paris…[Inquisitors’ note: Comte Henri de Sainte-Yvonne, dec. 1942]

It sounds like his “small aristo” parents worked still, and in banking–it sounds like they were not entirely naturally “noble”/“aristocratic” in the sense of via bloodline, owning their own land or whatnot and being able to survive entirely on that, or else they probably wouldn’t have had to work? The mention of an uncle who sounds legitimately French and apparently belongs to the French nobility (”comte”) also makes me think that one of Jim’s parents may have been of French noble extraction or something, which would also explain why he would be considered upper class but still somewhat “exotic,” by virtue of not being entirely English and by virtue of not having gone to school at Eton or Harrow or similar. [Bill’s family is entirely upper class English and also “small aristo,” by the sense of it, with a father who’s a high court judge and sisters who have married into the aristocracy proper, which I gather would put them more firmly ahead of the Prideaux set just by virtue of “lack of foreignness.”] By the 1930s, when Bill and Jim were at Oxford, the pre-war class system was beginning to shift a bit, I think, thanks to the after effects of World War I, with less and less room for random bluebloods to just clutter up the place doing nothing (and indeed that shift I think is part of the reason for Bill’s resentment at England, or at least what he uses as an excuse after he’s caught–that wounded sense of “well, we used to rule the roost and now we have less power and fuck this”).

Bill and Jim’s heyday together was during the war itself, I think, but after WWII they sort of separated out into agent runner and scalphunter, so probably during the 1950s? The war would likely have done a lot to “even out” traditional distinctions, making it possible for a sort-of blueblood like Jim to end up doing scalphunting, an incredibly physical field job that other bluebloods/small aristos (like Bill) could easily opt out of for safer desk jobs if they wanted to. (And I think Jim actually did like doing fieldwork and found a niche doing it, even if he ended up mostly behind a desk by the end, eventually being able to run the department by the time of the novel.)

I think Jim living in the van etc. is probably also due to his inability to be Jim Prideaux anymore? The circumstances of his repatriation after Operation Testify seem to mean he’s basically a legally dead but actually alive ghost, cut off from most contact with his old life to preserve the fiction that he died, so he wouldn’t be able to access too many funds or anything. [And maybe he’s also a morose bastard by that point in time, who wants to mope around in a van or something!]

Hopefully this sort of helps, or at least is interesting, and if anyone out there knows more, feel free to chime in!

[cenedrariva]

i have feelings about this

yes, i think adults should consume more adult-oriented media, especially if they are trying to create their own story aimed at adults with adults as main characters. even ignoring the sex and violence side of things, adult shows just have a very different feel to kids shows. a light-hearted show aimed at adults has a completely different feel than a kids comedy. personally i find it very hard to connect to most kids shows despite them being hyped as great stories, because they’re not really stories for or about me anymore

but also i get why many people aren’t interested in adult-demographic shows, even ones with queer rep. as i see it, queer children’s shows are a safe escapist fantasies, precisely because they’re children’s shows, and a happy ending is all but guaranteed.

many queer adults aren’t in a place where they feel happy or secure irl. for some people, seeing a queer drama that reflects their irl experiences feels validating, but for others that kind of story would make them anxious. a lighthearted story about queer teens with a happy ending might make some queer adults feel fantastic, but for other queer adults it feels cloying and infantalising.

what we need there is a variety of queer adult-themed shows. the majority of adult-themed queer content out right now (at least the really big well-known stuff) is all real world drama stuff, with the occasional romcom. it’s great, it has subtle storytelling and mature themes, but sometimes people really do jsut want lighthearted fluff. if there were more sci-fi/fantasy/action/comedic adult-themed shows featuring queer characters doing their thing, a lot of the she-ra and steven universe crowd would love them too.

as a separate issue, getting back to what OP was saying, if you’re going to write for a genre, you need to read from that genre. if you’re going to write a children’s show, it is absolutely fine to watch a heap of children’s shows and re-use the kinds of tropes they use, but those tropes belong with that genre. if you want to write adult books about adult characters doing adult things, and you’ve never read or consumed any adult-themed media, you’re gonna struggle to make something good and interesting.

you cannot give writing advice about a genre you don’t actually read or know.

but also

this is tumblr. its not exactly a bastion of academic enlightenment and highbrow literature. not all adult-themed shows are the kind that will get an obsessive cult following. 

and what someone does online doesn’t really say much about what they do irl. someone with a she-ra blog devoted to catdora might have moonlight as their favourite movie of all time, but they don’t talk about that on tumblr, they talk about it irl with their friends. someone who loves tinker tailor soldier spy sees ca:tws and reads more subtle political intrigue into it, but they never mention ttss because that’s not what they log into tumblr to chat about

(consuming media isn’t political activism, whether that media is fandom shipping or original LGBT content, but that’s a whole separate issue that deserves its own rant)

tl:dr

adults should watch more adult themed shows, but also there needs to be a greater variety of genres available for them

if you’re trying to write for a target demographic or genre, or you’re giving writing advice about it, you need to read from that genre!!!

this is tumblr, not an adult literature class. this isn’t the place to look for analysis on the complex subtle themes of adult themed shows, this is the place to find spn gifs

No offence, but some of you have never consumed media whose target demographic is adults and it shows in your writing advice.