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preserving-ferretbrain · 6 years ago

Text

Merciless

by Wardog

Wednesday, 16 September 2009

Wardog reviews Havemercy by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett~

And here I am with the ex-Harry Potter fanfic writers yet again. Havemercy is a fantasy novel, written by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett of Shoebox Project fame. It's basically Temeraire meets The Mirador and, well, it’s not entirely dreadful.

It’s set in the kingdom of Volstov, which is currently embroiled in a century-long war against the neighbouring Ke-Han Empire (who are the usual different-coloured, braid sporting fantasy ‘other’). Volstov’s greatest weapon is the mechanical, magic-infused dragons, which are powered from some kind of magical well and piloted by the Dragon Corp. The war, however, recedes into the background for most of the novel; instead we concentrate on the developing relationships between the four (yes, four) POV protagonists.

First up we have: Margrave Royston, a socialite-wizard, and a big gay, who has been exiled to the country for bumming the crown Prince. He is packed off to stay with his countrified brother and his brother’s horrid wife, and finds himself becoming friends with the quiet and scholarly tutor who has been charged with the education of the children. This is Hal, Protagonist II. Back in the capital, we have Rook, the worst of the Dragon Corp, who has recently involved them in a massive diplomatic scandal on account of treating an Ambassador’s wife like a whore. And finally Thom, an aspiring academic at the university, who is tasked with basically putting the Dragon Corp through sensitivity training as a consequence of Rook’s actions.

The focus is very much on character and relationships rather than, y’know, events. The war does kick it up a notch in the final third of the book and various things come together but it all feels a bit non-urgent to be honest, although the consequences of it are genuinely devastating (more on this later). I remember the first time I ever picked up a book by Sarah Monette and I was so impressed. “Wow,” I said (or words to this effect), “it’s wonderful to come across a fantasy writer capable of creating complex characters, and taking the time to develop them.” Unfortunately, I think it’s time for me to eat those words. I’d like some goddamn plotting please. To be fair, I think part of the problem is not that they’ve chosen to focus on character over action but that they’re basically not as good as Monette. I’m not saying Havemercy isn’t moderately competent and reasonably entertaining, it’s just also emotionally unconvincing and has a weird attitude to homosexuality.

The novel is told from the perspective of all four of its protagonists, which keeps things from dragging too much. There has been some attempt to differentiate their voices, Rook, for example, talks common (although, again, he comes off as a poor man’s Mildmay). And everybody else pretty much blends into sounding vaguely like Felix or, you know, possibly the authors. The effect of the four different points of view is generally positive and enlivening although I do think four was perhaps slightly too ambitious. And as much as it’s illuminating to have multiple perspectives on the same events occasionally it does lead to what feels like a tedious and self-indulgent dissection when you’d much rather be getting on with the … oh … what that’s word again … plot.

There are things to like about Havemercy. Steampunk dragons, for example, powered by the magic of eccentric magicians, you simply can’t go wrong with that. And I loved Havemercy herself:

“Just a spin,” I said. “Good,” said Havemercy. “I’m getting rusty.” “Shit,” I said, “you ain’t.” “Aren’t,” Havemercy said. “You common little fucker.”

She’s a nice antidote to swotty little Temeraire. And actually I quite liked Rook, who is the only character in the whole novel with any bollocks to speak of. And to give Jones and Bennett their due, they do a good job with the world building, weaving the history and the culture into the narrative without making it too oppressive.

However, there are a bunch of problems with Havemercy which reveal both the novel’s status as a debut and, perhaps, the youth of its authors. Spoilers ho.

Havemercy

She ain’t in it anywhere near enough. I know part of the deal with having a cool concept is that you don’t overplay it but, seriously, for a novel called Havemercy I could have done with a touch more dragon. Besides, as we can see above, when she is there she’s fabulous. As the war finally becomes marginally more important than the characters’ personal lives, the first major indication that something bad is in the offing is that the dragons start to act a little strangely and feel a trifle ‘off’ to their pilots. Now, I know the Dragon Corp are supposed to be an insular and closed off unit to which the reader has only mediated access but because the dragons aren’t really given enough page-time it’s next to impossible to engage, emotionally or intellectually, with the fact that they’re starting to go wrong. The dragons are off, are they? Well, uh, what were they like when they on? This also interferes with the climax – mad clockwork dragons charging towards their destruction or their salvation, it’s such a fantastic image but it has no depth to it because the dragons are basically scenery by this point anyway.

Sausage Party

There are no women in Havemercy, unless you count Havemercy herself. Oh, and a bunch of whores and a homophobic wife, of course. It must be the fandom-gene at work, because it’s obvious that Jones and Bennett are way more interested in pretty, angsty boys than they are in, well, anything else. Maybe I shouldn’t penalise them for this (at least they’re honest) but if a male writer wrote a book in which his only female characters were prostitutes, flirts or bigots I would hit the roof. Again, maybe it wouldn’t be such a problem if the fantasy genre didn’t have such an appalling history with female characters. History? What am I saying. Present. Also it genuinely does unbalance the book, what are women doing (apart from whoring and being homophobic) in the kingdom of Volstov? I think it might have helped the authors differentiate their voices and perspectives if one of them had perhaps been female.

Puerile Emotions

The characters are all of them saturated in angst, except, having read Monette, I can safely say it’s a kind of angst-lite, in which the characters moop and weep and put their wrist to their foreheads but ultimately it all feels a bit pointless. Take Hal and Royston. They fall for each other hard. They get caught in a rainstorm. They take shelter in a small hut. They are forced to remove all their clothes. To keep from, like, catching a mild chill or something. They have tension. They nearly kiss… but Royston decides he would be taking advantage of Hal if he did institute snoggage so they don’t. Basically their relationship goes something like this:

Royston: I am blatantly in love with you (sorry I have a silly name, by the way, I know it’s horrendously unattractive but we can work round it)

Hal: I am blatantly in love with you too.

Royston: Shall we shag like bunnies … wait … no! We cannot shag like bunnies because … because … look over there, a plot development.

Hal: But I want to shag like bunnies!

Royston: We cannot. Woe!

Hal: But why?

Royston. Because we cannot. Woe!

Hal: Woe! (I’m still a bit confused on this point)

Royston: Because I will be taking advantage of your innocence, dammit. Woe.

Hal: But I’m blatantly in love with you and I want to shag like bunnies.

Royston: But we cannot. Woe! Come away to the city with me.

Hal: But then I would have to abandon these people who are horrible to me and be happy. Woe!

Royston: You’re right, it’s a terrible and selfish thing to ask of you. Woe.

Hal: Oh, all right.

Royston Woe…err…what? Oh. Okay. Yay. Let us shag like bunnies … oh wait … we cannot shag like bunnies.

Hal: Why not this time?

Royston: Because … because … I only want to do it when you’re absolutely ready. Woe.

Hal: I’m fucking ready, I’ve been ready since page fucking 30.

Royston: Well, tough, I’m going to war. Woe!

Hal: Woe!

Royston: I am back from War.

Hal: Can we…

Royston: Well, now I am really ill and might die of a magical disease. Woe. Gosh, I wish we’d shagged like bunnies.

Hal: Me too.

Rosyton: Woe.

Hal: Woe.

Following a similar pattern, is the relationship between Rook and Thom. Rook hates Thom because … because … he does? And is generally bitter and heartless because his younger brother was tragically killed in a fire when he was but a Rookling. Thom, too, is carrying deep psychological wounds from the fact his older brother was tragically killed in a fire when he was…. Yeah. Zomg. I could cope with this Home and Away style plotting if hadn’t been so appallingly handled. Essentially Thom works it out first from something Rook says in a moment of vulnerability (Havemercy, of course, spotted it straight away because she is fabulous) and then … wait for it … decides not to tell him. Because … because … ?

There is no excuse for this kind of nonsense. Nobody in the novel seems remotely capable of behaving in a sensible, non-histrionic fashion or accepting other characters as adult human beings capable of making their own decisions. You can argue this is all part and parcel of their flaws but it seems more like authorial incompetence than human failing to me. And it makes Havemercy extremely irritating to read at times because I simply couldn’t respect the characters.

Teh Gay

So we’re getting more homosexual and bisexual characters in fantasy these days. I guess that’s a good thing. But with an increase in quantity, as ever, comes a decrease in quality. I think I’ve playfully remarked that it’s impossible for anybody even vaguely connected to the fandom to not have a gay in their books (I’ll forgive Erastes because she’s writing m/m romance), but there’s something horribly tokenistic about this parade of brand new, card carrying poofters. I’d better refine that slightly. It’s not that they are there to be token gays, but there is something about their homosexuality that feels tokenistic.

Take Royston and Hal. I seriously have no idea why these two are together. I mean, I know the principle – Royston is cynical and depressed after the unfortunate crown-prince-bumming-incident and is attracted to Hal’s gentleness and innocence, and Hal is desperate for knowledge of the world and somebody to be interested in him. It’s a typical innocent youth / man of the world pairing but it’s utterly utterly hollow. It’s all fluff, cuddles and celibacy. I’m not saying I want hot man-on-man action every other page, or even at all, but I felt no genuine sense of individual connection between them. It was more sort “hey, you have a cock, I like cocks, maybe we should think about having a relationship.” Also I don’t mean to be vulgar but the constant deferral of sexual gratification struck me as a bizarre way to endorse the merit of their relationship. It was like the authors were elevating one form of homosexuality (the pretty, celibate kind) above another (one that actually involves two men fucking each other).

Take this description of Hal, from Royston’s point of view:

I didn’t know who’d moved first to make it so, but quite suddenly he was tucked in close against my chest, warm and impossibly soft. Everything important about Hal was softness, I decided, his hair and his mouth, the sweet curve of his jaw, and the way it fit neatly into my palm.

What the hell?! Now, I’m no expert on what gay men think about the men they find attractive, but, seriously, soft? Soft?! To describe another man? I’m kind of assuming here that gay men fancy other men for pretty much the same reasons women fancy men … and, let me tell you, when I’m cuddling a man, or a kissing a man, I’m not thinking “gosh, isn’t he lovely and soft.” I’m not demanding chiselled and rippling masculinity here but there’s no way around the fact that ‘soft’ is a terrible word to use in conjunction with a man, especially if you are one. And, again, there’s something so flaccid and de-eroticised about the whole scene. For heaven’s sake ladies. Homosexuality is not an aesthetic.

It’s possible that I’m just too used to romances, heterosexual and homosexual, and therefore emotionally limp, sexually uninspiring and generally badly done romance arcs irritate me more than they should. But it doesn’t help that Hal is as wet as Fort William. He does occasionally make things happen, but mainly by crying at them. Weirdly, I do think I’d have found Hal less offensive if he’d been a woman. Not, I hasten to add, because I believe crying at things is more acceptable if you’re female, but because the “quiet governess / cynical lord” is a romance trope with hundreds of years of associations behind it, hopefully lending it some resonance even if the depiction of it is rather lacking. Pathetic guy and slightly less pathetic guy, not so much.

Furthermore, Havemercy suffers from an equally unsuccessful depiction of homophobia. The prevailing view of homosexuality is not really established – it seems to lie, rather like the present day in the real world, somewhere between widely accepted and generally reviled. Royston is exiled for his shenanigans with the Crown Prince, indicating a certain degree of political discomfort and there’s an amount of social sneering directed at him for his predilections. However, the only people who are openly homophobic are those we are supposed to view as ignorant (Rook) and/or repugnant (Royston’s brother’s wife). This leads to a peculiar implied social structure in which homosexuality is not completely approved but only evil people are homophobic. This is turn elevates homophobia to being basically morally equivalent to murder. Thank you self-consciously liberal, queer-positive fandom. Thank you. Ultimately, there is no denying that homophobia, sexism and racism are bad but there are plenty of perfectly nice, perfectly moral people out there who just happen to be, ‘a little bit racist’. As I think we’ve argued here at Fb on many an occasion, you do not get ‘isms’ by people waking up the morning and deciding to be prejudiced today. Again, I’m not saying the novel should have had more homophobia in it, I just think it should have more bollocks. And, regardless, it’s pretty irresponsible of Royston to “out” poor Hal (who, as we have already established is a basically homo-convenient) in a society that may judge him harshly for his sexuality.

Whedonesque

And I mean that as an insult. Again, massive, honking spoilers incoming. So, at the end of the novel they realise they can probably deal with the magic illness that is affecting Royston and the other magicians, and driving the dragons made, by taking out the magicians who cast the spell. Conveniently these magicians are standing around like NPCs in a big blue tower in the middle of the Ke-Han capital. So the dragon corp get on their now batshit dragons in a desperate attempt to tkill the magicians, save themselves and save the world. All the dragons and nearly all the dragon corp are killed. Except Rook, the one who might be gay, and the non-homophobic one, of course. In some respects, the fact I was genuinely shocked and upset by this says positive things about Jones’ and Bennett’s writing. On the other hand, it’s also a shot so fucking cheap it’s worthy of Mr Whedon himself. Kill Tara why don’t you. Kill Wash. But keep your main characters miraculously isolated from the slightest ill fortune as if the Almighty Plot Angel itself was watching over them.

Conclusion

I guess I’d better stop bitching and wrap this up. For all my criticisms, and let’s face it, there were many, I did kind of enjoy Havemercy, in spite of myself. It has some good ideas, even if they are somewhat buried beneath the layers of adolescent characterisation and gay-fetishisation.Themes:

Books

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Minority Warrior

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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/

at 13:02 on 2009-09-17There seems to be an infestation of dragon riding books right about now, with all of these Eragon's and Temeraire's and what not. Personally, I've never really cared for that idea, especially if the dragons are supposed to be intelligent. In Harry Turtledove's Darkness series and George R. R. Martin's The Ice Dragon(at least in the short story) the dragons are not terribly intelligent or are quite alien (respectively). But in these other books the dragons are supposed to have personalities and to be intelligent.

So we have a large awesome magical beast which is awesome in its own right and then we have some whiny humans who control them. What! I mean, dragons can be good and all but the idea of an intelligent awesome creature being controlled consensually by some puny and usually whiny humans is not acceptable to me. Dragons might give the occasional lift to a human, but they are not horses people!

In other words some jerk using a dragon as a weapon and that dragon just getting along with the idea reduces their awesomeness into mere attributes to make the human characters cooler.

My other point concerns the high amounts af angst which seems to infest the genre as well. It connects to the point about this books' take on homophobia and in general coming out stories and such like. Now, it is clearly meant to make some aesop about how homophobia or such like things are bad, but if we have characters who are only defined by their narcissistic whining and their utterly frustrating behaviour because of this, we have a problem. The problem being that they are uninterestin characters.

I mean if the character being portrayed isn't a teenager(and an angst ridden teenager is a horrible cliche in itself) or clinically depressed then it just doesn't make any sense. It is strange that reading the Maus comic book for example contains very small amounts of angst from the main characters, even when they're put in Auschwitch for god's sake and on the other hand we have fictional "heroes" who can't do anything because things are so frigging bleak. I'm looking at you Mr. Potter.

End rant.

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Arthur B

at 13:51 on 2009-09-17

So we have a large awesome magical beast which is awesome in its own right and then we have some whiny humans who control them. What!

I do find this a bit jarring myself, and it only gets more jarring the more independently intelligent the dragons get. I seem to recall in the

Pern

books it kind of makes sense because the dragons aren't smart enough to just be told "go and destroy those space threads", they need telepathically linked human riders to steer them right. But if you've got dragons who are massive, powerful, and smart enough to follow a mission briefing and understand what they need to go do, one does begin to wonder what the point of having someone riding them is in the first place. Why stick a squishy vulnerable person atop a powerful war machine when the war machine is perfectly capable of doing the job itself? What on earth does the rider bring to the fight which the dragon doesn't bring in spades?

Which isn't to say that

Havemercy

doesn't have an answer to that - Kyra doesn't mention either way - but it is something people should probably think about when they're writing this sort of thing.

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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/

at 14:26 on 2009-09-17The use of dragons as war machines and comparing them to bombers and fighters should really be examined and justified more completely if it appears that these 'machines' have real intelligence. I believe Michael Swanwicks' The Iron Dragons Daughter is one of the greatest successes when it comes to making this kind of thing work. The dragons are gigantic warmachines whose intelligence is like a magical artificial intelligence filled with hate, because they're war machines. So they need to be controlled by pilots or they would try to destroy everything. So there's actually a reason for the control. It's so sad that some pure badass creature would take orders from some squishy apes without being fordced to.

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Dan H

at 18:47 on 2009-09-17I'm with Arthur on this one. It's not that I find it degrading for dragons to have riders (I find it a little hard to get het up about the dignity of fictional beings, and I don't actually have a problem with the whole "bond between dragon and rider" thing) it's just that in a military context it makes no sense at all. It's like insisting that all of your soldiers go into battle with a small child on their back.

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Rami

at 19:00 on 2009-09-17Wow. Magical steampunk dragons. I really can't see how you could go wrong with that. Maybe you could have them run out of coal mid-flight and have the riders necessary as stokers, or something.

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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/

at 20:15 on 2009-09-17Well, truth be told, I'm not much of a torch bearer for fictional beings' rights myself. I just get bugged about stuff and too often the cool image of dragons is just a cheap way of giving the central character(s) a cool accessory.

In this case, the dragons being mechanical, I suppose it's not really important. The cover blurp is incorrect though, steampunk magic dragons can be found in The Iron Dragons Daughter, which I mentioned before. It's a great idea though anyways.

Actually Dan, judging from your own writings that book by Swanwicks' could suit you. It's been described as an anti-fantasy and is its authors reaction to run-of-the mill trilogies and such. Plus it's a changeling story, with a magical society run by amoral elves, which is pure cutthroat capitalism and rule of the strong.

An example is that when a citys' and its universitys' costs and population gets too high, they(it's emblematic of the story that who they are is left intentionally unclear) initiate a Tenism, which means that in carnivalistic time of chaos one tenth of the population is handily destroyed. The strong and the rich are supposed to survive. Well, it's at least different I suppose.

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http://miss-morland.livejournal.com/

at 15:55 on 2009-09-18

Everything important about Hal was softness, I decided, his hair and his mouth, the sweet curve of his jaw, and the way it fit neatly into my palm.

Blergh. This is the sort of weirdness you'll find in a lot of slash fanfic, and which contributes to giving the genre as a whole a bad reputation. I'm so glad I've never bothered to read The Shoebox Project...

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Wardog

at 16:26 on 2009-09-18

Blergh

Thank you. I read that description and I felt exactly the same way. But I thought perhaps too much hypermasculinity had warped my sense of romance. I feel vindicated in my blergh now.

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Arthur B

at 18:45 on 2009-09-18The jaw bit seems particularly weird. Jawbones are not, by and large, especially soft, and jaws by extension tend not to be soft unless they have a fair amount of padding. Heck, I'm a fat bastard and I still don't have enough fat in my face that you could really describe my jaw as soft to the touch.

The mental images conjured are bizarre. Either Hal has some sort of horrible bone-melting disease and has to eat through a straw, or he's an extremely chubby guy whose jowly jaws and double chin fit neatly into Royston's hand.

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http://miss-morland.livejournal.com/

at 19:20 on 2009-09-18

he's an extremely chubby guy whose jowly jaws and double chin fit neatly into Royston's hand.

Lol! What a romantic image. :-D

But really -- I don't mean to sound condescending or anything, but I do wonder a little how much these authors actually know about the male physique, because realistically I'd expect there to be some stubble, at least. Not all this 'softness'. But perhaps gay men don't have facial hair? *eyeroll*

In fact, I get the impression they think gay men are completely different from straight men, both mentally and physically, which I find offensive -- it's not so much that I have a problem with male characters crying; it's rather that I have a problem with male

gay

characters crying, because I'm 100 % certain the author wouldn't portray a straight male character that way.

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http://miss-morland.livejournal.com/

at 19:46 on 2009-09-18Oh, and I should add that I haven't read

Havemercy

, I'm just speaking about bad slashfic in general.

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Dan H

at 21:27 on 2009-09-18The "gay man = woman" (or possibly "alien") thing is particularly disquieting, if only for its popularity amongst people who would never in a million years think of themselves as homophobes.

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Arthur B

at 22:45 on 2009-09-18We have people riding dragons, we have weird attitudes towards homosexuality... I don't think there's ever going to be a better time to cough and note that

Anne McCaffrey

has some interesting ideas about tent pegs.

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http://descrime.livejournal.com/

at 03:05 on 2009-09-19My impression of slash fanfiction is that there are two kinds of slash writers: writers whose characters like they like to write about just happen to be guys, and writers whose characters they like to write about happen to be guys because they hate writing women. I once took part in an online discussion where women seriously complained that it wasn't their fault they just wrote women completely out of their stories, it was simply too hard to write female characters. And they saw nothing wrong with this. From this review (I haven't read the book), it seems these authors fall in the latter category.

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Viorica

at 05:16 on 2009-09-19I think it's also a form of emotional porn/Mary Sue syndrome. There's a reason fangirls swoon over angst.

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Dan H

at 20:36 on 2009-09-20It's one of those difficult situations where you *almost* have to stand up and say "well fair play to them then". I mean it seems that what you've got here are a couple of girls who are mostly interested in pretty men angsting about stuff and who write exactly that. You've almost got to admire the honesty.

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Wardog

at 23:12 on 2009-09-20@Dan - Yeah, I know what you mean about the honesty. But ultimately I think I'd be kicking up a fuss if a male writer did it so I feel morally obliged to kick up a fuss if female writers do :)

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Arthur B

at 01:58 on 2009-09-21I think the difficulty is the inclusion of the homophobia angle; by introducing what is essentially a RL issue into their story about pretty unthreatening men having pretty unthreatening relationships, they are kind of inviting people to compare said pretty unthreatening homosexuals to actual flesh and blood homosexuals. And asking the reader to compare your fantasies to reality is not a game that ever ends well.

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http://roisindubh211.livejournal.com/

at 02:07 on 2009-09-28I actually find it odd that they did such a silly job with the romance in this, because they wrote much more believable boys in the Shoebox project:

Sirius makes a noise that's kind of a laugh and kind of a groan and then presses his lips against Remus' without any warning. Or with ample warning that Remus is only just now beginning to decode. He hasn't shaved and his hands are sweaty and there are teeth in there, and it is not much at all like kissing Lily except that kisses, Remus has learned, are wet, nervous, compelling, terrifying things. He makes a sound. Sirius jerks away. "Let's never mention this again," Sirius decides out loud, leaping to his feet, as if he's been electrocuted. "Shall we?" "Uh," Remus says.

I'm wondering now how much of the quality in the Project has to do with the pre-existing characters.

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Dan H

at 10:36 on 2009-09-28I'd imagine pre-existing characters are a big part of it. It takes pretty much no effort at all to make a relationship between two characters convincing if everybody is *already* convinced those two characters are at it doggy-style.

There's very little, for example, in the passage you quote that tells us why these two people are attracted to each other beyond the fact that they're Remus Lupin and Sirius Black.

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Arthur B

at 16:39 on 2009-09-28This would, in fact, seem to one of the dangers inherent in using fanfiction to develop your writing talents: because someone else has done all the heavy lifting of establishing the characters for you, there's far less need to actually develop your skills on that front.

It's slightly less true of setting, because you get weird alternate universe fanfics which play merry hell with the setting - or indeed ditch it entirely and populate an entirely new world with the same characters - but the fanfic scene does seem to be all about the familiar characters. Even when the occasional original character creeps in, it's considered bad form (and indeed textbook Mary Sueism) to let them upstage the established characters, and you don't see many people writing alternate universe fanfic where the setting is the same but all the characters are different.

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Dan H

at 18:48 on 2009-09-28To be fair to fandom, there's a sense in which working with pre-existing characters can actually help sharpen your mad characterization skillz. You can talk about "voice" all you like, but in the end one of the best ways to really understand how the whole thing works is to look at something and say "yes, but would Severus Snape really *say* that?"

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Arthur B

at 19:17 on 2009-09-28It can help there, sure, but that sort of exercise does nothing to help you establish "Who is this Snape person?" in the first place, which is the aspect I think people can neglect. As you point out, you can get away with not explaining who Snape is in fanfic, you can't get away with not explaining who Royston is if you're introducing him to people for the very first time.

Essentially, it can help you understand voice, and how to write in particular voices, but those skills are at best ancillary to the skill of coming up with distinctive voices for your characters in the first place. Hence Cassie Cla(i)re and the mysteriously Malfoylike qualities of certain of her characters.

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http://roisindubh211.livejournal.com/

at 01:53 on 2009-09-29They do make them believably attracted to each other throughout the Project, I just chose that segment to contrast with the "Hal is so soft and delicate" bits from Havemercy. I think they would have done better to write about teenage boys in a "semirealistic" setting (I can't believe I just called the Potterverse semirealistic- I guess I mean contemporary with or without magic tacked on).

They do a good job with characters we don't really see in the books -Pettigrew, for instance- you almost get why he'd fall in with the DE crowd and his motivations there- and also they manage to write James as a

likable

jerk, which is not the easiest thing to pull off.

Mostly, I mean that they can write boys who are goofy and dorky and shy and pull pranks on each other, and who like each other, without getting taken over by teh gay like poor Hal (and, to be honest, a hell of a lot of slash fanfic)

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Wardog

at 12:22 on 2009-10-05I just wanted to say, I like the bit you quoted and I see why you quoted it. I think the fandom/not-fandom thing is, for this, largely irrelevant - the point is it shows them having something like a clue. I can only presume they threw said clue out of the window when they came to write Havemercy. I don't know how could they could from this quite harsh, quite 'realistic' depication of a clumsy boykiss to soft melting girly Hal.

Seriously, ladies, what the hell happened to you?

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valse de la lune

at 12:26 on 2011-12-08Necroing this to note: the things you've said about slash and fandom here would have gotten you absolutely

eviscerated

in some circles and, probably, called a raging misogynist or something. Slash fandom has become this weird sacred cow thing to some social-justice types. It's bizarre and also reminds me that, in my flailing desperation to seek out more lesbian representation, all the attention is always given to the hot gay boys--consider the Rachel Manija Brown thing and the "say yes to gay in YA." All of which always made me comfortable too because, uhm, we're still raising a big giant fuss about a couple of straight white ladies who wrote this gay Asian--Japanese?--boy. Wow gosh, they are so brave! Deepa D.

expressed her misgivings

better than I could. tl;dr even if I don't think much of her writing on a technical level, Malinda Lo's Asian lesbian girls > this crap by an order of magnitude of fifty thousand.

but there’s something horribly tokenistic about this parade of brand new, card carrying poofters. I’d better refine that slightly. It’s not that they are there to be token gays, but there is something about their homosexuality that feels tokenistic.

That seems to be a thing which plagues pretty much all former HP fanfic authors who "graduated" to writing YA. And, well, there's probably a reason the YA reader/writer subset is so strangely insular and so very, very like fandom.

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Wardog

at 14:39 on 2011-12-10Yes, I'm slightly more aware of the discussions / context of the role of homosexuality in fandom these days so I might express myself a little better ... but I do kind of stand by my comments. And although I'd rather people didn't come and bite my face off and make me sad ... well ... yeah. It's just everything about the portrayal of a gay relationship in Havemercy brings me out in HIVES.

As I'm sure we've discussed before I have no problems with people getting off on hot (potentially not very dudely) guys sexing each other up - but when you claim that's *representation* then it's *appropriative*.

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valse de la lune

at 18:09 on 2011-12-12No, I agree with you and don't mean to bite your face off by any means!

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Wardog

at 18:45 on 2011-12-12Hehe, not you! I meant an angry fandom complaining about me impugning them :)

#Ferretbrain #Havemercy #Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett #Joss Whedon #Harry Potter #Fanfiction #Wardog #Minority Warrior

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