#rebelsandfools

[oxideblack]

[rebelsandfools]

It's our 7 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳 (Or it was on March 24th) 7 years since we started our journey to a digital B7 fanzine, which resulted in 7 issues of the Rebels and Fools zine, all of which you can find totally free as PDF download on this blog!

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about further, probably stand-alone zine projects, so keep an eye out.

[probably-enjoying-this]

“Vila weighs seventy-three kilos, Avon.”

The door closed on its own, inches from Vila’s face, and all Vila could do was sit and stare at the metal, unseeing, fear flooding his bones. No way out but one, and Orac had found it, but Avon wouldn’t, he’d never.

Would he?

Vila���s feet knew the answer before his heart would admit it, and he was down the ladder, hunting for the rungs blindly, hands slipping with sweat, then once halfway down he let himself fall the rest of the way; he’d misjudged the height and the pain of the impact shot all the way from ankle to knee, and he knew that if he broke his leg he was dead. Where could he hide? He blinked away tears of agony, swiping at his face, cursing quietly at the salt in his eyes because he couldn’t afford not to see. It wasn’t a large shuttle; he couldn’t go back up; Avon would be coming from there, any moment now, and he needed to get away—but where to, where? There was just the cargo hold, but Avon had sent Vila there, he’d expect him—

“Vila?”

The cloying voice slid down Vila’s spine, and his last feeble hope that Avon didn’t mean to kill him shriveled away into nothingness. Avon had never sounded like that, not in all of their time together, not in their worst moments. Vila hit the door lock, and he was in the cargo hold, the only place he could go, his legs still burning in pain but blessedly not broken, and the voice—that voice—followed him like in a nightmare, “Vila, Vila,” and he slammed the door mechanism shut to keep it out.

He had no time to pick out a good hiding place. He climbed up into a compartment at random, in the back and in the shadow as far as possible. Would it be enough? There was nothing he could use to block the view and hide behind. If only he’d looked for another option: the racks in the back, perhaps, or maybe a panel in the wall—but then he heard the door opening, loud in the silence, and he knew he was in it for good or ill. 

“Vila? Are you here?”

He folded his legs as close to his chest as he could and trembled, not daring to breathe. 

“I need your help,” the voice that wasn’t Avon’s voice said.

The door whooshed shut, and they were sealed together in their private crypt. 

“Vila, I know you’re here. Come out.”

He could faintly hear boots on metal, stepping softly to muffle the noise: a predator’s steps. And then Avon turned a corner and Vila could see him. He could see the gun in Avon’s hand, too.

Vila shut his eyes, like a child hiding in plain sight who thought he’d not be seen—but that was even worse; he had to look; he didn’t want to look. 

“Vila. I know how they did it but I need your help. Please help me.”

Avon was right underneath, now. One glance upwards would be all it would take, and there was nothing Vila could do, nothing at all. 

There was scattered cargo at Avon’s feet: some sort of transparent cube, hard to see. If he tripped, that would be Vila’s one chance; he could drop and try to disarm him. He planned the motion, the best way to grab Avon’s arm that held the gun; he could fight well if he had time to plan, it was not so different from a sleight-of-hand trick. He closed his fist as he thought of how to throw the punch—and his trembling elbow hit the panel at his side and dislodged a metal piece that fell to the floor, clattering loudly.

A hand was on his collar, yanking brutally hard; he was falling face first, and the floor came up to meet him. He’d lost.

“Get up,” Avon rasped into his ear, too loud and too close.

Continue reading on Ao3

Originally published in the Blake's 7 zine Rebels and Fools #7

[jaelijn]

Happy Gauda Prime Day!

Rebels and Fools #6!

It's here! Enjoy! Look! Read!

GPD Calendar Masterpost

[hadescavedish]

My humble contributions to the amazing @rebelsandfools fanzine #4!

(Tumblr tags have some problems I’ll put the link of this issue in my reblog)

PGP Blake & Avon poster

Film Noir Avon & Vila poster

3-7 are arts for @foreignobjecticus‘s lovely Avon/Vila fanfic called “Three Times the Fool” in this issue. (and thank you for the encouragement and inspirations!)

[foreignobjecticus]

I feel this may be dangerous, but for the WIP ask game... 19 and for something potentially more wholesome 7.

Hehehheeh I'm so glad that you think it's dangerous to ask for gifs! mwahauhaah

19: Post a picture or gif that describes your WIP.

I'm using Poirot here as a stand-in for B7 since what I want is not really in B7

7: What are you most proud of?

I'm assuming these are meant to be for the same WIP, so I'm gonna say - in all seriousness - the thing I'm most proud of is the fact that it's gen for once ahahhhaha and Teen (for blood because obviously I can't write something mundane without adding angst and/or whump).

Anyway you'll find out what this is because I'm gonna submit it for @rebelsandfools 5 and yes this is my way of making sure I'm held accountable.

Thanks for the ask!

[ruth-dw]

I saw your reply on Horizon about B7 Discord Servers but the invite code is out of date and does not work - how can I join the Rebels & Fools?

That's a really good question - I thought the link in the Tumblr post I linked to was perpetual. @rebelsandfools should know whether new guests are currently accepted!

[certified-diplodocus]

It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing.

Macbeth

[ruth-dw]

A vignette which shows us a beginning...

All told first-person in Vila's voice, but there any resemblance to John Watson ends. That narrator's circumlocution and baseline state of speechless astonishment would be completely out-of-place, here. Instead the narration is lodged firmly in Vila's familiar character and mode of speech.

By @castielslight for @rebelsandfools

A Study in Gold

read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/2Q00pnA

by Jaelijn

No business making a big name for yourself as a thief; that just means you get caught all the more quickly.

A Victorian AU.

Words: 2484, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Blake’s 7

Rating: General Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: Gen

Characters: Vila Restal, Kerr Avon

Relationships: Vila Restal & Kerr Avon

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Victorian, POV First Person, First Meetings, Developing Friendships, Gentlemen Thieves and Detectives, Inspired by Sherlock Holmes and Arsène Lupin, Vila’s POV

read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/2Q00pnA

[talesfromthenorsesmouth]

Just wanted to say, Rebels and Fools Issue 1 is SO GOOD.

I'm gonna send messages to the individual contributors, but I just wanted to yell about it here first. 

Fantastic work- really happy to be included in this, and especially to @castielslight for getting us all together.

*Blows kisses to all*

[oxideblack]

[rebelsandfools]

Rebels and Fools: Issue 7

It's time for the grand finale - the final, sparkling new issue of our digital Blake’s 7 fanzine, Rebels and Fools, has arrived!

Seven issues - what a fantastic achievement, at last complete. If you're new, you now have the full set of R&F issues at your fingertips - if you've been here forever, here's the final piece for your collection.

One last time a massive THANK YOU again to all contributors, without whom this zine wouldn’t exist. As our readers, please be vocal in your appreciation, in public or in private. You will find ways to contact the individual contributors in the zine, but I’m also always happy to take messages on this blog (ask box!), and appreciation posted into #rebelsandfools is most welcome and will be reblogged here (unless Tumblr eats the tagged posts because, well, Tumblr). And if you happen to be in the mood for a review - there is still space on R&F’s fanlore page!

Click here to get to the pdf download of the zine, or find the link for copy-pasting under this issue’s cover image by yours truly the editor, @jaelijn.

Here is the link to the zine again, and for copy-pasting: 

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/l889fts4u35tqfm0l4pcd/Rebels-and-Fools-Issue-7.pdf?rlkey=85bggvwjr1ikf5x90k38tnl5p&dl=0

Enjoy the zine!

Sharing and Promotion: You are absolutely encouraged to talk about and promote the zine to Blake’s 7 fans anywhere and everywhere! If you wish to publicly share the zine off Tumblr, please link to the original of this Tumblr post, not the direct Dropbox link. I will be maintaining the link on here, but cannot guarantee that the download link won’t change over time.

One caveat on promotion: you cannot use the cover image or any content that is not your own in full or in part for the promotion of the zine (or any other purpose, really) without the explicit permission of the editor (me) and the creator of the content in question - if you plan a bigger piece on/promotion of R&F, contact the editor. You are not permitted to profit financially from this zine in any way, including but not limited to promotion and/or sharing of the zine.

Contributors: You are absolutely allowed to post your own work elsewhere, as long as you don’t submit it to another zine. I would, however, ask you to wait just one little week until August 30th 2023 before doing so, just so people have time to appreciate the zine in full first, and that you mention the zine and link back to this post when you do. There is also an AO3 collection, if you want to add your works there. For now, you can absolutely point people to the full zine and highlight where to find your content, if you want. Please do not use any submissions to the zine to make financial profit. And finally: thank you again for your wonderful submissions!

[jaelijn]

Let us know if you have any platform preferences!

Hey, Rebels and Fools on Tumblr!

After some thought and discussion, we have a proposal to contributors and would-be contributors of the Rebels & Fools fanzine (and the Blake’s 7 fanfic/fanart people in general.)

Would you be interested in a semi-private chat room for writers and artists and beta-readers to get together to talk together in real time, exchange ideas, and pair up for collaborative works?  Not just for the goal of the next issue, but for creative fan talk in general?  And if so, what platform would you prefer?

The two options currently being considered are IRC and Discord.  I have a lightly used IRC channel all set up that can easily be repurposed for R&F chat.  @castielslight and I are also researching Discord as a more multi-featured option.

If you’re interested, reblog or reply and let us know what you want out of it, and which platform you prefer.

[jaelijn]

Hello. Sorry to ask a silly question and I hope not too many people have asked you this endlessly, but why is it the final edition of Rebels and Fools? I mean why is it stopping? I'm not on Tumblr so I'm pretty clueless (generally, haha)

No worries at all, nor a silly question - I don't think I've explained this at length anywhere, as yet. So @rebelsandfools....

The short of it is that *if* I were to pick to stop anywhere, Issue #7 is where it would be - because Blake's 7, naturally. It feels both appropriate and a place to stop while on a high, because the last thing I want is for the zine to die a sad death for some reason or another. As in, I don't ever want to promise an issue that then never happens.

The long answer is that I never expected this zine to have anywhere near this many issues - when I had the idea, I frankly barely expected there to be *one* issue, haha! But when I realised that it could happen, reaching the appropriate 7 issues became a dream and something that seemed possible even when I was at my lowest: The zine is a massive commitment of time and effort on my part, one that I can't muster if I'm not fully committed to the project, and I don't want it to die because I fail to deliver. The seven issues also represent 7 years of my life, which is a decently long time to be in a fandom in the first place, and also a time in which - as you can probably imagine - a lot of things can change in real life (IRL) as well as in fandom. I'm still here, clearly, but when I was looking at editing issue #5 (which is when this decision was made), I thought that if I fell out of love with the fandom in any of the next two years, I could probably manage to push myself for *just one more issue* and finish it up neatly, regardless of what was happening IRL. As of yet, I haven't fallen out of love with the show/fandom, and I honestly hope that I won't, ever, but it's not always easy, and I want to conclude the project while I still feel that I want to do it. (The fact that R&F is ending doesn't necessarily mean there won't be future B7 zine projects from Rebels and Fools Press aka yours truly, by the by, if I feel like it, but the continued yearly commitment is getting A Lot, because after issue #7, there is no place that seems like a natural stopping point anymore.)

Beyond my personal stuff, the other factor is, of course, that I can't do the zine alone. I do *a lot*, but if there's no content, there's no zine, and across these 7 years, I have seen a lot of shifting in the fandom. While I have definitely also seen new people and creators join across the years, a significant number of people alongside whom I originally started this project have had less time or have moved on to other things. The tumblr community that was the original start of it doesn't really exist in this way anymore, even though a lot of the people are still around; the more active areas of the fandom seem to have moved to different shores or towards aspects that I have no personal interest and/or involvement in. As such, maintaining a connection to a community for finding submissions after the initial year has never felt easy and has, in fact, become increasingly difficult, as evidenced also by the delay to issue #6. I don't want to be at a point where I could do a zine but know nobody else who wants to and/or wants to do it with me, and after committing 7 years to this, I also don't want to just pass the zine over to someone else who might be more in touch with other parts of the fandom. But I also don't want R&F to become a one-person-project that will eventually just not happen anymore because I can't be bothered. I want to give it a grand finale as the community project that it always was - and to do that, it needs to have a fixed, predetermined end point that people can work towards, and there seemed to be no more appropriate place than the seventh issue. I do hope that people will want to join me again for a this final issue to achieve a grand finale worthy of the zine and the show/fandom. And if you're new to the zine - don't let the fact that it's the finale deter you! We may have a long history, but just because you are coming in at the final issue doesn't mean we won't love to have you (and hope that you will continue to stick around, after!)!

As for what comes after Issue #7 - who knows. I have been toying with the idea of single-issue topic and/or character/pairing specific zines, but first I want to give R&F the grand finale that a seven year project deserves. Hopefully, I'll see you as part of it!

[foreignobjecticus]

Argh why is the word limit 15,000?! I think to myself, and then see the page count:

Fuck.

[foreignobjecticus]

Check out the full zine above for some amazing A/V and filk as well! :D :D

My humble contributions to the amazing @rebelsandfools fanzine #4!

(Tumblr tags have some problems I’ll put the link of this issue in my reblog)

PGP Blake & Avon poster

Film Noir Avon & Vila poster

3-7 are arts for @foreignobjecticus‘s lovely Avon/Vila fanfic called “Three Times the Fool” in this issue. (and thank you for the encouragement and inspirations!)