#Archontes

[curus-creations]

Keep it all under control

[dinosaurhedgehog]

[satturn]

been writing a paper

[croissantfromeden]

Morax

[vvhiteangel-warframe]

Actualités Warframe de la Semaine ! Quoi de beau du 29 Avril au 5 Mai 2024 ?

Les Actus de la Semaine ! L’Édito PROTEA PRIME Le Devstream de la semaine précédente nous a donné des news et une belle vue sur les prochains mois concernant Warframe. Mais ! En attendant la mi-Mai, Juin et surtout Juillet … nous avons l’arrivée de Protea prime dès le 1er Mai ! Le 11ème anniversaire en est à son sprint final, il est toujours temps de se connecter et récupérer le Dex Nikana.…

[cucamonga-springs]

To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.

Philip K. Dick, Valis

[rejectedreligion1]

RR Pod E26 Prof. Dr. Wouter J. Hanegraaff: Hermetic Embodiment, Interpretation, & Imagination It was my pleasure to speak with Prof. Dr. Wouter Hanegraaff about his new book, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity. As Wouter preferred not to give a general summary, I chose four very important themes of the book to discuss: what the Hermetica is really all about; the notion of embodiment in the Hermetic texts; the difficult but extremely important task of interpreting the ancient texts; and the importance of the faculty of the imagination - not only within the Hermetica, but also for the scholar trying to understand what the texts are actually saying. Wouter does an excellent job of explaining the terms gnosis and nous (that Wouter calls the "hero of the book") and how they are used within the Hermetic texts; these terms are crucial for the rest of the discussion.  Following the four themes, Wouter discusses in more detail how Platonism influenced the Hermetica, how Gadamer's concept of hermeneutics plays a role in the process of understanding these texts, the paradox of how we think about the term imagination, and how Wouter tries to 'systematically privilege weirdness' when studying the Hermetic texts.

[vipnoviny]

Proč nás Archóntové postrkují do válek

Války nevznikají zničehonic, ale jsou předem plánovány temnými silami. Kniha „Předpovědi o budoucnosti a pravda o minulosti“ byla napsaná roku 2003. Čili téměř před dvaceti lety. Nicméně tato kniha předpověděla mnoho událostí, které dnes zažíváme a také nám ukazuje kdo za těmito událostmi stojí. V tomto článku budu citovat z knihy pasáž o Archontech a jejích poskocích jako jsou například Rotschildové, kteří po celá staletí vtahují lidí do válek a utrpení, aby na tom vydělali, anebo v případě archontů čerpali energii z lidského utrpení a zvyšovali si tím sféru svého vlivu. Budu zde citovat ze strany 28 a 47 této knihy.

Citát z knihy:

Historická fakta o působení Archóntů Příčiny vzniku států a válek „…Co myslíš, proč a jak vznikl takový stát ‚Neomezených možností‘ jako je Amerika? Nebo proč došlo k první a druhé světové válce?“  „Hm, proč?“ poněkud znejistěl Nikolaj Andrejevič. „Mělo to své historické důvody, politické faktory, nakonec to možná byla jen náhoda. Co se týče válek – pohár trpělivosti přetekl a jen sebemenší důvod stačil, aby se rozhořelo nepřátelství mezi politiky, kteří uvrhli své národy do těchto válek.  Vezměme si například sarajevský atentát na rakouského arcivévodu, dědice rakousko-uherského trůnu. Právě tato událost posloužila jako záminka k rozpoutání první světové války.“  Sensei se pousmál a řekl: „Jinou odpověď jsem ani nečekal. ‚Historické důvody‘, ‚politické faktory‘, ‚náhoda‘, ‚pohár trpělivosti‘ – to jsou jen klišé Archóntů, která byla násilně vnucena lidem, aby nikdo nechtěl odhalit pravou podstatu toho, co se stalo. Historie, můj drahý doktore, nevzniká sama od sebe, dějiny lidstva tvoří a formují autority.“ V letech 1861–1865 vyprovokovali Svobodní zednáři v USA občanskou válku, aby zchladili horké hlavy lidí, kteří nebyli spokojeni s vládou. Země se rozdělila na Sever a Jih. Rothschildova londýnská banka financovala Sever a Rothschildova pařížská banka zase Jih. Rothschildové, kteří zásobovali obě strany zbraněmi a prostředky, na tom vydělali obrovské jmění. Je to stejné, jako když hrajete šachy sami se sebou. Ať vyhraje kterákoli strana, černé nebo bílé figurky, hráč vyhrává vždy. Prohrál pouze americký národ, a to jak Sever, tak i Jih. No, takže války a revoluce se nestávají jen tak. Přinášejí zisk právě tomu, kdo je vyprovokoval. Válka je neštěstí pro obyčejné lidi. Pro Archónty a jejich patolízalské finančníky je to velmi výhodný obchod. Jedni si rozšiřují sféru vlivu a druzí zvyšují své jmění. Trpí obyčejní lidé.“ Jak se můžeme postavit Archóntům? „...Copak Archóntové činí?“ pousmál se Sensei. „Chtěl bych objasnit ještě jednou, Archóntů samotných je jen žalostná skupinka v porovnání s celým lidstvem! Pokud je lidé nechají být, Archóntové se jednoduše zblázní. Archóntové pouze plánují, kdežto my, lidé, volíme, budeme-li souhlasit s jejich volbou nebo si obhájíme volbu vlastní. Vždyť společná volba závisí na osobní volbě každého z nás, na tom, co v nás převáží uvnitř, jestli duchovní přání, nebo materiální klam. Proč nás Archóntové postrkují do válek, revolucí a konfliktů mezi národy a proč my jdeme jako stádo, jako ovce a zabíjíme sobě podobné, aniž bychom přemýšleli o následcích? Proto, že pro Archónty je důležité formovat lidi neschopné samostatně myslet, neschopné najít si souvislosti a konat. Mají zájem o otroky, kterými je možné manipulovat prostřednictvím sdělovacích prostředků, vnucovat jim normy Archóntů – jak mají vypadat, jak se mají chovat a myslet, jakých politických a hmotných zásad se mají držet. Udržují lidi v neustálém strachu z chudoby, z hladu a hmotného strádání, v obavách o vlastní život a zdraví. Člověk začíná věřit, že toto je ten pravý život, že toto je jeho osud. Ale tak to vůbec není! Člověk je vždy svobodný ve své osobní volbě! Veškeré obavy jsou výsledkem Materiální podstaty, jejího absolutního strachu ze smrti. Jenže každá hmota je smrtelná. To je zákon. Avšak právě v tom spočívá kouzlo člověka, že není jen kouskem hmoty, není otrokem, že se v něm skrývá obrovská duchovní síla, která jej může přeměnit na Člověka Skutečného, na bytost, která je povznesena nad hmotný svět. Osvobodí-li se od lži, pak se osvobodí od hlouposti. Poznáním Pravdy se člověk stává silnějším a moudřejším. Čím více bude na světě lidí moudrých a svobodných duchem, tím hůře se bude Archóntům dařit realizovat jejich plány, tím slabší bude jejich vliv na lidi. A pokud budou znát Pravdu všichni a udělají svou správnou volbu, pak Archóntové nebudou mít jednoduše komu diktovat své podmínky. Vždyť oni ve skutečnosti nejsou nikým. Archóntů je jen žalostná skupinka. Lidé mají rozhodnutí ve svých rukou – buď se poddají provokaci Archóntů a rozpoutají globální válku, nebo svrhnou vládu Archóntů a vytvoří zlatý věk této civilizace. V rukou lidí je budoucnost světa. Je to jednoduché. Je třeba být tím, koho se Archóntové bojí. Je třeba být Člověkem!“ Konec citace.

Závěr

Archonti staví často na kolektivismu a budují v lidech kolektivní myšlení. To je základem pro manipulaci a nastolení diktatury, ať už formou komunismu, fašismu, nacismu, nebo dnes covidismu. Staví na společenské odpovědnosti, pocitu provinění (když nejdete s proudem) a potlačení individualismu. Proto když nějaký politik, jako například Radim Fiala veřejně prohlašuje „Jsme ve válce“, i když to dokonce ani oficiálně není pravda a neoficiálně to většina národa ani tak nevnímá, nebo výroky „Musíme se společně postavit proti Putinovi.“, tak si můžete být jisti, komu tento politik slouží a kam nás chce uvrhnout. Read the full article

[gogandmagog]

Guys! Yesterday I had a book-shaped piece of mail, and inside of it was my copy of Children and Childhoods in L.M. Montgomery: Continuing Conversations being returned, from another very dear user here! I bring this up only because some-months-ago I promised to copy out a particular article from this book, for yet another user here, who was interested! Interested because it’s on the the subject of a Fan Favourite thing... fan fiction. And better still because some of our (basically famous) mutuals here are mentioned by name! If you’ve ever wondered if the Montgomery scholarship is reading your fan fiction... the answer is yes, they are! They totally are. More than that, they also have some thoughts to share… as well as recommendations of their faves too! This article even covers the F/F and M/M fan fiction presented by fans in LMM’s universe, and I’m personally super excited to be able to begin reading these works, as soon as I can find them all. I’ve done my best to link what I could immediately find, but some of the mentioned stories were unavailable... potentially due to changes in usernames? (That said... if anyone knows of the works indicated here, that I haven’t provided a link for, please do share!)   This article, by the way, was written recently... in 2020! It’s very current, and it covers a few stories that were still being actively updated during the pandemic. The focus of this article is less so on canon (or really just the Anne/Gilbert pairing), though, and seems to prefer demonstrating the versatility of mixing relationships (Anne and Emily, for one!) and the wider more general universe-building aspects (the entanglements of future generations/Anne’s grandchildren) that fans have been expounding on for nothing less than decades. 

Okay, here we go! xx

Continuing Stories: L.M. Montgomery and Fanfiction in the Digital Era by Balaka Basu

Fanfiction – the recreational (re)writing of texts – is a literary genre of rapidly growing significance. Abigail Derecho in her brief history of fanfiction identifies it as “a genre that has a long history of appealing to women and minorities, minorities, individuals on the cultural margins who used archontic writing as a means to express not only their narrative creativity, but their criticisms of social and political inequities as well.”

Insightfully defined by Francesca Coppa and Mary Ellen Curtin as “speculative fiction about character,” fanfiction can be even more precisely understood as fantasies about the diegetic positioning of characters in the context of various settings, communities, relationships both textual and paratextual, and eventually all manner of cultural mythologies.

Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson describe the production of fanfiction as “part collaboration and part response to not only the source text, but also the cultural context within and outside the fannish community in which it is produced.”

They point out that the shift in the method of dissemination of fanfiction from newsletters and zines to internet archives means that “ever-younger fans who previously would not have had access to the fannish culture except through their parents can now enter the fan space effortlessly; financial resources have become less of a concern because access to a computer is the only prerequisite; and national boundaries and time zones have ceased to limit fannish interaction.”

The nature of fanfiction allows participants to cross-generational and socio-economic boundaries in an ongoing exchange of responses to a source text with which they share a fascination, developing new texts that in turn elicit their own responses. While the creation of fanfiction is evidence of an affective, loving, communal relationship with the source text, this genre of writing is still dismissed in many quarters as overly emotional, purely erotic, and even perverse, a type of amateur and immature engagement with popular texts that produces writing necessarily divorced from literary significance. Produced in staggeringly vast quantities by subcultures with complex vocabularies and traditions that can intimidate the casual reader, fanfiction is perceived by many to be more of a cultural practice than a literary genre, variously denigrated for its pornographic potential and its lack of originality. However, close examination reveals that fan writers are able to create a critical dialogue with the originating author in acts of communal storytelling that incorporate allusions and reference points to which other dedicated fan readers and writers may respond.

In this chapter, after examining how L.M. Montgomery and her writer heroine Emily themselves engage in practices now associated with fanfiction, I survey four forms of fanfiction that remove Montgomery’s novels from her seemingly idyllic and timeless island settings, contextualizing her characters and plots within history and other genres: the sequel set during the Second World War, the modern AU (alternate universe), the gap-filler, and the slash fic, all of which allow the young readers who grow up with her novels to engage in dialogue with the stories they love, a type of literary conversation that Montgomery herself models within her texts. Emily’s reading, which is active rather than passive, resembles twenty-first-century fans’ ownership of the texts they love, provoking creative responses. For instance, after reading works by Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Matthew Arnold, Emily writes, “Teddy lent me 3 books of poetry. One of them was Tennyson and I have learned The Bugle Song off by heart so I will always have it. One was Mrs. Browning. She is lovely. I would like to meet her. I suppose I will when I die but that may be a long time away. The other was just one poem called Sohrab and Rustum. After I went to bed I cried over it. Aunt Elizabeth said ‘what are you sniffling about?’ I wasn’t sniffling – I was weeping sore … I couldn’t go to sleep until I had thought out a different end for it – a happy one.”

The reactions Emily catalogues are those of the fan; they are viscerally felt in the body and attempt to dissolve the boundary between author and reader, producer and consumer. She inscribes Tennyson within her heart in order to possess the poem she loves; she creates a relationship between Barrett Browning and herself; and, most significantly, she interjects her own desired happy ending into Arnold’s tragic narrative, a corrective desire that is at the core of many works of fanfiction. Emily’s diaries and her story reflect Montgomery’s own experiences from childhood to adulthood as reader, writer, and reader-turned-writer discussed in the introduction to this volume. Depicting Emily as a voracious reader and a life-writer like herself, Montgomery places the child Emily’s voice in conversation with that of the narrator through Emily’s letters to her dead father in Emily of New Moon and through her diary entries in Emily Climbs and Emily’s Quest, creating a form of joint authorship that is referenced explicitly in “Salad Days,” the second chapter of Emily Climbs: “book is not going to be wholly, or even mainly, made up of extracts from Emily’s diary; but, by way of linking up matters unimportant enough for a chapter in themselves, and yet necessary for a proper understanding of her personality and environment, I am going to include some more of them. Besides, when one has material ready to hand, why not use it?”

The narrator’s willingness to use the “material” that is “ready to hand” reflects Montgomery’s and Emily’s practices, and also validates other writers’ use of the material Montgomery places at their disposal. As with many fans, Emily’s reading frequently makes itself felt within her writing.

Like Montgomery, Emily learns her trade through mimicry, from her first poem in blank verse inspired by James Thomson’s Seasons to her unwitting imitation of Kipling that is pointed out by her teacher, Mr Carpenter, in his review of her work. Like Sara Stanley of The Story Girl, whose compelling and fascinating stories are rarely if ever original, Emily is a fan of the oral traditions of her community, incorporating and building upon them in her own writing, transforming and recreating, for instance, the story of “The Woman Who Spanked the King” in Emily Climbs.

The retelling and versioning that Emily practises signal her immense admiration for the source texts she adapts, just as the creation of fanfiction does for Montgomery’s readership and fans. The possibilities inherent in versioning and adaptation are illustrated in Emily’s Quest. When Montgomery depicts Emily undertaking the reworking of someone else’s narrative, she is adapting an episode from her own experience while working for The Echo in Halifax, which she records in her journal. Montgomery, like Emily, was asked to create an ending for a serialized story, “A Royal Betrothal,” after compositors had misplaced the original text.

Like Emily, she claims that her “knowledge of royal love affairs [was] limited,” and that she was unaccustomed “to write with flippant levity of kings and queens.” Nevertheless, Montgomery manages to create a conclusion that passes muster, since “as yet nobody has guessed where the ‘seam’ comes in.” She is, however, curious about the original author’s reaction to her unauthorized adaptation, and while she never discovers this in real life, she does imagine it in her fiction when she introduces Mark Greaves, who is horrified by Emily’s new ending for the story but enchanted by its author. Neither Montgomery nor Emily engages in this sort of writing from a place of fandom; they have no previous attachment to “A Royal Betrothal,” and both are writing professionally. Nevertheless, the ability to solve the puzzle of the story and the weaving of their work into an already extant text are the very project of fanfiction: ludic narrative composition that recalls the way children play make-believe with the narratives they love, reworking and extending them. It is telling that Montgomery uses the metaphor of the “seam” to describe this particular craft. Jane Dawkins, writing about her fanfiction, which is inspired by Jane Austen, describes her fan novel Letters from Pemberley as “an old-fashioned patchwork quilt, where in place of the scraps of fabric reminding one of the favorite frocks or shirts whence they came, there is a line or a phrase or a sentence from one of [the original] books or letters stitched alongside the lesser scraps of my own manufacture.”

Montgomery’s final book, framed by the two world wars, is just such a patchwork sequel, albeit providing only brief glimpses of the characters that readers met as children and who have now grown older. When a version of the book was published in 1974 as The Road to Yesterday, these glimpses, lacking the interstitial materials, became even briefer, mirroring the more forced insertion of beloved characters that the two earlier collections, Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles of Avonlea, display. Only two of Anne’s grandchildren – Gilbert Ford and Walter Blythe – are obliquely referred to, in the story “A Commonplace Woman,” where an unpleasant young doctor reflects on both of them as potential rivals for the affection of a beautiful girl he himself hopes to pursue.

However, the full novel, The Blythes Are Quoted, published in 2009 and comprised of short stories about the people in Glen St Mary and over the harbour, is interspersed with poetry by both a young Walter and an adult Anne. The poems are cut with tiny slices of dialogue that suggest the continuing lives of fans’ favourite characters and how they might have developed. In “‘Dragged at Anne’s Chariot Wheels’: L.M. Montgomery and the Sequels to Anne of Green Gables,” Carole Gerson notes the mixture of feelings from pleasure to frustration that Montgomery records in her journals as she prepares to write her first sequel.

While Montgomery wrote the first installments of her various series out of inspiration, she was certainly aware of what her market desired from subsequent installments. She often regretted the necessity of marrying off her characters, but was aware that her fans demanded this conventional outcome for the characters they had come to love; these traditionally romantic endings, when not offered by Montgomery herself at the instigation of her publishers, are regularly deployed by contemporary fanfiction authors building on the source texts.

Indeed, long before the original structure of The Blythes Are Quoted was revealed to readers in Benjamin Lefebvre’s afterword, fanfiction writers were spinning off lengthy narratives that included a third generation of young Blythes, Fords, and Merediths dealing with the onslaught of the Second World War. While earlier installments in the Anne series – such as Anne of Green Gables and Anne’s House of Dreams – depict the deaths of Matthew, Anne and Gilbert’s first daughter (Joyce), and Captain Jim, Walter’s death in Rilla of Ingleside is somehow more striking. Unlike Matthew and Captain Jim, he has not yet had time to grow old; unlike Joyce, readers have had opportunities to get to know him as a child in Rainbow Valley and as he grows into young adulthood in Rilla of Ingleside. His death is unnatural and, therefore, all the more horrifying. These two aspects of Rilla of Ingleside – the evocation of history by a nostalgic fictional world that is still tied to real time and the use of high drama, tragedy, and romance – provide fanfiction authors with a model they can use to appeal to the emotions of those readers who are immersed in the next generation of Montgomery characters.

The Second World War, then, provides an entry point into the series for fanfiction authors, who can deploy real history coupled with beloved characters to create a tale that feels absolutely authentic. One example of this is a short story, “The Pen and the Sword,” written in 2007 by MarnaNightingale. Here, mimicking the style of Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Wimsey Papers (a series of Spectator articles published between 1939 and 1940, which interestingly also continue the story of First World War–era characters during the Second World War), MarnaNightingale employs epistolary excerpts and newspaper articles to tell the story of a family going through the horrors of war for a second time. Grounding her fragmented story – like The Blythes Are Quoted, a mixture of genres – in the accounts of novelist Mollie Panter-Downes (1939) and war correspondents Ernie Pyle (1940) and Ross Munro of the Canadian Press (1941), whose articles are attributed to Kenneth Ford, she offers a story that, like Rilla of Ingleside, is anchored to the historical moment, while also nostalgically focusing on the character development that comes from Gilbert Ford’s death, Rilla’s and Faith’s reactions to the war, and the lives of their children. Here war also serves as an opportunity for new experiences, particularly for women and children: Rilla takes a factory job as a machinist, liking it better than working in Carter Flagg’s store; one of Anne’s grandchildren, Susan, plans to be a doctor; and Faith, who worked as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in the First World War, mentions how she can sympathize. As well, the daily tidbits that flavour the pages of Rilla of Ingleside are there: one article, attributed to Anne, includes the recipe for Susan Baker’s war bread, reminding readers of the problems of wartime rationing, even in the Americas. Real life events – like the Canadian forces trying (and failing) to make a beachhead at Dieppe – arouse the passions of the reader. Unlike Austen – who also famously wrote of three or four families in a country town, but kept the Napoleonic wars firmly in the shadows – Montgomery brings the passions and high drama of the world stage into the sleepy villages of Prince Edward Island, which inspire fanfiction spinoffs.

The long novel Cecilia of Red Apple Farm, by a fan author who posts under the pseudonym ruby gillis, also directly reworks passages and scenes from the whole range of Anne books, set in the late-nineteenth century, to The Blythes Are Quoted, set in the early years of the Second World War, to highlight the similarity between her new generation of characters and their ancestors. Cecilia is the daughter of Una Meredith and Shirley Blythe (characters often married off in fanfiction). Like MarnaNightingale, ruby gillis provides period flavouring in the styles of dresses and behaviour and in references to 1940s popular films and songs. Simultaneously, this setting offers new opportunities to her female character: Cecilia wants to be a doctor, and rather than staying in Canada, she joins up to be a nurse in England. She has a series of romances – one with Sid Gardiner (before he marries May Binnie), and one with her cousin Blythe Meredith, who is this generation’s poet – before finally ending up with Marshall Douglas (the son of Mary Vance). Just as Anne initially refuses Gilbert Blythe in favour of Roy Gardner’s resemblance to her ideal man in Anne of the Island, ruby gillis’s Cecilia is fooled by the allure of Sid and Blythe as Roy Gardner–like romantic heroes into believing that she does not truly love her fun, practical, “Gilbert-esque” friend. Published in 2004, Cecilia of Red Apple Farm further illustrates the opportunities presented by reusing and reworking a body of texts through its incorporation of Montgomery’s poem “I Wish You” as the work of Blythe Meredith. Montgomery includes this poem and attributes it to Anne in The Blythes Are Quoted, although ruby gillis could not have known this when writing. The repetition of names and circumstances might seem derivative, but for readers who have read and reread the original books so many times, the extension of the story world is prized, even if – perhaps even because of – its callbacks to the original text. Due to the tendency of fans to fixate on “the good bits” in a reread, these parts can be taken for the whole.

Austen fanfiction demonstrates this aptly. Indeed, Helen Fielding’s second Bridget Jones novel, Bridget Jones and the Edge of Reason (1999), illustrates just such a reading of Pride and Prejudice: she shows Bridget, a fan, watching the scene from the 1995 mini-series in which Darcy, dripping in a wet see-through shirt, exits the lake, and then rewinding and rewatching the scene multiple times. How many times might a similar fan reread Walter’s letter from Courcelette? This repeated reviewing of selected portions can replace the amplitude of the original novel. With this delimited focus, narrative is no longer seen as a progression, but as a single moment of pleasure, sustained as long as possible. Reading the Second World War as a repetitive sequel to the First World War further highlights this possibility.

Even Montgomery seems to do so, as demonstrated in The Blythes Are Quoted, with its new generation of characters confusingly named after the old: Walter, Jem, Rilla, Di, Anne, and Gilbert. A variation on Marah Gubar’s kinship model, this kind of continuation highlights the blurred boundaries between child and adult characters who are literally related to one another and whose adventures mimic one another.

In a third example of fanfiction set during the Second World War, Weeping May Tarry, a long novel by ElouiseBates, Meggie, the heroine, is Shirley’s daughter (and also, surprisingly, Paul Irving’s granddaughter). In this story, which like Cecilia of Red Apple Farm is an installment of a longer series, Meggie is sent off to a conservatory of music to study singing, aptly combining the traditions of the nostalgic boarding-school novel with “Girl’s Own” wartime fiction. Following the tradition of Magic for Marigold, which explicitly suggests in its second chapter that the Murrays of Blair Water and the Lesleys of Cloud of Spruce exist in the same universe, @e-louise-bates (like many other fanfiction authors, including ruby gillis) suggests that all of Montgomery’s characters exist in a single universe: Meggie partners briefly with the grandson of Sara Stanley (The Story Girl and The Golden Road) and is close friends with Jane Stuart (Jane of Lantern Hill).

Going even further, @e-louise-bates introduces the grandchildren of the What Katy Did series as friends for Meggie and includes Betsy from Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Understood Betsy as Bruce Meredith’s wife, creating a world where all the characters of early-twentieth-century girls’ fiction seem to have truly lived, where their descendants must cope with victory gardens and dances with soldiers at the Exhibition Grounds, and where kisses are much more commonplace than they once were.

These particular continuers of Montgomery are also desirous of membership in the community of her fans, seeing their literary endeavours as productive of approval from a fellow readership. Likewise, the novels are notable for their sociality – they seem to offer the reader not only a fantasy friendship with the characters themselves but also the very real society of fellow readers of the works. Thus, these fan authors attempt to diversify their stories so that they represent contemporary beliefs regarding multiculturalism; ruby gillis, for instance, introduces into the family by way of marriage a French girl who has had to flee the Nazis due to being Jewish, a situation Montgomery and her contemporaries might have had some difficulty accepting, considering early-twentieth-century attitudes toward interreligious marriage and Montgomery’s othering of the German-Jewish peddler who sells Anne green hair dye.

The Second World War thus offers writers of Montgomery fanfiction the loom on which to weave new, more diverse stories, even as The Blythes Are Quoted, which also traces the characters’ reactions to this new war, demonstrates how these readers-turned-writers followed Montgomery’s own trajectory, not knowing that they were doing so. On the subject of fanfiction, young-adult author Patricia C. Wrede writes: “The thing that fascinates me about fanfiction, though, is the way that it models the decision tree that writers go through (whether consciously or unconsciously) to get to their final product. For those of us who do this part mostly unconsciously, it can be interesting and instructing to see the multitude of alternate paths that a story could have taken, all laid out more-or-less neatly in different authors’ fanfics [… taking a slightly different fork in the road] resulting in the plot veering in a completely new direction. Friends become enemies; enemies become friends; goals and objectives and results shift and change.” Within these pieces of fanfiction, then, fan writers are able to follow these decision trees with subsequent generations of characters as well.

Another avenue of access occurs when fan authors transpose historical narratives into the contemporary moment. Perhaps the best-known example of this modern alternate universe [AU] conversion is the television program Sherlock, which takes Arthur Conan Doyle’s Victorian detective into the twenty-first century. While new cultural contexts appear, the essence of character is meant to be retained. Just as Sherlock uses text messages and blogs to substitute for telegraphs and handwritten journals, fans of Montgomery reimagine the relationships between her characters as if they were taking place online.

For instance, “Work in Progress” (2012) by verity postulates a friendship between Montgomery’s most famous heroines, Anne and Emily. In this piece of fanfiction, Emily circumvents Aunt Elizabeth’s injunction against fiction during her time at Shrewsbury High by becoming a blogger who is restricted to the “truth.” The story’s online summary, a part of which reads “Anne rolls her eyes. ‘Is your aunt really going to know if you cheat on your nonfiction with some hot prose on the side?’” shows how the story preserves the character qualities that Montgomery laid out, complete with references to the Murray pride and Anne’s orphanhood. Mr Carpenter’s admonitions are spelled out at the beginning of the story:

“Emily Byrd Starr has a sticky note on her desktop. It reads:

ITALICS

CAPITALS

!!!!!

“just”

“really”

CTRL+F!

It is almost like having Mr Carpenter in the room with her.”

Verity creates humour through the juxtaposition of contemporary social media and allusions to Montgomery’s source text. Another story by verity detailing Rilla’s romance with Ken Ford and her friendship with Una Meredith, “Rilla of Toronto,” takes place mainly through instant messages. In this story, Rilla reflects on her life from eighteen to twenty-five, tracing a continuum from her child self to her new adulthood, underscored by verity’s translation of Montgomery’s work into contemporary millennial language.

A third type of fanfiction narrative, the gap-filler, focuses on and expands the implications of the source texts. Moira Walley-Beckett’s Netflix/CBC series Anne with an “E,” as Laura Robinson shows in chapter 12 of this volume, is somewhat fanfictional in and of itself: as Robinson points out, the show fills gaps by bringing to the fore the darker currents that have always been beneath the seemingly untroubled waters of Anne of Green Gables, including Anne’s potential post-traumatic stress disorder from the disturbing life she led before coming to Green Gables. This kind of versioning and adaptation tacitly permits fan authors to feel that their versions are just as valid as those produced by professionals. Gap-fillers frequently expand on romantic pairings and in fandom are often referred to by portmanteaux of characters’ names that perpetuate some inside joke or work as puns. “Shirbert” – a moniker for Anne and Gilbert – is the latter, and demonstrates how fans posting on sites like Archive of Our Own (Ao3), Fanfiction.net, and Wattpad (this last generally populated by younger fans) develop their own language to identify their stories within the community for which they write.

One such story, “You caught me staring, but I caught you staring back,” by Anuka, clearly inspired more by the television series than the novels, begins with an author’s note that reads, “I decided to write some fluff for these two, because I need more Shirbert moments, and season 2 is so far away. I added gifs to make it more vivid.” Here, the romance between Anne and Gilbert as depicted by Montgomery and Walley-Beckett is not sufficient for the reader-turned-writer. Anuka wants the gaps in the narrative to be more fully explored than they are on either page or screen and to be made more “vivid” by the inclusion of images that help make the story come alive.

Similarly, “Rilla Blythe’s Wedding: A Not Entirely Comprehensive Account” by Scylla also fills a gap: Rilla and Ken’s wedding day, a scene that Montgomery leaves to the reader’s imagination at the end of Rilla of Ingleside. Modelled upon other accounts of weddings within Montgomery’s fiction, the story also suggests that accounts of Walter’s death have been gravely exaggerated, as he makes a stunning appearance at his sister’s wedding. In order to align her work with Montgomery’s novel, Scylla ensures that Little Dog Monday’s awareness of Walter’s death remains, but makes it only a technicality, writing, “His heart had stopped for a full ten seconds – long enough for his Captain to feel for his empty pulse and for Dog Monday to be jolted with the fullness of his death. Little dogs, after all, can only have tender dogs’ hearts. Grief to Dog Monday was an all-consuming thing, and when Walter’s heart began to beat once more, he was deaf to its spark of joy.” After meeting with his eldest sister, Joyce, in heaven – which is, as he had always hoped, Rainbow Valley, Walter is returned to life so that he may write of peace as well as war (as he did when he was a boy), marry Una, and repair the broken hearts of readers who did not want to lose him.

While heterosexual pairings are the most prevalent in Montgomery fandom, there is room for queer imaginings as well.

This very popular genre of fanfiction, known as “slash,” is generally defined as stories that centre on samesex romances between characters, particularly between men. Montgomery slash fiction usually stars Walter Blythe.

One slash story, “but i don’t know who you are” by @freyafrida, imagines a bisexual Walter. Told in an enduringly popular sub-genre of fanfiction often referred to as Five Things Plus One (which involves a series of thematically linked but not necessarily chronological scenes), the story is summarized by @freyafrida as “Five people Walter thought he wanted, and one person he didn’t notice until it was too late.”

This last person is original to Montgomery’s text: Una, whose apparently unreturned attraction to Walter is woven through Rilla of Ingleside. The other five potential partners are all alluded to as Walter’s close friends, beginning in childhood with Alice Parker from Anne of Ingleside and Pat Brewster from The Blythes Are Quoted and then carrying on through adolescence and young adulthood with Faith Meredith, Ken Ford, and finally Paul Irving from Anne of Avonlea. While his feelings for Faith and Ken are clearly unrequited, Alice, Pat, and Paul all express their own desire for Walter. The inclusion of the famous poet and Walter’s “model” uncle, Paul Irving, in particular, particular, illustrates how traits of sensitivity and aesthetic appreciation that challenge traditional ideas about masculinity are frequently interpreted as queer by fan readers and writers.

In another slash fiction, cero_ate’s “The Moving Finger Writes, and Having Writ Moves On,” Walter discovers his homosexuality while fighting in Europe:

He wrote half truths and lies once more, when he wrote his Rilla that he could not form poems of the depths of the war. For who could write his sister of the phallic love he had found? He had found his reason in a tow-headed American boy. He meant so much more to Walter than mere friendship could explain. He wanted to write, as sweethearts write, of the tempest of joy in the darkest night. But how would they understand? How would they even try to understand he sought not the Dark Lady of Shakespeare but the youth, fair and Wilde? When he was presented with Una’s faithful heart, he spurned it. When his tow-headed darling presented his own, Walter took it, greedy for him. His grecian style love, the boy who’s [sic] eyes danced, even in the darkest of days. He would do anything to keep him safe. But he could not present him to his family, for their scorn or pity. War had broken him, but made him as well.

While male/male pairings are generally the most popular stories in fandoms, Montgomery’s novels, peopled as they are by communities of girls and women, require that readers who want to queer the text must explore what is called femslash (that is, slash fiction featuring two female characters).

Such relationships have been explored within the academic setting. For instance, Laura Robinson remarks in “Bosom Friends: Lesbian Desire and the Anne Books,” that the relationship between Anne and Diana uses “the language that readers associate with adult romantic love rather than girlhood affections,” even as it is expressed through the heterosexual paradigm of marriage.

One fanfiction author, ArcticLava21, makes it clear that such fan written stories are not speculation but instead address key issues of representation. The author’s note to ArcticLava21’s short Anne/Diana story, “Nature,” reads, “Hello everybody! Hope your [sic] having a wonderful day. Before anyone yells at me for ‘sexualizing platonic friendships’ please note that this is for all those queer kids who grew up pretending. Pretending that he ended up with him instead of her, or desperately wanted representation. Are we good? <3 Enjoy yourselves lovely people.” The intended audience of the story, “queer kids who grew up,” again establishes the transgenerational kinship between Montgomery’s child and adult fans.

All fan fiction, shared on the Internet, exist in dialogue not just with Montgomery’s fiction but with the author herself, and between the fans who read the novels as children and adolescents and the adults that these readers become.

Whether fan writers extend the narrative or fill gaps, transpose chronology or to queer the text, these pieces of fanfiction allow fans not only to insert themselves into the narrative, but also simultaneously to revivify the original novels, published a century ago. In performing interventions to the text, Montgomery’s young fans grow up to reply to the discussions that she began long ago in the pages of her journals and stories, ensuring that all three – author, reader, and text – are continually reborn into a conversation that will never end.

[haeresys-realm]

Here lies the unpopular point of view so please DON'T answer me and try to start arguing with me if you disagree.

But.

I TOTALLY HATE IT.

The Harbingers who enhanced themselves for ages? And here especially the one who survived for so long in Abyss being trained there? – phhht, what a joke! Here we have a new noname who will be represented as a god to sell his banner! Behold! That's who we all should admire! We didn't hear anything about him before but surpriiiise now he will be represented as a god-powered smth terribly special! Fuck it all. Let's humiliate Harbingers more and more just to make some new fucking charactes look more representative. That's so cringe and disgusting, I can't say anything else. And I am not even a fan of Childe.But I know that his power is about this of 6th Harbinger (as you remember, firstly it was HIM who was send to bring Scaramuccia back, heh.).

Oh that's for sure you will say that he's not a noname blahblah he's a hydro sovereign, but have we ever heard about such powerful entity in person of 2nd man in Fontaine before? But the Harbingers has their sourses of information from which they could know even how this world TRULY works and how to defend Celestia... And they don't know that it's not easy to fight Neuvillette? And this Neuvillette himself sitting under some childish girl, why do we have 2 Hydro archonts here, 2 brain parts for one archont? As they will say, you will eat it greratefully. Ok.

They showed us Tartaglia in a court in a resent teaser for...what?? Just to repeat Liyue defeat, with the Harbinger woman making all the job?! It's starting to be a pathetic cliche that makes him look as an idiot. But here in Fontaine it looks even much more cringing self-cloloning plot. Some shit with praising a new character because of his approaching banner at the cost of old characters, especially, Harbingers, reputation.

Yes, here I will remind you again how stupid they tried to make Dottore more weak just because one little loli said – I am a segment of Rukkhadevata but I hate you for making segments, delete them all or I will put all my country that (was rejecting you for all the time being) I've always defended even for the cost of my life in a danger by threating to break a Gnosis, lol. And he said ok, I am a god-powered genius, logical and sly-scheming scholar, but if the game developers say from your month that I should obey the plot cliches for immature audience just to make Nahida character look not that weak and defeated before me, just to sell her banner to admiring children, then it means I really have no choice but to submit it.

That's how it works. So many expectations. And such a shame as a result, just a piece of shit in a candy cover. I knew it but... It's still more that disappointing when you started to love some characters and hope for interesting plot without childish cliches.

But you can continue defending mhy for free the most of you always did. They will never thank you for it.

[curus-creations]

AND YOU'VE BEEN LISTENING YOUR ENTIRE LIFE.

[dinosaurhedgehog]

[camodust]

Fauna and flora ❄️🍃

Draw my main boys. Really like theys comfort and supportive gameplay. Tighnari bomb can save claymoreboi im melee, and charge Freminet ult fast. And Freminet can stunning enemies for archer. They roles are important in my party and i like mix range-melee playrithm.

Tighnari, as an senpai, can give him a lot of useful experience, and Freminet is able to open his eyes to many things that even the fox does not notice. And they also have a heartwarming moment of the exploration of the massive world of the Archonts. They are bookworms and clearly enjoy spending time with each other.

[chainelunaire]

"sometimes i feel really guilty”

“why?”

“because i left. even though i love liyue, i don’t... i don’t think our archont would appreciate that”

“well, i may assure you, he would definitely forgive you” you look at zhongli, very unimpressed, because who is he, exactly, to tell you, what your archont would do. 

in your defense, you rarely feel that way now, but when you do, it almost suffocates you in it’s intensity. you weren’t a priest, you weren’t even religious. you were just a dancer, born in qingce village and later in life traveling around teyvat, doing perfomances here, there and everywhere. you’ve been in so many places, you met so many people, you could find a piece of yourself almost everywhere. 

except here.

you never did great in liyue. you never knew who’s fault was that, but it always felt like your god didn’t like you very much. you grew up watching everyone succeding with seemingly no stress or doubt, you started to wonder if your god even knew about your existence. you heard people saying morax knew everything that happened in his land. you felt like you were the only one left unseen.

it was like he was watching over everyone except you, no matter how hard you tried. so one day you grew tired of that. you finally stopped trying.

and you left liyue so long ago, sometimes it feels like you never belonged there. like this place, which is very sacred to your heart, hates you for your betrayal. you never felt at home in your, well, home. 

if you think of people belonging to liyue, you immidiately think of zhongli. you know him well enough to say that he’s an actual embodiment of a harbor, metaphorically, but sometimes you think quite literally. he’s just as stoic and calm and strong as the city you left years ago. when you change as quickly as the water adapts it’s form, zhongli stays the same. he even looks exactly like he did when you left - you remember him, even though you never dared to talk to him back then. he was staying in the crowd and watching you dance with those piercing eyes of his, small girl hiding under his coat. hu tao was so shy when she was a child, sometimes you don’t believe it, even though you saw it with your eyes.

when you think of liyue, you think of him. he looks like he’s at home there.

you don’t.

“what’s on your mind?” he asks, gently pulling a strand of your hair, curling it on his finger. he becomes a lot softer and quieter after sex, and you actually like that. you like him speaking, of course, but you enjoy those peaceful moments when he listens to your ramblings, his patience almost godly.

but somehow you’re a bit ashamed to tell him that you don’t feel at peace here, in liyue. you just know, he- he would be disappointed.

“tell me” he insists, “i can’t help you, dear, if i don’t know, what’s the deal”

“all about deals here” that you hate too, and you see, even though he hides it well, that he’s a bit offended of your remark. 

“you spent too much time in natlan, i must say. i would love to see you there more often” yeah right, because you only find the willpower to comeback when it’s lantern rite. 

because there’s nothing more beautiful in the world than the lantern rite. you’ve seen the world, you know what you’re talking about.

“miss me dancing on the streets?”

“that too” he comfirms with a gentle smile. you - well, you don’t miss those times. you wouldn’t want to bring it back. you don’t want to dance on a harbor’s streets because there was nothing else for you to do there. you had nothing to offer. “i heard you were doing well in fontaine”

you did. strangely, the only place which really felt like home was the place where the law was above anything. and you hated the rules, you had a lot to hide, yet, it felt like you finally found your justice there. 

and that’s where your guilt found you, actually. right after getting a gnosis. because it was fontaine, and it was all about being guilty or not. you were not guilty for feeling betrayed.

and yet, you were guilty of not being loyal. 

“tell me” you say suddenly, he almost shievers, but then he puts an hand on your shoulder to calm you and himself down. somehow it always worked for both of you. “am i a bad person because i love not only liyue, but natlan too? and mondstadt, and sumeru, and fontaine?” 

“no” he says immidiately “you deserve seeing more than just a harbor. it’s okay for people your age. any age, i assume.”

“but you love harbor” he does. he loves it so much as if it was his child. he knows a lot, and he often talks about things you don’t understand, to be frank, yet you just feel it. “this means morax can see you. and you’re strong and faithful, so that’s why he gave you the gnosis. you stay here, so that’s why morax may love you.” zhongli chuckles quietely, which you find almost offending. “what?”

“that’s an interesting logic, for sure.”

“what’d i miss?”

“you have a gnosis too.” that you do. that was your justice.

“and i don’t”

“what?” you can’t believe it. “where’s it?”

“i gave it to someone.” he answers, stroking your cheek lazily “see, that’s the main misconception, dear. archons do not give people gnosis, it’s not up to them. and even if it was, what’s bothering you so much? you wanted to have a geo elemental so badly?”

you did.

you wanted to feel see by morax. just once. you wanted to know, why he resented you so much, even when you did nothing to make him angry.

“i wanted my archon to love me” you hear yourself saying, and zhongli’s face is really strange to you, it’s almost like he’s in pain “i never wanted to leave liyue, but what else could i do, when morax didn’t want me there?”

you feel strangely uneasy, saying that to zhongli of all people. but you never connected to anyone but him here, even yunjin rarely stopped to really hear what you were saying. you always felt at peace with him, it was like he was the home liyue failed to provide you with. even if it promised to do so.

“do i sound ungrateful to you?”

“not exactly” he says after a long pause “i’m afraid, i just can’t fully understand, why it’s hurting you so much”

you look at him, something don’t sit well with you.

“have you slept with anyone while i was away?” you were never exceptional and you too had slept with people other than him. you didn’t feel jealous, just interested.

“i have” you feel a spark of interest.

“was it a woman or a man?”

“a man. he’s from snezhnaya.” he sighs quietly, while you pat him on a head “he returned home recently. haven’t seen him in a while”

“i see you prefer your hook ups to be away from you” you actually giggle a bit. he on the other hand looks serious, still.

“maybe you’re right” he says after thinking “i am selfish, dear. i too don’t want to be hurt any more than i already am. i’ve lost too much.”

“have you actually ever loved someone?” because you can’t imagine him being in love. you know you’re not in love with him, and he doesn’t exactly love you. even though sometimes it feels like he does, with how much he cares about you. you like to think he’s your reward for being neglected.

“i did, once. it was a very long time ago.” he looks so sad saying that, you feel your heart clenching. “i don’t even remember her face anymore”

“you could love me, if you want. i can take it”

“oh really?” his small smile doesn’t make him look any happier. it’s like he’s too used to it.

you don’t really want to hear the answer, and yet you can’t help yourself, you should ask him.

“will you remember me? after i leave?”

for a few very long seconds you feel small and miserable again, like when you did when you were standing against the statue, begging for morax to see you, to guide you, yet your pleadings were never met. you were left with nothing but cold emptiness.

“no” and even when zhongli looks directly at you, you feel like he sees through you, not seeing you at all. his eyes are glowing in the dark, burning your soul away without any mercy, almost like a god’s punishment for your existence. “i’m afraid not.”

[vvhiteangel-warframe]

Actualités Warframe de la Semaine ! Quoi de beau du 22 au 28 Avril 2024 ?

Les Actus de la Semaine ! L’Édito DEVSTREAM EN VUE !! Au coeur de l’actu tant attendue de la semaine, la prochaine vue sur le futur de Warframe : Le Devstream 179 ! Le programme a été dévoilé à son sujet : Une vue en profondeur concernant la mise à jour (majeure ?) Jade Shadows. De quoi attendre potentiellement une vue de la 57ème Warframe : Jade mais aussi d’autres éléments. Aussi ils…

[the-ninth-moon]

( Banque de personnages) Laëris

L'Ordre du diamant vert ( 13 / 13 )

Cet ordre est celui de l'empereur et de ses proches, sa cour rapprochée, si l'on peut dire. Attention, spécificité pour les postes d'empereur et d'impératrice, il pourra y avoir une exigence plus élevée concernant l'activité (et certaines actions pourraient vous êtes imposées par le MJ - jamais sans vous en avoir informé, bien sûr).

 1/1 libre ;; l'empereur ( pv )  1/1 libre ;; l'impératrice ( pv )  

 4/4 libres  ;; les archontes - dirigeant.es politiques, magistrat.es des villes (archonte de Dynacairn en poste vacant, les archontes de Aermagh, Airedal et Orveil sont libres).  4/4 libres ;; les conseiller.es  - paroles honorables pour l'empereur, sorte de " ministres " (conseiller.e des armées en poste vacant)

 2/2 libres ;; les maîtresses impériales  - (la favorite en poste vacant)

 1/1 libre ;; lea chambellan  - officier.e de cours chargé.e du service rapproché de l'empereur (poste vacant).

Les ailes carmines ( 11 / 12 )

Guilde d'assassins impériaux, qui ne communiquent qu'à visage couvert avec l'empereur en personne ; nul ne connaît ne serait-ce que leur existence. iels sont les bras armés de l'Ordre, œuvrant en toute discrétion pour que le pouvoir en couronne d'or ne glisse pas de la tête de l'empereur.

  1/1 libre ;; Chimère - lea chef.fe de la guilde (poste vacant)  1/1 ;; Elytre  - lea guérisseur.se de la guilde (poste vacant)  0/1 ;; Cerbère - le conseiller (pris)

6/6 ;; Les Pourpres  - les assassin.es chevronné.es (dont 1 en poste vacant avec le personnage de Virago)  3/3 ;; Les Velours  - les assassin.es en formation, nouvelleaux arrivant.es dans la guilde, qui doivent encore faire leurs preuves. (dont 1 en poste vacant avec le personnage de l'Hydre)

Les voiles noires ( 13 / 13 )

Les voiles noires qui surgissent au loin, ornées de l'emblème impérial. Cet équipage a vocation à faire respecter la loi de l'empereur sur les mers des Abysses de Vassion, de gré ou de force.

1/1 libre ;; Pillard - lea capitaine du vaisseau  1/1 libre ;; Silex  - lea second  1/1 libre ;; BlackDog - lea cannonnier.e  1/1 libre ;; Vagabond - lea quartier-maitre

 9/9 libres ;; Les Corsaires  - les membres de l'équipage