#gorgeousgirlsspring

[iluz]

@gorgeousgirlsspring 's ocs i drew for her bday

[anghraine]

gorgeousgirlsspring replied to your post:

author u got read by abigail? i- ur so lucky.

I did! It was pretty cool, even back then.

Abigail and I were part of the same Austen forum in the early 2000s, before people were formally publishing nearly as much Austen fic, and we both had very active comments sections (hers more so, of course) and ended up involved in the discussions of each other’s fics.

It was a cool experience, except for this random person who connected my comments at the Republic of Pemberley site, under a different username, to my Anghraine account that I was posting fic under, and made fairly aggressive comments about what I was going to do in my fic based on my ROP arguments. But that wasn’t Abigail. Abigail was already fairly well-established by the time I showed up, and clearly one of the best fic writers in the fandom, but hadn’t gone pro, so I was actually part of some of the original discussions in the comment sections of the fics she was writing then.

Anyway, I posted my first Austen fic on that site and I ended up getting quite a lot of comments because of the somewhat trolly opening chapter. It’s just a scene in which a woman returns home to her father’s house with a sickly, premature baby. It turns out that her husband, Mr Darcy, has cheated on her (*GASP*), and she got upset and rushed to visit her family with the baby. They speak of her sister Catherine in passing and then her father asks the baby’s name. The woman says she named the baby for him, and he assumes she means his first name. She clarifies: the baby’s name is Fitzwilliam.

The site did not have character tags, btw, so I didn’t break any rules, technically, and the summary was just about Mr Darcy’s wife going home after he cheats on her. A bunch of people showed up to hate-read and ended up either “aha, it’s a twist! I get it!” or being very deeply confused about what the hell was going on until other commenters explained. My original motive was partly just to screw with people’s expectations and partly to push back against the idealized image of Darcy’s parents, the super-healthy-alpha-manly idea of Darcy himself, and the expectation that all fics had to be about Elizabeth.

I don’t remember if Abigail responded to that first post, but I was encouraged to continue the story once people realized what was actually happening in it, and I ended up writing this (pretty meandering) story about a deeply imperfect Lady Anne, her incredibly dysfunctional marriage, and her relationship with adorable tiny Darcy as he and Wickham grow up. I never finished, but I did end up with a lot of commenters who came to trainwreck-read the opening chapter and then stuck around to see how it went, and I did keep turning out chapters for several in-story years. Abigail ended up asking if I had meant to write Darcy as autistic, because a) he seemed like it and b) she had recently read a discussion of that interpretation of him and this reminded her of that.

I was very flattered and I think ended up saying something about how I didn’t have a specific diagnosis in mind, but I could see it, though mostly he was based on my own experiences as a child (I am autistic but wouldn’t get diagnosed for years after this interchange). I think she did leave other comments as the fic went along, but I don’t remember them any more, and maybe also some on The Rich Are Always Respectable, a Darcy/OFC->Darcy/Elizabeth fic that was originally posted at the same forum and also had a very exciting comments section. I was in my late teens at the time and Austen fandom skewed much older and even more female than most fandom spaces, so I was kind of this fandom baby who ended up getting taken under the wing of a bunch of surrogate aunts who gave me college advice and stuff when we weren’t talking about P&P.

I did ultimately end up souring on forum-based Austen fandom, mostly because the forums were often deeply homophobic and gender-normative, and so obsessed with the appearance of civility that there were all these Byzantine alliances and grudges behind the scenes and eventual meltdowns. But my first experience at this specific forum was really good.