#lockea rambles

[lockea]

One thing I love about fanfiction and fandom is the way that fans take what is implied by canon but otherwise ignored and stretch it out to become explicitly part of the narrative.

I've seen this across multiple fandoms, but the one that I was reflecting on recently was the Mandalorians in Star Wars. No, not just the show The Mandalorian, but the whole cultural group.

In Star Wars, there are a few canon sources for Mandalorian culture. In Legends, the big one is the Republic Commando novels by Karen Traviss, and in the new Disney canon, that's whatever we got from Clone Wars and The Mandalorian. For the most part, these two sources seem to agree with each other*.

*(we'll ignore whatever the hell is going on with the Kryze clan in Disney canon that I just straight up don't understand)

In RC, we get our first Mando'a glossary and our first explicit explanation of the Mandalorian culture and creed. The Gai bal Manda (adoption oath) comes from the RC novels. In fact, here is what we are canonically told about Mandalorians in the RC novels:

Mandalorians are a collection of different species and races, a cultural group that thrives by adoption and love of children. They take raising children very seriously, whether it's their own or adopted.

Mandalorians do not ascribe to gender roles and do not see same-sex partnerships as any different from hetero-sex ones.

DESPITE what is stated in 1 and 2, Mandalorian women are often the first teachers of their children, and male children are still more preferred than female children. A Mandalorian mother will try to have a male child first. if she succeeds, she will wait until the boy begins training before having another child. If she does not (has a girl instead), she will keep trying for a boy right away.

If you're an avid reader of Star Wars fics about Mandalorians, that third bullet probably came as a surprise to you if you haven't read Karen Traviss's notes on Mandalorian culture or the RC novels (congrats, I envy you). That's because fandom in large saw points one and two and decided that point three was absolute bullshit that did not match points one and two and so disregarded it.

The other part of Mandalorian culture I want to point out, is that canonically, there are only TWO explicitly non-human/near-human Mandalorians across both Legends and Disney canon. This is despite the fact that modern Mandalorians with long clan lineages like the Fetts, Mereels, Vizlas, and Kryzes can trace their ancestry back to the decidedly non-human Taung.

I'm seriously not kidding about this either -- I dug through Wookiepedia to try and find as many EXPLICITLY non-human Mandalorians as I could (they had to have names or a visual appearance) and I found TWO.

One is a Twi'lek bartender from Coruscant who marries into the Skirata clan during the clone wars (she has a name but Wookiepedia is failing me right now and you can't pay me enough to reread the RC novels).

The other is Grogu. As in Din Djarin's ward. Baby Yoda. That one.

Again, if you read a lot of fanfiction about Mandalorians (like I do), this will probably be a surprise. After all, in fanfiction, the Mandalorians are an extremely diverse group of different species and genders.

Canon told us that Mandalorians are diverse, that they hold to no species, that they adopt to fill out their clans and value the act of being a parent and a member of the community. Canon told us that Mandalorians don't ascribe weight to a person's gender or sexual orientation. Yet when canon failed to deliver on what it told us, fanfiction stepped up.

And I think that's beautiful.

(Which means Disney really should consider canonizing several other members of the Children of the Watch as non-human while they're at it)

[kattitina]

I was double tagged by @lyragoblin and @lockea for the WIP meme

Rules: post the first line of a WIP and tag as many people as there are words in the quote.

“A particularly large bump knocks Xion’s head against the passenger window, waking her up.”  

F me for choosing an opening with 14 words.

@semisweetnsour @k-she-rambles @heathersnape @silverfirelizard @io-ri @megaderping @treehawkdoesinternets @serenity-tardis-impala  

Alright, that is only 8 but I don’t feel comfortable tagging people who aren’t following me if you are following me and want in, consider yourself tagged.

[lockea]

So thinking about that one post talking about AO3 and how important ephemera is to Historians (Ea-Nasir's hate mail) got me thinking about two reasons fanfiction preservation is important beyond just fanfiction preservation being important.

The first is the glimpse into people's lives that are offered by Author's Notes. Author's Notes (ANs) are written at or near the time of the chapter publication and offer a glimpse into the feelings and experiences of that person at that moment.

In a recent update I read, the author announced they had just passed the Bar to be a lawyer. Rereading an older fanfiction the author mentioned their joy at the birth of their nephew. Shortly after Trump's election in 2016 I read a fic where the author noted they began writing this, quit political, fic to cope with the stressful new reality of the president of the US. My very first fanfiction was posted to FF.Net in Jan 2002 and was written as a direct response to the feelings I felt when my father returned home from his first deployment following 9/11.

Anne Frank is not a historically significant person because of any real influence she had on the global sphere during her life. She's a historically significant person because she was an avid diarist during a historically significant period of history who told a story future generations needed to hear.

The second reason preserving fanfiction is important is because fanfiction is an excellent litmus test for the prevailing beliefs and social mores of the Fandom community at the time. Fanfiction is overwhelmingly made up of female, queer, BIPOC, and other marginalized voices. Mainstream media has always been slower to adapt to the social mores that fanfiction authors embrace, but even we have our history.

Remember when having two characters of the same sex kiss conferred an adult rating on a work of fanfiction? That was once a thing, ya'll.

Consider the Open Doors project Boys in Chains. It was a slash centric slave fic focused archive that ran in the early naughts. I happen to like Power Exchange fic (which is an expansive category that includes slave fic) so I read BIC when it ran and recently reread some fic on AO3. Boy Howdy have we changed. We were extremely permissive of May-December relationships in slash back in 2004, for quite a few reasons I could spend a whole post on alone, but suffice to say our relationship with slash changed and we became less permissive of these types of relationships.

Again, because I track the tag, I'm aware of when the "Slavery" tag dropped out of AO3's top 100 tags (around 2018 iirc) because we as a community no longer engage with those topics with the same attitudes we had in the past. Given some of the ways it was engaged with in the past, this is not necessarily a negative, as we've also become more sensitive to things like the very real pain these topics can cause our communities of color. Given the BLM movement and the recognition of Juneteenth (the end of Slavery in the US) as a national holiday, the falling out of this tag nicely correlates with these events in our history.

LGBTQ+ themes emerge first in fanfiction and then are adopted by the mainstream. We saw this with slash and gay, lesbian, and bisexual relationships. We are currently seeing it with transgender and asexual characters now, with the character studies and experiences found in fanfiction slowly finding their way to mainstream media.

Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the parent non profit that runs AO3 also runs an academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, where much of this type of history is being analyzed and preserved for future use. The Fanlore wiki, another OTW project, also works to document Fandom history that is not necessarily fanwork. Things like the amazing Ms.Scribe drama, for example.

Anyway, now that I've rambled long enough you probably stopped reading, here is the TL;DR Fanfiction preservation matters because it is an insight into the community around it at various times in history and reveals our relationship with and in opposition to mainstream culture at that time.

[lockea]

File this under "things that have aged poorly"