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gaunt-and-hungry · 10 months

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20 Questions for Fic Writers!

From @library-child This looked like a lot of fun and I thought it would be a delight to do! Thank you for everything!

How many works do you have on AO3? Seven

What's your total AO3 word count?

32,832 words

What fandoms do you write for? Mostly just The Terror

What are your top 5 fics by kudos? "If we sing the song of our people" - 129 "Embouchure of Leviathans" - 20 "Basic Needs" - 10 "To Make a Captain Scream" - 5 "Shelter" - 5

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not? I do. I do enjoy engaging with the community I write with. We have a shared interest that is very profound. The Terror fandom is very different from any other fandom I have experienced. There is a uniqueness to it that is unlike anything I have ever seen. I do enjoy it deeply. I love seeing what others think and how I have impacted them and be able to really see how my work reflects on their individual!

What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? I cannot say I have written a fic with an angsty ending before!

What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? Brine and Ice. I am still working on edits and posting to Ao3. It's mostly finished in the workshop however it is rather rough. I still have to smooth out riggings and sails on it. But people live. People fall in love. People get the relief they need. Do you get hate on fics? If I do, it is not something that is vocalised! Either that or it has gone right over my head and I have disregarded it. So not to my knowledge! Do you write smut? If so, what kind? Of course I do! I write a lot of good wholesome delight and smut and reader insert content. We are on a ship, after all...

Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written? I do not write crossovers. I am not particularly crazy about them myself. They do not suit my palette. I think the craziest fic I wrote was for a friend and it was some Lovecraftian porn. Have you ever had a fic stolen? Goodness no. Not that I am aware of. That sounds awful! Have you ever had a fic translated? Not yet. Though I could translate my own fics if I so wished. Have you ever co-written a fic before? Yes! I have co written several fics though I doubt any of them are posted anywhere. What's your all-time favorite ship? Francis Crozier x James Fitzjames or Francis Crozier x Thomas Jopson What's the WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? No such thing. How dare ye.

What are your writing strengths? I descriptions, I think. Immersion as well, I hope. Or at least I think I am quite sound in that field. I spend a lot of time studying and focusing on era / age/ time appropriate materials and consume a lot of media that already is proper-set for my focus. This means immersion into that area and space is usually easy for me coupled with my ability to describe things.

What are your writing weaknesses?

Hetero romance and I sometimes struggle with properly articulating when time has passed. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic? I am a polyglot. First fandom you wrote for? Does Crime and Punishment count? Favorite fic you've ever written? I do love them all equally though I am currently most invested and beloved of Brine and Ice which currently exceeds 100,000 words in its current form. It is a guilty pleasure fic and shamelessly at that. It is a process to make it postable for Ao3 currently. Tagging: @smileofacaffeinatedsaint, @charismat1c-megafauna, @wantsusdead, @tommyjop, @ashton-slashton, @alittletoosmarttobestraight, @pretendingday I tried to think of all the fic writers I am following or are mutuals with. Please include yourself if I have missed you!

#ask game #fanfic writers #the terror #the terroramc #writing asks #fanfiction #ao3 writer #This was a lot of fun to do!

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septembriseur · 5 years

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A comprehensive theory of The Terror, pt. V

Hickey.

Oh, Hickey.

Or should I say: not-Hickey?

Hickey is a man who, over the course of the series, undergoes a profound transformation. When we first meet him, he’s a sullen and fairly useless caulker’s mate whose clumsy manipulations always seem to go slightly awry— he mistakes Crozier’s eagerness to get sloshed as an overture of friendship; he deploys his awareness that the tuunbaq isn’t really an animal to an unimpressed panel of officers; his daring escapade to kidnap Silna gets him flogged. Yet by the end of the show, he’s become a kind of ragged, savage would-be prophet, an unstoppable and hardly-human consumer of other men.

The seeds of this are already present in his initial appearances. The first time we see Hickey as Hickey, rather than as one of a group of seamen, is when he helps to bury David Young in episode one. There is a miniature transformation that takes place here: at first, he’s a comic figure, flicking Tozer the V before hastily turning it into a thumbs-up, but when the other men leave him to work, he opts to climb down into Young’s grave. This is ostensibly so he can fix the broken lid of Young’s coffin, but in fact (we later learn) to rob Young’s corpse, and perhaps for some other, less articulable reason.

The scene in the grave is lit dramatically, which my terrible capping probably can’t really capture; there are several distinct moments at which the sun is positioned just above Hickey’s head, obliterating him like a particularly ruthless halo.

When it isn’t, he remains wreathed in a foggy light, or else struck by a sort of painterly chiaroscuro.

There’s something uncanny about the effect thus produced, particularly at the moment when Adam Nagaitis does a brilliant bit of physical acting: a lizard-like head-flick and lip-licking that will recur later, when Hickey kills Irving. It’s a gesture that looks wrong, at the same time as it communicates a kind of joy or a physical release.

Hickey wants to be in the grave, face-to-face with the dead body. I’m undecided how much he’s indifferent to any potential taboo— how much we should believe the casualness with which he later says, about the ring he steals from Young’s body, that he got it from “someone who didn’t need it anymore”— and how much it’s the very violation of that taboo that excites him, the touching-the-corpse and the going-down-into-the-grave. Either way, we know from this point on that he is someone whose nature is to transgress boundaries.

Sometimes that transgression is sympathetic! Why shouldn’t he get off with Billy belowdecks? He seems genuinely besotted with Billy, in a sort of feral, half-formed way. But the explanation he gives as to why Irving won’t inform on the two of them should raise red flags. Irving won’t say what he saw, Hickey says, because to do so would mean “he’d have to open his imagination to what he didn’t... That’s a man afraid of chaos. He’s not going to invite more if he can help it.”

Here, “order” becomes what is seen, and “chaos” what is not seen— not only what is not seen, but what cannot be seen without puncturing order. This is tremendously important, I think, because the grave scene above also features one of several moments in the show at which the camera deliberately does not follow Hickey, barring the audience from seeing what he sees.

This is what the audience sees while Hickey is actually in the process of rifling through Young’s corpse: a long, slow push in on the exterior of the grave. We hear Hickey’s noises of effort, but we don’t rejoin him until he’s slipped the ring into his pocket.

This is exactly the technique used in the scene in episode six where Hickey puts his fingers into Heather’s exposed brain. We see Hickey pull the “veil” back to expose Heather’s injury, then bend over his body to inspect him:

However, we then cut to an angle at which the camera is positioned behind the veil, watching Hickey’s face yet concealing his actions.

We hear the wet noises as he touches Heather’s brain, but the show has literally drawn a veil across his actions, preventing us from seeing them and allowing us to leave them unimagined. (There is, I must note, a grimly clever little cut from this scene to Jacko the monkey digging his fingers into a tin of food.)

This isn’t a show that shies away from gore. I mean, in the final episode, we get multiple straightforward shots of Goodsir’s naked, butchered, and partly-consumed corpse. So it seems significant that there are these moments when the camera specifically will not let us follow Hickey where he is going, as though it does not want to implicate us in his violation.

When I say violation, I don’t want to imply that these things are somehow inherently morally wrong. What they are is exactly what Hickey says: chaotic. (I should note that the scene in which Irving finds Hickey and Billy having sex draws on elements of this same pattern— we distinctly hear Hickey and Billy going at it, but don’t see them until they’re clothed— but everything about the way the show depicts not only their relationship but also that of Bridgens and Peglar suggests that we are meant to find these relationships tender and tragic, not unpleasant.) Hickey is, characteristically and centrally, chaotic. To paraphrase a wise man: he sees a boundary, he eats a boundary and washes it down with a cup of hot steaming rules. He’s a social transgressor, having sex with men and drinking with the captain. He’s a spatial transgressor: he sneaks back onto the ship during Franklin’s funeral and wanders through everyone’s private places, touching their intimate possessions. He takes a shit in Billy’s bed. There are other elements of confusion: he’s a man who’s “punished as a boy.” And, of course, deeper than all of these things runs the abiding formlessness at the heart of Hickey: he isn’t really Hickey. We never know who he is. He has no name, no past; he’s just someone who wandered onto the ship, looking for a “change of everything.”

We find this out about him in episode seven, the end of which marks the break between his nascent chaos and chaos unleashed. Something... happens to Hickey. In the scene that sees Irving return from his meeting with the Netsilik, Hickey is shot from angles and in poses that are designed to make him appear inhuman. First there’s this—

—a weird, disturbing shot in which Hickey is crouched, mostly naked, concealed under a greatcoat, and vaguely monstrous over Farr’s corpse. Then, as Irving approaches, Hickey springs animalistically at him, stabs him, and proceeds to squat over Irving and hold a hand over his mouth until he dies. We see Hickey through Irving’s eyes while this happens, at an unnatural angle that not only accentuates the sharp, triangular shapes of his body, but also seems to distort him slightly. He looks demonic, even before he repeats his restless and lizard-like head-flick...

And then: yikes.

It’s a shedding-his-skin motion, is what I think of that head-flick. From this point forward, Hickey is no longer a resentful man kicking against his confines. He has escaped those confines. He slips into an easy, ruthless, natural command of the mutineers, including men who outrank him and have previously mocked him.

He also slips further and further away from humanity, moving towards something else. “I’ve shot smaller hawks than you,” Jopson says, but Hickey isn’t a hawk, exactly. He looks like a man, albeit a man who’s mostly running around in his long underwear and a greatcoat in the Arctic, seemingly unable to feel the cold, but gradually all his previous strangenesses come to the fore. With a rope around his neck (once more lit strangely through a haze) he tells Crozier that he “must pierce this thing [Crozier] calls truth,” and takes on Crozier’s own voice/accent to do it— another absenting of identity, another piece of evidence that Hickey is not so much a person or a thing as a void of anything, a formlessness.

I can’t help but think that what the mutineers are following is not Hickey, but the formlessness that has broken free from within him. At the mutineers’ camp, Hickey takes on the demeanor and appearance of a prophet, embracing the air with his arms open (in the same pose that recurs throughout the series as an emblem of chaos and collapse) while skinned of most of his clothing—

—or meditating alone on hillsides for hours, “listening to his thoughts.” (“I dare not go up” to interrupt him, Tozer says.) He’s killed and eaten Billy by this point, and if we were looking for a logic to his actions, it would be possible to read it in the toast he reminds Crozier of: “Ourselves.” Crozier intended it as a self-deprecating joke, he says, but for Hickey it’s become a tenet: he is a wholly self-interested being whose principle is survival, a formlessness that wants to go on being a formlessness.

Yet he has contrived a strange plan that he doesn’t reveal to anyone, which rests on an observation that Crozier makes about him: “You must be a surpassingly lonely man, Mr. Hickey.” I’m not sure how sincere Crozier’s being in this moment; it’s pretty obvious he doesn’t agree that he and Hickey were each other’s only “equals” on the expedition. The observation is accurate, however, I think. Hickey is a surpassingly lonely man, but: “Not for long,” he tells Crozier. He plans to bind himself to the tuunbaq, becoming a shaman.

So let’s talk about this plan.

Hickey arranges this bizarre sacrificial tableau in which he stands atop the boat, again almost unclad in the middle of the Arctic, and rambles from what seems like a place of holy madness, cursing all the national and religious figures of England while offering what are pretty nakedly incisive truths. “What if we’re not the heroes?” he asks. “Our empire is not the only empire. I’ve seen that now.” Arguably, what allows him this vision is that he now stands outside of all the empires, having transcended every taboo, every boundary line.

Yet when he offers his tongue to the tuunbaq, the tuunbaq rejects it and eats him. The important question is: why?

Let me get philosophical for a second: what is a connection? It’s a point of contact between two beings, right? It’s a touch; the place where two parts of the world are joined to one another. For this to happen, there has to first be a dividing line; there has to be a way in which the world is divided up into things to start with. I am separate from you. Man is separate from animals. The sea is separate from the land. There are these boundaries in the world that allot us places; there are rules that govern how we relate to every other kind of thing. It’s not good or bad, any more than chaos is; it’s just order. And fundamentally there has to be an interplay; we always have to be moving towards a synthesis of order and chaos. But when you have just chaos, with no boundaries, then what you have is an everythingness that is also a nothingness, which is: Hickey. Everything is permitted, is his attitude, pretty explicitly; or alternatively: everything can be consumed, an act that literally treats everyone and everything around him as just a potential part of his body. The result of this is that it is impossible for him to connect.

When I was first trying to figure out why the tuunbaq refuses Hickey, I thought to myself: is it because Hickey thinks he’s the shaman, but he’s actually the monster? It’s possible to view him as “a spirit that dresses as an animal,” or as an animal that dresses as a man. But I think it’s that, at this point, Hickey has become so formless that he simply isn’t enough of a thing to be able to touch another thing. I think that’s the birthplace of the urge that drives him to to bind himself to the tuunbaq in the first place, but it’s also the reason why he can’t.

I find Hickey quite tragic, actually, because I can understand his frustration with order— with boundaries that are arbitrary and don’t seem to make sense. But in breaking and breaking and breaking forwards past those boundaries, Hickey fails to understand that the boundaries don’t exist to be boundaries qua boundaries. They create the possibility of relationship. And while touch is perhaps the push of chaos that nudges us to new and more perfect iterations of order, we can’t allow it to become the will to consume.

And on that note... next time, I have much to say about Goodsir.

#tv: terrible people #a comprehensive theory of the terror #the terror #terroramc #very long post #i don't think he's this important just because he's #the two degree murderous cannibal

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