to play the game or change the game: fanauthors in profic, my ongoing fascination

[psocoptera]

So I just finished League of Dragons, the final book in Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, and Carry On, Rainbow Rowell's version of the final book of a YA fantasy series she originally invented as a Harry Potter analogue for Fangirl, although this is not, in fact, the series as it existed in Fangirl, this is the book it actually is, a book in our world. Novik is still active in fandom and I'm a big fan of her fanwork (as well as prowork); I don't know who Rowell is but there is *no way* she wasn't in HP fandom and I would love to know who she was if someone ever wanted to slip me that secret under the table. I'm just really fascinated by the whole business of having that context, as a reader, although it also feels like a delicate subject, maybe partly because SRB has been vocal about disliking people talking about it in her case? But, argh, this is too interesting to be too taboo to talk about! Novik and Rowell are doing really different projects but are doomed to end up on the same syllabus when someone gets to teach a class on this stuff in 2035 or whatever; I suppose you could consider this a sketch of a paper for that class.

(If you just want to know if I'd rec them, without spoilers, then yes, both; the Temeraire series is fantasy alt-history done excellently, and I think Carry On would be interesting to anyone who ever thought much about Harry Potter. (I would love to know whether it makes any sense outside of that context, but who on earth is going to want to read it who doesn't know Harry Potter?))

Under the cut there are spoilers about shipping, for the very end of League of Dragons, and for earlier books in the Temeraire series, but I've tried to avoid other references to plot events in both books.


So: if the essential theory of slash is that a character's relationships with the most intense feelings and most lasting commitments can and should also be their romantic and sexual relationships, then Rowell is raising her banner for that whereas Novik is willing to play the game where they're not, but in a very knowing, deliberate, and surprisingly satisfying way.

Rowell's Simon and Baz are very, very Harry and Draco. I love a game of "spot the reference" and Carry On is chock full of references not only to all sorts of things in the Harry Potter books (like Ebb and the goats as a mashup of Aberforth and Hagrid), but what I read as references to common tropes and even specific stories in HP fandom. I'm not going to make a list right now, although if someone wants to squee with me about this in the comments, let's do it, but I am just so convinced that Rowell was in so many of the same Yahoo groups that I was in the early 2000s, and I'm not just talking H/D ones. Them being so very H/D means their rivalry-to-romance arc feels very familiar, but it's really well done and it's still very exciting for me to see that slash theory in action in canon(s), and I think it's exciting for Rowell, too. I mean, I think we can infer from her having written this book that it was something she wanted to do.

Laurence, on the other hand, totally moves to a Canadian shack country estate with Tharkay, bends his principles for Tharkay to a degree that he explicitly doesn't for anyone else, gets over his amnesia at the sight of Tharkay (in an earlier book) - this is claaaassic slash fodder, and obviously Novik knows what she's doing there, she's serving you the slash opportunity on a plate. Laurence, though, is canonically straight (in a way that actually matters to the story, for his interaction with Granby when he finds out Granby *isn't*, which I thought was really well done, and was a good reason for him to be straight?) His whole arc of interactions with women, too, the disappointment over Edith, his coming to be able to see female aviators as fellow soldiers, it's really good stuff, for which Laurence's heterosexuality isn't just a character default, it's important as part of the very conventional and in-no-way-marginal place where he starts. (I mean, the whole series, in a way, is Laurence coming to see all kinds of margins (marginalities?), species, geographic, racial, sexual, as equals, yeah?) I really loved what Novik did with his relationship with Jane Roland in this book, the way it's so tied up with her being his commander/colleague, that she's the best of the British aviators and her sexual/romantic acceptance of Laurence is also the restoration of his feeling satisfied in his honor as a British aviator. And I think the whole thing works so well in part because while the last few books have been pretty slashy with Tharkay, neither Roland nor Tharkay is the real core pairing of the book for Laurence. That is obviously Temeraire. Which is maybe easy to lose sight of with the relationship being *so solidly established* by this point in the series, but then I look back, and remember how the first book was a riff on the involuntary soulbond trope... I feel like it gives Novik a little more space to "legitimately" play games about whether Laurence is more like "with" Tharkay or Roland, when that's a sorting out of secondary relationships. And, honestly, I think that's great. I love that the primary relationship is non-sexual and non-romantic and yet sweeping and overpowering and consuming and transforming, that his sexual relationship with Roland is so profoundly *friendly*, that he can go off into the sunset with Tharkay in this unexpected but delightful way. I think I see Novik's background in slash fandom and that sort of scrutiny/dissection of relationships in how she manages all those different strands. For me, that's a satisfying ending.

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

It sounds like I might want to read CARRY ON after all. I wasn't sure if I would like it.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

I am happy to answer questions about it if that would help with your decision!

[belecrivain.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure Rowell has been open about writing Harry/Draco fic at some point, though I don't know if she ever gave exact titles.

I read Fangirl and was dissatisfied with it, for a couple reasons. I remember saying to Kyla that one of the reasons was that I was maybe one of five people who read it without having read HP, and so I didn't have any backstory to rely on when reading the fic bits; they were just fic bits of a story I didn't entirely understand. And so any heavy lifting Rowell needed the fic to do -- which would have made lots of sense, Cath using the fic to express things she couldn't otherwise -- was somewhat lost for me.

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

I already didn't much like Fangirl before I got to the part where Harry Potter was mentioned as existing in-universe (partially because the fic bits irritated me and didn't add to the story--so you weren't missing much!--but mostly because I absolutely hated the love interest), but that was definitely the point where I completely gave up on ever liking it. What the fuck. Harry Potter cannot exist in that universe. That ruins every single meta point she could have made.