Concordia discors

The author would like to send *hugs* and cuddlerays to kalpurna, annephoenix, prettyveela, and most especially to wminstrel for his performance here.

Also, ‘season one’ is now available in print, if anyone shares my fetish for properly bound copies of things. You can buy it for cost at lulu.com; there’s no markup on that whatsoever, so if you really want to give me money you’ll have to mail me your pocket change instead.

Or, should you have slightly more money and an affinity for worthy causes, there’s a cafepress version which is, with my permission, being sold as a fundraiser for 4Christina.org. Obviously it’s your choice to buy this version, t’other version, or no version at all; I’m not holding a gun to your head or anything. But I do, for what it's worth, nudge you gently in the direction of this one. It features beautiful new art from mutecornett, for one thing.

And finally, I just want to reiterate that Mina’s amazon wishlist is by way of being an in-joke (and also, sort of, a reading list); you are not actually expected to buy her things off of it, unless you are secretly A Very Wealthy Stalker. I trust that none of you are.



‘Thank you for reading,’ I typed, dutifully responding to a recent comment on the introduction to At His Lordship’s Behest, which was still picking up new readers even after a largish break between updates. In truth, I’d been shamefully neglecting my fanfiction lately, preferring to reserve my plot bunnies for my original fiction. My recently conceived Young Adult work-in-progress was guaranteed to create a stir. It was layered with metalevels of meaning and laden with subtle references (to amuse the jaded and snarkish), while still lightly witty in tone and romantic in plot (so as to please my devoted fangirls and frequent readers).

But I had, to my credit, been actively involved with other people’s fanfiction. I’d been attending the Penn’d Passion editorial board chat sessions, proffering my opinions not only on Dread Lane works but on several other sections, and was pleased to have had the opportunity to save a quite-worthy fic from rejection. Some confusion had arisen as to whether the title contained a spelling error or a deliberately silly pun, and I’d saved the day by pointing out that it was neither: takeaway food was, in fact, a crucial plot element in Take Me, Wonton Time Lord, so that was clearly the word the author had intended to use.

Also, I’d been very busy scholastically. I had a major paper assigned in my media studies course, and the truckload of books I’d checked out of the library were the mere tip of the research iceberg. I needed to familiarize myself with some original sources, and that, the cadre of front desk librarians informed me, meant gaining access to one of the special collections rooms. Each of these was guarded by a ferocious specialist librarian, and the one in charge of the fanac collection was, so rumour had it, a sort of über-librarian, bristling with degrees and publications and surrounded by a staff of assistants. I’d heard the lady was a tiger, and had felt a cowardly relief when I’d found, on my first approach, that the fanac collection was locked, because its irregular and inconvenient hours had meant I could postpone my den-bearding for a few days. There’s something about the really rigid sort of librarian that scares one, well, rigid, don’t you find? So I’d put in several diligent hours perfecting my outline and making thorough use of my secondary sources, preparatory to trying again.

But quite apart from monitoring Penn’d Passions’ borders, and from the necessity of gaining access to the Great Fanfiction Works that had made it into print and thereby into the library’s zine horde, I had other fanfic problems brewing. Personal ones.

Chan and student-teacher may have been safely banned from Penn’d Passion, but they were rampant elsewhere on the net, and to my intense dismay I found I wasn’t going to be able to avoid the issue. It was Warr1or who let me know, actually. ‘Mina,’ he messaged me, ‘do you read an archive called Candy 4 Children?’

‘I most certainly do not,’ I snapped back.

Everyone’s heard of that site, of course: it’s downright notorious. But I’ve always been afraid to click on any link leading back to it, lest the authorities show up and slap me with a scarlet letter ‘P’ for ‘paedophile.’ It’s not that I can’t, as the more shrill supporters always put it, ‘distinguish reality from fiction.’ It’s just that I lack faith in the ability of your average vice cop to understand or care about the nuanced arguments surrounding the literary merits of lolicon and incestfic. I don’t want to go down in fanfic history as a famous test case.

‘No, of course you don’t,’ he responded soothingly. ‘I knew that couldn’t be right. It’s just...one of your fics has been nominated for a Lollipop Award.’

I broke out in an instantaneous cold sweat. I had to steel myself to go look, and it was every bit as bad as it could be. My first thought had been that the fic Arc had deleted from her archive had resurfaced here, but this was actually worse. A fic I’d written years and years ago, when I was well underage myself, was listed right there on the front page of Candy 4 Children.

You have to understand: at the time I wrote it, I was very young, far too young and innocent to appreciate the inherent wrongness of cross-generational non-con incestuous femmepreg. I’d been too naive to fully understand the implications of what I was writing. I’d certainly never dreamt the fic would survive to cause my adult self such intense chagrin. Who knows how many varying flavours of pervert had seen ‘Bound for Detention; believed to be an early work by Mina de Malfois’ listed amongst the other horrors. It was small consolation to note that so far, 52% of said perverts had voted for it.

I clicked on the title and confirmed that yes, they’d archived the full text of that long-forgotten creation. I’d thought I’d tracked down and deleted all extant copies of it, back when I’d started to gather a following. Its sudden resurrection was horrific. I had nightmarish visions of it falling into the wrong hands, gleefully pounced on by those who would see, all too clearly, its full potential to embarrass me. If anyone passed it on to Arc or PrinceC or Xena I’d expire from sheer mortification. Funny: I’d imagined there was nothing left that could cause me to blush in PrinceC’s presence, but I’d underestimated the cringe levels achievable via fanfiction.

Candy 4 Children didn’t make it easy to identify its maintainers, much less to contact them--not that I blame them; the majority of their readers and authors might well be creative geniuses exploring the delights of human sexuality in an entirely harmless way, but there was no way to be sure about any of them, was there? I did, though, find Gerry'sGirl listed as one of the moderators of the C4C livejournal group. It was an invitation-only community of select literary perverts, and Gerry'sGirl didn’t, she informed me, have the authority to let me join, but she reluctantly promised to pass my concerns along to the group.

Someone called MidgeDarling IM’d me the next night. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she wrote in a gentle calligraphic font, ‘that your story was uploaded when you weren’t looking for the extra attention. It should never have been nominated without your permission in the first place. But, as you must know, sometimes fans hold on to copies of particularly beloved works from years past. It’s a compliment to your ability, my dear.’

Yes. Well. Not all my abilities are ones I want put on display. ‘Can the story be removed?’ I asked, by which I obviously meant remove my story.

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘It’s terribly annoying, I know, but Candy 4 Children has a policy against removing fanfiction. Otherwise, authors could so easily be intimidated by unreasonable laws that it would be catastrophic to our archive--and to free speech and creativity. Once the story leaves the author’s harddrive, it belongs to all of us. I know it must seem unreasonable, but it’s archive policy.’

‘But isn’t C4C your archive?’ I asked, bewildered. ‘If you agree it’s an unreasonable policy, can’t you overlook it just this once and de-nominate my fic?’

‘That’s against our policy,’ she said firmly, and logged off.

Was I destined to gain a reputation amongst age-players? There had to be some solution. Confronting the thing directly by posting about it was out of the question--it would only link my name more firmly to the whole sordid loli-noncon mess. Perhaps, I mused, I could float some protective rumour that Bound for Detention had been written under extenuating circumstances of extreme youth and stupidity. Better yet, maybe the whole thing could be pinned on someone else; I could blame some deserving LNF, who’d be instantly vaulted to the ranks of known authors, a leap so devoutly to be wished that surely they’d be grateful for the misattributation.

I just want to state for the record that although I read anon memes, I have never actually posted in one. I know the meme, but I don’t, so to speak, acknowledge it in public, and if I met it on the street I’d give it the cut direct. That said, I do have to admit I’ve more than once contemplated its potential usefulness for disseminating helpful rumours. On this occasion I was seriously tempted.

Not so tempted that I’d rush into anything, of course. Instead I messaged Arc.

‘Arc,’ I asked cautiously, ‘you know the anon meme?’

‘That font of sparkling wit and stale grudgewank?’ she replied. ‘You haven’t been posting there, have you?’

‘No, no,’ I assured her. She did have a point: it did rather reek of grudgery. ‘I just...wondered if you read it.’

‘I’ve tried,’ she replied, ‘but in the end, I realized I preferred fresh vitriol to stale. Why are you asking? Have I been abusing my capslock key?’

‘Of course not,’ I said, not mentioning that I’d had her pegged as a lowercasasaur anyway. ‘I just thought, you being C of M and all, perhaps you hung out there.’

‘I’m so devoutly C of M I sign my attacks,’ she said crisply, and rang off. I hoped I hadn’t insulted her. I’d never meant to suggest she posted there; I’d only wanted to gauge whether she thought it was too, too infra dig for me to do so. Apparently she did, so there was nothing for it but to discard my half-formed anon rumour scheme and wait for inspiration to strike. In the meantime, I settled down to distract myself with my collection of PrinceC pics and the attendant consoling thought that at some point this year he was due to turn nineteen. The photos Rabbit had sent me were typically gorgeous, although there was a clutter of people in the background of each one--other con-attendees vying for camera space or possibly for the chance to get next to PrinceC.

Or, I realized, to get next to Josh, who was the focal object for most of Rabbit’s pictures. In one snap Josh and PrinceC appeared side by side, dressed identically in blue and white track suits, only Josh held a ‘second place’ card instead of the ‘first place’ PrinceC had earned. PrinceC was slightly taller, slightly broader-shouldered, and, apparently, slightly more talented at...wearing perfectly ordinary sports clothes. Whatever. Although really, when you thought about it, it was impressive that Jen could appear in public as Josh and pass so well. If I hadn’t met Jen at camp, I’d have been utterly taken in by the young man in the photographs.

On my second or third flip-through I noticed something else. Almost every one of the con shots had a guy lurking in the background. Sometimes he was blurred, and usually he was so far back he was hard to spot, but he was usually there if you looked long enough. I recognized him immediately, of course, although in several shots his face was partially obscured by his own camera. In the flesh he was Marlboro-man handsome, sort of ruggedly hick but in a hot way. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why he was at KawaiiKon; he looked far too homespun. Brokeback Otaku? It just didn’t seem likely. Was he stalking PrinceC?


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footnotes