Concordia discors

09 May 2009: Without the help of flyingcarpet, who placed references within the text, re-organized the footnotes, and generally helped get this post-ready, this would not be posted right now. Many, many thanks to her for her work and patience.

The author extends her sincere thanks to everyone who has taken the time to comment on these stories, friend this journal, or let others know about mina_de_malfois. Your support, tolerance, and good humour are greatly appreciated.

Disclaimer: These stories and characters are the sole property of the author. This is a work of fiction. No resemblance is intended to any person or persons living, dead, or online. No BNFs were harmed in the making of this fic.

temaris has a podcast of Mina de Malfois and the Young Blood here.



Even as I sat there, eyeing the screen thoughtfully, two more messages arrived from Warr1or. ‘I hate all slashers,’ one read (an unnecessary clarification, in my books, as I’d already sensed some such attitude on his part), ‘and vow vengence on them.’ I debated correcting his spelling, since I am an editor now, but decided against this course of action.

‘Have you ever been in the military?’ his second message demanded. ‘If you had, you’d understand why Pierce and jab must be defended!’ If that was true military training must be a lot more extensive than I’d ever imagined. I hadn’t pictured them talking about slash.

Five more messages--two firmly in favour of PB/J, two equally rabid about PB/P, and one deploring our inability to all just get along--piled into my inbox while I was reading Warr1or’s contributions. I decided to mention these developments, ever so casually, to my nearest and dearest.

‘Arc,’ I told her, ‘I’ve stumbled across a bunch of crazy people online.’

‘Yes,’ said Archivist12. ‘They’re called 'fandom.'’ I chose to take the high road and ignore this.

‘I’m worried that insane shippers will come get me,’ I explained, aware as I typed that this sounded slightly silly, but there you are. ‘Or failing that, that the anti-slasher who seems to have fixated on me, deploring me for slash I haven’t written but he thinks I might, will decide my bloodied corpse would be a disincentive to future slash writers.’

‘Did you want me to help?’ she asked kindly, and I paused. I mean, I had, not to put too fine a point on it, more or less been hoping for advice, but now that she came out and asked, I rethought the thing. I didn’t want Arc getting the impression, which I rather felt she might be getting, that I was constantly running to her for support. The relationship between author and archivist should be one of mutual respect and admiration, tilted perhaps slightly in favour of the author, who as the creative force naturally commanded more awe. This routine of crying to Arc like a child with a skinned knee bawling for its mother was possibly putting a slight strain on that dynamic.

‘Oh, no,’ I assured her, authorial dignity oozing from my very font. ‘I have it well under control.’

And as a matter of fact I did, or was about to. The answer, I saw suddenly in a flash of brilliance, was to quietly let it be known that neither PB/J nor PB/P, much less P/J, interested me in the slightest. Lord Henri Antoine Silvestre de Gravina, the most captivating, multi-faceted anti-hero to grace page or screen in recent memory, was, I felt instinctively, where it was at--or, if he wasn’t yet, he would be, once I’d dashed off a few of the scenarios now percolating through my brain. I decided my next submission to the archive would consist of the introductory chapter of an epic new Silvestre-centric fic. That would show the shippers of both stripes that they were barking up the wrong tree entirely in their mindlessly compliant focus on the ‘main characters.’

I spent a happy few days (barring mundanities such as my job and grocery shopping) busily working on the introduction, and jotting down an outline and plot points for my fic. A whole new world, lush and resplendent, seem to open up before me as I absorbed myself in mastering Lord Silvestre de Gravina’s speech patterns, understanding the motivations for his deliciously well-bred cruelties, and sketching his extensive wardrobe. Of course my research involved playing the game every night, too, to properly steep myself in the canon. But just between you and me? I’d begun to suspect that my retelling had rather more depth, profundity, and style than the original. Well, it’s to be expected, really, isn’t it? Sanguinity was created by gamers--talented gamers undoubtedly, but at the end of the day, what’s a gamer, really? Whereas I have been clearly destined from birth to be a novelist. It’s an entirely different level of thing, I’m sure you’ll agree.

So I was, as I’ve said, contentedly absorbed. If I could have quit work and just stayed in the old apartment, life would have been one of those glorious medleys of song, as the Romanian ruling class used to put it.⁶ As it was, I still had more time off shift than on, and I spent that time in an atmosphere of heady creativity and, as is my habit, exotic perfume.⁷ I must say, my last order was something like. I’d got ‘Final Resting Place,’ ‘Decayed Splendor,’ and ‘Old Money,’ as well as three others I hadn’t opened yet, and for pure atmospherics, nothing could beat them. I heartily recommend them to the young author-about-town.

From time to time I sought diversion by watching the hurly-burly that was my comments section, although strictly speaking, I appeared to be the only person not joining in the fray and commenting. It had sort of become the comments section of the people, as it were. The masses had teemed in en masse, plunked themselves down and set up base camps, and were diligently getting down to the business of hashing out the borders between PB/J and PB/P. It was like an infestation of peculiarly romance-obsessed ants: workmanlike, but insane.

There seemed no discernable limit to the amount of time they’d spend defending their pairing, or the number of references they’d drag into the argument as proof. Every now and again some sane soul would pop up and suggest that maybe, just maybe, the game manufacturers hadn’t had Shakespeare, Melville, Austen and Tolstoy in mind when they created Sanguinity, but these helpful attempts at perspective were immediately washed away in a tide of shipping philosophy. It was fascinating to watch. It was a sort of what’s-it of society, you know? A micro-thingy.

As near as I could figure it, the PB/P shippers, or ‘Booters’ as they called themselves for some obscure reason,⁸ clung to the traditional aristocratic practice of marrying distant cousins as an indisputable proof that PrincessB and Pierce were destined for one another. Well, I say ‘indisputable,’ but in actuality they disputed it from sun-up to sundown and for a goodly portion of each night. The Booters were much enamoured of hereditary aristocracy, monarchies, tradition (or their own notions thereof), etiquette (which they strictly upheld, as long as calling their opponents ‘mindless fuckwitted plebes’ didn’t count as a breach of etiquette), and fanfiction that revelled in a kind of mild incest.

The PB/J shippers, or ‘Sammiches’ as they liked to call themselves, saw the eventual union of PrincessB and Jab as an example of the purity of love, the value of friendship, the dignity of the working class, the need to resist base physical lust, and a bunch of other high-flown ideals I’d been unable to follow. They were a cheery, in-joke-prone, kindly lot, strewing their every message with smiley-faces and *hugs*, which made it all the more unnerving when you caught them calling their opponents a bunch of jackbooted perverts who should have been aborted directly after conception. Watching the Sammiches turn on their foes was like reaching the end of the rainbow and finding a pot of broken glass and infectious syringes.

And every now and then, to leaven the mix, Warr1or would show up, incoherent with rage and his own special brand of crazy, bent on defending all military personnel everywhere as represented, or possibly incarnated, in Pierce and Jab. His latest comments had taken a turn for the graphic. ‘I will destroy all who write about Pierce holding Jab in his muscled arms all through the night,’ one promised, and another ran, ‘Jab would never whimper piteously and rest his cheek against the torn cloth covering Pierce’s rock-hard thigh.’ It’s like whoever-it-was said: we become the thing we despise. Give him enough time, and Warr1or looked set to become one of the legends of slash, although my glee at this was tempered by the fact that he still seemed obsessed, to an uncomfortable degree, with my location. ‘I have your IP number,’ he warned, including a string of digits that, for all I know, might well have been my IP number, ‘so I know what state you’re in.’ I was in a state of mild worry and elevated mirth, but I doubt that’s what he meant. Warr1or, though no doubt a good fellow in real life and kind to his mother, struck me as singularly unconcerned with my well-being. He didn’t appear to have any proper concern for my privacy, either, as I’d had to delete three comments of his containing my purported IP. Bugger.

And I’d just, with an exasperated sigh, stumbled across yet a fourth of his ‘your IP is thus-and-thus’ memos and was about to delete it when, to my delight, a defender appeared.

‘You semi-literate thug,’ PrinceC began, and I found myself nodding in agreement as he berated Warr1or, ‘what are you hoping to accomplish by threatening the lady? All you’re doing is proving your own cowardice, and your unworthiness to stand with heroes such as Pierce and Jab. Leave Mina alone, or I’ll make you sorry you crossed her, you blighter.’

I blinked at the screen. I say, that was something more like it. Suave, I put it to you. I wondered from whence this loyal supporter sprang, and how long he’d been reading my stuff. Which of my fanfictions was his favourite? But there’d be time enough for personal questions later. The thing to do now was to get to know who this young knight-errant was,⁹ and whether I should befriend him.

‘I say,’ I typed. ‘Thanks.’

‘At your service,’ he answered. ‘Never let it be said that the scholar’s mind cannot find a home in the warrior’s body.’

As is so often the case online, it was difficult to tell if he had a deliberately playful mock-courtly style of expressing himself or a congenital brain disease.

A scholar, he’d said. ‘Are you at school?’ I asked.

‘My final year,’ he answered, ‘but, I hope, only the beginning of a lifetime of learning.’

If I hadn’t currently been taking a year or two off, I’d be on the final year of my B.A. myself. I perked up a little. He must be roughly my age.

‘And you’re a fan of Sanguinity, I take it?’ I continued.

‘I’m a fan of many things,’ he said, ‘and Sanguinity is, potentially at least, one of them. I think it shows great potential for backstory development, and I look forward to reading the fanfiction it gives rise to.’

I perked up a little bit more.

‘I have to go,’ he added, and I fancied I could sense the regret that lay behind his words, ‘but I look forward to talking to you again.’ Shortly after his departure in a metaphorical cloud of pixels, the computer chimed, and checking my email I found PrinceC had sent me a picture of himself. No message, just the photo, which revealed a rather handsome young man in full pirate costume standing next to a sign which read, ‘Welcome to the Second Annual ConFanLitCon.’¹⁰

Quite, I repeat, handsome. Definitely worthy of further study, that photograph. Indeed.



Footnotes:

6. life would have been one of those glorious medleys of song, as the Romanian ruling class used to put it is Mina failing to understand that the last line of a Dorothy Parker verse was meant sarcastically.

7. The expensive mail-order scents with the insanely pretentious names are a poke at BPAL.

8. Booters: playstation uses PBP to start itself up. Sammiches: peanut butter and jelly, of course.

9. PrinceC (Prince Charming, of course) stands for every devastatingly attractive but sadly underaged young man you’ve ever caught yourself lusting over in fandom.

10. Okay, I made up all the convention names. ConFanLitCon stands for "'conventions in fantasy literature' convention."