Concordia discors

This is is dedicated to mosellegreen as a combined early/belated birthday gift and a thank-you for the prompt.
BTW, egged on by a discussion of eggcorns and Lady Mondegreens, I’ve attempted to introduce an eggcorn of my own with ‘dagger-drawn,’ an adjective that manages to confuse ‘at daggers drawn’ with ‘drawing the line.’ I thought it went nicely with the militaristic flavour of the thing.

Disclaimer: 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.

Permissions: Mina de Malfois is an original fictional creation. These stories and characters are the sole property of the author, but she lends them out for fanfic and fanart. A list of Mina de Malfois/Sanguinity things by other people can be found here.


I’d been wrestling for some time now with the question of what to do with my work in progress (which was ferociously popular, and continued to be a major draw at ‘Penn’d Passion’ even without regular updates). But I was pushed into making a decision when rumour reached me that Warr1or had embarked on a new crusade. I wasn’t eager to become a target, as you can well imagine. And Arc was still away, although due back soon, so I was having to ponder the problem on my own.

The thing was, Warr1or had decided that any fanfiction author found guilty of abandoning a work in progress was a kind of fandom apostate, and he had taken it upon himself to hunt those authors down. He suspected them, he made it clear, of desertion: WIPs left languishing without updates were clear proof, to his heated and disordered mind, that the author was drifting away from Sanguinity fandom. And so he was not only tracking down authors of WIPs, but subjecting those on his list to a campaign of harassment designed to force them to make a choice. Either they must make a public declaration of their loyalties and update the damned fic, or else they must remove and destroy all their Sanguinity works and post a Goodbye Cruel Fandom letter.

I don’t mind telling you, I’d already considered taking down At His Lordship’s Behest. It wasn’t that I hadn’t had a sufficient number of comments to persuade me to continue. I’d had a thoroughly gratifying amount of positive feedback, and a quick comparison with Of Vice and Velvet’s comments stats showed me still, as expected, in the lead. But I just hadn’t had time to work on it, and I couldn’t seem to rekindle my initial creative enthusiasm. Only the thought of my fans stayed my hand: I knew how upset and bereft they’d feel without those opening chapters to console them.

Not that some of them deserved any consolation. You would not believe the sense of entitlement some readers have. Just because they’d sent me a few paltry gifts, or bestowed paid account time or Sanguinity Online tithing points on me, some of these fangirls were possessed of the entirely erroneous notion that they had a positive right to updates. They pestered me with questions, and with reviews that said only, ‘Update soon!!!’ I had begun to fully and deeply appreciate Arc’s advice about not accepting gifts.

And now that Warr1or was on the prowl once more (though no longer, thanks to my home in Tia House, claiming to be possessed of my IP address), the question had acquired new urgency. In his self-consecrated quest to cleanse our fandom of apostasy he had crossed a dagger-drawn line. He had breached that one revered standard that rises above mere differences of creed, practice, or symbol, and that eclipses variance in pairing, kink, genre or even fandom: the Sanctity of the Friendslock. He had been quoting, as evidence of certain apostasy among the Sanguinites, from livejournal posts that had never been public. The internet quaked with indignation.

Unfortunately it also quaked with mirth, and at PrinceC’s expense. Warr1or hadn’t, I was convinced, meant to humiliate PrinceC. He’d merely publicly denounced a perceived defection from Sanguinity in favour of something that, in Warr1or’s phrase, ‘constituted a new fandom on which PrinceC was bestowing the undeserved gift of his attention.’ And, unwilling to let the defection occur unopposed, Warr1or had screencapped and reposted parts of one of PrinceC’s flocked-and-screened posts--in order, he said, to prove that PrinceC’s interests had shifted. I noticed Warr1or didn’t denounce PrinceC as immoral, faithless, or vile (and those were three of the least objectionable terms he’d applied to the other authors of ill-updated WIPs). Instead he’d made a heartfelt plea to Sanguinity fandom at large to rush to Of Vice and Velvet and smother PrinceC with renewed entreaties to continue it.

Except Sanguinity fandom was too busy reeling about with laughter to offer much in the way of positive feedback and pleas for continuance. What Warr1or had chosen to interpret as ‘a new fandom’ was more along the lines of ‘an embarrassing delusion.’ No bloody wonder PrinceC had carefully flocked his post and secured it from the eyes of all but the similarly deluded. For once I found myself grateful to have been left off a friend’s special livejournal filter: it stood me in good stead not to have been screencaptured commenting to encourage PrinceC in his special spiritual beliefs. The variously-titled historical personages who had been caught commenting were all likely too far gone in eccentricity to care that their pseudonyms were being bandied about the internet, but I wasn’t.

PrinceC, it stood revealed, had made a lengthy and solemn post announcing to his ickle wee friends that he was, in fact, the reincarnation of someone called James Morrow Walsh. And he might have been able to pass that off as an in-character RPG post--I suspected that was what Warr1or had taken it for--but the chain of comments made it too, too unflinchingly obvious that he and his special filter were in deadly earnest. They all, to a mun, believed that they were reincarnates, and were moreover bound and determined to defend the Good Names and posthumous honour of their former selves.

It was all rather mortifying. I mean, my avatar had been seen in-game--however heavily disguised--holding hands with his. We were known to spend time together; some of that time, most particularly our night with Lord Henri Antoine Silvestre de Gravina, was notorious for its implications. And now here PrinceC was, known to all and sundry as a deceased Mountie.

Little good it did now to chastise Warr1or for his defiance of lj etiquette: the damage had been done. And anyway Warr1or was still obstinately insistent that apostasy was the greater evil.

I had, I’m sure you’ll see, to prevent similar catastrophes from befalling me personally. The problem was, I was a tad guilty-as-not-yet-charged. It wasn’t that my devotion to Sanguinity had weakened at all; I was still as thoroughly enthralled, enamoured, and en-other things as ever.

But I did sometimes feel a pang of wistful regret that I wasn’t broadening my horizons and expanding my fanbase with a few brief but talented fics in some of the other newly popular fandoms. I mean to say, a few thousand words devoted to brotherly love here or to handsomely bare-pated villains there and I could easily capture a little of the applause and lipgloss currently being scooped up by others. Being tied to At His Lordship’s Behest unfairly limited my range. If I passed on AHLB for completion by some other author, I would spare myself the tedium of Warr1or’s crazed wrath while simultaneously freeing up my time for shorter fanfiction.

And sometimes, to be perfectly frank, the shorter the fanfiction the better. Completing a piece in that first flush of fannish enthusiasm is infinitely preferable to letting it drag on for fifty-odd chapters, by which time your original readers are all disenchanted with your characters’ clothing choices and/or particular tradition of witchcraft, and your new readers are too intimidated by the length of the thing to even begin. I longed, sometimes, for the heady freedom of the one-shot.

So I decided to pre-empt whatever Warr1or might have gotten around to doing to me. I made a public post outlining my reasons for setting aside AHLB--comments off natch; I wasn’t interested in debate--and then put it up for adoption over at one of the WIP placement communities. Of course I felt a faint pang of regret, but really, what was the worst that could happen? If it was brilliantly concluded by some other pen, some of the accolades were bound to reflect back on me for having started it so well. If it was taken up by unskilled hands and poorly finished, my own opening chapters would stand in talented contrast to the subsequent hack job. Whichever happened, the unwritten version my fans imagined me writing would outstrip any actual fic that could possibly exist. And I'd be encouraging new writers, really, when you think about it; I'd practically be mentoring them. I couldn’t lose. And now I had all the pleasure of new fandoms to explore, and world enough and time for the exploration, not that I had any intention of quitting Sanguinity Online.

And then Arc returned to the internet. I’d been waiting with mingled hope and dread for this, because the realization that I’d seen and interacted with her offline self was more than a bit unnerving. What if my real-world incarnation was a letdown compared with the glittery breathtaking BNFdom I’d achieved online?

I shouldn’t have worried. Arc messaged me out of the blue, which was in itself pretty reassuring. She’d heard, she said, that I had set aside At His Lordship’s Behest, and she strongly hinted that she approved of my decision to redistribute my time and energies more fairly amongst several fandoms. ‘You have been putting in a lot of hours wandering around Sanguinity Online with Eva’s son,’ she said. ‘It must be fatiguing. Perhaps some of that time could more profitably devoted to your novel, or to shorter fanfiction. You have done some rather interesting work in the one-shot line.’

I gathered from that that she’d read Bound for Detention, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask outright. After careful consideration during her absence, I’d concluded that B4D was the sort of work that needed time to sink in before one asked for honest reactions.

footnotes