Concordia discors

[Thank you to everyone for friending, reading, linking and pimping; the author is grateful for these little kindnesses on your part.]

Disclaimer: 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. 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 Twee Little Maids here.



‘I’ve just been conversing with one of the Jolly Hockeysticks people,’² I typed, ‘and she tells me she’s a Girl Scout.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Arc replied.

Well, I had been. The J.H.er in question was an adult woman, for one thing. ‘Arc,’ I asked her, hoping to work my way round to enlightenment, ‘were you ever a Girl Scout?’

‘Back in the wild days of my youth, I was noted for it,’ she said, which was more than a little perplexing. I’ve always pictured Canada as a stiflingly bucolic place, but never guessed it was quite so numbingly tranquil that its denizens would view the Girl Scout movement as emblematic of youthful dissipation.³

I wasn’t asking out of mere idle curiosity. Ever since PrinceC had started archiving his fanfiction at Penn’d Passions, there’d been a pack of howling fangirls hanging around the place, cluttering up the message boards with their inane chatter. I mean, I had fans, but this was ridiculous. He couldn’t leave so much as a comment on anyone else’s work without an influx of them descending to leave dozens upon dozens of comments--not comments on the work, just comments in response to his comment, all readily recognizable as desperate bids for his attention. I was beginning to truly loathe them. I mean, I’d even begun to feel a sort of fond nostalgia towards Warr1or, and wondered where he’d been lately.

Some of the worst of the lot belonged to a sort of club called Jolly Hockeysticks, which had recently held one of its annual meetings at some hotel where PrinceC had been attending a cosplay event. The J.H. people weren’t cosplayers, they were some other type of lunatic, but I suppose the sight of PrinceC in tights did something to their already precariously-balanced sense of reason, because they’d been trailing after him ever since, all over the bloody internet. I don’t know how they all came to hear about Penn’d Passion, or Sanguinity, or PrinceC’s multi-chaptered fic-in-progress. Maybe one of them sent up smoke signals, or used semaphore flags, to alert the others. All I knew was that they had all wafted in, a foul concoction of drippy schoolgirl slang and overwrought hormones, and showed no signs of leaving.

When they weren’t cooing idiotically over his fic, they were posting pictures on their ‘author bio’ pages, or pestering Arc to set up a special section of PP for fanfiction based on traditional girls’ boarding school stories. I’d argued pretty strongly that she shouldn’t, but I couldn’t be sure that Arc was onside. It’s not that I think she’d want to give aid and comfort to these godawful drips. It’s just that when you own and maintain a large archive like PP, it can be difficult to resist the urge to make it even larger. It becomes a kind of mania. I’d seen it before.

Anyway, I hadn’t yet seen any of the J.H.ers’ fanfiction, so I had no way of judging how ghastly it might be, but it would have to work long and hard at ghastliness to be anywhere near as ghastly as their photographs.

I’d worked it out. Basically, any Jolly Hockeystickser who was below a certain age, I.Q., and bodyweight specialized in pictures of herself, usually dressed in a cross between the ‘Gothic Lolita’ look and a schoolgirl outfit. Any Jolly Hockeystickser above either the age or weight cut-off, or possessed of a dribble of misplaced common sense, specialized in photos of her toy collection, dollhouse, or tea service. Some managed all three, and posted pictures of their toys holding miniature tea parties in over-cluttered dollhouses. Not to be outdone on the creative combinations front, the younger, thinner, more clue-bereft J.H.ers sometimes exerted themselves to the extent of posting self-portraits in which they clutched their own dolls to their chests or sipped tea out of dainty teacups.

Aside from writing schoolgirl fanfiction, which I devoutly hoped Arc would condemn to the outer darkness, the J.H.ers held meetings and meet-ups and meet-and-greets with frightening regularity. I say frightening, because from the sound of it, what went on at these events was designed to strike terror into the hearts of the reasonable. When I tell you that they’d recently gotten together to read Alice in Wonderland out loud to their assembled My Little Ponies, you’ll understand my horror.

As far as subcultures go, this one was pretty damned sub. You couldn’t shove any more cute into this lot with a shoehorn. I was pretty much fed up--I'd started to daydream wistfully about shaving kittens bald and drop-kicking wee fairies off the balcony--and when a few of the bolder young J.H.ers posted pictures of themselves in gauzy pink lingerie, I wanted to choke them all.

And I was in this frame of mind when one of them, a ‘Xenalvr’ by name⁴, sent me a gushing review of my own multi-chaptered Sanguinity fic. Like PrinceC, I’d thus far only posted my introductory chapter, but it was pretty juicy stuff, sensual and suggestive, obviously setting the stage for my own special brand of intellectual perversity. I couldn’t understand why any of the J.H.ers would be reading it, but this female had, she assured me, loved every word. She wanted, she claimed now, to get to know me better.

‘You must be one of PrinceC’s fans,’ I’d said, trying not to sound bitter.

‘Oh, no,’ she’d assured me. ‘I’m a Girl Scout.’ I’d never heard that the Girl Scouts were particularly anti-PrinceC, so her response was a tad baffling, which is why I’d brought up the subject with Arc. I mean, in the run of a normal day, I don’t discuss or even think of the scouting movement at all, but I sensed some mystery here.

‘I hope I haven’t shocked you,’ Arc said now. Apparently it was going to be one of those days when people made no sense whatsoever. I gave up expecting any logical answer to the puzzle.

‘Not at all,’ I told her, and I meant it. If her idea of a good time encompassed tents and sleeping bags and gaggles of uniformed girls practicing their knot tying, it wasn’t my place to criticize. ‘I think that’s marvellous, Arc old girl.’

Having offered this spot of reassurance re: her wholesome girlhood activities, I reluctantly returned to what I’d been doing before the Girl Scout question distracted me: editing. I had six short submissions to proofread, and scrutinizing them for worthiness for inclusion at PP, while no doubt a heady experience of power, was a little on the tedious side. Three of them, I noted, were from Booters, and the other three from Sammiches. That, I supposed, was a good thing. I didn’t want one or the other faction deciding I was guilty of shipping favouritism. Although, I reflected grimly, a good ship war might send those damned wannabe-schoolgirls scuttling for cover.

To his credit, I’d noticed, PrinceC never bothered to grace these fiends in femme form with much of his attention, at least not that I could see. Possibly he whiled away his evenings poring over their abundant photographs, but if so, he never revealed it by word or deed. Still, as I’ve said, every time he left me a public comment, which he did with gratifying regularity, swarms of them would appear, yapping and twittering away amongst themselves, and never so much as addressing me or my fics.

And speaking of these pests, there was something odd about these fanfics I was supposed to be editing. Well, not so much the fics themselves, if you follow me, but the usernames of the authors who’d submitted ‘em. The three Booters in question were ChaletGirl, MalTowers4ever, and AnnMarlow, whereas on the Sammich side of the equation we had NawtyestGrrl, BalletChic, and RowanMarlow.⁵ This suggested something to my heightened suspicions. I mean, above and beyond the prolific output of these Marlow sisters, there was something not quite right about those names. Not a single one of them, I mean to say, referenced Sanguinity or its characters or setting. Rum, what?

It came to me in a flash: those damnable Jolly Hockeysticksers were trying to sneak their way into Sanguinity fandom to get PrinceC to notice them!

‘Arc!’ I bleated, only luckily via instant messenger no one can hear you bleat, so dignity was preserved.

‘What’s up?’ she asked.

‘Our current plague of schoolgirls are hanging around the Sanguinity section, making asses of themselves,’ I told her. ‘Can’t you tell them to clear off?’ I explained my theory re: the names of the new authors and what that revealed about their fandom origins.

She remained unconvinced and, what was worse, unconcerned. ‘I can’t tell them to get out of the Sanguinity section for writing Sanguinity fic,’ she pointed out, in what she no doubt felt was a reasonable manner, but it came across as callous and disloyal. ‘And sometimes people do continue to use pennames they created for a previous fandom.’

‘Like that Xenalvr person,’ I said, reluctantly conceding her point.

‘Who?’ Arc shot back.

‘Xenalvr,’ I repeated.

‘What? The last I heard, she was fully absorbed into trad. girl school stories’ fandom,’ said Arc, switching her posish on the matter so abruptly that my head spun. ‘So she’s making a nuisance of herself on the Sanguinity boards, is she?’

‘No, wait,’ I protested weakly, ‘not really. She’s one of the sounder ones, I think. She just dropped by to tell me how much she enjoyed my work.’

‘I just bet she did,’ said Arc’s next message. I was beginning to sense hidden depths here. ‘What else did she say?’

‘Nothing much,’ I replied, too alarmed to bother going into the whole anti-PrinceC stance the Girl Scouts had apparently adopted as part of their pledge, or something. It’s not like Arc to be this emotional. I wasn’t sure dredging up scouting memories was safe right now. ‘Why, do you know her?’

‘We were at school together,’ Arc said. ‘Listen, if these people want to hang around Penn’d Passion, there’s no reason for them to be in the ‘Dread Lane’ section. I’ll take care of it.’

Somehow this failed to fully reassure me. Usually when Arc says she’ll take care of something you can consider it as good as taken care of, but this case, it struck me, was different. I’d received the definite impression Arc wasn’t thrilled to the core to be reconnecting with this old chum from her schooldays. In fact, I suspected some sort of longstanding grudge here. The mere mention of this woman seemed to have irritated her in some fashion. In this mood, I mused, who knew what Arc was capable of.

And I mused jolly correctly, let me tell you, because on the following day I saw for myself what Archivist12 was capable of when roused: betrayal, deceit, poor judgement, pandering to the basest element of fandom, and did I mention betrayal? Well, if I did, it deserves mentioning again.

Right there on the main page of Penn’d Passion was a tersely worded announcement: ‘Penn’d Passion, as part of its ongoing expansion, has opened ‘the Girls’ Dormitory,’⁶ a section devoted to fanfiction and discussion of traditional girls’ series.’

I tried, once I’d calmed down, to view the thing neutrally. Arc had probably thought she’d acted for the best. But, dash it all, you don’t fight a plague by inviting it to take up a post as pestilence-in-residence, do you?

I uploaded my next chapter in moody silence. No good, I felt, could possibly come of this.




Footnotes:


1. "Twee Little Maids" is a Mikado pun. Sorry.

2. "Jolly Hockeysticks" is a phrase used to describe bluff, hearty, schoolgirl-story type women.

3. The Girl Scout song is used as a Sekrit Lesbian Signal in Mabel Maney’s brilliant Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse. There’s a song:

"I'm a Girl Scout, I'm a Girl Scout,
How 'bout you? How 'bout you?
Can't you tell by looking?
Can't you tell by looking?
I'm one too, I'm one too."

So, no, Xenalvr and Arc are not talking about the Girl Guides; they are trying to tell Mina something else.

4. Xenalvr is, obviously, from Xena fandom; like Arc, she has ties to the Girl Scouts. ;)

5. ChaletGirl, MalTowers4ever, and AnnMarlow, whereas on the Sammich side of the equation we had NawtyestGrrl, BalletChic, and RowanMarlow. In order, these are fans of the Chalet School books, Malory Towers, Antonia Forest’s Marlow series, Blyton’s Naughtiest Girl series, and Noel Streatfeild.

6. Thanks to redpiratemel, I now know that there's a real fic archive called the Girls' Dormitory.