Medium Dawn Felagund of the Fountain

I have been, as is the norm for me, up to my ears in Everything. Most of it is (as usual) work, but I've been up to some fannish stuff too that I'd love to share. So, first, some links!

• The Fading of the Elves: Techno-volunteerism and the Disappearance of Tolkien Fan Fiction Archives. I wrote this symposium article (on encouragement by Maria :) for the special Platforms edition of Transformative Works and Cultures. The crux of the article is the disappearance of single-fandom archives and what precipitates that. I argue that it's technology + volunteers ... techno-volunteerism, to use the term coined by Abigail De Kosnik! In short, people who are willing to volunteer their time time learn the technology needed to maintain an archive or other fannish platform. While viable options for doing so have dwindled in the wake of eFiction's demise, there has been a dearth too of education, support, and mentorship opportunities (although this does seem to be changing, I hope). Finally, the invisibility—an intentional choice on the part of those of us who do this work—can be grinding. Everyone else is hanging out, chatting, writing and reading stories, and you're updating software. Yet independent, small archives are a vital part of the fannish ecosystem, so what needs to change to make them a viable part again?



• Discord as a Fandom Platform: Locating a New Playground by Welmoed Fenna Wagenaar. This one is not mine, obviously, but it appears in the same special edition of TWC, and one of the two Discord servers discussed is the SWG! The author uses the lens of play to study how "users interact with and negotiate rule-based structures and designs" on a Discord server. The SWG functions in the article mostly as an example of a moderated space, but I'm okay with that. I'm proud of the work my comoderators do on the server to keep it a safe and friendly space!



• Ten Important Moments in Tolkien Fanfiction History. For February's Cultus Dispatches column, I thought I'd give myself an "easy month," which I think I defined at the time as "no data to crunch or graphics of said data to make," for the Organization for Transformative Works' challenge to write a "10 things" essay about fandom Ha. HA. This was not an easy article to write! In fact, I think it was my most challenging Cultus article to date. Not only did I have to choose ten things (which is very political and potentially fraught, as more than one person who clearly thought this was a bad idea pointed out), but I had to do enough research to speak with some authority on all of them. I quite liked the resulting article, though. It was worth the effort!



• Grief, Grieving, and Permission to Mourn in the Quenta Silmarillion (text, audio, and slideshow). This is my presentation for this year's Tolkien at UVM Conference. The theme was Tolkien and Psychology, and this was my attempt to achieve a tenuous connection to the theme while yattering on, yet again, about narrative bias with a hearty scoop of quantitative data. In this presentation, I look at the data not only on death in the Quenta Silmarillion (who dies? and how? ... other than "lots" and "violently," that is) but on grief and mourning. What I've discovered is, yet again, Tolkien has constructed a pseudohistorical text that shows clear narrative bias, this time using death and mourning rituals cast certain characters in politicized ways. In other words, some characters go conspicuously ungrieved and unmourned. Others receive more than their fair share, and very often, this seems to be motivated by a desire to distract from what they were up to when they died. (Fair warning that I knock a few heroes of The Silmarillion off of their tear-washed and haunted pedestals, including my own namesake!)

So Tolkien at UVM was this weekend. This is honestly one of my favorite weekends out of the year. Grundy comes up from Jersey, sian22redux comes down from Ontario, and we have a splendiferously nerdy weekend in Burlington, closing places down because we get so involved in talking (not just about Tolkien! but there's a bit of Tolkien stuff in there too!) that we tend to lose track of how late it is until we realize they are putting up the chairs around us ...

The conference itself is excellent every year. Vermont is a bit out of the way, and early April is not the best time to be in Vermont (it's usually rainy and cold, and it's mud season, though that's less noticeable in B-ton), but the conference itself is always warm and friendly and fun. (And Vermont any time of year is itself a friendly place with great food, minimal crowds, and cheap/free parking!) This year's presentations were excellent, as I have come to expect from many years now attending this conference; several of them got my brain turning in new ways, including about my own topic, which I might expand on for one of the hybrid conferences coming up this summer.

I am a very introverted person and usually have to be coaxed into socializing. (Once I'm with my friends, I have a good time. But I rarely look forward to hanging out with people beyond a very small circle.) And the past five years have hacked away at me until I feel like I have no soft edges left; i.e., I am sometimes a crabby person. I am very often in the role these days of "advocate," which means I don't get to go with the flow, and I say "fuck" a lot. But I do look forward to this weekend so much each year and cracking out of my shell, and I'm actually feeling sad right now that it's over.

Okay, at long last, I am sharing the video of my presentation at the New York Tolkien Conference here. The full title (which will not fit in the space allotted for titles) is "The Loremasters of Fëanor: Historical Bias in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien and Transformative Works." It discusses both the evidence for historical bias in Tolkien's works (especially The Silmarillion) and how the fan community uses that bias to create fanworks.



You won't be able to see the data and other visual aids on the screen behind me. That data (as well as a detailed synopsis of the paper) is available on my blog The Heretic Loremaster.

Also, a friendly reminder that The Heretic Loremaster does have a feed set up on both LJ and DW at heretic_lore_feed. Following this feed will bring new HL posts directly to your flist. Because my journal has come to be just that--a journal--it is usually the last place that I bring fannish stuff; however, I know a lot of people who friended me here did so because of our shared fandom involvement, so if you miss seeing that stuff here, the HL feed might help a bit. (Just a bit because it is infrequently updated thanks to my grad school schedule!) Also, please remember that I have no ownership or control over this feed, which means that I don't receive comments left on feed posts. Please comment directly on the posts themselves; no membership is required to do so.

The paper will eventually be available to read but I need to clean up citations first. If you don't mind my sloppy sourcing and want a copy early, just let me know.