speculum saints

tumblr might be dying for real this time! or not. to deal with my anxiety about losing the only fandom space/social media that has ever really worked for me, i started to think about how i could use dreamwidth to fill the hole it will leave, should this demise prove true. so i am going to try to gather together my thoughts about two novels i read recently, by collecting together my tumblr posts on them and trying to turn it into dreamwidth posts…

the lesser bohemians is a novel by irish writer eimear mcbride. i had a remarkable experience with this book (and its sequel which might be a different post). they have some incredibly specific and weird concerns i have tried to do in my writing in the last couple of years, so specific and weird i haven’t encountered anything that is preoccupied with them in exact combination. it felt like it was in conversation with my fanfiction, or reading my fanfiction back to me. providing a reading i never got from any reader itself, almost. those concerns are, roughly: 1) the structural demands of disclosure of childhood sexual abuse 2) age gap relationships as a way to turn up the dial on certain themes of dependency and need inherent in all bonds of love 3) unsettling substitutions for various emotional deprivations that mix the familial and the sexual (in this case, a daughterless father falling in love with a fatherless daughter the same age as his lost daughter).

i really think all writers of romantic fanfiction should read these books. they are doing simply incredible things with the question of how to write people falling in love as thrilling as falling in love can actually be (and in the second with creating tension within established relationships). like formally and linguistically dazzling but all in service of people falling in love and fucking like so much fucking half this book is sex and having emotional problems from their bad childhoods. my response to this heir to joycean experimental prose is i want to take it apart and put it back together to figure out how to do exactly this, in my fanfiction. under the cut i am going to try to bring together the more scattered form of the tumblr post to get at in the dauntingly more finished form of the dreamwidth post what i liked so much about it. a fittingly experimental attempt at a review, if you will.

( could i grow up in a night? )

Title: the rapture of that cruelty which yet is love
Fandom: House of the Dragon
Pairing(s): Alicent/Rhaenyra, Daemon/Rhaenyra
Rating: Explicit
Length: 35k, 1/1
Tags: Alternate Universe - Victorian, Vampires, Gothic Pastiche, Frame Narrative, Uncle/Niece Incest, Sexual Abuse, Rape/Non-con Elements, Dubious Consent, Blood Drinking, Vampire Sex, Lesbian Sex, Embedded Images, NSFW Art

Written for the Fire & Blood Kink Reverse Bang.

Summary:

Rhaenyra died when Alicent was fifteen. Now, almost twenty years later, Rhaenyra has returned looking not a day older than fifteen—and speaking fondly of something queer: bloodlust.

Content warning: the “sexual abuse” tags refers to an adult vampirically feeding on a minor—no human sex happens, but it’s an intensely erotic and eroticized act and experience that qualifies it as such; this is my attempt at a Neo-Victorian narrative/pastiche in a Victorian Era/Westeros mashup and although it’s relatively minor the general vibe contains some Orientalism, colonial mindsets, ableism, fetishization of paleness/white skin, admiration for the vanished glories of civilizations that were brutal slave empires, etc.; lastly it’s a vampire story with all that might imply about consent issues, as well as specific themes of predation/underage predation/fixation on eternal girlhood or youth etc.

Acknowledgments: Thank you to Becca for her gorgeous art and for being a lovely collaborator, and to all the event staff for their hard work that made this such a well-run event that was a joy to participate in every step of the way!

(  Twenty-seventh day of the tenth month, 1875 AD... )

Title: what scar, what light, what fire
Fandom: House of the Dragon
Pairings: Helaena Targaryen gen
Length: 4.3k, 1/1
Rating: Teen
Tags: Prophetic Visions, Character Study, Old Valyrian Worldbuilding, Amateur Arachnology, Child Marriage

Summary:

A white immensity. Thrusting up above a deeper darkness. A sun? A white immensity cresting dark waters and shattering them into streams of red and gold. No, not quite. It is smaller than that, quite a bit smaller. She would think about it the next time she was so open time poured in. Or perhaps it was that time poured in so insistently it opened her up.

Note: Tagging this one was a challenge - it’s mostly an odd character study, but there’s a quite oblique mention of underage/mother-daughter incest at the end.

( Helaena had been open the morning of her wedding. )

Title: a lesson in canvases
Fandom: House of the Dragon
Pairings: Alicent/Rhaenyra
Length: 2.5k, 1/1
Rating: Explicit
Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Established Relationship, Bed-Wetting, Trauma, Past Rape/Non-con, Past CSA, Watersports, Hurt/Comfort, mild age play, Vaginal Fingering, Under-negotiated Kink, Background Relationships

Summary:

“Not enough room,” Rhaenyra croons. “Not enough room in such a little girl for a stuffed cunt and a bulging belly, is there?"

( “No,” Alicent whimpers, “no, no—” )

POSTULANT CHAPTER ONE

🐉masterpost🐉

(  “My princess,” Alicent says, hands clasped in front of her stomach, head bowed before the desk where Rhaenyra applies herself to being heir to the Seven Kingdoms. “With your leave, I intend to take vows as a septa, and then take up residence at the motherhouse in Oldtown.” )

GENTLE MOTHER, FONT OF MERCY CHAPTER TWO

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( “Princess, thank you so much for coming,” Alicent said, hastening across the room toward Rhaenys with her hands outstretched. )

Title: wife, mistress, queen
Fandom: House of the Dragon
Pairings: Alicent/Rhaenyra, Daemon/Rhaenyra
Length: 17k, 2/16
Rating: Explicit
Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Trans Female Character, Trans Rhaenyra Targaryen, Lesbian Alicent Hightower, POV Alternating, Other Additional Tags to Be Added

Author’s Note:

-This is a fic where a transfeminine character is referred to with he/him pronouns for approx. the first fourth (and some change) of the story.
-It's a story about a trans girl in AWOIAF. More specific warnings will be included in chapter notes, but in general themes of transmisogyny, dysphoria, and sexual and reproductive coercion will be big factors.
-I am not a trans woman. I work very hard to be thoughtful and intentional while telling a story that interests me, but I am also not aiming for "good representation" in any sense—these are Targaryens, this is AWOIAF, and as with all my fics the mess and the often deeply uncomfortable is the draw. In short, and to spoil a bit in service of giving an illustrative example: if a fic where a girl experiences gender euphoria from her uncle saying he always wanted her to be a girl so he could marry her is offensive to you, I'd give this a pass.
-Dual Rhaenicent and Daemyra endgame, with a couple of side trips (Rhaenyra/Mysaria, Rhaenyra/Criston, perhaps some others...)
-Title from Cassius Dio on Elagabalus: "And finally, — to go back now to the story which I began, — he was bestowed in marriage and was termed wife, mistress, and queen." From a hostile source, I find this a really moving articulation of a demand for and claim to an expansive, full womanhood in relation and through the relations of a specific cultural context, which is what this fic is also about.
-Thank you to Lilica and E for hammering all of this out with me at great length.

Summary:

“At night he would smuggle him from his rooms dressed as a courtesan and take him secretly to brothels on the Street of Silk, where the prince could observe men and women in the act of love and learn more of these “womanly arts” from the harlots of King’s Landing.”

- Fire & Blood, Being a History of the Targaryen Kings of Westeros

( Content Warnings and Tags By Chapter )

( Table of Contents )

Since I can't write at the moment, I am going to try to remember what writing is like by slowly trying to do DVD commentaries for every chapter of my Daemon Targaryen CSA trauma manifesto/Daemyra age play epic, rūs riña. Here is chapter 1.

( CWs at above link )

GENTLE MOTHER, FONT OF MERCY, CHAPTER ONE

🐉masterpost🐉

( The heavy cream of the paper, the neat, pretty swirls and loops of the ink, the wax seal with the three-headed Targaryen dragon—it all crumpled satisfyingly in Rhaenyra’s fist.  )