Invisible Ficathon: Introducing My Fandoms
invisible_ficathon is a fic exchange based around fandoms that don't really exist! Specifically, fandoms based on books, movies, and TV shows that exist within a fictional world (think Dog Cops or Inspector Spacetime). Nominations for this round - yes, I'm already anticipating enough success for a second round - have already closed and can be found here on AO3. There are a lot of fandoms available for requesting and offering! I nominated three:
Queen Lear - Shakespeare (from St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold)
Queen Lear is the final play written by Shakespeare. It was written in addition to King Lear, not instead of, and my impression was that it wasn't simply a rehashing of the same story.
The Shakespeare who wrote Queen Lear was a woman who had lived as a man, first as a notorious pirate and then, after retiring from swashbuckling, as a playwright. Below is the scene where a group of St. Trinian's students discover the heretofore unknown original manuscript:
Click to viewVampirita book series (from Disney's Fillmore!)
Vampirita is a series of YA sci-fi/fantasy novels about a vampire astronaut! The fandom shows up as a major part of the case in episode 2x08 "The Unseen Reflection", where a disillusioned fan is sabotaging her friend's attempt to win them a spot as characters in the next book. We don't know much about the books except that they're set in space and that there have been a lot of them (lots of canon!):
O'Farrell sitting at his desk. There are ten Vampirita books on the desk and one in his hand.
We do know that Vampirita knows about something called "the secret of the muber force", which sounds pretty interesting, yes? We also know that there is an enemy of Vampirita that seems to be a fairly developed and/or important character called something like Zolfram the Gold (to my ear. Others might hear it differently). In the as yet unpublished next book mentioned in "The Unseen Reflection", Vampirita and Zolfram start dating. The fans of the series that we see in the episode are shocked and appalled at this development. Do I smell a shipping war?
The Preservers (from "Destroyer of Worlds" by Claude Lalumiere)
The Preservers is a comic book that gets mentioned in the works of Claude Lalumiere, most prominently in the short story "Destroyer of Worlds" where the narrator of the story is a long time fan of the comic.
There are four main characters in the comic, the titular Preservers: Stanley King, Suzanne King, Sandy King, and Cliff King (PLEASE NOTE: I totally got Sandy's name wrong during nominations, whoops. It's definitely Sandy, not Sally :-P). Lalumiere gives their origin in brief:
The Preservers were Stanley King, the patriarch of the family, a shapeshifter who called himself Professor Unknown; his wife, Suzanne, who could become intangible and who adopted the name Spectral; their daughter, Sandy, a.k.a. the Human Angel, who sprouted wings that gave her the ability to fly; and Stanley's younger brother, Cliff, who was transformed into a superstrong ten-foot, blue-scaled giant called the Brute. They gained their powers when, after their private jet crashed in the Himalayas, they were rescued by the god Vishnu, the preserver, who granted them strange abilities "to preserve the world against the forces of destruction."
They're sort of a mystical (as opposed to scientific) version of the Fantastic Four. The narrator in "Destroyer of Worlds" describes them as more adventurers than superheroes in the classical sense, with "the stories concern[ing] themselves with hidden societies, old gods, and magical artefacts rather than supervillains and the like." Common themes from the comic include "humans being pawns in complex games and conflicts between the gods of various pantheons". We get the impression that there are some thematic distinctions between two different production eras of the comic, which could definitely be A Thing in the fandom!