Vorkosiverse on Crack_Van

[beatrice_otter]

I'll be driving the crack_van for the Vorkosiverse as a Featured Fandom in March.  The fandom overview is, erm, somewhat limited and out of date, being almost exactly five years old.  I'd like to do a supplement; what things and people do you guys think should be added?

Comments

[philomytha]

Oh gosh, it is, isn't it? The fandom's had a lot of activity since that was written. A lot of the links are dead, for one thing. You should probably mention the ficathon(s) - the summer one seems to be a fixture, and I daresay Tel will chime in with whether she plans to keep Winterfair going in future years. And it might be nice to mention the Russian fandom, since it's large and active. Most of the fanart is done by the Russians - you could link here for a lot of it, and this is the main Russian archive site.

Perhaps also link to the fandom's section at AO3, since a great deal of the fanfic written in the fandom gets posted there. From there it's pretty clear that Aral/Cordelia is the most popular pairing in the fandom, along with Gregor/Miles, Ivan/By, Gregor/Laisa and Alys/Simon. (Interesting that Miles/Ekaterin barely gets a look-in.)

Oh, and you could link to the entire works (except Memory) free online.

[branchandroot]

It might be good to mention the Cryoburn CD which has released the books into the wild for legal non-commercial distribution.

I'd also say that a few more words about the planet Barrayar are in order. It's a lot more complicated than a bunch of pre-Communist Russians, and the "all soliders" thing is... well, that's flattening things a lot. Maybe mentioning that Lois spends actual plot time on the variety and the ethnic/class/gender divisions. Cetaganda could also do with some mention of the haut as well as the ghem. Lois elaborated a lot after that initial military-mad-miles focus.

Definitely add Ekaterin to the Characters section. I'd also say Mark and Kareen. Possibly Galeni and Simon, but possibly not. Given latest developments, perhaps Roic as well.

I'd really like to see the het pairings get more specific than Miles/Various Women. That's... really a lot more dismissive and erasing of some fantastically kick-butt women than I'm comfortable seeing, especially in this fandom! Miles/Ekaterin has grown up nicely, and I'm reasonably sure Miles/Elli is still hanging in there. To say nothing of Miles/Bel, and, speaking of that, this is a fandom that seems to call for a more flexible and open-minded framing of fic than just a "slash or het" binary with gen not even getting its own heading. An AO3 link for fic might be of use by now.

I think that's most of my two cents.

[beatrice_otter]

Good ideas--and I didn't know that everything except Memory was free online!

What's the link to the summer and winter ficathons?

[beatrice_otter]

Good point on the Miles/Various Women. Gack.

[philomytha]

Oh, definitely mention that the fic is mostly gen rather than either het or slash, and has a lot of AU gen arcs of various kinds.

The Miles/various women thing - yes, that's definitely not representative of canon. In the fic, there's actually relatively little Miles het of any kind - occasional Miles/Ekaterin or Miles/Taura or Miles/Elli, and yes, some Miles/Bel too - but most Miles fic is gen.

[philomytha]

The ficathons are all run out of bujold_fic, they don't have separate links, and sadly there isn't a systematic tagging system there to make it easy to find. Here's last summer's masterlist, and the current Winterfair masterlist.

[reginagiraffe]

Aral attractive? Um, that's not generally one of his defining characterstics.

I think you should mention right at the beginning that this is a universe with NO aliens. Humans only.

ETA: Having read it more thoroughly, I think you should throw out the whole "no spoilers" thing. Put a big note at the top that it's going to be full of spoilers and that if they don't want to be spoiled, go read the damn books already... and then go for it, full speed ahead.

[branchandroot]

Seriously. I mean, in that framework, where on earth would the Petya-verse go? Just calling it slash is like calling Chex mix "cereal". And of late a lot of Miles stuff has Miles/Ekaterin cranked in as an assumption but there's no particular focus given to it, which I would totally put down as more gen than het. *waves hands* So much variety! It's a good thing!

[beatrice_otter]

...and that would be why I couldn't find a com or tags. Thanks!

[philomytha]

Absolutely! It's definitely not your 'dominant slash pairing accounts for 90% of fics' type of fandom :-).

[azurelunatic]

I think the major divide in pairings in Vorkosiverse fic is not slash/het, but fic that works with canon relationships, and fic that goes against canon relationships, with fic that fits in non-canon relationships without challenging canon relationships somewhere snugly in the middle.

[jmtorres]

I dunno, I agree if there's a divide it's not slash/het, not with the way the canon works and the kind of fans that attracts. But I am uncomfortable with defining it as C/UC relationships, I've been in a fandom like that and it was *weird* and doesn't feel like this.

I'm gonna say actually that if there's a divide it's generational: who's primarily interested in writing about Cordelia and Aral and Alys and Simon and their generation, and the people who are primarily interested in writing about the people in Miles's generation.

But I'm not sure I buy outright that there's a *divide.*

[tel]

I would definitely be interested in running something like Winterfair again, but I might need to scale back unless more translators show up. I'm already leaving an embarrassing amount of stuff untranslated. Maybe less of a joint-fandom operation and more like a ficathon that's fine with Russians wandering in and participating if they want to.

[tel]

Well. Most English fic is gen. There's quite a bit of slash in Russian.

[beatrice_otter]

Really? Is there a central archive or journal for Russian fic? It would be nice to have links!

[tel]

I am only knowledgeable about the subset of the Russian fandom I directly interact with. The main slash archive is http://barrayar.slashfiction.ru/. However, the Cyrillic encoding there is nonstandard, so people might have trouble with it. It hasn't been updated in a little over a year.

Current fandom activity is centered on jetta-e's journal (http://www.diary.ru/~jetta-e/)

The most prominent work in the Russian fandom is probably the slash novel "Победивший платит" (http://barrayar.slashfiction.ru/pp.htm or http://barrayar.slashfiction.ru/pp.zip), set just after the First Cetagandan War, in the Cetagandan Empire, starring OCs.

For people interested in reading translations of Russian fic into English, there's a good selection on the Winterfair master list. Some other translations have been done as well.

[beatrice_otter]

Thank you!

[raveninthewind]

I will add this information to the post. (If I can credit you for this, let me know in the next couple of days as my edit rights expire on 2/28 evening, PST).

[raveninthewind]

Hey, I posted the overview back in 2006, although I didn't write it. I currently have edit rights and can update the post if you suggest changes. It's only till the evening of 2/28 that I can update.

Or if you post an entirely new Part 2/update, I might be able to get the mods to let me link it in this overview.

I did add some links as noted in the comments above, tweaked the pairings and put the gen section above the slash and het pairings lists, because you are indeed correct that there's more gen/less of a slash presence in this fandom.

I'll at least try to remove dead links. I have to work tomorrow, so I won't have tons of time to spend on this.

[beatrice_otter]

Awesome. I'll see if I can get the edits/expansions I'd like to you sometime tomorrow or Monday, then; if not, I'll probably just start off with a second recap that links to the one you posted.

[raveninthewind]

Take a look at what there is now. :) I did check the links and edited a bit here and there.

The cut off time is dependent on the time one of the mod doing it. It can mean one's edit perms get cut off earlier than expected. I've learned not to wait too late on the last evening.

[tel]

I think a second recap would be a good idea regardless. So much has changed, even in the last six months, that starting nearly from scratch is probably a better way to go. The present state of the fandom really, really, not the same as it was back then.

[tel]

I kind of feel that the fandom divide is between a mostly genfic core on bujold_fic and the drive-by ficcers that write for yuletide or other challenges (often slash) but don't otherwise participate in fandom.

On this side of the language barrier, anyway.

[philomytha]

Yeah, that's how it feels to me as well. There are a bunch of people who write regularly for the fandom, and there's a much wider group who know and love the books but only rarely write fic for the fandom. Though 'divide' implies some kind of antagonism, and there really isn't that at all, just two different groups of people.