Ask Anything: Answers (1)

[narya_flame]

These were from spiced_wine - I'll come back to the others in batches!

How old were you when you first read Tolkien?

Encountered - tiny!  My uncle showed us the Bakshi cartoon one night when he was babysitting for us, back in the early 90s, and that was it, I was hooked.  My favourite part was where Frodo got stabbed - make of that what you will.

Read - seven or eight when I read Fellowship for the first time.  My uncle (same one!) bought me the trilogy as a late birthday present to keep me quiet on a long car trip to Cornwall.  I think I read The Two Towers and possibly RotK the same summer, as I remember asking lots of questions about Shelob, and worrying about finding her down a Cornish mine shaft. 

 

What was your first fanfic?

Published - this one.  

A lot of the stories I wrote growing up were basically fanfic, though - not that I knew what it was back then!  I remember one about a girl named Ethel going off to an academy for witches, which owed far more to Jill Murphy's Worst Witch series than it did to Harry Potter.  I'm not even sure Harry Potter had come out at that point.  

I also had an English teacher whose favourite creative writing exercise was getting us to write from the POV of one of the characters in a book we were studying, or encouraging us to write what was effectively canon divergence fic - what might have happened if the friar had refused to marry Romeo and Juliet, that sort of thing.  And I wrote a gothic romance when I was thirteen/fourteen that was a thinly veiled crossover between Flambards and Jane Eyre.

 

What was the first fanfic you read?

I used to read a lot of Harry Potter fanfic when I was at school.  When we were waiting for my Mum to finish up I would obsessively scour the JK Rowling website to find clues or announcements about the next book (I feel like I shouldn't need to say this but just in case it's necessary, this was literally decades before her views on the trans community emerged).  She had links to some of the more popular fan sites on there, I think, and that was my gateway drug.

I didn't go looking for Tolkien fanfic until I was into sixth form and procrastinating when I should have been studying!  Dark Prince was the first one I remember reading; it may not have been the very first, but it was the first one that stuck.  I also read Adora's tenth walker series, which I don't think she ever finished, and, a little later, Pink Siamese's A Dawn of Many Colours, which gave me the multiverse bug!

Comments

[shirebound]

Three cheers for your uncle!

[narya_flame]

Indeed 😁

[spiced_wine]

I’m sure you told me about your uncle, but not about worrying about finding Shelob down Cornish mine shafts, which actually makes sense as they’re very cave-like.


I also had an English teacher whose favourite creative writing exercise was getting us to write from the POV of one of the characters in a book we were studying, or encouraging us to write what was effectively canon divergence fic - what might have happened if the friar had refused to marry Romeo and Juliet, that sort of thing.

I think a lot of people not keen in English might be much more inclined if their teachers did that.

Thank you so much, Narya 🤗

[narya_flame]

To be honest a lot of subjects are badly taught because schools have to teach to the test. I thought I didn't like maths and physics because all we ever did was exercises from a textbook.

[grundyscribbling]

Glad your uncle introduced you to Tolkien! :) (Though worrying about Shelob in Cornwall sounds a bit stressful on a kid...)

(I feel like I shouldn't need to say this but just in case it's necessary, this was literally decades before her views on the trans community emerged)
I am so angry at her for this. Her descent down the anti-trans/Nazi rabbit hole has retroactively tainted so much.

[narya_flame]

I know. I tried not to let it at first, but she continually makes things worse. She's been full on radicalised and it's so sad when the message most of us originally took from those books was one of tolerance, kindness, and standing up for what's right.