Nothing can come close to the power trip i get when i finish a very respectable classic and realize i can use the power of the internet to read the most UNHINGED fanfiction about it. You can't do anything about it, dead writer. You're POWERLESS, morally upstanding literature enjoyer that is scared of gay people or eroticism or smth. The world is at my fingertips and now the lovely lovely civilized christian characters are GOING TO HAVE PREMARITAL SE-
New fic incoming! This is a small thing I have been wanting to write for a while. There is not much plot, apart from @my-life-as-a-reader's headcanon of Grantaire and Musichetta being step siblings and my own headcanon of them being competitive dancers in their teenage years.
Summary:
Joly is wondering whether he should get up and join the conversation, when Jehan’s speakers give a small hum and a familiar riff starts. Musichetta’s head snaps up, a mischievous smile on her lips, and she turns to her brother.
"Dance with me?"
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The Amis are having a nice picnic when they discover something new about their friend.
Word count: 1,620 words.
Pairings: None romantic. Grantaire and Musichetta friendship.
oh my GOD jvj, Weird Old Gavroche, and a bunch of gavroche's unnamed roomates are literally riding a minecart??? through some mines?? to rescue cosette who is being held captive by a group of criminals who could very easily just be patron-minette but are instead just some random criminals??
So recently I lost my internet and I haven't had any for a good few weeks, I apologize in the sincerest for not putting out more content. That's just the reason. I've had no internet- (rip)
However in the process I somehow lost everything in my inbox. I have like ONE draft that got saved but otherwise it's all gone. I'll be opening requests back up in regards to this!
I've decided to add Enjolras from Les Misérables too- since I started the series and I love his chaotic ass. No spoilers plz! Still not done with it
But uh, yeah! However plz keep in mind that I don't feel comfortable writing for fem readers, I'm sorry in regards to that
TOP 10 THEATER ON AO3 BASED ON NUMBER OF FANWORKS, SINGLE CATEGORY TAGS ONLY VERSION (2009-2022)
If you want to see the Theater bar chart with the multi-category fandoms included, please check this post.
To make these bar chart race, all series titles in the Theater Category on November 29 (or the closest date to it) of every year were copy-pasted from Wayback Machine to Google Sheets, rearranged according to number of fanworks, manually filtered for fandoms belonging in only one category, and then inputted to Flourish to turn into a bar chart race.
Locked fanworks aren't included in the count because Wayback Machine can’t view those, only Ao3 users can.
The high-ranking Les Miserables tags (Les Misérables - All Media Types & Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil) are both in multiple categories (Books & Literature & Theater) so it has been excluded in this bar chart. You can see it multicategory version.
Fandom tags that are no longer in the Theater category tag as of posting this are left out of the bar chart race. These tags are usually either miscategorized or already have other tags referring to the same fandom.
Please refer to this post for more fanfiction bar chart races.
Thanks for understanding and hopefully I didn’t mess up anywhere! 🙏
I have a new fic!! It’s an (unofficial) sequel to @pumpkinspice-prouvaire‘s fic “Out Where The Lighting Splits The Sea”, where reclusive god Grantaire falls for a revolutionary mortal. Go read it if you haven’t already!
Summary:
“Vermin, you dared lay a hand on my beloved,” he snarls, and Le Cabuc takes a hesitating step back. The god doesn’t seem to notice, though, as he continues. “For that, you will be punished."
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Someone tries to attack Enjolras. Grantaire doesn't take it well.
Word count: 1576 words.
Pairings: Enjolras/Grantaire.
Warnings: ... Greek gods being Greek gods? Nothing major, though.
Woe, Boypussy Be Upon Ye: Transing Characters in Fanfic & Fanart
What’s the deal with envisioning your blorbos as transgender?
Originally published in Prism & Pen. Also on my Patreon.
It’s a meme, I made it. Here it is.
It’s been unbelievably positive for me as a trans dude, the change in approach to trans characters in fandom and subsequently in media in general, and I just wanted to write a bit about my experiences with the cultural shift and how positive it’s been for me personally.
What’s weird about people in fandom confidently, nay casually, writing characters as transgender and just having them be a regular dude with a pussy or a regular girl with a dick is that like… I remember when it wasn’t a thing.
Back in 2009, for example, which was a big time for fandom — Superwholock was running rampant, Star Trek (2009) had just gotten a new generation of fans into Trek — or even in 2012, when Les Misérables (2012) had dropped and gotten new people into Les Mis, or when the Hobbit had revamped a lot of interest in Tolkien’s books and the original Lord of the Rings films, not to mention The Hobbit itself, none of this even getting into the Marvel movies, like…
It just. It wasn’t a thing.
Sure, there were transgender characters around, characters that people wrote as trans, but I remember it so strongly as being very niche. It was deep, emotional work where people had to work to “justify” the emotional work they were doing, and even then, they couldn’t just say a character was trans and be chill about it. In order to justify a character being transgender, one had to put in mountains of evidence, or admit the trans perspective was a genderbend of sorts.
For me, I’m pretty sure the moment when things started to change was when I was reading and writing a lot of Loki-centred fanfiction, roundabout 2014–2017 — and the more permissive culture was very much borne of Loki being seen as an exception.
Loki, of the Marvel film and comics, is an alien secretly kidnapped and adopted into the Odinson family, and is known to change his body and appearance frequently, including changing his apparent gender or expression.
He was, in the comic canon (not to mention the original Norse mythologies) quite genderfluid, after all, so even if you didn’t refer to him as explicitly transgender, you could explore him as being some variety of genderfluid, nonbinary, or intersex — as an alien, as a Jötnar as opposed to being AEsir like Thor or Odin, as a god.
But then things changed a bit more.
Welcome to Night Vale, a weird narrative horror podcast, started in 2012, and one thing you could rely on from a lot of fanfics is that people might have weird or alien or otherwise not-not cisgender but not entirely cisgender genitals either. The Magnus Archives, also a narrative horror podcast, started in 2016, and when I got into the fandom in roundabout 2019, which is also when the new Good Omens TV show was due to release and there was a resurgence of interest in the book as well, I remember experiencing a sort of newfound thing where like…
I’d had a mental block around writing many trans characters, before — I could create my own characters who were trans, but a big part of me still felt like I wasn’t allowed to just make a canon character trans if they’d never been mentioned as being trans before or made explicitly trans.
What was it that stopped me?
My own dysphoria? Perhaps a little. Maybe some lacking self-confidence.
Most of all, it just felt as though I couldn’t justify it. I couldn’t justify seeing a cis man written by cis people in a cis show and saying, “Hey, no, he’s like me, actually” — even though I could easily do it about the same character being gay or Jewish or even chronically ill or disabled.
It was like there was a mental block inside me I just couldn’t get past.
I still had a lot of the old online cultural expectations stamped onto me, I think, even being an out trans man who knew many many other trans and intersex and nonbinary people of every gender imaginable in fandom.
I think for Welcome to Night Vale and then especially for The Magnus Archives, part of what made it so easy for people to write and envisage different characters as trans, the fact that there was such limited physical description of characters, the fact that you were attached to them by their voices alone, allowed people to envisage them in whatever way they liked.
In The Magnus Archives, most of the main characters are envisaged as trans in one way or another — Daisy Tonner particularly is explored with all flavours of butch dykey complexity, trans in whichever ways or directions are juiciest and most interesting. But for so many of the characters — from Jonathan Sims and Martin Blackwood to Sasha James and Tim Stoker to Elias Bouchard to Peter Lukas to any of the other Entities — there is no end to the characters people will explore or envisage as trans or nonbinary or just straight-up outside of gender or gender-weird.
No one has to justify a period character being trans with no problems. Loads of people write Izzy Hands or Stede Bonnet or Edward Teach, as being trans in Our Flag Means Death alongside the canonic nonbinary character Jim Jimenez. Any and all characters, trans or otherwise, are invited to participate in ye olde top surgery performed by Roach, the ship’s surgeon, or somehow get hold of ye olde hormones in whatever handwavy way necessary, and it’s cool and fine.
And what’s wonderful for me is the way I see the current approach to trans characters gleefully and delightedly applied to fandoms that are years if not decades old.
I see people write House MD fanfic now where they just go, right from the beginning, yeah this or that character is trans, and they’ve always been trans, and it’s chill. What if James Wilson was trans? It’d rock, that’s what. What if Greg House was trans? Yeah, he’d probably do his own T-shots under the table.
People write Spock as trans now, or guys from M*A*S*H, or Jean Valjean.
What if in the X-Files Dana Scully and Fox Mulder were T4T? Makes complete sense, and also, the idea fucks absolutely. They’re already so lesbian vibes for each other, it fits perfectly.
I wrote a silly little Tumblr post a few weeks ago envisioning Morticia and Gomez Addams as T4T, and it blew up immediately — I think about how if I’d made that most a decade ago it would have been met with crickets, if not a bit of scorn, and not just from transphobes, but just people who like me at that time hadn’t been able to relax and have fun with it.
That’s the real crux of the matter, the impact a lot of fandom has made on me and the way that trans characterisation is approached, the hunger I have for trans characterisation now — it’s the idea of being trans as joyful and delightful, as inherently fun and sexy, but also just as being something every day and normal. A detail you can include as casually in your interpretation of a canon character as any other headcanon.
There’s a beautiful freedom in it, and I’m so grateful to have been able to learn from and grow because of other trans people paving the way with their confident headcanons and delving into trans ideas in their fic.
It’s done wonders for me everywhere — not just in my fanfic, but most of all in the original works I pen now, each one of them featuring trans character after trans character.
Can you find the post about writing modern AU Les Miserables fanfiction in the same style as the original book?
i don’t remember much but there was a bit about capitalism and iphones as ‘the tainted apple, original sin’ or something similar
thank you!
*saxophone music to the tune of Stars begins playing*
There, out in the hellsite / A post case needs solving
Les Misérables / In a modern AU
Tumblr's against me / But I never shall yield
When there's work left to do / There is work I must do...
I approached the Search Bar / And I entered in stride
Knowing Google would taunt and would spite me / My resolve would tried