1.10 Mina de Malfois and the Attempted Coup (part one)
[The author wishes to thank all of you for your patience and willingness to be amused. Extra thanks to those of you who've expressed an interest, however tongue-in-cheek, in taking part in Fanfiction Idol. Thus far most inquiries seem to have come from HP fandom, but we're hoping for a wide display of, uh, talent. Yes, Mina and her fellow sockjudges really will post links to all audition posts, and then hold a public poll so that the listeners readers at home can pick their top ten. Subsequent rounds will involve reposts of entries, judges' commentaries, and further polls. Remember to wank vote for your favourites! No, there are no prizes, but you'll be internet famous and lots of people will want to friend you, including this author.]

Permissions: All rights reserved. All other reproduction, transmission, or storage, in any format, is prohibited unless the author is contacted beforehand and grants specific written permission. The author may be contacted at mina_de_malfois@yahoo.com.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. No resemblance is intended to any person or persons living, dead, or online. No BNFs were harmed in the making of this fic.



I wandered across the grounds of Malfois Manor--of course it’s possible to apparate your avatar directly inside your home, but I preferred to touch down on Dread Lane and stroll in through the front gates, admiring the rolling lawns and gardens. Warr1or was doing beautiful work. Just now he was watering the rosebushes, although his puzzled frown seemed directed at Stasia, my junior maid, who was dancing and pirouetting along a mother-of-pearl flagstone path, oblivious. I made a mental note to turn down the volume on the in-game soundtrack. All residents can choose music in their own rooms, but only the property owner can set the volume and choose the master playlist.

Or, I thought irritably, maybe I ought to turn it off altogether. I was feeling pretty damned annoyed with the stable of models and vocalists responsible for such features as the game’s soundtrack and the appearances of the NPCs. Sure, these professionals had contributed to the atmosphere of the game, and had incidentally provided a new category of real-person fiction for those who liked that sort of thing. I’ll grant you that that earned them fair claim to their own following of fans.

But it did not, at least not in my opinion, justify their recent bid to take over the entire fandom. These singers, musicians, and models, collectively known within Sanguinity fandom as ‘the Voices,’ were not only attempting to organize their own for-profit conferences, but were threatening to use their leverage to shut down all con activity by the fans, unless said activity had their prior approval and ongoing supervision.

It irked me. They had no right to meddle with fan activity. And yet that was exactly what they’d been trying to do, intruding themselves heavy-handedly into communities set up to organize conferences, and even criticizing fan-based charity drives and newsletters. It was an outrage.

This might have all amounted to nothing. The powers that be have made futile, impotent attempts to control fandom before now, after all. Take those insecure profic authors who wrap themselves in the franchise as a futile shield against critical readers, and who regularly mount flaccid attacks on fanfiction authors in a pitiful attempt to ride BNF coattails and stir up controversy. They usually can’t keep it up for long.

But at about the same time this grumbling began from the Voices, a new player appeared on the Sanguinity landscape, and I sensed at once that here was a powerful emergent force. Well, just the fact that he’d come to my notice at all was telling, really. He’d dashed onto the scene with a handful of fics that were accomplished enough to briefly float a rumour that he was my sockpuppet, a charge Josh promptly denied, all the while charmingly professing himself flattered by the misunderstanding. ‘Mina can’t have a sockpuppet,’ the Mean Girls sneered. ‘She puts her name to everything, even things she hasn’t written.’ That was an unfair reference to an honest mistake from eons ago, and my friends once again lost no time in leaping repeatedly and energetically to my defence, occasionally accidentally lying in their well-meant enthusiasm.

Next there was, for a short time, a suggestion that he was a PrinceC sockpuppet. I wasn’t fooled, though. There was no way this Josh Amos was a sockpuppet. His was a distinct, recognizable, unique voice, and besides, his Sanguinity avatar was noted for its tousled brownish-blond hair, whereas everybody knew PrinceC chose avatars with sleek black hair like his own, so he’d be easily recognized at cons.

Josh Amos, it quickly became evident, epitomized cool. His fanfics were brilliant, but he downplayed them. His avatar was frankly gorgeous, but thus far he’d declined to flirt with anyone. Fans went out of their way to talk to him, but instead of taking this for granted, he responded graciously to each and every comment, always managing to sound faintly surprised at the attention. He’d never said a word about his connections, but somehow a whisper ran through fandom that he had several of the Voices on speed-dial, or that he’d met the game designers, or that he was, perhaps, an actor himself. He fast became a nucleus for those fans who structured their lives around ‘encounters’ with their favourite celebrities, and a growing number of these insisted he would turn out to be someone famous. I found it distasteful, personally.

And besides, Josh was, unfortunately, also becoming a focal point for those fans who supported the Voices in their bid to control Sanguinity fandom. He didn’t call them fans--he called them ‘Nomadic Listeners,’ whatever that was supposed to mean--but he made convincing arguments that their loyalties should lie with the Voices who had given them so much joy with their NPC characterizations and sheer soaring musicality. Was it, he asked, too much to expect that they retain control over their artistic creations?

Surprisingly, Warr1or provided a strong counterargument. At issue, he pointed out, was not just control, but a fundamental moral schism between the greed of the Voices, who sought to limit Sanguinity fandom to financial transactions and paid appearances at Voice-arranged events, and the higher, purer, selfless participation of the fans, who were motivated only by love and creativity. Reading his impassioned open letter, I felt tears spring to my eyes. It was a masterpiece of moving sentimentality and an almost spiritual plea for the fans to transcend commerce in favour of art. At least, it was until the point when he accused the Voices of being immoral man-whores. One of the things I planned to do today was to discreetly ask him to tone that bit down. It wouldn’t help us any if the fans started to sound like freaks.

When I entered Malfois Manor I saw that the ghost of Ciyerra had left a message in blood, or possibly lipstick, across the front hall mirror. ‘How dare they? We’re the real fans, not those starfuckers,’ she’d scrawled angrily. I rather resented that ‘we,’ as it seemed to imply that she thought herself on equal BNF footing with myself, but I couldn’t afford to alienate anyone right now. I needed her faction onside if we were going to successfully resist this attempted coup.

There’d already been one split among the Jolly Hockeysticksers, and that had probably affected Ciyerra’s base of support, since the two sides weren’t currently speaking to each other and were automatically taking up opposite sides on every issue from appropriation to yaoi.

One doesn’t like to imperil one’s feminist cred, so I’d kept my derision to myself, but honestly, they were behaving like a bunch of girls. The split had occurred because a few of them had gotten their feelings hurt because some of their bestest chums had remarked that they didn’t enjoy a particular secular holiday. This had been taken as an outrageous offence against everything the holiday could possibly be taken to stand for--patriotism, motherhood, and romantic love had been mentioned--and a series of huffy defriendings resulted. The newer, smaller group had gamely tried for ironic distance by calling themselves the Jolly Holidays, but their ‘see us? We’re laughing at you’ pose rather failed to come off, as you’d be hard put to find a less jolly group anywhere outside of an actual morgue. They specialized in nursing their hurt feelings tenderly and proffering one another handkerchiefs and endless cups of imaginary tea.

Weeping copiously all the while, they’d recently come out strongly in support of Josh Amos, variously arguing that he had a delicate, sensitive nature akin to their own, that famous people had to put up with unfair scrutiny and criticism from a harsh, unappreciative world, and that the rest of fandom were ‘the great unwashed’ whom they didn’t deign to interact with anyway.

So they wouldn’t be supporting Ciyerra and the rest of us on principle, unless we lucked out and Josh denounced another of their cherished holidays, or kicked a puppy or something. But on the bright side, this meant that the vast majority of the Girls’ Dormitory crowd would be on our side no matter what we did, as long as we agreed the Jolly Holiday lot were utter drips. Which, you know: they were. So no problem there.