This has been going on since 2020 and at the time of the post it is 2023 and she is still running her mouth. In the interest of making sure my side of the story is heard, I have separated this into a few smaller "digests" for accessibility reasons.
This is the first part, with what happened.
In early 2019 I participated in Fandom Trumps Hate. I was bid on by Spiced Wine, with a donation made to the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, for me to use Vanimórë in the setting of my choice. At that time, I had not yet written for Silmarillion fandom, though I've been a fan since I was 15 (back in the 20th century) and had always wanted to write Tolkien fic, just felt daunted by it. I was more involved in Star Wars fandom at the time, and she knew this going in, that whatever happened would be a crossover.
I began to write Chains of Eternity, a Silmarillion/Star Wars crossover story about Vanimórë helping to reunite the Force-sensitive Sören with his lost love "Alejandro" (one of Maglor's aliases) and, ultimately, give Sören and his partner Dooku immortality so they could be in a triad with Maglor. The reveal was, of course, that they were Fëanor and Fingolfin reborn as mortal, and in addition to figuring everything out about their past, they had to start thinking about the future and that the Valar won't leave them alone so easily. This was my idea. I wrote the first version of this story from March 2019 to July 2019.
Chains was a sequel to my fic Don't Threaten Me With A Good Time, set in a magical-realism/urban-fantasy universe I really loved which I called Northern Lights. As I was writing Chains, I got regular positive feedback from Spiced both on A03 and Dreamwidth. There was no indication given at any time that I was doing anything "bad" or "wrong". Spiced even recommended my work to other people, like Narya.
Then crossover stuff started happening with Narya's characters as well, Narya wrote a fic shipping Sören/Claire (and I also wrote some things, like a fic called Surrender and Certainty that has since been deleted). My stuff was already part of a multiverse (Sören was an AU version of an OC I wrote in 2016 named Severus, and I had also written a "Sören in Space" named Severin in 2018), so more universes was, at the time, totally fine with me, and we all seemed to be having fun with it, many months after the chapter with Tindómion's (off-screen, briefly referenced) burning was written in Chains, and well after Spiced wrote the original version of Burnt Offerings, which was originally a gift fic to me.
In the months following that chapter and the original draft of her one-shot, Spiced not only gave me the green light for Flames of Eternity and (my original plans for) Blood of Eternity, but expressed enthusiastic support for them (here's one conversation regarding that and a backup mirror of the screenshot). Here's her encouragement on the first [mirror] and last chapter of Flames of Eternity, written several months after That Chapter Of Chains. She was totally fine with me writing Van's appearance in After the Rain and she encouraged me to write him outbidding Sauron, in fact. She left kudos on these fics, and other fics and numerous one-shots of mine within the multiverse, in the months following what I wrote about Tindómion.
She also wrote me gift fics for a few months following her writing Burnt Offerings, that she eventually pulled off of A03 in April 2020 (almost a year after I wrote Tindómion's burning). These fics include Night of Blood (Van kills my OC Justin Roberts), Solstice Fire (Edenel meets Sören at Avebury and initiates a one-night stand), Worldweavers (Van rescues Sören from Justin; this would be the fic with the semi-graphic rape scene) and A Dream of Summer (Van dreaming of everyone at a nightclub). I have downloads and screenshots of these fics as proof, and there are others who can vouch that these fics existed and I'm not just making this up. Worldweavers was posted as late as October 2019, and A Dream of Summer in November 2019. The first version of her fic Last Night I Dreamt I Went to Summerland Again had Van naming his Bentley Sören; Sören the person met Sören the car in the last chapter of the fic (before it was scrubbed out of the fic) in December 2019. I did not, by the way, pressure her to write any of this. And at the time she told me she was having "a lot of fun" writing all of it.
After I'd gotten close to two million words deep into the multiverse, Spiced abruptly pulled out. When she removed her gift fics for me on A03, I asked what happened and this was the response I got:
(I would have liked advance notice of the gift fic removal to download the fics if I hadn't already done so, particularly the birthday present and the early birthday present.)
She could have taken the opportunity then, in that message exchange, to tell me she was *~so triggered~* about her OC dying, as opposed to telling me she wasn't happy with her writing. But that was all she said, and then suddenly, when I was rereading her fic in June 2020, I found the new notes for (the revised version of) Burnt Offerings ca. June 2020 [mirror], where Spiced said she
was extremely upset when Verhalen killed off one of my characters just to give his OC Elf blood. He had absolutely no permission to do so, and did not ask.
If you read his public Transformative Works Policy on Dreamwidth you will see that he says: "...I don't *generally* have a problem with this so long as you're not writing spitefic (as in, horrible things happening to my characters...)"
I don’t know what he calls having one of mine burned to death as a ‘throwaway’. It was unnecessary and frankly incredibly rude not to ask.
His ‘verse has nothing to do with mine, and I am ensuring that anything I wrote which might have mentioned it has either been edited, or deleted completely while hoping he simply gets bored enough to just not mention or write my OC’s any more.
Let's set the record straight, shall we?
The original version of Burnt Offerings (which looks very different from this; here's a PDF of the original) was written and posted in May 2019, while Chains of Eternity was still in progress. While Spiced was still regularly commenting on my fic and telling me how much she loved it
1. I did in fact ask her permission in April 2019 if I could write Tindómion being burned as a witch, and she agreed to it.
1a. Here's hard proof that she liked the chapter, and there was no weeping and gnashing of teeth at the time. [mirror]
Here's the 'gotcha' where she explicitly said what I wrote was OK, which catches her in a lie.
Here's her comment on the last chapter of Chains.
That comment was written in July 2019, close to three months after the chapter that mentioned what had happened to Tindómion.
Here's more proof that she seemed to be totally fine with the story upon its completion. [backup mirror]
Here's a gallery of screenshots re: the original version of Chains [backup mirror], where if you have that kind of time and obsessiveness you can see screens of the comments made for *months* where not a single indicator was given that I had done a damn thing wrong. As late as October/November 2019, she was still leaving friendly comments on my fic. [October 2019 A and backup mirror | October 2019 B and backup mirror | November 2019 and backup mirror]
2. She has done far worse things to her own characters. She really seems to have a fondness for writing rape (Van was raped repeatedly, as were a number of her other characters). She wrote about the Dagor Dagorath, which was traumatic for Van, Edenel, and Coldagnir as survivors.
If we want to go there, she wrote an OC named Móriel, who's Fëanor's daughter (sans permission of the Tolkien estate, I might add, as is everything else), and her place in Spiced's verse was basically just to get raped by Sauron so Van could be born. That was it. That was her entire reason for being there, was to get raped and fridged, just a bit part in Spiced's verse. "Killing someone just to give his OC Elven blood?" You wrote a woman getting raped just to give your OC Elven blood. Don't even. Please. The cognitive dissonance is painful here.
I could go on and on, but she has written all kinds of messed up things happening to her characters in her own fic. That bit with Móriel is the tip of the iceberg.
2a. My own characters have been through no shortage of tragedy and pain, as anyone familiar with my fic will recognize. One of the gift fics Spiced wrote for me and later removed had my OC Sören being raped in semi-graphic detail. Spiced herself has often said that tragedy makes for a good story; in case this weren't obvious, The Silmarillion itself is a non-stop tragedy.
As such, even though the idea of the death-by-witch-burning didn't sit well with me, and in fact made me cry, I also didn't think it was out of line to ask to write it into the Northern Lights verse where so much other tragedy has happened. And she certainly agreed to it at the time.
If she was *~so triggered~* by the off-screen, referenced death of her OC, she should have either told me not to write it to begin with, or expressed her distaste for it THEN, instead of continuing to string [x] me along [x] for months [x] like she loved my fic. She was on my Dreamwidth and she had other contact info, plenty of ways to get in touch with me and complain, and she did not. And again, when I asked her what was going on, I received a very different answer than the one she gave publicly, which I didn't even know about until June 2020 and she didn't even have the balls to tell me directly, I had to see this on a revised edition of Burnt Offerings, which was still gifted me after she severed contact (which feels shady, like I'd just assume it was fine and wouldn't know edits had been made smearing me, and WAS intended to trigger/upset me once I found it). (I refused the gift after I saw the edits.)
I feel like I've been gaslighted, and I feel like her lying about this (which feels like trying to turn the fandom against me) is a form of bullying. And that's not OK.
Nonetheless, I decided I would find a way for her OCs to exit my verse, so in June 2020, Van and her other OCs were written as departing Blood of Eternity. I did not, at that time, just scrub them out of my fic where they'd already been long since written (while I had permission and encouragement to do so) altogether, because it was not just a simple find-and-replace job, and it was triggering to even THINK about, with how many hours I'd worked on this stuff for nothing.
I felt, and still feel, like I made a friend a plate of cookies and the friend pretended to like my cookies and one day threw it in my face and yelled "I HATE YOU AND YOUR COOKIES!"
I also don't like the insinuation in the revised Burnt Offerings that Chains was some sort of "spitefic". Writing Tindómion's death was not spitefic, it broke my heart when the idea came to me. I did not enjoy writing that into my fic, nor did I sacrifice him "just to give my OC Elf blood" (which is more than I can say for you fridging Móriel after writing her being raped). He was not a "throwaway", for God's sake (and I never used that word). His death in that verse was a tragedy, and one that was mourned in Chains of Eternity and mourned in other fics in the Northern Lights verse. I was relieved that Spiced was going to write a fix-it with Burnt Offerings (the original version), because I couldn't bear it.
(That said, I do find it disingenuous to claim my verse has nothing to do with yours and yet you feel you can overwrite the canon for mine. That's not what "nothing to do with mine, and these are just characters with the same name only" actually means.)
Also, since Spiced_Wine took this out of context, I'm preserving this bit from my original Transformative Works Statement for posterity, when I used to be more open to people playing in my sandbox:
But, politeness aside, I don't *generally* have a problem with this so long as you're not writing spitefic (as in, horrible things happening to my characters / my characters doing horrible things because you want to try to piss me off - if you're familiar with my multiverse you're aware my characters often have a hard time of things, I draw a differentiation between "writing tragic things" and "writing something intended to be hurtful to me personally").
No, what happened to her OC Tindomión in one of my verses was not spitefic as I define spitefic, thank you. Meanwhile, the revised version of Burnt Offerings - and leaving it gifted to me - absolutely WAS spitefic, and I will die on that hill.
I stopped writing her OCs back in June 2020, once I found out I was no longer allowed. I began to edit her OCs where they had appeared with permission out of my works in October/November 2020, and I decided in November that I would take December 2020 off from longfic projects and scrub "the juggernaut", aka Chains of Eternity, Flames of Eternity, and Blood of Eternity (which have since been renamed for my mental health).
This was not a simple find-and-replace job but necessitated reworking the plot a bit, and besides resenting that I had to do it at all, I was daunted by the 700k words that remained [x] (the first two fics involved them more directly, the third involved their lingering influence). There were also other non-trivial considerations involving the now-inaccurate-of-what's-going-on comments, the chapter count, and things like subscribers. But after working around the clock throughout the month of December, I was able to complete the edits ahead of schedule on December 19, 2020, as a gesture of the last remaining shred I have of good will, in time for the holidays, because 2020 sucked, and while I still think what happened to me was grossly unfair, I also don't want to cause upset by keeping her OCs in something she finds objectionable. (Again, I wish she would have told me much sooner, but whatever.)
One of the most relevant changes re: Spiced is that Ecthelion as Maglor's son is now (as of December 2020) canon for my multiverse. Tindómion's burning never happens in my work because there is no Tindómion in my multiverse (no death, he just never existed), only Ecthelion.
And, none of her OCs will ever appear in any of my fics again. Her verse has nothing to do with mine and vice versa, and my verse also has nothing to do with Narya's and vice versa.
I would love to say the wank ended here after I complied, but it did not.
