(August 30, 2022 - mirrored on Dreamwidth here)
Please read this post all the way through, I promise there is a point and I'm not just being petty. (Part one is here.) Also, I have images hosted on different sites; if you get an "this image could not be displayed because it contains errors" message from any images on Dreamwidth, reload the Dreamwidth image page.
In October 2019, Spiced wrote a gift fic for me called Worldweavers. She deleted that fic and her other gift fics for me in April 2020. When she resumed working on The Once And Future Kings in 2021, after a hiatus on the fic for close to two years, she said she would rework Worldweavers into the fic.
Worldweavers featured my OC Sören. For The Once And Future Kings, Spiced came up with a new OC named Blaise Worth aka David Darling/David Balfour. She continued Blaise's story in A Time Of Thunder. I have the PDFs of both fics here [Kings | Thunder] as proof in case she tries to edit things later, like the rape backstory, the sex work, David telling people he's from Maine. [PDF of Thunder is current as of August 29, 2022, but the story is still a WIP.]
She's gotten commissioned fanart and my roommate Detergent said to me in private conversation that she thinks Blaise/David looks like a red-haired, clean-shaven Kit Harington [Sören's faceclaim], this despite Spiced having said she thinks KH looks like a "sulky brat" who needs to be slapped.
Screenshot of commission here.
Screenshot of another commission here.
Here's a comparison of the faces of Blaise/David [posted July 2022] and my friend SemperViridis's portrait of Fëanor [May 2021], which uses Kit Harington as a faceclaim.
[And Blaise/David's hair is exactly like a red version of Sören's in most universes; unless y'all live under a rock you know what KH's hair looks like so I'm not gonna do a side-by-side for that.]
Blaise/David used Sören's phoenix costume from Worldweavers, with some modifications. Blaise/David also has tattoos on his back that are reminiscent of Sören's without being exactly the same.
Longtime readers of my fic know that I first wrote about Sören's ink in Don't Threaten Me With A Good Time [2018] and there was more exposition of it in my fic In Chains [2019]. People who have been longtime personal friends of mine, like my roommate, know and can vouch that the phoenix has been an important symbol for me for years and Sören's ink is in fact the ink I myself would have if I didn't have Ehlers-Danlos and wasn't prone to bad scarring that contraindicates tattoos.
Blaise/David has a sexual abuse history, which is an important theme of his character; so does Sören [first featured prominently in In Chains and Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, which I wrote in 2019, two years before Blaise made his debut].
The issue that I have is not that Blaise/David is an obvious expy of Sören, or I would be a hypocrite. After all, I had to make edits to the Northern Lights and Learning To Fly series to replace Spiced and Narya's OCs after the collaborations went south, since I had gotten hundreds of thousands of words into my series before things exploded, and I thought editing characters was better than abandoning something I'd worked so hard on and invested many many hours and months in. So my OC Karen looks like Narya's OC Claire. I've been pretty up-front about that. As such, my problem isn't so much that as it's something else, and I'm providing the above information as context on the "something else".
You see, when Spiced and I were friends and she was playing the "sympathetic mom friend" role, I confided in her that when I was twelve, my father raped me and he trafficked me across state lines for his friends to gang rape me. My villainous OC Justin was named for my father's "roommate" [his lover], who also raped me multiple times.
In The Once And Future Kings, we learn that Blaise/David is molested by his father and at the age of twelve he is trafficked and shared at a party where his father's rich and powerful friends take turns using him and other boys.
While I am not from a well-to-do background like Blaise/David is - just the opposite; I was gang raped at a camping trip for biker dudes rather than a posh party for rich people - it still hit close enough to my personal history that I'd confided in her when we were friends, that I was completely shocked to see this in her fic a year and a half-ish after she and I stopped talking [around the same time she was also playing the bump game and making snark about Jon Snow, which felt obsessive and creepy]. She literally used my trauma as the backstory for an OC that is an obvious expy of my main OC - and of all my characters, Sören has the most in common with me and I've always been extremely up-front about that [though I hesitate calling him a self-insert, since there are some important differences, like me being American and him being an Icelander].
It felt absolutely violating to see this piece of my personal history turn up in her fic, and gave me a visceral trigger/squick response.
Just a coincidence, you say? It gets worse. Blaise/David has reddish hair. My own natural hair color was auburn [before it went grey; here's a younger photo of me, with face blurred for privacy reasons], and I've mentioned this to her before. Blaise/David has a half-brother named James; I have a half-brother nicknamed Jamie, again, this is stuff I've discussed before.
David is the name of my abusive stepfather.
When Blaise assumes his new identity as David Balfour, he has to construct a false past history for himself, so he pretends to be an American, from Maine. I have spent a significant portion of my life in Maine, which I've talked about on my blog and has come out in my fic [some of my works are set in Maine].
Blaise/David was a sex worker. I've mentioned on my blog and in private conversations with people, Spiced included, that I was a sex worker in my early twenties, which is not something I'm proud of but not something I'm ashamed of either - I was waiting for my disability case to go through, had no money, and it was how I survived.
Blaise/David has sex with older men, there's a mention of him going to a daddy/boy party, and this is presented in the fic as a negative thing and something he's doing to re-enact the abuse he experienced. It's not a secret that I'm attracted to older men and have a daddy roleplaying kink - see also, the Sören/Nicholas ship, and other stuff I've written. This felt like a form of kinkshaming me, on Spiced's part.
[Not the first time she's done it, either - some months after The Drama, here's her writing a thinly veiled potshot at Sören/Nicholas in another fic, where the "Sick Baby" - an ableist mockery of my chronic illness, btw - has "liver-colored" aka brown eyes like Sören's, and the older guy looks like Nicholas. Here's the full chapter for proof/context. She actually for real wrote expies of them as p*dos, that is some anti bullshit, I can't fucking even. Btw, she also knows I have voice dysphoria, so the whole "high-pitched voice" thing? Yeah, let's make fun of my gender dysphoria too while we're at it, while she publicly pretends to be an ally.]
All of this put together, looks like far too many coincidences for it to be innocent coincidence.
So to reiterate, she literally worked my life, my trauma, my pain into her fic, and is still writing this thing as of August 2022. I can only assume that she's doing this deliberately to try to trigger me, probably in the hopes that I will nuke my AO3 account and stop writing [which is one of the few things that gives me any comfort in life].
She's probably going to deny it, and she's probably going to do a "whatabout". She's probably going to talk shit about me some more and lie and try to discredit me, again, just like she did when I first addressed her harassment; it's a well-known tactic and people still fall for it.
Here's the thing. Even if I had deliberately maliciously written Tindómion burning to death [which was absolutely not what happened at all, as I've discussed previously, with receipts], that still doesn't justify her appropriating my trauma and personal history that I'd told her in confidence, for her Sören expy, and knowing how upsetting that is to me - how difficult it's been for me to talk about until very recently, where I've literally gone mute at several therapists' offices trying to talk about it, because of how triggering it is. Seeing this again and again in the Silmarillion tag feels like having a wound ripped open over and over again, and I've no doubt that was the entire point.
That is sick and twisted beyond belief.
And for awhile I just let this go. At least a year. I didn't want to give her the satisfaction of knowing I've seen it and that it triggered the fuck out of me. I didn't want another round of accusations and shit-flinging and her crying "bullying bullying" [when I've had literally no contact with her since April 2020; when I burn bridges, I burn bridges] and inciting a dogpile to come drag and harass me some more.
But this is August 2022 and she is still writing this fic and still using my background, my trauma, still kinkshaming me for liking older men, still shaming me for having been a sex worker.
And with the SCOTUS Roe v. Wade fail and having news of teen rape victims forced to give birth constantly shoved in my face every time I check the news, I finally reached my breaking point and had to say something about it, I couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't sit there anymore in good conscience and watch the SWG clique rally around her as she continues to claim I'm harassing her in a "very underhanded" way, while she pulls this shit and makes a public mockery of my trauma [even as she's presenting Blaise/David as sympathetic, she still borrowed my personal history without permission for his backstory and as such, it still feels like weaponizing my trauma against me].
I don't expect this to change the minds of the mainstream of the fandom. I was shunned in 2019 well before the drama started for being openly trans and queer, and for writing kinky gay smut as a gay man in a fandom that skews religious-conservative [most of my fans are from outside the fandom, and came for the porn]. And, I don't know how to play the game of thrones - I'm autistic, I'm not good with people, and I mostly write for my own entertainment, which puts me at odds with fandom culture which is very community-oriented and writing-for-others oriented. This isn't going to bring me any kind of clout, I have nothing to gain and she probably won't lose any friends/fans, because she's gotten away with all the other shit for the last two years. I'm bracing myself for another round of harassing comments from sock accounts on AO3, like I had to deal with in 2020.
Nonetheless, I had to say something. I couldn't keep silent anymore. I was told my entire life not to talk about the abuse that was happening to me, and I learned to just shut up about it, reinforced as an adult that venting about it was "draining and difficult", or "negative and toxic", is somehow "seeking attention" like a "narcissist".
Well, I'm nobody's doormat anymore. No shame, no silence.
So I felt forced to come out about something that was deeply personal and upsetting for me, something very private that I shouldn't have had to share with the public, because this has been going on and on and on and on and on, for over two years since she and I broke contact.
Because, again, I feel violated.
onto Part Five [tw: racism] | return to Silm Fandom Drama Thing | return to index
