(originally posted on my Dreamwidth in July 2020)
This is a huge wall of text, for which I apologize in advance, but the length is necessary.
To back up a bit, 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). Here's her encouragement on the first 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, 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.
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.
Here's a gallery of screenshots re: the original version of Chains, 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 | October 2019 B | November 2019]
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 me along for months 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.
_
UPDATE DECEMBER 2020
This continued (and continues) to escalate for months.
I put an IP tracker on my Dreamwidth in July after I found out what Spiced was saying in June, and started to see this (1 2) - as you will note, the IP logged matches the one in the DW comments threads I posted screens of. My roommate was also routinely getting hits on her IP tracker from Spiced, which she will vouch for if asked.
A few days after the September 11th visit, I mentioned the visits on a locked post, and they stopped after being regular for months, which tells me that someone (probably Narya) leaked locked information and told her I'd said something.
Then on November 18th, not long after Narya decided to fling poo and sever ties with me (apparently me being triggered and upset re: being shit-smeared and cyberstalked for months while a pandemic and very stressful election was happening makes me "difficult!" - good to know) I got another Virgin ISP from the United Kingdom that doesn't match anyone on my f'list (and while it's different from Spiced's usual IP it's also one of those phone IP addresses, so I'm willing to bet money who it is, and I only bet on sure things). After I made a note of this on this post in November, my roommate and I started getting visits from a VPN, who coincidentally uses the same browsers Spiced uses, and visits on the same 3-7 day interval. 🤔
I don't visit Spiced's DW, have not read her stuff on A03 since April, I don't even want to see her name, period. I don't understand why our journals are so interesting? When I cut all ties with someone I cut all ties with someone.
Which leads me to the next thing - as I said, I stopped writing her OCs back in June, 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, 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 (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.
So like, merry Christmas, I guess.
_
UPDATE AUGUST 2021
So despite the fact that I have moved on with my life, the drama continues continuing on Spiced's end.
For awhile she had a statement on her A03 profile that accused me, among other things, of having "socks and followers" who "harass" her with a warning that "she would protect herself".
First of all, I have not had any contact with her whatsoever since April 2020. As far as trolling, I don't use social media or chat apps (I'm pretty explicit about this), and A03 logs IP addresses and I can't afford a VPN, but even if I could, I don't see the point in leaving her nasty comments. It's not healthy to be that fucking miserable.
I myself received some hate, which is why I turned comments off starting December 2020 and only began enabling them in late April 2021 on select works. (It wasn't from Spiced, as far as I can tell, but one of her fans.)
Second of all, I don't have followers, just friends, friendly acquaintances, and some people who kudos my fic because they like my fic: kudos does not equal endorsement of someone as a person. With regards to "socks", Spiced seems to think anyone with an A03 profile with no works or bookmarks constitutes a sock, which... is quite a lot of people who kudos her as well. Believe it or not, most people who have A03 accounts are reader-only, and the reason why they have accounts is because you have to have an account to subscribe or bookmark. Also, I don't have the energy to try to juggle a bunch of different accounts to inflate my kudos count or leave comments to people. As it is, I had to consolidate my RPG journals on Dreamwidth to one account because I'm too fucking tired to juggle different accounts, and that's something I actually care about. Why would I do this on A03 for a few extra kudos and for drama I'm utterly bored of? That accusation sounds like a ploy for attention and sympathy.
(Not to mention I still have an A03 account which I regularly use. They would have caught me and suspended me if I was doing this.)
Well, it didn't stop there.
In May-June 2021 I began collaborating with a couple of friends on fanart, and making more regular updates to my fanart collection on A03. In July 2021, according to reports from friends who check the Silmarillion tag for new stuff to read, Spiced started bumping my fanart collection down the Silm tag by updating hers within an hour, sometimes as soon as 15-20 minutes after I'd updated. The first few times it looked like a coincidence, but this is a consistent pattern of behavior, especially as I update at irregular times (I have N24SWD so when I'm awake varies) and some of those updates have been after 5 PM US Eastern time which is after 10 PM London time, on a weeknight (when most employed people are in bed). Also, a few times I posted more than once in a day, since I was trying to get through a backlog, and she too would update right after I did. But, the updates on my fanart collection are mostly of actual art (with some silly/memey stuff that still took awhile to make) and according to the people observing, hers have been overwhelmingly using apps like Reface, Canva Pro, and My Nostalgia which allows her to create content quickly (I guess, to keep up with me).
To make things even weirder still, much of these "refaces" are of modern takes on characters like Fëanor, and when we were friends she used to go on and on about how she hated modern-day stuff (except for mine and Narya's) because the hair wasn't long enough and this and that... so either she's gotten over that and is embracing modern-day wholeheartedly, or her idea of "just for fun" is to play the bump game and this is the fastest and easiest way to do it, being commissions usually take weeks if not months.
(documentation of the bumping - and you'll see she started doing the app stuff on June 30th, chapter 136.)
And she keeps emphasizing how she's doing this "just for fun", "just for her", over and over again (like people didn't get it the first time), which starts to sound like denial of any other motivations.
Now, I actually don't care about being bumped, I don't need to be "me first", so if she thinks this is upsetting me at all, it's not. I'm not saying she can't update, or even daily. It is, however, a very obsessive pattern of behavior to do it right after I've updated, day in and day out (as of August 2021 this is still happening), that's kinda creepy. I'm just saying.
Then, a friend of mine alerted me to the fact that one of her Refaces, posted in late July, was of "Fëanor as Jon Snow", where she posted a rather long bit of snark, including calling Kit Harington "a sulky brat" who "needs to get dinged about the ear", and her commission of Fëanor is "better-looking".
For those of you who don't already know this, Kit Harington has been my faceclaim for Sören since Sören made his on-screen debut in 2018 (and earlier than that, as an OC I was RP'ing who became Sören), and I write Sören as a human reincarnation of Fëanor. In 2019, while Spiced and I were friends, I commissioned a piece of art from Kaprriss of Sören and Maglor, so she can't say she doesn't know what Sören looks like. (She also commissioned this while we were still friendsing - I might add, a couple of months after the Tindómion scene in Chains that she alleges she had such a problem with.) Furthermore, I've used pictures of Sören as my avatar on A03 (my current one, which I've been using since June, is cropped from this; it's pretty recognizable).
I don't care if she thinks Sören (or Kit H) is ugly, people are entitled to their opinions, it's no skin off my nose. But the commentary expressing a desire to hit KH sounds like a desire to, as a friend put it, "hit me by proxy", since again she knows what Sören looks like and she knows I use him as my avatar.
PS: Spiced knows my mother used to hit me and that I'm also a domestic violence survivor, I've mentioned it on Dreamwidth behind lock while she was on my journal. (There are multiple witnesses.) So that's a particularly low, tasteless remark from her.
There is a custom site skin on A03 that you can use to mute people, hiding their works. I don't understand why Spiced is doing this, months later. Does she really want to live out her years refreshing to see when I've updated and make snarky commentary about how she wants to hit me (without coming right out and saying she wants to hit me, since A03 would get her for that)? Why can't she just ignore me? It's not hard.
I originally wasn't going to add anything to this post, as I said I'm utterly bored of this, but after being alerted by a few friends to the fact that her wank about me has been scrubbed from her profile but she now has a statement up there saying she's "just writing for herself" and doesn't like how fandom has become with "bullying", and her commentary re: hitting KH is less than a month old (at the time of this post), and she's still playing the bump game, I decided it was probably a good idea to make a formal note of the recent updates on the drama so people understand this sentiment of disliking drama and "just ignore what you don't like" is a load of bullshit from her.
As further icing on the bullshit cake, Burnt Offerings is still in my Related Works from her end (I don't link to it on mine), and as mentioned way up there, that was edited from the original (a gift fic for me) to be an attack piece, its sole purpose now is to antagonize me, since I have to see it in my Related Works list.
Yawn. Back to ignoring her now.
SEPTEMBER 2021 EDIT:
After three months, she may have stopped the update-15-20-minutes-after-I-do-no-matter-what-time game, she didn't bump me for two weeks and then she just updated whenever. If I hear that changes and she's back on her bullshit, I'll make a note of it. (OCTOBER 2022 EDIT: She's back to the "bump me down the tag" game. Back to me updating late at night, I guess.)
However, she also killed off a character described as "soft-faced", "bearded" with "a sulky mouth", who drives a blue Audi (my favorite color is blue and she knows this). 🤔 Btw, my politics are far-left, not far-right, sweetie.
MAY 2022 EDIT:
Spiced began collaborating with AnnEllspethRaven, the world record holder for longest fanfic, and AER gave an interview in Slate and name-dropped Spiced as an "inspiration", so in addition to all of the above, I felt it necessary to add this last bit for context:
Evidence of problematic racist behavior from Spiced.
Evidence of problematic racist behavior from AER.
[^Those two entries are by my friend @mx_rumpleteazer, who gave me permission to link to them here.]
"But but but they've said Chinese people are beautiful!" See this post.
If you kudos and/or leave positive comments on The World's Longest Fanfic, you are supporting racism and you are supporting a pack of bullies.
AUGUST 2022 EDIT:
I have finally broken my silence about yet another way the harassment from Spiced has escalated out of control. If you needed any further evidence, please read that post. [TW for talk of abuse, CSA, etc.]
