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Or failing that, ships where the subtext is heavy enough you can't help but consider them as canon, even when no confirmation is given by WoG or anything (Subaru and Teana in Nanoha, Sayaka and Kyoko in Madoka, Sunset Shimmer and Sci-Twi in Equestria Girls, Lyra and Bon Bon in Friendship is Magic... You get the idea).

In fanfic, I don't mind shipping making sense relatively to the characters' personnality and development and their orientation when it's stated by the canon authors (no suddenly gay/straight/bi character when we already know their orientation).

And to be fair, I feel the same way about Tolkien a lot of the time. :-)

Yeah, makes sense. As does your distaste for Asimov: it's not for everyone, especially not Foundation, which is an interesting series, but has quite a few problems as a story - well, the trilogy does, because that's what I read.

But as for historical fiction... well, the only thing I can think of is Stephenson, with Baroque/Cryptonomicon, but 1) that has a massive timeskip, and 2) it includes one character who is actually immortal. So... yeah.

OSC isn't the greatest writer in the world, but I agree with hS here - he may be a bad person, but he's not a bad writer. Well, he's not an awful writer, anyways. Ender's Game is the only novel of his that I'd really recommend with no provisions. And I've read quite a bit of him.

OTOH, Sanderson's work is absolutely fantastic, and I'd recommend just about anything I've read by him with no reservations.

...I don't actively ship anything usually, with the exception of canon ships. I'll read basically any ship in fics and stuff (with the exceptions of incest/pedophilia/abuse/etc) but I don't think I've ever written any shippy stuff apart from for friends and things like that.

Gondorian monumental architecture grew directly out of Numenorean funerary architecture. The early Numenoreans were at peace with the fact that they were going to die (Elros Tar-Minyatur laid down his life willingly, rather than dying of natural causes, though whether that's suicide or an act of will is unmentioned); their descendents were not, and they began to build grand tombs - Houses of the Dead, in later Gondorian parlance - to pretend that the dead were coming back.

And of course, if the dead deserve fancy houses, so do the living, right...? Annuminas in Arnor was probably built in the same grand style, so it's not just Gondor.

The other drivers in (above-ground) city-building in Middle-earth are 1) fortresses (Minas Ithil to an extent, Ost-in-Edhil, Barad Eithel), and 2) the very specific 'looks like Tirion-on-Tuna' (Gondolin, and honestly most of what you think of when you imagine an Elven city). Other than that, people were happy to live in smaller communities and/or underground.

None of which you can get by reading A Scholarly Guide to Gondorian Architecture, because it doesn't exist. You have to pick it up by reading the books, and unless you read them in detail you can't know for sure that you've got everything. It's not like being a chemist, where you can plug 'organometallic silver' into a journal and get only what's related to your field; you have to study everything, or you might miss what matters.

I suppose if you intended to make a career our of elf-sex criticism stories, then you could focus what you reread... but who does that? Most people write a broad range of stories, and for that, you need to know as much as you can.

~

As to your struck-out sidenote: there is an inherent bias to storytelling in Mormonism, simply because the Book of Mormon has a far more coherent narrative and better worldbuilding than the Bible (^~). But I think it's more of an observer effect: you don't flag up how many SF/F writers are Catholic, or Baptist, or Pentecostal, because it doesn't come up in discussion of them. The cultural perception of the LDS Church is closer to how people think about Islam, or the Amish - a distinctly other religion. So they stand out.

Glancing through <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDSfiction">LDS fiction, which is apparently a real Wikipedia article, the only names that pop out of the Notable section for me are Steph, Orson, Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn), Chris Heimerdinger (Mormon YA books), and Glenn Beck (who... is a fiction author apparently?). I've read the first three, and while Brother Orson has recently(?) shown himself to be a pretty bad person, the only one whose work I would describe as unambiguously bad is Stephanie Meyer. Which is essentially because she's trying to write romance novels but without the titillation.

(I always feel bad for calling Steph's writing bad, because she clearly cares so much. But she's also one of those people who drives her characters through to her predetermined ending regardless of whether they would actually act that way - and she has frankly dangerous ideas of what's romantic.)

hS, words words words

Also, sidenote: why are so many garbage SF&F writers Mormons? OSC, SMeyer, the list, it goeth on...

However, I also think that there's such a thing as going too deep in ways that are unproductive. To use your own example, a fic concerning and questioning the idea of IF elfbang GOTO elfnuptials absolutely needs a secure understanding of the various elfish cultures in Arda... but it might not need, say, a prolonged look at the architectural vagaries of Gondorian city-builders. It's a question of staying on topic and not getting bogged down in ever-more obscure detail, which can just descend into he-said-she-said. =]

Although, I reckon there's probably a story in just why Gondorians build such grand cities when nobody else does, exploring the social and political pressures inherent in the commissioning and construction of monumental architecture (see Follett, K., The Pillars Of The Earth). =]

... the better you can think about the material.

To use your own example: you can write an Ender/Alai slashfic ("salaam"), but unless you read the Shadow books and realise that Alai will end up as Caliph [/spoiler for 15-year-old book], you can't use that story as proper criticism - which it would be ideal for, since the moral assumptions in the Ender books come from OSC's Mormonism. You get to use a religious character to cast light on the implicit assumptions of a religious author - or you just read the first book and use Alai because he comes across as the most "feminine" of the Battle School boys.

I'm writing one story as a direct response to Tolkien's 'sex=marriage among the elves' idea. If I don't have a secure understanding of that idea, the whole concept is completely useless.

hS

... is that I've learned most of what I know about it from alternate history stories. Certainly I can't think of any other reason I would have had the Natural Geographic civil war poster hanging around for so long.

hS

It's bad to say that I've never really liked his writing, isn't it? :( But I haven't.

I think this genre is actually more common in fantasy/scifi than realistic fiction. Being able to explore the progression of your ideas beyond one lifetime is a big deal - heck, even Tolkien did it, if you think of The Hobbit and LotR as a series. (And of course 40K has taken it to the ultimate extreme, with 'here's two series set ten millennia apart'.)

Sadly, it's specifically the ability to learn about real history that I'm interested in with this.

hS

Wikipedia's list looks incredibly drab, though - it's items 'of literary note', which is usually shorthand for 'borderline unreadable'. ^~ I quite like the idea of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalaiologanDynasty(novelseries)">The Palaeologian Dynasty. The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, but I don't think they've been translated from the Greek; they're certainly not in my library.

And that's going to be a problem: most of these stories are written by people from the relevant culture, and they're not going to be translated. FROWNYFACE.

hS

The 'fiction' part of 'historical fiction' was the more disposable part. ;) It sounds interesting, I'll have to look it up; the artistic nature of the heirloom ties in with some of my previous interests, so.

Thank you!

hS

Though I'd also say that it can be a springboard for interrogating the broader themes of the original work. For instance, if anyone can point me in the direction of Ender's Game slash or a slow-burn romantic flower shop AU of anything by Heinlein, those'd be interesting to read. I just think there's so much potential for fanfiction to be used as criticism in the manner of old musical criticism - rather than a Baroque criticism of Monteverdi or whatever, we can have a slashfic or AUfic critique of modern popular media. It's the democratization of literary theory, of really thinking about what we consume rather than unquestioning canon-minutia memorization.

... that shipfic is a good way to explore characters?

Yeah, that makes sense, and I'm inclined to agree that that's an important thing to do. (Since fanfiction is basically generally about extending/exploring a universe, IMO)

- Tomash

I devour it because I'm way more interested in how the characters interact than in the fic's inherent minutiae-friendliness. Fanfic of any kind asks questions about the media from which it derives, and shipfic in particular can ask some really fascinating ones about the characters they're shipping, and also about the ones they're not. Not all of them do, obviously - we wouldn't have DBS agents if they did - but it's still not something that should be discarded out of hand. At least, that's my view. =]

The style works surprisingly well--or perhaps unsurprisingly, since it's an epic storyline. Anyway, it's...really thrilling to read. :D I like it a lot.

~Z

Non-fiction, though--a sort of creative autobiography mixed with family history, IIRC. It's called The Hare With Amber Eyes (I've forgotten the author's name). It uses a particular type of Japanese figurine (the name of which I have also unfortunately forgotten) as a thread in a family story that stretches from Europe to Japan and I think America too? It does include Western Europe, IIRC, but it's really not the typical story, and it's not following a white family. It stretches across several centuries, at any rate, including both the author and his ancestors.

I don't remember being *that* caught by it--among other things, the print in my copy was really small--so I didn't finish it, but the story itself was interesting and I know my mom (who's much more into non-fiction and autobiographies than I am) read it and liked it. I think she said it picked up a bit after the beginning, though.

Anyway. Not straight historical fiction, but certainly interesting, and it does otherwise fit that subgenre you're talking about. At any rate, it was the first thing I thought of.

~Z

I got OTPS, NOTPS, crackships and some very curious ones.

If they aren't canonically interested in that gender or lack thereof, I don't ship it.

If it isn't canonically stated outright their sexuality, well... Who doesn't swing even just a little bi?

If they are canonically in a relationship then I do not ship them with anyone else. If they already have a love interest I SHIP IT

>Liliana/Chandra from Magic the Gathering (which is entirely based on the art of a single card from Kaladesh block)

I don't totally remember, but IIRC, there was a short story Wizards published for the Amonkhet block that substantiated that.

So I am basically the opposite of Thoth. I ship largely based on hypotheticals (which I guess could be called crackshipping?) and unless explicitly stated otherwise, I generally assume every character to be at the very least open to exploration, if not outright bi/pan.

My current favorite ships are CD-RW, Ultra Magnus/Megatron and Nautica/Brainstorm from IDW's Transformers comics, and Liliana/Chandra from Magic the Gathering (which is entirely based on the art of a single card from Kaladesh block)