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The Writer, the Fiction, Teh Crazy
I'm late to the party, but...
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naomikritzer sent me a link to a story a few months back because she knows I'm interested in reading good fanfiction depictions of Neville Longbottom. I didn't get around to reading it until this weekend, but the story sucked me right in. It's a re-telling of Deathly Hallows from Neville's point of view, covering what happened at Hogwarts, with Neville running the D.A. An author's note at the conclusion of the story ended with this:
There was something about that last line that niggled at me, though, something half-remembered. Who was this author, anyway?
I took a look. The author's name was "thanfiction" (on Livejournal asthanfiction). I sat there for a second and then my eyes widened. Thanfiction? Wait a minute. I spent a couple minutes googling, following up on something I'd noticed fleetingly on my friends list sometime in the last month.
I told you I was late to the party. Well, it was a weird trick of timing, actually. Naomi had sent me the link months ago, before the knowledge hit the internet (she said she's a little embarrassed about doing so, in retrospect), and I didn't look at the author's name until I had finished reading the entire story. But yes, dear reader, I had unknowingly spent the last two days reading and enjoying Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness (the "DAYDverse") a work written by one of the craziest people I've ever encountered on the internet: the notorious Amy Player AKA Victoria Bitter AKA Mr. Frodo AKA Jordan Wood AKA Andrew Blake AKA thanfiction. The dots were connected that thanfiction was the person that![[journalfen.net profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fandom_wank calls "VB," I guess, about a month ago.
For those of you unfamiliar with the story of this person, take a look at the fandom wiki here.fandom_wank has written extensively about VB. Here's a typical entry which gives an idea of the spectacular series of weirdness and lies this person spread--and that was way back in 2004. Apparently after flaming out in the LOTR fandom (after cheating some people out of tens of thousands of dollars), Victoria Bitter, now Andrew Blake,* had resurfaced in the Harry Potter fandom. And he seemed to be back to his old tricks: gathering a circle of enthusiastic admirerers excited about his fiction (daydverse), leading up to a convention being planned--but suddenly the person at the center of this is flaming out and disappearing, vowing to leave the internet forever. Sound familiar?
I was not one of the people who was hurt or scammed by VB. But I did contact Amy Player after reading some ofher his* LOTR stories, way, way back in the early days of LOTR fandom (long before the Bit of Earth and Tentmoot fiascos) as I have done from time to time with fanfiction writers I think are more talented than average. I told her him that I thought she he had talent, and really should consider working on some original fiction, because I thought she he might very well have the chops to publish something professionally. It was interesting to discover that I still found something to like in his work, all these years later.
So what did I really think about the story? And how did my opinion change, once I knew the authorship?
Well, as I said, the story sucked me along quite nicely. Technical competence, for the most part, vivid characterization, good dialogue, boffo scene endings building suspense. There was one clever bit partway through, the business with how Neville used a note from Colin Creevey to doublecross Draco Malfoy, which I thought was quite brilliant, and maybe fixed a plot hole in canon that I hadn't ever quite realized was there. On the other hand, there was a colossal plot miscalculation partway through, in which a couple characters were condemned to death--and then, bizarrely, the whole plot line was simply dropped, as if the Ministry of Magic had backed off and just sort of pretended to forget the whole thing.
I've read with interest throughout the years various discussions about how much you can discern about an author from a fictional work. I remember an author's afterward to a book where the plotline involved incest, where the author said, more or less, 'don't assume that this plot line has anything to do with my personal life. After all, I'm a fiction writer. I make stuff up.' Despite this basic understanding, that the author is not the same as the work, once I realized who thanfiction was, I started thinking about why he had picked this particular story to tell, and what, if anything, it revealed about him.
Several people commenting on all the wankage threads trying to figure out this person's psychology have repeated several things: he's very smart, and very creative, and he really craves being the center of attention. And yet I'm not the only one who's pointed out that it's rather a shame and a waste that he only works with other people's work for his creative building blocks. Despite my urging years ago, no one has any knowledge that he's ever attempted original fiction (and he plays with artwork, too, but as fandom_wank has sussed out with a great deal of enjoyment, it's mostly photoshopped re-imagings of other people's photos, which he has tried to sell as original work). Naomi wondered at it, too: here's someone who's quite good, and a fast writer (something I deeply envy), and those talents could have helped established him nicely in his own fiction career. But as Naomi hypothesized, he may simply be too dysfunctional to manage it. He seems to have a compulsion to shed his own identity and assume somebody else's. As a writer, he plays with fanfiction but unlike most (better balanced) fanfiction writers, he starts to really believe he is the character he is writing about. He did that with Frodo (and Elijah Wood) and there are signs he was starting to do it with Neville, too (i.e., claiming that his birthday just happened to be--July 30).
Why did Neville appeal to him so? Well, Neville at first glance seems ordinary, but there's all that raw heroism and specialness underneath. And during the 7th year, Neville became a true leader. He is absolutely adored by all the Hogwarts students (in thanfiction's retelling, Seamus Finnegan takes to calling Neville 'Fearless Leader') and it's his dogged determination that whips the D.A. into shape.
It was astounding to me, how much human insight and clear thinking was in the story--even thoughtful consideration of ethics--considering how much this person has messed up relationships, scammed other people, demonstrated truly bizarre beliefs, and lied to everybody. But as I said to Naomi, perhaps that ability, to understand clear thinking while simultaneously unable to follow it oneself might be an extremely useful ability to a compulsive liar.
Perhaps most suggestive was a plot arc of his own invention, which wasn't mentioned in canon at all. At one point in the story, Neville became SO determined, SO driven, that the rest of the leadership of Dumbledore's Army remove him from leadership. He's getting 'too crazy.' Neville's absolutely crestfallen and can't believe it. He made this group! How can they reject him like that? But he goes away and gets some perspective and gets over the crazy and comes back all rested and refreshed. And of course they accept him back more wholeheartedly than ever. I can't help but see this might have been reflective of the dynamic that he has played over and over in the various fandoms in which he's been involved: he starts a group, gets adored, and then it all starts to get to be too much and people turn on him because of teh crazy. How much a wish fulfillment it must have been for him to dream that OF COURSE the group would accept him back with open arms once he 'got his head back together.' I wonder how much he consciously reflected on this as he wrote it.
(In a case of life imitating art, apparently once the information about thanfiction's identity hit the internet a couple months ago, he announced to thedaydverse group that he was stepping back from the group to apparently get things together. Of course, all negative comments to the post have been deleted, and there are only cheerful and supportive messages wishing him well.)
The other thing I thought about, even as I was reading it, that as much as thanfiction was doing right, it was, by contrast, extremely odd that he got one character entirely wrong: Severus Snape. Practically every other character was developed by carefully extrapolating from canon, but unlike Neville, the visible hero who was adored by everyone, thanfiction chose to make Snape (the lying spy who led a secret double life) out as a total monster, and what's more, he violated canon to do it. And in doing so, thanfiction ironically obliterated and eliminated Snape's secret heroism. Rowling made the point that Dumbledore wanted Snape in place as Headmaster so that when Dumbledore died, Snape could protect the children from the Deatheaters that Dumbledore knew Voldemort would put in place at Hogwarts. Remember, Harry and Ron and Hermione thought it extremely odd that when Ginny and Neville and Luna were caught trying to break in to Snape's office to steal the sword, Snape only assigned the puzzlingly light punishment of sending them out in the Forbidden Forest for one night with Hagrid. But in thanfiction's re-envisioning of the story, that punishment is not a sinecure at all: Snape's clearly trying to feed them to the werewolves. And the whole business about how Snape doctored Neville's potion when he was sick with the dragon pox in an attempt to kill him: that doesn't fit at ALL with what canon says Snape was trying to do that year: protect the students. Snape eggs on the Deatheaters torturing students, and it is Snape who comes up with the idea of kidnapping Luna from Hogwarts to blackmail her father. Again, this goes totally against one of the key points of the seventh book, that Snape was truly Dumbledore's man. Once more, could it be unconscious? Perhaps. Perhaps whereas Neville was most like what thanfiction desperately wanted to be, Snape was what he was most like in reality, but he had to reject any semblance of Snape to himself (and deny that Snape had any good traits at all)...just as when thanfiction, cornered by his own lies, has resorted to claiming that Amy Player is NOT HIM AT ALL but, in fact, his evil mentally ill twin. Thus, to obscure that they were one and the same, he didn't hesitate to slander and denigrate Amy Player himself.
Like I said, I was never hurt by him, so I can maintain a detachment, although I must say the digging that thatfandom_wank has gleefully done into the antics of his past has yielded some jaw-dropping reading. (Oh, and that author's note that impressed me at the end, that implied he's talked with soldiers? Probably all lies: one of his favorite stories is that he's fought with the IRA.) In the end, I'm quite sorry for him. Whether he's a psychotic or a narcissist isn't possible to determine, given all his lies, but it's clear he's a deeply messed up individual. Such a shame that his problems has made him squander the talent he has.
___
*The person originally known as Amy Player now identifies as male (a FTM transsexual. So, male pronouns). (And no, I'm not at ALL saying that the fact that he's transsexual is what makes him crazy. His looniness is SO much bigger than just gender issues.)
*I'm not quite sure what the correct etiquette is on pronoun useage when I'm referring to the person at a point in time when he identified as female.
Tell me about an author whose works you enjoy, rather against your own inclination, because you find the person doing the writing to be absolutely reprehensible. How do you reconcile that for yourself?
naomikritzer sent me a link to a story a few months back because she knows I'm interested in reading good fanfiction depictions of Neville Longbottom. I didn't get around to reading it until this weekend, but the story sucked me right in. It's a re-telling of Deathly Hallows from Neville's point of view, covering what happened at Hogwarts, with Neville running the D.A. An author's note at the conclusion of the story ended with this:...This story is not dedicated to my readers, or to a group of fictional, if -- at least to me -- compelling teenagers [i.e., the D.A.]. It is dedicated to the real-life soldiers who gave their time and effort to help me with the psychology of war. Many of these young men and women are as young as eighteen themselves, and they are not fighting with wands and hexes on the grounds of an imaginary wizarding school. They fire real bullets and shed real blood on the very non-fictional battlefields of the Muggle world even as you read this, and their courage, their sacrifice is too often ignored because they do so out of our daily sight...Go ahead and drop me some feedback if you want, but I would also ask that the next time you spot a young man or woman in uniform, take a moment to shake their hand. Their truth is greater than fiction.That's quite a particularly graceful note, I thought. I remembered that Rowling has said that the series, and particularly the last book, is about recovering from the scars of war. Perhaps this fanfiction writer worked at the Veterans Administration or something?
There was something about that last line that niggled at me, though, something half-remembered. Who was this author, anyway?
I took a look. The author's name was "thanfiction" (on Livejournal as
thanfiction). I sat there for a second and then my eyes widened. Thanfiction? Wait a minute. I spent a couple minutes googling, following up on something I'd noticed fleetingly on my friends list sometime in the last month.I told you I was late to the party. Well, it was a weird trick of timing, actually. Naomi had sent me the link months ago, before the knowledge hit the internet (she said she's a little embarrassed about doing so, in retrospect), and I didn't look at the author's name until I had finished reading the entire story. But yes, dear reader, I had unknowingly spent the last two days reading and enjoying Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness (the "DAYDverse") a work written by one of the craziest people I've ever encountered on the internet: the notorious Amy Player AKA Victoria Bitter AKA Mr. Frodo AKA Jordan Wood AKA Andrew Blake AKA thanfiction. The dots were connected that thanfiction was the person that
fandom_wank calls "VB," I guess, about a month ago.For those of you unfamiliar with the story of this person, take a look at the fandom wiki here.
fandom_wank has written extensively about VB. Here's a typical entry which gives an idea of the spectacular series of weirdness and lies this person spread--and that was way back in 2004. Apparently after flaming out in the LOTR fandom (after cheating some people out of tens of thousands of dollars), Victoria Bitter, now Andrew Blake,* had resurfaced in the Harry Potter fandom. And he seemed to be back to his old tricks: gathering a circle of enthusiastic admirerers excited about his fiction (daydverse), leading up to a convention being planned--but suddenly the person at the center of this is flaming out and disappearing, vowing to leave the internet forever. Sound familiar?I was not one of the people who was hurt or scammed by VB. But I did contact Amy Player after reading some of
So what did I really think about the story? And how did my opinion change, once I knew the authorship?
Well, as I said, the story sucked me along quite nicely. Technical competence, for the most part, vivid characterization, good dialogue, boffo scene endings building suspense. There was one clever bit partway through, the business with how Neville used a note from Colin Creevey to doublecross Draco Malfoy, which I thought was quite brilliant, and maybe fixed a plot hole in canon that I hadn't ever quite realized was there. On the other hand, there was a colossal plot miscalculation partway through, in which a couple characters were condemned to death--and then, bizarrely, the whole plot line was simply dropped, as if the Ministry of Magic had backed off and just sort of pretended to forget the whole thing.
I've read with interest throughout the years various discussions about how much you can discern about an author from a fictional work. I remember an author's afterward to a book where the plotline involved incest, where the author said, more or less, 'don't assume that this plot line has anything to do with my personal life. After all, I'm a fiction writer. I make stuff up.' Despite this basic understanding, that the author is not the same as the work, once I realized who thanfiction was, I started thinking about why he had picked this particular story to tell, and what, if anything, it revealed about him.
Several people commenting on all the wankage threads trying to figure out this person's psychology have repeated several things: he's very smart, and very creative, and he really craves being the center of attention. And yet I'm not the only one who's pointed out that it's rather a shame and a waste that he only works with other people's work for his creative building blocks. Despite my urging years ago, no one has any knowledge that he's ever attempted original fiction (and he plays with artwork, too, but as fandom_wank has sussed out with a great deal of enjoyment, it's mostly photoshopped re-imagings of other people's photos, which he has tried to sell as original work). Naomi wondered at it, too: here's someone who's quite good, and a fast writer (something I deeply envy), and those talents could have helped established him nicely in his own fiction career. But as Naomi hypothesized, he may simply be too dysfunctional to manage it. He seems to have a compulsion to shed his own identity and assume somebody else's. As a writer, he plays with fanfiction but unlike most (better balanced) fanfiction writers, he starts to really believe he is the character he is writing about. He did that with Frodo (and Elijah Wood) and there are signs he was starting to do it with Neville, too (i.e., claiming that his birthday just happened to be--July 30).
Why did Neville appeal to him so? Well, Neville at first glance seems ordinary, but there's all that raw heroism and specialness underneath. And during the 7th year, Neville became a true leader. He is absolutely adored by all the Hogwarts students (in thanfiction's retelling, Seamus Finnegan takes to calling Neville 'Fearless Leader') and it's his dogged determination that whips the D.A. into shape.
It was astounding to me, how much human insight and clear thinking was in the story--even thoughtful consideration of ethics--considering how much this person has messed up relationships, scammed other people, demonstrated truly bizarre beliefs, and lied to everybody. But as I said to Naomi, perhaps that ability, to understand clear thinking while simultaneously unable to follow it oneself might be an extremely useful ability to a compulsive liar.
Perhaps most suggestive was a plot arc of his own invention, which wasn't mentioned in canon at all. At one point in the story, Neville became SO determined, SO driven, that the rest of the leadership of Dumbledore's Army remove him from leadership. He's getting 'too crazy.' Neville's absolutely crestfallen and can't believe it. He made this group! How can they reject him like that? But he goes away and gets some perspective and gets over the crazy and comes back all rested and refreshed. And of course they accept him back more wholeheartedly than ever. I can't help but see this might have been reflective of the dynamic that he has played over and over in the various fandoms in which he's been involved: he starts a group, gets adored, and then it all starts to get to be too much and people turn on him because of teh crazy. How much a wish fulfillment it must have been for him to dream that OF COURSE the group would accept him back with open arms once he 'got his head back together.' I wonder how much he consciously reflected on this as he wrote it.
(In a case of life imitating art, apparently once the information about thanfiction's identity hit the internet a couple months ago, he announced to the
daydverse group that he was stepping back from the group to apparently get things together. Of course, all negative comments to the post have been deleted, and there are only cheerful and supportive messages wishing him well.)The other thing I thought about, even as I was reading it, that as much as thanfiction was doing right, it was, by contrast, extremely odd that he got one character entirely wrong: Severus Snape. Practically every other character was developed by carefully extrapolating from canon, but unlike Neville, the visible hero who was adored by everyone, thanfiction chose to make Snape (the lying spy who led a secret double life) out as a total monster, and what's more, he violated canon to do it. And in doing so, thanfiction ironically obliterated and eliminated Snape's secret heroism. Rowling made the point that Dumbledore wanted Snape in place as Headmaster so that when Dumbledore died, Snape could protect the children from the Deatheaters that Dumbledore knew Voldemort would put in place at Hogwarts. Remember, Harry and Ron and Hermione thought it extremely odd that when Ginny and Neville and Luna were caught trying to break in to Snape's office to steal the sword, Snape only assigned the puzzlingly light punishment of sending them out in the Forbidden Forest for one night with Hagrid. But in thanfiction's re-envisioning of the story, that punishment is not a sinecure at all: Snape's clearly trying to feed them to the werewolves. And the whole business about how Snape doctored Neville's potion when he was sick with the dragon pox in an attempt to kill him: that doesn't fit at ALL with what canon says Snape was trying to do that year: protect the students. Snape eggs on the Deatheaters torturing students, and it is Snape who comes up with the idea of kidnapping Luna from Hogwarts to blackmail her father. Again, this goes totally against one of the key points of the seventh book, that Snape was truly Dumbledore's man. Once more, could it be unconscious? Perhaps. Perhaps whereas Neville was most like what thanfiction desperately wanted to be, Snape was what he was most like in reality, but he had to reject any semblance of Snape to himself (and deny that Snape had any good traits at all)...just as when thanfiction, cornered by his own lies, has resorted to claiming that Amy Player is NOT HIM AT ALL but, in fact, his evil mentally ill twin. Thus, to obscure that they were one and the same, he didn't hesitate to slander and denigrate Amy Player himself.
Like I said, I was never hurt by him, so I can maintain a detachment, although I must say the digging that that
fandom_wank has gleefully done into the antics of his past has yielded some jaw-dropping reading. (Oh, and that author's note that impressed me at the end, that implied he's talked with soldiers? Probably all lies: one of his favorite stories is that he's fought with the IRA.) In the end, I'm quite sorry for him. Whether he's a psychotic or a narcissist isn't possible to determine, given all his lies, but it's clear he's a deeply messed up individual. Such a shame that his problems has made him squander the talent he has.___
*The person originally known as Amy Player now identifies as male (a FTM transsexual. So, male pronouns). (And no, I'm not at ALL saying that the fact that he's transsexual is what makes him crazy. His looniness is SO much bigger than just gender issues.)
*I'm not quite sure what the correct etiquette is on pronoun useage when I'm referring to the person at a point in time when he identified as female.
Tell me about an author whose works you enjoy, rather against your own inclination, because you find the person doing the writing to be absolutely reprehensible. How do you reconcile that for yourself?