PKM resurgat

[wombat1138]

I have no idea how I initially ran into Patricia Kennealy-Morrison's now-defunct website, lizardqueen.com, several years ago-- even now, I think I've only read two or three of her books, and none of them before then-- but I enjoyed reading it and I was sorry when it vanished. While the site still hasn't returned, she now has a blog at http://mojohotel.blogspot.com/ ; it'll probably take a while for me to catch up with her archive of past posts.

While acknowledging that she may've lost some of her "Keltiad" fanbase by discouraging fan-neepery thereof in the strongest possible way, she doesn't seem to regret that aspect. It's always fascinating to see the wide range of authorial reactions to fandom appropriation (I mutter, guiltily glancing sideways at the doujinshi I'm currently translating-- although even if two wrongs don't make a right, three lefts do).

Comments

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

although even if two wrongs don't make a right, three lefts do).

Only if they're all at ninety-degree angles, or average out to be.

Better not show her Milliways (http://milliways_bar.livejournal.com/), then.

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

?

I don't think she universally disapproves fan-neepery; she just doesn't want people doing it with her Keltiad material. Or does Milliways have people RPing some of her specific characters? (I didn't see any of those from a quick glance-- at least, not that I know of; I'm still not terribly familiar with her Keltiverse-- but it does seem to be a rather large crowd.)

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

Oh, not that I've noticed, not that I've looked. (Actually, I'm slowly reading through the Jack Bauer archives to get a handle on the thing, for amusement value.) But seems to me that if she feels this way about people using her material, she'd probably feel roughly the same--at least in the abstract--about similar fanac in general. You don't think?

(Not to come in swinging passionately for either side, but it's a little odd that she overtly acknowledges that her position probably lost her fanbase and, perhaps, her shelf life, yet is fine with that.)

Urgh. Am in computer suite at the hospital, and teenybopper in next seat has just started chirping on her cellphone. I'm outta here.

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

But seems to me that if she feels this way about people using her material, she'd probably feel roughly the same--at least in the abstract--about similar fanac in general. You don't think?

Nope-- I skimmed back through one of her books at the library yesterday, and the vanished long-ago homeworld of her Elves-from-Space is named after Tolkien's Numenor. Also, especially in Blackmantle, many of her characters are named after real people-- either as (usually) Celtic calques or as anagrams. Which, come to think of it, may've been what put me on her trail in the first place, from hearing that she'd given Katherine Kurtz a cameo role of that sort.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

See, to my mind this makes PKM rather a hypocrite. (So in the series, Celts are from space, rather than having gone there? Think Robert Silverberg did something similar with the Romany in Star of Gypsies, which I'll dig up again someday. I'm not quite sure how I feel about establishing that Human Group X are really aliens.)

I seem to've slept for several hours. Waste of a day.

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

Hopefully I'm not mangling the names/framework very much, but PKM gives the Celts a rather winnowed-out descent from an original group of space refugees from Numenore who settled on Earth and founded Atlantis. After Atlantis was destroyed, some of the survivors of *that* disaster relocated to the regions of Europe now considered Celtic; the ex-Atlanteans became known as the Tuatha de Danaan, the Sidhe, the Fair Folk etc. with eternal youth, indefinitely prolonged lifespans, superhuman powers, etc. Some of them intermarried with garden-variety humans.

Eventually, all of the Danaans and most of the Celts left Earth to get away from St. Patrick, and founded the space empire of Keltia. It looks as if her website's compendium is still (patchily?) archived here (http://web.archive.org/web/20020803160156/www.lizardqueen.com/html/keltcomp.html), though I haven't checked all of the links to see if they're still attached to anything.

Aha, her long essay about where/how she feels innocent fandom crosses the line is archived here (http://web.archive.org/web/20020619234644/www.lizardqueen.com/html/karma.html); likewise, her essay about Blackmantle is here (http://web.archive.org/web/20020204092343/www.lizardqueen.com/html/FAQ53.html). I've orphaned both of those links from their original framed FAQ menu, whose archive keeps acting funny at me.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

...wait, if the Danaans had indefinitely long lifespans and superhuman powers, why didn't they send St. Patrick packing? And how did they manage to found a space empire when they couldn't stand up to one medieval monk?

Thanks for the links; will look around at them. It remains an otherwise blah day in Qadgopville, punctuated only by occasional exchanges along the lines of "What do you want to do?" "Nothing."

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

Reading "The Karma of Obsession." You know, while I'm not a fan of real-person fic by any means, it seems to me that in one blow PKM deligitimizes any and all historical fiction that includes actual historical figures as protagonists (or antagonists). And again, while I do see where she's coming from and agree that there's a line beyond which things become distinctly unsafe, it seems to me that she's talking about something that happens to every story that ever lasts.

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

Well, one of her primary tenets is that she married Jim Morrison in a pagan ceremony, giving her the moral authority to guard his memory from people who didn't know him and try to twist his image into their superficial, misguided notions of who he was. It's consistent with her process in Blackmantle, where the lightly-veiled RPF is based on people she has directly known and loved-- with certain exceptions for whom she entirely *intends* the sort of disrespect which she describes as being involuntarily perpetrated by distant fans upon their would-be idols.

I should probably note that while I enjoy reading her essays, most of the subject matter ends up falling into my mental wasteland of "this is all very interesting, but I have no real sense of my own reaction to the substance of what's being said"-- sometimes it's because I don't completely grok what's going on, sometimes it's because I don't perceive any connection to egotistical moi and therefore can't be bothered to care, sometimes it's because I can't disentangle the objective core from the subjective presentation, etc. etc., but most of the time I have no idea whyfor things have been mentally wastelanded; they just are.

[sff-corgi.livejournal.com]

BTW, firedrake_mor is a friend of hers, if you're curious enough to ask questions. :)

I don't quite get her fan-use position myself, although I would've been annoyed to receive something signed 'Aeron Queen of Celts' without being PKM anyway! That was pretty obnoxious, especially to the canon's creator.

Blast, I really need a general-Celtic icon.

[duncatra.livejournal.com]

Oye vey.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

Huh: an attempt to find out a little more about the Keltiad online turns out very little. (The Wikipedia article on PKM is sparse, and there's no article on the series itself.) If there was a fanbase, it does indeed seem to have evaporated worse than The X-Files' did. //B/u/t//h/e/y/,//a/t//l/e/a/s/t//n/o/b/o/d/y/'/s//u/s/i/n/g//h/e/r//c/o/p/y/r/i/g/h/t/e/d//n/a/m/e/s/.//

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

IIRC her prohibition on Keltiad fan-neepery extended to disallowing fan websites, even strictly canon-based informational compilations. But I could be wrong.

I don't think it's so much the names she's protective of-- a fair number of them are taken from Celtic lore (Taliesin, Arthur, Padraig), and exactly how does one copyright Saints Brendan and Brigid as fictional characters anyway?-- as the characters and contexts she's built behind them. If she's decided that she'd rather let the Keltiverse entirely disappear rather than be touched by other hands, however superficial/transitory those touches might seem to a third party, then that's all there is to it, I guess.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

Sure; I wouldn't dispute her right to close it off. It just seems awfully self-defeating. (I suppose one could make a thin argument that the Keltiad is, in turn, Celtic-mythology/Mabinogion fanfic, though of course that's long out of copyright...)