yuletide | 2022 Yuletide Promo Post

Welcome to the Fandom Promo post, everyone!

Here's where you get those eyes on your fandoms for sign-ups!

Share what makes your Yuletide fandoms the shiniest and why you love them. A big part of Yuletide is how small our fandoms can be, and this is a good way to make sure other people know what gems there are out there!

NEW: We've made a register! There is now a searchable Google spreadsheet index of the canons promoted on this post. Go ahead and add yours or any you see that are missing! We hope this helps connect people up with canons of interest to them.

Here are some areas you can cover:

Title:
Please put your fandom's title in the subject of your comment, too. This helps people find your promo again.

Media:

Approx length:

Where to find it:
(If giving links, please only link to legal sources. You may want to encourage people to contact you directly if they are having trouble finding a canon and you can give them tips)

What is it, in summary?:

What do you love about it?:

What sort of things are you likely to request for it?:

Are there sections of canon (rather than the whole canon) that can be consumed by themselves to fulfil your requests, or that showcase particular characters and relationships?:

Content warnings (ie, rape, incest, racism, gore/violence):
This is at your discretion and is not expected to be comprehensive

(Bonus options: What are you thinking of requesting for this? If you're thinking of nominating worldbuilding, what sort of worldbuilding topics might people explore?)

Useful tip (Not required, but helps people if they want to engage with your fandom!):

- It's best to make each fandom its own entry with its own title in the subject line! That makes it easier for people to find/see what you're promoting! Don't worry about 'spam', that is the entire point of this entry and you're using it exactly as intended.

Previous fandom promo posts can be found at this tag!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Title: Stormy Petrel series of books by Violet Needham
Books: The Black Riders, The Emerald Crown, The Stormy Petrel, The House of the Paladin, The Betrayer

Media: mid-century (but reads as if written earlier) British children's Ruritania/adventure series

Approx length: each novel is about ~300 pages in large-ish print.

Where to find it:
This is the tricky part. I came across this series by finding one in a used book sale, and had to acquire the others on ebay and similar. They might be in libraries in Commonwealth countries, but don't seem to exist in libraries in the USA and Canada (or at least, not in libraries willing to lend them via inter-library loan). I'm promo-ing/nominating mostly in the hopes that there are others out there in the same position as me (have happened to find them and read them). But if this sounds exactly like your jam and you can't get them from a library, send me a direct-message and I can help with the first book at least.

What is it, in summary?: A series of adventure stories set in a fictional central-European Empire and a couple of its equally fictional neighbors; many of them star Dick Fauconbois, a young boy who (in the first book) aids a charismatic political dissident in the Empire and ends up caught between his more humanistic mentor and the more authoritarian but equally honorable chief minister of the Empire. The second, third, and fourth books involve Dick with young monarchs struggling to keep their thrones and learn how to take up their duties: the newly-ascended Emperor Carol, the long-lost true heir to the kingdom of Flavonia, and the young Duchess of Ornowitza respectively. There's derring-do, secret passages, oodles of pledging loyalty, and a lot of pro-monarchy propaganda (and that may really not be your thing, at this precise moment in time! I totally get it!)

What do you love about it?: Although the protagonists are children, there's a surprising amount of depth to the adult characters, from (my personal favorites), Count St.-Silvain and Count Jasper, old friends who have become implacable political enemies without losing their respect for each-other to the weak usurper-king of Flavonia who just wants to admire his art-work and kind of knows he's shit at the whole leadership thing.

The other thing about this series that fascinates me is how bizarrely out-of-time it is. The books were published from the late 1930s-50s, and they are set basically in "the present"--except it's pretty clear that none of the political events in European history from 1914 happened in this universe. In many ways, they're embarrassingly retrograde fantasies of a world where the era of monarchs never ended, but, like all fantasies, it's kind of comforting to hang out there for a bit.

What sort of things are you likely to request for it?: I'm likely to request backstory fic about the adults (St.-Silvain, Count Jasper) and the political conflicts that are hinted at to have happened in the previous generation. I also will probably nominate "worldbuilding", because there's so much potential for that! I am not personally *that* interested in subversions that go down a very dark road, but there's a lot of room for more critical takes on hereditary power and political repression before one would come near "grimdark". Finally, I think it could be incredibly fun to cross this canon over with other similar ones (The Lost Prince, The Prisoner of Zenda, etc.)

Are there sections of canon (rather than the whole canon) that can be consumed by themselves to fulfill your requests, or that showcase particular characters and relationships?: I'm mostly interested in the Empire characters, who show up especially in The Black Riders.

Content warnings:
In particular: there's a nasty strand of anti-semitism that appears throughout the series, most notably in Stormy Petrel and (less explicitly) House of the Paladin. Several books end with the tragic death of a secondary character.

In general: It's exactly the kind of wall to wall flag-waving, royalty-lionizing, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori one would expect from late 19th/early 20th century boys' fiction.

Edited 2022-09-17 19:03 (UTC)

2022 Yuletide Promo Post

Stormy Petrel Series - Violet Needham