Purim fics I: Raven Cycle
Mar. 8th, 2015 01:12 pmI wrote my assignment plus a pinch hit for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
purimgifts this year--that's six (short) fics--so I'm going to put them in two different posts.
My assigned recipient was![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
darkrosaleen--possibly the first time I've ever gotten a flistie as part of an exchange. I particularly wanted to write something good for her, because she's awesome, and because she'd written me the most amazing Ronan/Gansey bloodplay fic a few years ago for Yuletide. Luckily for me, she had a really fascinating prompt about a Jewish Kavinsky--so the ficlets turned out to be, if not easy, then at least really interesting to write.
In The Dream Thieves, Kavinsky, as the villain, is coded as, if not Jewish, then certainly not Anglo-Celtic-Christian the way the heroes are. His family is supposed to have come from Bulgaria, and they are neither poor, like some of Stiefvater's characters, nor rich, like others: instead, they are the kind of cartoon nouveau riche who live in McMansions in New Jersey, have mob money and wear sunglasses with white plastic frames. The Dream Thieves gets a disturbing amount of mileage from cultural markers like that. Lines like this one, describing Blue's distaste for Kavinsky, have always bothered me: "There was something erratic and vulgar about the full line of his lips, like he'd swallow her if he got close enough. She hated the smell of him." All the good guys in the novel have thin lips.
Anyway, I didn't want to rehabilitate Kavinsky as a misunderstood hero, or take the book to task for its fear of the ethnic, but I did want to give that immigrant, non-WASPy, background a bit more texture. And I really wanted to see what another magic system would look like mapped over/against the books' Celtic one. Jewish magic, at least of the Ashkenazi sort, is all about Hebrew letters and mystical names. It took a while to figure out how to integrate that with the dream forest magic that's canon in the books, but I liked the solution I came up with.
( three Jewish!Kavinsky fics )
purimgifts this year--that's six (short) fics--so I'm going to put them in two different posts.My assigned recipient was
darkrosaleen--possibly the first time I've ever gotten a flistie as part of an exchange. I particularly wanted to write something good for her, because she's awesome, and because she'd written me the most amazing Ronan/Gansey bloodplay fic a few years ago for Yuletide. Luckily for me, she had a really fascinating prompt about a Jewish Kavinsky--so the ficlets turned out to be, if not easy, then at least really interesting to write.In The Dream Thieves, Kavinsky, as the villain, is coded as, if not Jewish, then certainly not Anglo-Celtic-Christian the way the heroes are. His family is supposed to have come from Bulgaria, and they are neither poor, like some of Stiefvater's characters, nor rich, like others: instead, they are the kind of cartoon nouveau riche who live in McMansions in New Jersey, have mob money and wear sunglasses with white plastic frames. The Dream Thieves gets a disturbing amount of mileage from cultural markers like that. Lines like this one, describing Blue's distaste for Kavinsky, have always bothered me: "There was something erratic and vulgar about the full line of his lips, like he'd swallow her if he got close enough. She hated the smell of him." All the good guys in the novel have thin lips.
Anyway, I didn't want to rehabilitate Kavinsky as a misunderstood hero, or take the book to task for its fear of the ethnic, but I did want to give that immigrant, non-WASPy, background a bit more texture. And I really wanted to see what another magic system would look like mapped over/against the books' Celtic one. Jewish magic, at least of the Ashkenazi sort, is all about Hebrew letters and mystical names. It took a while to figure out how to integrate that with the dream forest magic that's canon in the books, but I liked the solution I came up with.
( three Jewish!Kavinsky fics )
