By sheer coincidence, both my official assignment and the treat I hadn’t planned on writing are historicals – of a sort, since they aren’t direct historical fiction but fanfiction of historical (pro) fiction, so to speak. They even overlap in time, place and setting, while dealing with entirely different characters (and their interpretation). To wit: one – the unexpected treat – is having a go at Shakespeare’s history plays. Now I absolutely agree that the Hollow Crown ‘s production of Henry V. was the weakest of the HC productions, but by letting Falstaff’s page, referred to only as “Boy” in the play, survive into the John-Hurt-played Chorus (this is the final reveal of the HC Henry V), it gave me a fanon idea which I haven’t been able to dislodge from my brain since, to wit, that Falstaff’s page is, in fact, none other than Owen Tudor, aka that adventurous Welshman who got together with Henry V’s widow, had several children by her and thus without intending to ended up founding a new dynasty. (His grandson was the first to make it to the throne; everyone’s least favourite wife killing monarch was Owen’s great-grandson.) After I had kidded around with likeadeuce about this a couple of times, she ended up requesting it for Yuletide, and well, how could I not? Especially since, thinking about the premise further, it occurred to me that if Owen Tudor = Falstaff’s Page, it meant he’s also the sole surviving character of the Henriad to have experienced both Prince Hal living it up at the taverns and Henry V. winning Agincourt. He’d have had a front row seat at the Falstaff/Hal relationship and ended up living with Henry’s Queen for fifteen years. He even got old enough to see the Wars of the Roses start and thus lead into the next quartet of history plays.

When this occurred to me, I also knew which form my story would have, to wit, it would be Owen, on the eve of his execution, talking to the man he’d known both as Hal and as Henry. Whether he’s chatting with an actual ghost here (it’s Shakespeare fanfic, after all) or just having an inner monologue is up to you, dear reader. Owen – spelt the Welsh way, Owain, because I can – was great fun to find a voice for, which helped me overcome my inhibitions at tackling the Bard’s characters.

Gentlemen of the Shade (3155 words) by Selena
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Henry V - Shakespeare, Henry IV - Shakespeare, The Hollow Crown (2012), Shakespeare - History Plays, 15th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Owain ap Maredudd ap Tewdwr | Owen Tudor/Catherine de Valois, Sir John Falstaff/Prince Hal (Shakespeare), Sir John Falstaff & Owen Tudor, Henry V of England & Owen Tudor, Catherine of Valois/Henry V
Characters: Boy (Henry V), Owain ap Maredudd ap Tewdwr | Owen Tudor, Prince Hal (Shakespeare), Henry V of England, Sir John Falstaff, Catherine of Valois Queen of England, Fluellen (Henry V), Nym (Henry V), Pistol (Shakespeare)
Additional Tags: Ambiguous Relationships, Agincourt, Character Study, Messy, Yuletide, Yuletide 2016
Summary:

In which Falstaff's page has a chat with the late Henry V. about shared bed fellows (plural), accidentally founds a dynasty and changes the course of English history.

Meanwhile, when offering fandoms I was ready to write for, I included Sharon Penman’s novel The Sunne in Splendour, which deals with the Wars of the Roses from a distinctly Yorkist and Ricardian pov. Now The Sunne in Splendour is a novel I’d read for the first time when I was 20 or 21. And I fell in love instantly. Decades later, I freely concede its flaws to anyone grumbling about them – the pseudo medieval language at times (which Penman ditched in later novels), Richard as the hero is verging on too good to be true ness, a bit odd pov choices (Penman is prone to include more than necessary every time), etc. But. But. The reasons why I loved it so much in my early 20s to begin with are still there. Penman’s great with the family dynamics of both the Plantagenets and the Nevilles. She was the first author I’d read who does more with Edward IV than “playboy king”, and her version is still the most interesting Edward of them all to me, just as her Elizabeth Woodville is my favourite Elizabeth Woodville (way more interesting than Philippa Gregory’s who is meant to be the heroine, btw). The Edward and Richard dynamic pushes my button for sibling relationships. I love that while being pro York, her pov chapters for various Lancastrians – Edmund Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset, and Marguerite d’Anjou herself – makes them not just human but sympathetic. (Yes, Marguerite is a villain from Yorkist pov chapters, but not in her own, and not in a villainous monologue way, either.) Her solution to the “What happened to the Princes?” mystery makes sense to me. And I still can’t get through the last chapters without crying.

Now, my recipient’s request for this story was that she wanted more about the Richard/Anne relationship, with Richard and Anne being supportive of each other, the way they are in the novel. (She also suggested maybe the wedding and subsequent nights fleshed out, but I can’t write sex. Truly, I suck at it, and not in the fun way. So emotional exploration it was.) Well, the Richard/Anne relationship is of course pretty central in the novel and thus already well covered by Penman, BUT remember those odd pov choices? One of them is that we don’t get Anne Neville’s until after she’s widowed the first time (before that, she’s described from either Francis Lovell’s, or her sister Isabella’s), and Richard’s only intermittently, and not at all at what must have been turning points for the relationship. Which gave me something to work with in a missing scenes & alternate pov kind of way. It also provided me with a friends-to-lovers arc, and the challenge I gave myself, to write the development of the Richard and Anne relationship in a way that I hoped would work both for readers of The Sunne in Splendour and for people who haven’t read a word of the novel but are interested in the era.

Still: it’s meant to be a Penman derived fanfiction, and thus I was of course bound to her narrative choices (Anne’s first marriage: not a happy event, to put it mildly), including her choices of (nick)names. (Or full names; that Anne is the only one in their families close to Richard who doesn’t call him “Dickon” but “Richard” is important in the novel, and of course I stuck with it.)

Below is the result: Plantagenets, Penman edition.

Troth (9410 words) by Selena
Chapters: 4/4
Fandom: The Sunne in Splendour - Sharon Kay Penman, 15th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Anne Neville Queen of England/Richard III of England, Anne Neville Queen of England & Richard Neville Earl of Warwick, Edward IV of England & Richard III of England, Richard III of England & Richard Neville Earl of Warwick, Edward of Lancaster | Prince of Wales/Anne Neville Queen of England
Characters: Anne Neville Queen of England, Richard III of England, Edward IV of England, Richard Neville Earl of Warwick, Edward of Lancaster | Prince of Wales, George Plantagenet Duke of Clarence, Isabel Neville, Marguerite d'Anjou | Margaret of Anjou
Additional Tags: Missing Scene, Dysfunctional Family, Friends to Lovers, Friendship/Love, Regicide, Yuletide, Yuletide 2016
Summary:

Four times the relationship between Anne Neville and her cousin Richard Plantagenet changed, and yet remained the same.

Not the Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner film, obviously.

I first got introduced to this bit of English history when I had to do a report on Shakespeare's Richard III for English class. Being the thorough sort, I also aquired a biography of the historical Richard III (the one by Paul Murray Kendall) and thus was introduced to the whole Ricardian controversy at the same time. Then I read Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time and promptly became a partisan with all my teenage righteousness. Incidentally, I'm still more Ricardian than not, but the intervening twenty plus years ensured I have a whole lot more time for the non-Yorkist pov.

Of course, Richard III (both historical and fictional versions) only marks the end of the War of the Roses, and while I battled, bad pun inevitable, my way through the three parts of Shakespare's Henry VI, my teenage self was also a Joan of Arc fan and wasn't impressed to find Will S. slandering her in the Henries. Plus his later dramas were far better written anyway. As far as non-Shakespearean presentations of the War of the Roses were concerned, I found the occasional novel which didn't really grip me and more interesting non-fiction books (until, in my early 20s, I came across Sharon Penman's The Sunne in Splendour, and it was love at first sight. I probably would be far more critical of some aspects now if I read it for the first time today, but back then it was a terrific experience. Not least because while York-centric, it was an ensemble piece, with multiple interesting relationships and people whose name I had known before but whose personalities hadn't registered, like John Neville (younger brother of Warwick the Kingmaker). Most of all, it made Edward IV. into the type of morally ambiguous, smart and charismatic figure who couldn't fail to hold my interest, and his relationship with younger brother Richard hit my soft spot for sibling relationships (so rare to be treated as central in historical novels unless they're incestous) massively. The most common criticism I've heard of the novel is that Richard is written as too good to be true, and I can see that, but all the same, the Edward-Richard relationship was my favourite sibling relationship in a novel until Penman tackled Llewelyn and younger brother Davydd in her Welsh Princes trilogy. Speaking of morally ambigous characters, ironically enough I find Sharon Penman's Elizabeth Woodville far, far more interesting than the one from Philippa Gregory's The White Queen. In The Sunne in Splendour, she's a tough as nails ambitious woman who doesn't need magical powers to succeed, and while she's at times an antagonist, she gets enough pov chapters to come across like a three dimensional character to me.

Which brings me to the current most popular fictionalisation. The White Queen tv series, based on three of Gregory's novels, was advertised as the War of the Roses from a female pov, and it is certainly that, but I had been hoping it would transcend its source material. (This happens occasionally: see also, the first season of Dexter versus the source novel, or The Godfather films versus Puzo's novel.) Which it only rarely did (one reason why I never even finished watching the series). The most striking improvement to me in the early episodes I watched before giving up was Amanda Hale as Margaret Beaufort (mother of the later Henry VII). Margaret Beaufort in Gregory's novel The Red Queen was simply an unsympathetic madwoman, but in the tv series she was the most captivating of the female characters, and her early wish to become a saint, coming across as preposterous and vain in the book, came across as ardently sincere. (A power hungry schemer who is also a sincere believer struggling with those contradictions, and getting steadfastly more ruthless? Margaret Beaufort, let me introduce you to Rodrigo Borgia. You're totally my type now!) Hale just radiated intensity in everything, from her need to see her son on the throne one day to her anger at her mother for having married her off as a child. Something else this version of the tale truly brought home to me was how relatively young Margaret Beaufort still was during the last phase of the War of the Roses, due to having been married and immediately impregnated (NOT the norm for child brides) at twelve with the son whom she eventually would see as king. (Otherwise, the tv White Queen is terrible with everyone's ages. When Edward married Elizabeth, his brother Richard and Anne Neville were both still children, for example, but the tv show, not wanting to hire kid actors, one assumes, already lets them be played by the adult versions. And Elizabeth herself doesn't age through all the episodes I've seen.) I had never considered that before, having imagined her as the equivalent of the York family matriarch Cecily Neville. Speaking of whom: poor Cecily is the victim of the usual Phlippa Gregory thing where she can't write about one woman positively without bashing another. (See also: Mary Boleyn versus Anne Boleyn, Mary Tudor and Mary Stuart versus Elizabeth Tudor.) In this case, Cecily Neville draws the short end of the stick and in both novels and series is presented as a harridan who only cares for one of her sons (George) and is horrible to all the other characters. Good grief. And Cecily's daughters don't even show up, including Margaret who was arguably the Yorkist sibling to make the most of her life - loyal to her brothers (and sheltering them when Edward and Richard were in exile) but also a very successful Duchess of Burgundy, trolling Henry Tudor even after the War of the Roses ended and dying in bed. Okay, back to the few things I found positive about The White Queen: Jacquetta Woodville, Elizabeth W.'s mother, certainly gets her due here. (She also gets to have magic. I only rarely like it when historical novels use fantasy elements. Some authors can pull it off, and then I love it. But in two thirds of all the cases, including this one, I don't.)

Leaving aside all fiction: the War of the Roses, thus non-fiction books tell me, was the last gasp of the middle ages in England, the last time the nobilty played such an important role in deciding who was king, and the various provinces, whereas the eventual winners, the Tudors, ushered in the more modern form of absolute monarchy. Whether this was for good or ill is beside the point: it was inevitable. I dimly recall George R. R. Martin saying one reason why he wrote his fantasy novels and not a straightforward rendition of the War of the Roses was the suspense factor: everyone knows who will win going in a War of the Roses novel, so he claimed. (I think he's overestimating the state of historical knowledge in the avarage reader, who can't tell their Henry VI. from their Henry VII, for starters, or, depending on their age, is prone to ask "which one was played by Laurence Olivier/Kenneth Branagh/Tom Hiddleston?") Sometimes I come across the occasional compare and contrast of the Game of Thrones/ASOIAF characters to the War of the Roses characters. I've seen the Lannisters, despite the name similarity to "Lancaster", matched to the Woodvilles, for example, Cersei to Elizabeth and Jaime to Anthony, with Robert as an unflattering version of Edward IV. and Ned Stark as the Richard who doesn't take the crown for himself and thus promptly loses his head; otoh I've also seen it declared that Tyrion Lannister is Richard III (and will end on the throne for a short while before being vanquished by Danaerys-as-Henry-Tudor), with Sansa Stark as Elizabeth of York. Littlefinger's closet match is usually Lord Stanley. But whatever the original inspiration, I think the GoT characters have been far too much their own people for their story to work even as a fantasy AU of the War of the Roses. One actual AU I would dare someone to write, though: Edward IV. doesn't die relatively young but lives into old age. (Which means that when he does die, Stillington is dead as already and thus nobody finds out the marriage to Elizabeth has a certain legitimacy problem. Both of his sons, hopefully without a Joffey among them, are adults and ready to succed.) Richard stays in the North with Anne, which by all accounts he did a good job at and was very popular for. Anthony Woodville, who was patron of the arts, helps rushing in the Renaissance a bit earlier. And Henry Tudor? Was always very good with numbers, knows he'll never get French backing for an invasion under these circumstances and decides to go to Italy, where there's always a market for smart Machiavellian power players.

...otoh, where's the drama in that? On second thought, I can see why no one has written it. Especially not history.

5 sequels (or continuations) you thought were better than the original.

I'm afraid the first two aren't very original, but they still are inevitable choices for me.

1.) Star Trek: Wrath of Khan. There is a reason that this film became the golden standard against which any subsequent ST film was measured, and much as I often champion the fannish underdog, I just can't in the case of Star Trek: The Slow Motion Picture.

2.) The Empire Strikes Back. Now the is a brand of SW fan who loves only this one and bashes all the others. Don't count me among them. I happen to be fond of the prequels, love Return of the Jedi and am okay with A New Hope, though it alone would have never made me a fan. All this being said: The Empire Strikes Back really improved on the first one to no end - no Nuremberg Rally for rebels, the Leigh Bracket dialogue for Leia and Han is screwball comedy fun, Lando Calrissian is arguably the most layered character in the OT (what? he sells our heroes out for understandable reasons which aren't all about himself but about what he's in charge with and makes up for that without being prompted), and the part that got me personally hooked on the galaxy far, far away: Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker turn out to be one and the same, and suddenly Luke's goals can't be as simple as blowing up Death Stars and defeating bad guys in a duel anymore. So often copied and still the best idea Lucas had for SW.

3.) Harry Potter series. Now you can argue about which of the seven books is the best one, but it definitely isn't HP and The Philospher's Stone. I know most people root for Prisoner of Azkaban (because of Sirius and Remus, I guess), but my personal choice is Order of the Phoenix. (Because it was about time Harry showed something like post traumatic stress syndrom, because it introduced the wonderful Luna, because Dolores Umbridge is the most realistic and chillingly loathsome villain JKR ever wrote, because Harry's stint in Snape's memories turns what he and the readers thought they knew about the Marauders upside down and introduces Lily as something other than a corpse, because "I must not tell lies" and the way Harry reacts to this still guts me when I reread it.) Either way, though: the sequel(s) is/are better.

4.Sharon Penman: The Devil's Brood. I love When Christ and his Saints Slept (Maude and Stephen plus young Henry and young Eleanor of Aquitaine), but there is no denying that the middle volume of her trilogy, Of Time and Change, is anything but her best. Not least because it is a middle story, without a beginning and a climactic ending but also neither the author nor yours truly can decide on their take on Thomas Becket, who inevitably occupies a prominent position in the narrative, and the Henry/Rosamund relationship isn't that interesting, either. But The Devil's Brood (old Eleanor and Henry, and their sons - i.e. we're in Lion in Winter territory) is fantastic again, managing to make all of the younger Plantagenets understandable and three dimensional instead of just favouring one or treating Henry as King Lear with ungrateful kids, and as for Eleanor and Henry, well, they're superbly rendered.

5. The Beatles: Revolver. You can argue about favourite albums and the like because everything is subjective etc., but as fine as Rubber Soul already was, there's no denying Revolver was what sealed their critical reputation (and also showed they had left the moptop times far behind) for good. Also? Eleanor Rigby and Tomorrow Never Knows on the same album showcasing the range of what pop music can be. Your argument is invalid.

Siblings! I love siblings. Alas, I've also fallen out of love with several combinations that would, had their shows ended earlier before love for show and characters alike was lost, have made the cut here. *looks sadly at Justin & Iris Crowe and the Petrellis* Also missing out are the Morgans, Deb & Dexter, whom I do adore but who lost because there are other siblings I love just a tad more.


1.) Quark & Rom from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Several of my favourite scenes involving either character are about their relationship with each other, whether it's Rom asking Quark to tell the story for the nth unprofitable time at the end of House of Quark, their arguments and reconciliation in Bar Union or Rom telling Quark in the s5 finale he'll stay on the about to be occupied station, Quark calling him an idiot again and kissing him. Awwww.

2.) Buffy & Dawn from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I loved Dawn from the moment she showed up in Real Me. (An episode which if you play it for an audience is a surefire way to find out who was an older and who was a younger sibling, btw. I was an older sister.) Both the early sibling bickering and the shift when Buffy finds out the truth, plus the additional shift after Joyce's death when she has to double as a parent figure as well, were very captivating to watch for me, and much as Angel & Connor are probably the relationship I'm most invested in over in AtS, Buffy & Dawn is my favourite relationship in the later seasons of BTVS. It's no coincidence that the only post-show story I ever felt compelled to write, City Girls, features the Summers sisters.

3.) Sydney and Nadia in Alias. It's no coincidence my favourite Alias s4 episode is Detente which manages to combine two of my favourite aspects of the show, Sydney and Nadia and an examination of the Sydney & Sloane relationship. In defiance of clichés, Syd and Nadia were never rivals; Sydney was the one relation who loved Nadia unconditionally and who never let her down, and yet the relationship never came over as over the top sweet. (When Nadia figures out in The Index that Sydney used her to check out Sloane's house, she does this marvelous passive-aggressive thing of a birthday speech which manages to make Syd feel guilty as hell without giving her away at all, which, btw, is a Sloane, not a Derevko or Bristow thing to do and is one of times where you can see Nadia is Arvin's daughter.) One of the many injustices of s5 is that they didn't get more time together. *still bears a grudge*

4.) Llewelyn ap Gruffyd and Davydd up Gruffyd, as written by Sharon Penman. (In Falls the Shadow and The Reckoning.)Undoubtedly the most intense relationship in either novel, complete with affection, rivalry, (spectacular) betrayals, and reconciliations, their scenes together to me are the highlights of the novels in question, and Davydd's final scene in The Reckoning pretty much breaks me. (I also like Edith Pargeter's interpretation of the same sibling relationship in her Brothers of Gwynned cycle, but Penman's version is my favourite.)

5.) Luke, Savanna and Tom Wingo in Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. One of the many, many reasons why I felt let down by the film version is that it concentrated on the framing narration of the novel instead of the two thirds of it which actually made me fall in love with the book to begin with. Pat Conroy did the dysfunctional family thing many, many times, but this version is my favourite, not least because while the relationship between the Wingos and their parents is spectacularly screwed up, the ones between the three siblings (twins and an older brother) are their lifelines to sanity and what keeps them going. They love each other fiercely which doesn't stop the occasional competition and bickering, and they can both both incredibly funny and heartbreaking together, either all three or any two combination. I just love them.