Pod_Together Activity
Sep. 2nd, 2024 02:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phoenixfallsAs sanguinity has already announced on her journal, our summer ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
pod_together project has just been revealed!
Title: Friends of Cordelia
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga
Character: Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan
Rating: Gen
Word Count: 5,702 words
Podfic Length: 00:37:14
Tags: Queer Themes, Worldbuilding, Museum Exhibit, POV Outsider
Summary:
During her decades of service to the Imperium, Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan commanded a special place in the hearts of queer Barrayarans.
Explore their stories today at the Vorbarr Sultana Capitol Museum.
I've wanted to work with Sang on a pod_together project for a several years now, and this year the timing worked out - neither of us had any other significant time commitments interfering, and we've been trading fandoms for years so we had lots of options to choose from. I'm still not confident in my ability to produce writing, so I opted to be the podficcer, and then we batted around quite a few ideas for a half dozen canons before hitting on the idea of trying to explore how the queer community on Barrayar might have embraced Cordelia.
As I've gotten older, I've become interested in what appears to me one of Bujold's blind spots: she's amazing at building three-dimensional characters, characters who are shaped by their gender, by their sexuality, by their disabilities. She's writes pure science fiction - fiction that imagines a new technology, and then really explores all the ramifications of that new technology from a personal and a societal perspective.
Yet she does not seem to have any sense of the communities that marginalized people create. She just barely seems to have a sense of the women's world that Lady Alys inhabits; she never seems to even consider that Barrayar would have a queer community, would have communities of disabled people and those who care for them.
Aral is bi, Miles is disabled, Mark has massive amounts of trauma (and all the Vorkosigan men seem to have a mood disorder of some sort, I would guess they're bipolar), Lady Donna/Lord Dono is trans (probably), and these facts about them dramatically inform their characters - but they develop their identities in isolation, none of them ever interact with people who share these traits. (Ethan is sort of the exception that proves the rule - he's gay, but he comes from a world entirely made of men, where the only options are to be gay or ace, so he is explicitly not marginalized until he leaves Athos.)
So Sang and I set out to flesh out what Barrayar's queer community might look like over the century or so that Cordelia was a figure in the Imperium. It was simultaneously tremendously exciting and kind of terrifying.
It was also a true collaboration - Sang wrote the majority of the words, and it's only my voice on the podfic (though the original plan called for her to assist on the two interview chapters!), but we talked through each exhibit together, drawing on our own experiences and our knowledge of real-life communities to try and create something that felt real.
I really do think we succeeded in what we set out to do. I'm particularly proud of the way Sang captured the shifting perspectives over time, and the way she stayed true to the inherent unreliability of an outsider POV - there were multiple points where I took issue with something stated in the exhibit as fact that we know is actually sideways to canon, and each time Sang pushed back with the very salient point that *we* know the truth but *this particular person* would not know the truth, or would just have a totally different perspective on what "true" is in this case. We had lots of debates over terminology, and Sang had to build a timeline so we could keep canon and fic events straight, and I had a whole crisis because when I sat down to begin recording I lost all confidence in my ability to deliver - but at the end of the day, I think we made something actually good.
sanguinity has already announced on her journal, our summer pod_together project has just been revealed!Title: Friends of Cordelia
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga
Character: Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan
Rating: Gen
Word Count: 5,702 words
Podfic Length: 00:37:14
Tags: Queer Themes, Worldbuilding, Museum Exhibit, POV Outsider
Summary:
During her decades of service to the Imperium, Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan commanded a special place in the hearts of queer Barrayarans.
Explore their stories today at the Vorbarr Sultana Capitol Museum.
I've wanted to work with Sang on a pod_together project for a several years now, and this year the timing worked out - neither of us had any other significant time commitments interfering, and we've been trading fandoms for years so we had lots of options to choose from. I'm still not confident in my ability to produce writing, so I opted to be the podficcer, and then we batted around quite a few ideas for a half dozen canons before hitting on the idea of trying to explore how the queer community on Barrayar might have embraced Cordelia.
As I've gotten older, I've become interested in what appears to me one of Bujold's blind spots: she's amazing at building three-dimensional characters, characters who are shaped by their gender, by their sexuality, by their disabilities. She's writes pure science fiction - fiction that imagines a new technology, and then really explores all the ramifications of that new technology from a personal and a societal perspective.
Yet she does not seem to have any sense of the communities that marginalized people create. She just barely seems to have a sense of the women's world that Lady Alys inhabits; she never seems to even consider that Barrayar would have a queer community, would have communities of disabled people and those who care for them.
Aral is bi, Miles is disabled, Mark has massive amounts of trauma (and all the Vorkosigan men seem to have a mood disorder of some sort, I would guess they're bipolar), Lady Donna/Lord Dono is trans (probably), and these facts about them dramatically inform their characters - but they develop their identities in isolation, none of them ever interact with people who share these traits. (Ethan is sort of the exception that proves the rule - he's gay, but he comes from a world entirely made of men, where the only options are to be gay or ace, so he is explicitly not marginalized until he leaves Athos.)
So Sang and I set out to flesh out what Barrayar's queer community might look like over the century or so that Cordelia was a figure in the Imperium. It was simultaneously tremendously exciting and kind of terrifying.
It was also a true collaboration - Sang wrote the majority of the words, and it's only my voice on the podfic (though the original plan called for her to assist on the two interview chapters!), but we talked through each exhibit together, drawing on our own experiences and our knowledge of real-life communities to try and create something that felt real.
I really do think we succeeded in what we set out to do. I'm particularly proud of the way Sang captured the shifting perspectives over time, and the way she stayed true to the inherent unreliability of an outsider POV - there were multiple points where I took issue with something stated in the exhibit as fact that we know is actually sideways to canon, and each time Sang pushed back with the very salient point that *we* know the truth but *this particular person* would not know the truth, or would just have a totally different perspective on what "true" is in this case. We had lots of debates over terminology, and Sang had to build a timeline so we could keep canon and fic events straight, and I had a whole crisis because when I sat down to begin recording I lost all confidence in my ability to deliver - but at the end of the day, I think we made something actually good.
