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100 days of enemy recs: 16. The Lone Power
I went to a couple days of the free online Crossingscon a couple weeks ago (only a few sessions, sadly, work schedules being what they are, but it's always worth a chance to listen to Ursula Vernon get her raconteur on). One of the sessions was about writing really alien aliens, and Diane Duane talked about wizardry, about how every people has some kind of wizardry, some version of the Oath, but it may look very different than what you are used to or expect, and part of being a wizard is being able to look at all the different kinds of wizardy in all the worlds and know they're still wizardry.
And that really struck a note with me? Because, okay, what I do in Young Wizards-verse, mostly, is come up with crossovers. And when I talk about about Young Wizards crossovers with other people, they often get hung up on but there is no wizardry in that canon! Or they comment on one of the few fics I've written and posted - I had no idea how anybody could make this canon work as a YW crossover, but somehow you did it!
And - look. If there are wizards who are hyperintelligent shades of the color blue - or semi-hivemind biodata expressions with a complicated relationship with time - or individual atoms that form shifting patterns in a mesh - or crystal spiders who outlive Death and think cause and effect are nifty, but optional - if all that is true, and if you know Young Wizards, you know it is - than how can it be harder, somehow, to imagine wizardry among humans who are pretty much the same, just with slightly different rules to their world? And yet, somehow for many people it is harder.
To understand wizardry as it works not just in Nita and Kit's world, or the few worlds they've visited in canon, to understand how it works for fungal mycelia networks or for humans who are lawyers in a New York City that might or might not have the same kind of shadow of Manhattan, you have to be able to boil the Oath down to its very basics: to say, no matter what the wording or recension of the Oath you took, at its core all it takes to be a wizard is to say: "I want to try to help. Can I?" and to hear back, yes. But to be a good wizard, you also have to be able to look at someone else who said "I want to try to help" - even if the language they said it in, the ways they carry it out, their goals, their worldview, their methods - seem to you incomprehensible, or even abominable - to come to them, and see them trying to help, and say, cousin.
And once you've got that far - once you understand that - well. It's not that much farther until you see someone saying, let me help, and you can't remember if Dai stihó and Greetings and defiance really mean anything different after all.
So here's some fics about the Lone One, the Enemy, the Star-Snuffer, the Bringer of Death, the Lord of Entropy, the Fairest and Fallen, having a nice day.
And that really struck a note with me? Because, okay, what I do in Young Wizards-verse, mostly, is come up with crossovers. And when I talk about about Young Wizards crossovers with other people, they often get hung up on but there is no wizardry in that canon! Or they comment on one of the few fics I've written and posted - I had no idea how anybody could make this canon work as a YW crossover, but somehow you did it!
And - look. If there are wizards who are hyperintelligent shades of the color blue - or semi-hivemind biodata expressions with a complicated relationship with time - or individual atoms that form shifting patterns in a mesh - or crystal spiders who outlive Death and think cause and effect are nifty, but optional - if all that is true, and if you know Young Wizards, you know it is - than how can it be harder, somehow, to imagine wizardry among humans who are pretty much the same, just with slightly different rules to their world? And yet, somehow for many people it is harder.
To understand wizardry as it works not just in Nita and Kit's world, or the few worlds they've visited in canon, to understand how it works for fungal mycelia networks or for humans who are lawyers in a New York City that might or might not have the same kind of shadow of Manhattan, you have to be able to boil the Oath down to its very basics: to say, no matter what the wording or recension of the Oath you took, at its core all it takes to be a wizard is to say: "I want to try to help. Can I?" and to hear back, yes. But to be a good wizard, you also have to be able to look at someone else who said "I want to try to help" - even if the language they said it in, the ways they carry it out, their goals, their worldview, their methods - seem to you incomprehensible, or even abominable - to come to them, and see them trying to help, and say, cousin.
And once you've got that far - once you understand that - well. It's not that much farther until you see someone saying, let me help, and you can't remember if Dai stihó and Greetings and defiance really mean anything different after all.
So here's some fics about the Lone One, the Enemy, the Star-Snuffer, the Bringer of Death, the Lord of Entropy, the Fairest and Fallen, having a nice day.
- Well Played, Little Wizard (2661 words) by mutuisanimis
Fandom: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Darryl McAllister, Lone Power (Young Wizards)
Additional Tags: Kit shows up for two paragraphs, Chess, NME Compliant
Chess in a garden. - When the Man Comes Around (2553 words) by silverbirch
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Lone Power (Young Wizards), Original Character
Tea and cookies. - The Colors of the Evening Stars (4479 words) by atypicalowl
Fandom: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Lone Power (Young Wizards)
Additional Tags: Introspection, The Lone Power takes a self-care day, someday I will write a completely serious LP fic but today is not that day, today you still get some humor to balance things out
A sunny holiday. - Lips to the Vessels, Throats to the Heavens (4891 words) by yuletidefairy
Fandom: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Kit Rodriguez/Lone Power
Additional Tags: Mythology - Freeform, Yuletide, New Years Resolutions 2008
A boy and a fruit tree.
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Thanks for all these recs! I appreciate your intros, and particularly this one. I read "Well Played Little Wizard" and loved it. It touches on the slipperiness of the Lone Power, which is why I opened my mouth in response to the bit of your intro I quoted, and then closed it again. So much slipperiness around trying to help, with or without an embodiment of evil.
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(Sorry about the italics fail!)
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Darryl in the fic you read is from 'A Wizard Alone' - he was the first autistic main character in kids' lit a lot of people encountered! Unfortunately it was long enough ago that perceptions changed and she ended up re-writing that volume extensively a few years ago with lots of input from autistic fans, and I haven't read the new version. (it's only available as an ebook via her website and, in a lovely irony, I am apparently too non-neurotypical to successfully get ebooks from that website.)
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