Small Fandom Fest Plans

[nevanna]

I signed up to write a fic for Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, which has a brilliant and fascinating premise: a boarding school for young people who have returned to Earth from adventures in alternate magical worlds and have to re-acclimate to a reality where they don’t quite fit in. The individual stories don’t always quite work for me in their execution, but the setup and a lot of the characters are compelling enough that I’ve read every book so far, some of them more than once. Of the (relatively few) fics on AO3, at least a third are crossovers, which makes a lot of sense when one considers that the series is in conversation with a pre-existing and beloved subgenre.

The smallfandomfest prompt that I chose was at least somewhat based on the seventh book, Where The Drowned Girls Go, whose setting and hook (“what if portal fantasy heroes ended up instead at a school that wanted to brainwash them and crush their dreams?”) I am predisposed to love. Actually, lb_lee, the Whitethorn Institute has a fair amount in common with the House of Resilient Children, from what I recall about that project as you explained it to me. (Now that we’re watching Star Vs. The Forces of Evil, I can safely say that it also has a lot in common with St. Olga’s.)