azdak

I found out last night that legionseagle has died and these lines from Donne have been going round inside my head all day. Obviously, my sense of loss is nothing compared to the people who actually knew her. We were friends on Dreamwidth and I never met her in real life, or knew what she looked like, and I wasn’t entirely sure what her real name was. But I admired her enormously – her brilliance, her fierce intelligence, her fantastic fic – she was that rare beast, a fic writer who can not only write beautiful lines but also knows how to plot - and inextricably mixed in with all that, her courage, not only as a sailor (never in a million years would I wanted to face the hair-raising adventures she related so entertainingly), but in her online life, her willingness to put up a fight, to stand up to the scummier denizens of the internet and say what she believed without fear or favour.

For those of us who live part of our lives in fandom, a towering presence like legionseagle, who left her mark on every fandom she engaged with, plays a significant part in shaping our fannish world. I read a great deal of her fic (probably not all of it, she was an enviably prolific writer and her DW entries alone run to the hundreds), I even tread stories based in fandoms I wasn’t keen on. Harry Potter never caught my imagination, but I read all her LoPiverse stories because they were so damned well-written. Not only could she plot like a demon, she had an ear for a turn of phrase and psychological insight that could cut like a knife. Who cares if the original characters weren’t all that captivating when you’ve got that on offer? Sherlock was another fandom I never got into, despite watching some of the episodes, but I read every new volume in her Gondal saga which fused, amazingly, the Bronte children’s fantasy worlds with Sherlock. And why not? It was only one of the ways she broadened my fannish horizons, showed me the limitless possibilities of fic.

I watched my first ever k-drama because of the review she wrote of The King: Eternal Monarch, and my second, Hotel del Luna, for the same reason. When I discovered she was writing Nirvana in Fire fic, I was over the moon. A Long-Expected Party, co-written with caulkhead, will always hold a special place in my heart and on my bookshelf, it’s the kind of fic that makes you both giddy with delight to be reading something so utterly hilarious and wonderful and joyous, and at the same time plunges you into black despair because you know you’ll never write anything as good yourself.
And now, suddenly, she’s gone and there will no more fic, no more reviews, no more fists and feminism and rollicking sailing stories. And without her the world is so much drier a cinder.