Trivia / A Thing of Vikings

• Dear Negative Reader:
  • The author routinely gets accusations of "Christianity bashing" from reviewers, along with various other antisemitic attacks. To the accusations about Christianity bashing, he has responded that he COULD bash Christianity, based on his experiences, both personal and cultural, but is instead doing his best to be fair, especially given that the era in question was noted for corruption in the Catholic Church.
  • The hiatus ended with a note to any readers who were active supporters of President Trump that they were not welcome reading the story, due to Trumpist harassment experienced by the author over the duration of the hiatus, among other reasons. This resulted in an incredibly nasty and vitriolic response on Fanfiction.net (up to and including slurs and explicit antisemitic death threats) some of which can be seen from where the author shared them on his tumblr. As a result, he first stated that he would be stopping posting on Fanfiction.net; this escalated the abuse, with multiple self-admitted Nazis arriving to further vandalize the comment section. In the end, the author needed to take down the Fanfiction.net version entirely to stop the deluge of hate and bigotry, and locked down the copy on Archive Of Our Own to logged-in accounts only, so that further abuse along those lines could be reported to the Archive's Abuse Team.
• Fanwork Ban: Of a sort; the author has had multiple bad experiences thanks to entitled readers, including one stalker impersonating him in an effort to "canonize" their ideas, and others who have written outright bashfics that graphically murder his characters and gifted said bashfics to him. So while the author has explicitly stated that he has no problem with people using his worldbuilding ideas and OCs in fanfics of their own, so long as they give credit, he is keeping a tight lid on who can write derivative works in his setting; at the moment, there are two, written by one of his proteges, which are oneshots that explore aspects of the story setting.
• From Entertainment to Education: A regular refrain in the fic's reviews is that people have been so fascinated by the story's visit to an otherwise obscure era of history that the reviewers have started reading up on the time period themselves.
• Hire the Critic: The author tried this for his beta-readers, and advises against the practice.
• Life Imitates Art: In Chapter 147, the Jorgenson clan is holding elections for a new clanheir after the previous one died. Nobody can agree on a candidate, with one of them being on the fifth round of votes and no closer to a majority. The chapter was written years before, but published a few months after, a similar thing happened in the US House of Representatives, where Kevin McCarthy only became Speaker after 15 rounds of voting. In the fic, things don't end so cleanly, with the clan splintering into new clans to get out of the clanhead's control.
• Line to God: The author has both a Tumblr and a Discord server on which he's active and chatty.
• Series Hiatus: After two years of near-weekly updates, the author announced one of these after Chapter 85, which lasted for 11 months, between May 2019 and April 2020. Another hiatus was been announced to be impending once Book 3 was completed in March 2021. That hiatus ended in early June of 2022 with the posting of the first chapter of Book 4.
• Teasing Creator: The author has lots of fun using Brandon Sanderson's phrase of RAFO (Read And Find Out) to answer speculation, occasionally combined with popcorn emojis.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: Thanks to harassment and attempted gaslighting by bigots, the fic was outright deleted from Fanfiction.net (originally it was just going to be abandoned so that other people could find the story, but a large number of Nazis and other fascists descended on the comment section there to leave nasty and antisemitic messages, so the author deleted the story from the site in order to deny them the opportunity to attack and defame), and the version on Archive Of Our Own was accessible to registered site members only after a fascist apologist there attempted to gaslight the author about the Charlottesville "Unite The Right" rally and persisted in harassing the author after being told to go away. After the 2020 US Election results, the story was cautiously opened back up to non-registered users again, but there are currently no plans to post anywhere else other than Archive of Our Own. After additional Trumpist harassment, the story is locked down for registered AO3 members only again as of January 2022.
• Word of Gay: Aside from the characters whose queerness is made clear in the text, the author has posted a list of which characters are LGBTQ on Tumblr.
• Write What You Know: The writer is Jewish and a science teacher; unsurprisingly, there's a Jewish sub-plot and a lot of focus on science. They're also a history enthusiast and a lot of details in the story are based on actual historical fact.

---