This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/pillowcase-of-eels on 2024-05-02 14:30:08.
Welcome back to this write-up about a complicated artist’s complicated book.
Don’t be absurd, of course you have time!
Now that we’ve established what the book is about, let’s take a look at The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls’ rich publication and re-publication history. I promise, it’s more scandalous than it sounds.
“HER SPEECH IS NOTHING, YET THE UNSHAPÈD USE OF IT DOTH MOVE THE HEARERS TO COLLECTION” (HORATIO, ACT IV SCENE 5)
As I’ve mentioned in the last installment, TAFWVG has been released multiple times, in multiple editions – four of them, to be precise. And I wish I was exaggerating when I say that three of those four releases have been veritable masterclasses in testing your audience’s loyalty. In case you’re wondering: the secret is to alter your source material in strange and unpredictable ways, while also constantly messing up on the customer service front.
Most of this installment condenses and combines these two excellent write-ups, which contain most of the receipts: TAFWVG: A History / The Bloody Crumpets: An Inconsistent History. 🔍 Anything that isn’t sourced with links is in there.
It turns out there are good reasons why most fiction authors don’t do real-life inserts so overtly – but in EA’s case, it did make sense, and was warmly embraced by fans upon release. When the book first came out, some of these people had been familiar to the fanbase for years, frequently appearing in candid pictures on EA’s blog and leaving comments on the forum; some were also involved in her music and show. Recognizing that one character’s name was a pun on So-and-So’s username was a nice Easter egg for veteran fans, and newcomers got to learn about fandom lore; it brought the story to life and the community closer.
One side character, for instance, was named after EA’s best friend from Chicago, whom many fans had had direct interactions with: she co-ran EA’s online stores during the Enchant years, and acted as admin, main moderator and EA-liaison of the forum throughout its near-decade of existence.
One crazy girl who thinks she’s a pirate is 100% OC… but her description and illustrations 🪞 were explicitly modeled after pictures of Bloody Crumpet Vecona (one of EA’s back-up performers), who became the first stand-in pirate character 📺 in the live show. Captain Vecona was also celebrated as the “Asylum Seamstress” 🪞🔍: most of the iconic early Opheliac costumes were her design. She had a following of her own, even prior to touring with EA, for her professional costuming work and her collaborations with German photographer Angst-im-Wald. (Shitty archive link, sorry - most of those badass photoshoots seem to have been lost to time. But if you were a European goth in the mid-2000s, search your old hard drives: I promise you, you’ve downloaded some of those pictures.)
Inmate “Veronica”, a cabaret girl diagnosed as a nymphomaniac, was a doppelgänger of her namesake, burlesque dancer Veronica Varlow 🪞 – the ride-or-die Crumpet, whom EA often lovingly called her “husband”, saying they had been lovers in a previous lifetime. Veronica was part of every single tour post-Opheliac release and developed a solid fanbase of her own, which she maintains to this day.
Even the brave and well-mannered talking rats (oh yeah, there’s talking rats in the Asylum story) were named after EA’s real-life pet rodents, who had featured in glamorous photoshoots. (Slight NSFW for sideboob.)
You get the general gimmick by now: EA turns her personal life into art, which she turns into a fictional world, which she then prompts the audience to inhabit with her. The whole Asylum concept was essentially an open invitation to self-insert parasocial fanfic: “Here’s this very personal world that I’ve created, in which I, the artist, exist as a fictional persona, alongside all these quirky inmate characters that you’ve seen in my stage show, and who are avatars my real-life friends. Come on in, make it your home, and populate it with your own zany Victorian alter egos.”
And it worked, to an extent: like I’ve said, most fans were on board before they’d even read the book, and the Asylum became “real” in that sense.
But it can get a bit disorienting to find your place in a fantasy world, when said world keeps changing based on the author’s shifting feelings about her story, her target audience, and her friends… plus, you’d love to read the book, but the darn thing still hasn’t shipped.
ROUNDS 1 & 2: THE HARDCOVERS
~A MINOR ADJUSTMENT~
TAFWVG was first teased in spoken-word bonus tracks 🎤 on a 2007 EP. In spring 2008, EA started reading excerpts from her upcoming book at live shows. Early excerpts from the Asylum narrative featured a character named “Jo Hee” 📺; in the story, she is a cellist from “the Orient” (love that Victorian geography) and Emily’s childhood confidante.
In real life, Lady Jo Hee, Center of Happiness, was the OG Bloody Crumpet. 📺 She had been there since from the very first Opheliac show in Chicago in 2006, accompanying EA on the electric cello – the only instrumentalist ever featured in the line-up besides EA herself.
In August 2008, Alternative Magazine ran a feature about the upcoming book.🔍, teasing some of its pages. Fans were quick to spot a very sisterly picture of EA and Jo Hee 🪞, borrowed from a fan-favorite photoshoot of the two. (An aside: this specific picture also became famous in the fandom for another reason. At some point, someone made an edit replacing Jo Hee with Amy Lee from Evanescence; for a while, it kept making the rounds in alt/goth internet circuits, casual onlookers kept getting excited about it, and Plague Rats kept having to step in and disappoint them.)
Anyway. For reasons undisclosed by either party, Jo Hee quietly left the Crumpets after that tour, never to be mentioned again.
By the time the book came out in late 2009, the character of “Jo Hee” had been renamed “Sachiko”. (I guess it didn’t matter whether the one non-white character in the story was meant to be Korean or Japanese.) Jo Hee’s face had been edited out of the (still clearly recognizable) photograph, and eerily replaced with Nondescript_Asian_Woman_023.jpg from Shutterstock.🪞
You’d think that the switcheroo would have raised more eyebrows, or at least s…
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1ciegh3/bookmusic_emilie_autumns_asylum_pt_3_retconned/