Ardath Rekha’s Fan Art: The LJRP Era

So in 2005, I left my ex, packed up my stuff, and moved back to my hometown. I was going to have a year to wait until I became an in-state resident and could afford to return to college, and I found myself increasingly thinking about some of the ideas that I’d toyed with in “Fire Girl.” A pyrokinetic version of Jack, as a Fire Elemental in the CoR-verse? Why would someone with that kind of power be on the run? It was starting to distill into a story, but then I stumbled across two roleplaying communities on LiveJournal*: Sages of Chaos and Dear Multiverse. In those communities, characters from all kinds of fandoms crossed paths and interacted, along with original characters and all kinds of strange beings. I threw my pyrokinetic Jack into that mix… and things took off in a big way. So below are some of the characters that I ended up either developing or doing artwork for.

Jack B. BaddDame ZhylawAudrey and Riddick

Jack B. Badd

My pyrokinetic Jack ended up being a complicated girl whose life had been upended by a lie. Convinced (by a group that was trying to manipulate her for their own ends) that the other “Pyreons” on Quintessa had wicked plans for her, she had fled the planet and gone into hiding. She carried a lot of guilt over not using her powers to help her fellow Hunter-Gratzner castaways, and in general struggled between her desire to keep concealing her powers and her desire to learn how to use them effectively so she wouldn’t have to hide anymore. Reunited with a Riddick who had been mourning her apparent death, she grappled with how to open up to him and explain her issues. And then another Riddick appeared in the Multiverse Nexus… and another Jack… and things got even more complicated than ever. These were some really wild times. Friends of mine, along with members of RGFC and AoVD, joined in the festivities, bringing in a variety of PB and CoR characters and alternate versions of the characters, something that led to a cranky post on “Bad RPers Suck” about how the Nexus didn’t need anymore versions of “your Marlboro Man in Space.” But we were (mostly!) having a blast.

I decided that I would have my pyrokinetic version of Jack strictly use pictures of Rhiana Griffith that had been taken in the 2005 era where she sported short, straight, dark hair (aside from one early image where I experimented with the possibility that a pyrokinetic might have, or occasionally display, flame-red hair). I augmented the small number of images I actually had with some photomanips and a number of images I found on stock photo sites of women with similar hair doing interesting things with their faces mostly hidden (none of those are included, since they’re not really part of fandom and all I did was crop existing images). And her adventures may actually be resurrected soon, since they have inspired a completely original story that I am developing even now.

Attributions: The first banner graphic, “The Adventures of Jack B. Badd,” was used on the individual LiveJournal account page for the character, a page somewhat equivalent to the timeline page on Facebook, but more customizable. The picture of Rhiana Griffith came from a Newcastle Herald article about her posing for a portrait by another artist. The second graphic was created for a round of the “LJ Secrets” game periodically played in the “Dear Multiverse” community and elsewhere, in which one character account would post a collection of graphics that he or she had gathered (and which players had sent them) and everyone would try to guess (in character, and using only information their characters knew in-game) who the secrets belonged to. The lines in the graphic are a play on Riddick’s line to Jack at the start of Dark Fury: “First you were a boy, then you were a girl, now you’re a psychic. Be careful what you wish for, Jack.” The profile shot of Rhiana came from a screen capture from the Australian TV show “All Saints.” Unfortunately, Jack was still so new to the game that, while several players got the reference, none of their characters had the ability to make a correct guess. The first icon uses the same materials from the first banner graphic, and was the “default” icon for the journal. The second icon uses the photo from the “Putting Up a Fight” article that appeared in the Newcastle Herald in late 2003, while the third was my attempt to create an illustration based off of Rhiana’s face, that turned out decently. As most of the other icons I used at the time were simple bases, where I had done nothing more than crop and resize images, I have not included them.

Attributions within...

See a little less.

Dame Zhylaw

I was finally getting over my anger about the recasting, and having enough fun playing in LJRP and rebuilding my life that I no longer felt like my “pretendy funtime” escape from reality had been poisoned. A friend from AoVD first added a Kyra to our story and then, after we’d given the character a substantial role to play in the plot we were developing, vanished and became unreachable… so we needed a replacement Kyra. That was how “Dame Zhylaw” came into existence. This version of Kyra had a potent secret: she was the one who had inherited Lord Marshal Zhylaw’s “holy half-dead” powers, making her the new Lord Marshal of the Necromonger fleet. Something she had next to no interest in, because all she wanted to do was get back to her best friend Jack.

I became so taken with this version of Kyra, and her story, that (almost two years later!) I took the concepts I’d played with here and turned them into the first chapter of “Falling Angels.” How’s that for a fun twist?

Attribution: Both graphics make use of screen captures from The Chronicles of Riddick. The first graphic was used on the individual LiveJournal account page for the character. The second image was created for a round of the “LJ Secrets” game. Nobody successfully guessed the meaning of the secret; my intention at that point was that “it” referred to the moment when Zhylaw’s power transferred to Kyra, although that really didn’t make much sense and, when I later developed the concepts into Falling Angels that wasn’t when “it” happened at all.

Attributions within...

See a little less.

Riddick

When my friend brought her Riddick into LJRP, she wanted a very special icon of a sad, world-weary Riddick who looked hard-hit by Kyra’s death… so I made her one using a picture of Vin Diesel’s portrayal of Sean Vetter, in A Man Apart, as a base. I wish I could find the larger Photoshop files I used to create it… because I would love to use the main icon I made her for an eBook cover now. Well, maybe it can be reconstructed…

Just Audrey

A weird thing happened as the story developed. My pyrokinetic Jack turned out to have eyes for another pyrokinetic hanging around the Nexus (Johnny Storm, fergodsake, in a stunningly out-of-character portrayal by a problematic player on the site… but I didn’t know at the time how bad the portrayal was because I hadn’t actually seen The Fantastic Four yet) and wasn’t interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with the Riddick who was very definitely pining after her.

Enter Audrey, an alternate version of Jack who was a normal human being and a whole lot more grounded than my somewhat flighty (literally, thanks to Johnny Storm) pyrokinetic. She both was and wasn’t Jack — she was, essentially, the undisguised girl who appeared in Frank Lauria’s Pitch Black novelization, all grown up — but had all of the qualities Riddick truly needed most of all. Their love story was honestly very sweet. I decided that it would be good to help differentiate her from Jack if I used pictures of Rhiana as a blonde, most of them from her run on the Aussie soap Home and Away, and left the dark hair for Jack. The icons are currently not uploaded, as they were just bases and really, who uses 100×100 images anymore?

LiveJournal was big for a lot of AoVDers and RGFCers for quite a while. A blog-oriented precursor to social media sites like Facebook that followed a few years later, it took a prominent position in our social lives for several years. I got my first journal on there in 2002, but didn’t actually start RPing on there until 2005, when I found several RP communities after encountering some hilarious posts in a group called “Bad RPers Suck.” From late 2005 to mid-2007, my friends and I were incredibly active on there. In 2005, however, LiveJournal began to make changes that would ultimately have a detrimental effect on everybody.

2005 was when LiveJournal’s original developer, Brad Fitzpatrick, sold it to a company named Six-Apart, which had plans to commercialize LJ a lot more than it previously had been. New head Barak Berkowitz took the reins, and while initially things felt unchanged, plans to move the business from Seattle to San Francisco were soon underway. LiveJournal began running ads on its pages in April 2006, breaking a promise that had been foundational to the site before then, and there was talk of a possible IPO in the works. But its popularity with Russian bloggers was taking off, which led to a Russian company, SUP, courting Six-Apart in late ’06/early ’07. And that’s when things got weird.

Even as Six-Apart was trying to make itself attractive to SUP, a group called “Warriors For Innocence” was kicking up a stink over content they felt was objectionable. Apparently they drew especial attention to a blogger on the site who was a self-identified pedophile and used the handle “littlegirllover,” and whose posts were on the inflammatory side. In May, 2007, the powers that be made the dubious decision that they should sanitize LJ for SUP’s benefit… and went overboard. On May 13, LJers woke up to discover that many users on their friends lists had been crossed out in an event that came to be known as ~~Strikethrough.~~ While a few of the accounts may have genuinely deserved a permanent ban, it had also targeted people whose interests included “Lolita” (resulting in a book club that was discussing Nabokov’s works losing many of its members) and other key words from the “Interests” on user profile pages that turned out to be used by abuse survivors, support groups, and Harry Potter enthusiasts. Worse, when called out on it, Berkowitz and his top people doubled down and referred to the deleted accounts as containing child porn, something that led to threats of libel suits.

A friend of mine and I had been working on a story together, using the LJRP medium to test our characters out, that involved BDSM, and we weren’t at all comfortable with the possibility that our character accounts, or our main accounts, might be up on the chopping block next, so we moved our accounts to first GreatestJournal (which promptly died under the weight of all of the people trying to move their accounts over), then InsaneJournal, and finally Dreamwidth. While most of the struck-through accounts were ultimately restored, once SUP took the reins more questionable moves followed, including the removal of even Paid Users being able to keep advertising off of their pages. In retrospect, I believe that the sheer number of slash-friendly accounts that were affected by ~~Strikethrough~~ indicates the real motive behind the event: Six-Apart was attempting to cater to the homophobia of the Russian government that would regulate SUP, concealing it in the guise of “protecting children” (much like that “Don’t Say Gay” fuckery in Florida). In 2010, the advisory board that Brad Fitzpatrick had remained part of was dissolved, and in 2017, LiveJournal officially fell under Russian law for what could or could not be posted… which means that right now, any pro-Ukrainian posts on LiveJournal are illegal. I miss what it once was, but I will never, ever go back.

The decline and fall of LiveJournal is a long and sordid tale...

Don’t you feel more educated now?