In honour of the rarewomen ficathon, whose reveal is today, I've been saving four icons featuring...um, well...rare women! Or at least women (and an f/f pairing) that are rare within Forever Knight fandom. Of course, that doesn't include Natalie Lambert or Janette DuCharme: they may be female characters in a rare fandom (alas! that our beloved FK is today considered to be rare!), but they are hardly rare within the fandom.

However, that cannot be said of Grace Balthazar, Myra Schanke, or Urs. Though beloved, none of these is the primary focus of much fan activity. They have their factions; but even in the heyday of FK fandom, there weren't a lot of members. They have their fan fic; but they do tend to appear mostly as supporting characters in stories about other characters. As for the one f/f couple faction, Natalie/Janette, that has also always been one of the smaller ones.

Rare women they may be. Nevertheless, even the smallest faction deserves its icon.




Graces:

I think the Graces must be the oldest of these "rarewomen" factions, for there was someone in War Two who declared allegiance, and that was back in 1994. Grace Balthazar had just appeared in a couple of late episodes in Season One and would be in a few more early episodes of Season Two before TPTB dropped her.

Despite this, the faction seems not to have had a symbol created for it. So I was left with a blank canvas, and decided to use graphics that suggested her role in the show as Natalie's lab assistant at the Coroner's Office in Toronto. A microscope dominates the icon; however, more "faction-symbol-like" are the small flask and graduated cylinder. These were originally filled with garish fluid; but I altered the colours to blue/turquoise shades to suggest the walls of Natalie's lab. The same tones are picked up in the logo and background graphic.




Urchins:

That there are bears in the Urchins' icon will come as no surprise to those who know the etymology of Urs's name, always taken to be short for Ursula (no canon surname). Teddies, certainly: she is the mildest of vampires. However, why are there three of them?

During Season Three, when fans cast around for a name for a faction for the new recurring character, they proposed not only "Bears", but also "Goldilocks", before settling on "Urchins". Of course, Urs is blonde; but I'm sure the "bear" connection was also in people's minds! It is in memory of these alternative faction names that I put three little teddies in her icon. The original clipart came from Webweaver's Free Clipart; but I did a lot of tweaking to it.

The background is a small snip from a sunset screen capture.




Myras:

To outsiders it may seem perverse to have a faction for a character who never appeared in the show, save in a distant farewell shot in the Season Three opener. However, Myra is dear to everyone who loves Schanke, Nick's partner in the first two seasons. Much of our knowledge of his personal life comes from his references to his wife. Oh, the poor man seems so harried—in his own eyes! She wants him to diet, stop smoking, and take her on romantic holidays: how dreadful.

Most closely associated with Myra herself, in many fans' eyes, is her job as an Avon lady Skin Pretty saleswoman. Given that we have no screen captures of her, I decided to use that association as the focus of the icon. The jar used to hold Pond's cold cream. I retinted the base of the jar slightly beige, turned the cap a delicate baby pink, and gave it a (mostly) new label. The name of the company is done in a script font, and the old faction symbol—



—has been added, very tiny, to finish off the Skin Pretty logo on the label. Then I added, round the edges, silhouettes representing two of Myra's activities, as reported by her husband. You will recall that she wanted to go whale-watching, and asked for climbing rope as a birthday present.

The whole is finished off with a background gradient that shades from sky tones at the top (to match the rock-climbing) to sea-tones at the bottom (to match the whales). Like the other gradients I use, it was made at GRSites.com.




Nanettes:

"Nanettes" is, of course, a portmanteau of "Natalie" and "Janette". Nowadays, the term is mostly used only as a referent for Natalie/Janette f/f slash—or Natalie & Janette gen fic, for most FK couple factions have never required romance in their relationships. However, at one time the faction had its own list and a small website, Le Chateau des Nanettes (though that disappeared so long ago that there is only the sketchiest webpage available through the Wayback Machine). Indeed, the occasional Nanette story is still written.

The characters rarely met on screen. However, Natalie went to the Raven in "A More Permanent Hell", from which I took the two screen captures that I combined to make the picture that I used as the centrepiece of the icon. The lighting was luridly green; and so that lingering highlights would not seem out of place, I used green gradients as the background, both inside and outside the central circle. However, I did tweak the colour of Natalie's hair to bring it back to a more natural tone.

The Nanettes never had an official faction symbol that I know of. The raven up in the top right corner is, of course, Janette's symbol. You may be wondering, then, what I used to represent Natalie. Well, I decided to make use of the green lighting! The fluorescent light behind the raven is actually snipped from a screen capture of the morgue. It was under the counter over Natalie's lab desk. The green glow in the icon therefore commingles the lighting of both the Raven and the lab.