There was a time when people tossed out new faction names on a whim—so lightly, indeed, that it turns out they can no often longer remember what they meant. Browsing around the longer faction lists, I've come across a strange and varied collection of names. And my curious questions on FORNI-L have led to some racking of brains, but only sometimes to answers.

Nevertheless, fans can have very long memories. So here you will find icons for the Not So Vestal Virgins, the Oops! Faction, and the Unmentionables. And there are more little factions to come.




On the old Knights of the Cross website (now only available on the Wayback Machine), there is a page devoted to listing its members by their primary factions. Someone took the time to sort the subfactions; and the Cousins, in particular, wax prolific in the matter of subfactions. Even more LaCroix-related affiliations are on The Forever Knight Faction List. I've never quite believed in most of them; and sometimes I'm right. However, sometimes I am (most incredulously) wrong. So I simply had to check with people to find out which ones I should take seriously enough for icons—not that "seriously" precludes joke factions, mind you, provided the joke amused a sufficiency of fans.

As it turns out, the Not So Vestal Virgins are actually associated with the Nunkies Anonymous, being their term for members who are engaged in the duty of tending the Nunkies Shrine.

Those who haven't played war will be unfamiliar with the Shrine to Nunkies. A rather different version of it can be found on the NA website, where it is the name of their screen capture collection. I have obviously never seen the "real" Shrine, not only because of its virtual nature but also because it was destroyed a war or two before I ever got involved in FK fandom. However, the screen capture archive has a very striking design; and it is this that I took as the model for the icon.

The bust of LaCroix has therefore been flanked by torches (gas-powered, I think). So that they not be identical, I tweaked the picture into two different versions by superimposing the flame from another picture of the same model of torch. The whole is finished off with a lightly flaming logo (though, at icon size, the letters are really far too small for the style of the font to be clear).




The Oops! Faction was apparently at one time a running joke on list. People claimed the affiliation as a sort of mea culpa when they broke list rules. (Hitting reply so that the entire digest got copied at the end of their post, that sort of thing.)

The motif I wanted to use for the icon struck me as incredibly obvious. I assumed I'd find a suitable banana peel quite quickly. However, it actually took quite a lot of googling. You see, I wasn't going to put in a person to slip on it; so I wanted the peel flying up into the air. Instead, I kept finding faked photos of people just about to slip on a peel lying on the sidewalk, or cartoons of people going flying into the air with the peel left in situ. Eventually, though, I did find a few contorted banana peels, one of which proved suitable.

All I needed to do was add the swoop, and the name of the faction.

Oops!




The Unmentionables were suggested by Libratsie—which won't surprise anyone familiar with her devotion to Screed. They are by way of being the flip side of the Unsuiteds. Both are couple factions of the "least likely" variety, pairing a major character with someone whom we all know they would never really consider sexually desirable. In this case, our resident "nice girl" is paired with the grungiest of characters.

There are only a handful of Unmentionables stories, and they tend to involve a lot of heavy drinking. I was delighted to spot a most suitable morning-after shot of Natalie!

The rat is the same one that appeared on the Rat-Pack icon. However, I conceived the idea of fitting it with a little stethoscope. That there are those who delight in twisting hearts into the tubes was an unexpected bonus. It took only a little tweaking to fit it on the ratsie.