Mortal Love

The Nick and NatPack faction site. With the permission of the faction leader, now moved to https://www.foreverknight.ca/MortalLove/index.html

NOTE: archived within this site is Forever Knight - Canon & Trivia, now at https://www.foreverknight.ca/MortalLove/canon.htm


War V

Since Amparo Bertram's site has gone, the War V site (which she archived) has been moved to https://www.foreverknight.ca/WarFive/war5.html

As well as all posts, there is a drinking game and a page of quotations from the war.


Judith Freudenthal's Episode Guides

Now moved to https://www.foreverknight.ca/JudithFreudenthal/EpGuide/index.html

Before the deletion of the danaknight.com site, Judith's stories were uploaded to AO3; but the episode guides don't qualify for archiving there.

I've just finished updating the Fanlore article on FK Fic Fest. The article in the Forever Knight Wiki is also up to date.

In the latter, I've also updated the author pages for all participants and made wiki articles for each story.

Are there any other Forever Knight fans planning to do Yuletide this year? If so, we should coordinate on nominations. These will continue through the 27th (Wednesday) ending some time on the following day, varying depending on your time zone.

FK is eligible again this year because of changes in the rules.

One is permitted to request four fandoms this year; but only four characters per fandom. However, by coordinating with one another, fans can ensure that they each put in different nominations, thus getting a larger tagset. When one is actually signing up for Yuletide, one is only permitted to request/offer characters in the tagset; so it's important to get in the ones you want to ask for—and equally, of course, the ones you are willing to offer.

Because of the cast changes over the three seasons, FK has quite a large number of regulars, let alone occasional supporting characters and guest stars.

I plan to nominate Nick, Schanke, Vachon, and LaCroix—which makes a rather "guy-heavy" selection, I know, but I want to cover as many bases as possible, i.e. both vampire and cop plots.

If you plan to do Yuletide, you might need to get in a different set of nominations to make the requests and offers you hope for.

In checking which sites are no longer on the web so I can stick them in the archive, I have (obviously!) also found which ones are STILL out there. And yes, there are more of them than I'd thought.

So I've decided to add a good old-fashioned links page to the archive.

You can find it here: https://www.foreverknight.ca/links.htm

Happy scrolling!

 

For many years, one of the most recommended FK sites was one of the—if not the—very first fan sites devoted to the show. It was started by Jasmine when she was at Michigan Tech, and variously hosted on their servers until she left, at which point Dorothy Elggren gave it space on her website at http://www.loftworks.com.

Sadly, this recently disappeared. Along with the First Unofficial Forever Knight Page (which is a lot bigger than a mere page), we also lost Dorothy's archive for her own fanfic as well as some pages about her art, not all of which was FK.

Fortunately, Desiree had saved the whole site back at the beginning of the century (along with quite a few others, several of which have been in the Forever Knight Website Archive for a number of years). So I am very pleased to be able to put the Loftworks site back on the web.

You can find Dorothy's "Writing About the Knight" here.
The First Unofficial FK Page is here.
And (taken off the Wayback Machine, since neither of us had it saved), the OK Reviews are here, off a new index page so you can access them directly.

Now you may be wondering what those "OK Reviews" are. They were written by Lee Record for Season Three, and seem to have been posted shortly after each episode aired.

The First Unofficial FK Page has an "Episodes" section where each episode has its own page with basic info about it; and, for the Season Three eps, these pages have links to the OK Reviews, which were archived on the Loftworks site. All the episode pages also link to Marc Wallace's Forever Knight Critiques.

Like the First Unofficial, Marc Wallace's site has pages for each episode; and those pages link back to the First Unofficial FK Page. In fact the two sites are cross-linked all over the place. The FK Website Archive already has Marc's site. So I've gone in and changed every bloody one of those links so that the original effect is preserved. You can find the Forever Knight Critiques site here.

Enjoy!

In the later Forever Knight mailing-list Wars—at least, up till the "six-year gap" between Wars 12 and 13—a lot of factions put up their own war pages.

Some are just lists of participants, often with their permission statements (for every participant had to e-mail the the listowner, McLisa, explicitly giving permission to be written into the War). These often include short descriptions of players' war personae to aid the warscribes, especially those from other factions who might be writing crossovers. The bigger sites also archive the faction's war posts.

They vary a lot in size! Short ones are often found within the faction's own site; but sometimes (especially if the person who'd made it had gafiated), the war site would have to be a page in a member's personal site. Alternatively, they might make a tiny site just for purposes of war—something that was relatively easy back in the day of free sites like GeoCities.

A few still exist in the wild, so to speak. Others have been lost in the mists of time, which come up perilously fast on the internet. It was not uncommon for the old page to be simply taken down and replaced with the one for the latest war—at least while there were "latest wars".

These links lead to the faction war sites in the archive:

WAR 8:  Unnamed Faction

WAR 10:  NatPack, Ravenettes

WAR 11:  Cousins, Die-Hards, FoDs, Knighties, NatPack, Nick & NatPack, Ravenettes, UF

WAR 12:  Cousins, Nunkies Anonymous, UF, Vaqueras

"Factions" were (are?) a big thing in the Forever Knight mailing list fandom. The first were associated with major characters, and motivated the big round-robin RPGs known as "wars". These—and the others that followed—initially were by way of being teams playing in the wars; but, with the advent of easy mailing lists, became groups of friends with similar interests. From there, Yahoo!Groups of other kinds also became "factions", if only by courtesy (though some of them did play in a few of the largest wars).

For some factions, a website was basically a single page that advertised their existence. For others, it became an archive for fan fiction, jokes, top ten lists, screen- and sound-capture archives, and trivia/FAQ pages. Back at the beginning of the century, i.e. in the fandom's heyday, there were a lot of them. Some were formally associated with the faction's e-group; others were produced by a single member, with love and care. Some were elaborate, large, and regularly updated; others can only be called embryonic—barely started and left incomplete, with myriad "under construction" notices.

Most were uploaded to free sites—free to users, that is, because the webhost sold ad space above (or, in the case of GeoCities, to the side) of each page of the site.

Some of the faction sites do still exist out on the Web—either on the surviving free sites, Tripod and Angelfire, or paid for by someone still active in the fandom. Most, though, have long since vanished. Indeed, some disappeared so many years ago that even the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has, at best, a handful of shadowy pages missing most of their graphics and stories. A few of these, though, were preserved years ago by fans who supplied Steph and me with them when we started the Forever Knight Website Archive. Current faction leaders and/or other members helped us restore others. Fortunately, GeoCities and FortuneCity did provide a little warning that they intended to quit hosting free sites; so many I was able to collect just before their disappearance.

I think I've now uploaded to the new site all of the faction sites that we held. ( Here's the list of what is currently in the archive. )

The new rules for the Yuletide fanfic gift exchange, i.e. dropping FF.net when calculating eligibility, means that Forever Knight should once more be eligible.

Forever Knight fans take note!

There are well under 1000 FK stories in AO3 that are in English, complete, and under 1K words.

When nominations start, do please consider including FK among the fandoms.

Once upon a time, the Forever Knight mailing list fandom had a small zine, Crusader, associated with the Kickstart the Knight campaign. This was a print edition, scans of which were archived on the Kickstart the Knight site.

Crusader was later resurrected as an on-line zine on LittleBlackaPony's website. However, being on-line meant that each old issue was wiped whenever a new one was posted. The Wayback Machine has various back issues, but these are in quite imperfect condition, with a lot of missing pictures, buttons, headers etc.

Fortunately, as it turned out, although LittleBlackaPony didn't have the pages themselves anymore, she located a folder with most of the graphics. There are still a few things gone (esp. for the issue of Spring 2006). Still, I've been able to reassemble most of the on-line editions.

You can find them indexed here.

Once it was announced that FK was going to be cancelled, which happened in late 1995, there were repeated attempts by the mailing-list fandom to save the show.

The first—the Save Forever Knight campaign—began before the final episode aired. It was eventually designated "War 6", though that's really just a courtesy title. A prominent part of the campaign involved seven fans going to the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) in order to lobby in person. When (as we all know!) the show was cancelled anyway, a new effort—dubbed Kickstart the Knight—tried to persuade TPTB to bring the show back. This eventually segued into a campaign to have it released on videotape, and eventually on DVD.

Some of this appeared on the web. I figured I should prioritize getting these sites up, since they're a big part of our history.

The old Save Forever Knight campaign site was eventually moved to Mel's fanfic archive: https://www.foreverknight.ca/www.fkfanfic.com/sosfk/index.htm

Various versions of the Kickstart the Knight site can be found here:
https://www.foreverknight.ca/KtK/

As for the NATPE Seven: at the time, they reported their the exploits in posts to FORKNI-L. Eventually Diane Echelbarger put an expanded version on her website, The Pewter Gryphon's Lair. You can find the NATPE Seven report here:
https://www.foreverknight.ca/PewterGryphon/NATPE7/index.html

And finally, here's an on-line petition to put FK out on video:
https://www.foreverknight.ca/FKVideoPetition/index.html

Now that the three main archives are up in the Forever Knight Website Archive, I've started adding the War sites—and, if you weren't on list back in those days of yore, you can read about the wars here. In brief, call them a sort of RPG, with posts made to the FKFIC-L mailing list.

In the heyday of the mailing list fandom, a few hundred people might play. Not all were warscribes; but the old wars could be BIG. The Wars were, at one time, a big thing for the fandom. Quite a lot of people didn't play, of course; but those who did took war quite seriously. Hilariously so. A good time was had by all (etcetera, etcetera). I played in the last three wars, as scribe for the Die-Hard faction; and I made the website for War 15.

The first four wars are available on the main archive, indexed here; and War 8 is also there, but indexed separately.

Amparo Bertram archives War 5 on her own site.

And Jarvinia archives War 7 on her site.

(For those wondering what happened to War 6, it's a courtesy number given to the campaign back in 1996 when FK fans tried to persuade TPTB not to cancel the show.)

Here are the ones now in the Website Archive:

• War 9 site
  
• War 9 posts
  
• War 10 site
  
• War 10 posts
  
• War 11 site
  
• War 11 posts
  
• War 12 site (incl. posts)
  
• War 14 posts
  
• War 15 site (incl. posts)
  

Webspace was at a premium twenty-odd years ago; and early sites tended either to zip up the e-mailed story posts or leave them out altogether. So, for those wars, I've unzipped the stories and linked them to an index page for easy (or, at least, easier) reading.

Wars 12 and 15 have more familiar-looking websites, with a lot of ancillary material as well as the posts.

Alas, the site for War 13—quite a nice one—disappeared from the web before I'd tucked it away in its entirety. I have the ancillary pages, as well as the posts to FKFIC-L; but I must have quit for the day before collecting the webpages that were made for the stories. The Wayback Machine has hardly anything of the site; so I have quite a bit of editing to do to turn the e-mail into the site style. I should be able to recreate the War 13 site; but it's not up yet.

Also not up are the various faction war sites. Yet.

The main FK fic archive (Mel's archive) has now been uploaded to the Forever Knight Website Archive. You can find it here:

https://www.foreverknight.ca/www.fkfanfic.com/

This also means that V4S (the virtual season that was group-written after FK was cancelled) is back up. And the Forever Knight Bookcover Contest, FK font, 1999 FK fanfic awards, and episode transcripts.

Including five wars. One to Four are accessed from the "wars" link, and War Eight can be found here.

More to come!

Now that my own website is back up on the web (and I've checked through it and made edits where necessary so it reads properly), I've started uploading some of the archived sites that Steph and I had in the Forever Knight Website Archive.

The first to be uploaded was the site with the List Gardener's Tips, since it seemed important to get that back on the web. I know there aren't a lot of new people joining the list; but we do sometimes have fans-of-yore return to the fold.

You can find it here: https://www.foreverknight.ca/ListGardener/fk-lists.html

I've also got two of our fanfic archives up. Not Mel's yet: I've got some edits to make to it. However, both JADFE and the FTP site are now back on line.

You can find JADFE here: https://www.foreverknight.ca/JADFE/index.htm

And the FTP site is here: https://www.foreverknight.ca/FTP/index.htm

My focus next is going to be on War and faction sites.

Finally, finally ... I've bought webspace and a domain name and uploaded my website. You can find it at:


http://www.foreverknight.ca/FK4/


And, if that looks kind of familiar, it's because its almost the same as before. I couldn't use the same domain name that Steph had because it's paid up for another three years. However, the .ca version was available—and eminently reasonable for a Canadian TV show. (Being Canadian, I'm allowed to end my website with .ca if I want.)

No, this doesn't mean that the whole Forever Knight Website Archive is up. Yet. (Give me time!)

About a month ago, my website mysteriously disappeared. Along with all the rest of the Forever Knight Website Archive, including three main FK fic archives, most War archives and faction sites, sundry personal sites saved from GeoCities and Fortune City, and so on and so forth.

My first reaction was to e-mail Stephanie Kellerman, who had been hosting the Website Archive on her site, www.foreverknight.org. The e-mail bounced. I posted to the FORKNI-L mailing list (on which Steph had been active last fall). No response—well, except for concern and sympathy from other FK fans. I then googled and found an obituary.

Whether the Stephanie Kellerman who died is our Steph Kellerman from FK fandom is something I have no way of knowing. That's one of the difficulties with fannish friendships. You may not actually know the person's RL name; and, even if you do, you probably don't have a street address for them. However, the obituary included the usual little bio, which said the deceased knew computers and had four grandchildren—and, although my correspondence with Steph had been mainly about the Website Archive, things did occasionally get mentioned round the edges (so to speak); and it fits.

Anyway, I do plan to put my website up somewhere in the near future on some webhosting service yet to be decided. At the moment, I'm doing some revisions here and there; so it will probably be a few weeks.

When I do, I want to get a large enough site to be able to rehost the other things that have gone. As I did a lot of the collecting and editing of the old GeoCities sites, I have back-ups. I even, in a fit of concern, went page by page through the big fanfic archive copying absolutely everything (I hope!); so that's not lost either.

It'll take time to put everything back up; and, when I do, there'll be a new domain name since Steph's "www.foreverknight.org" has apparently been paid for until 2026, and I'm certainly not going to wait until then! It will all mean an appalling lot of editing in various wikis; but c'est la vie, I suppose, if one finds oneself called to be an archivist.

I've been pretty remiss over the past few years in writing about the new pages on my website. However, I recently added the page for "Limner", the story I wrote for this year's fkficfest. We got nine stories, all of them good'uns. Check them out!

"Limner" is set in a monastery in the thirteenth century; and I wanted the design to reflect this.

For the main background, I decided to use a graphic of ceramic tiles somewhat resembling those one might find in a medieval building. I found that I had to tweak the original, since it didn't display properly: the edges mated up all right, but the shading on the red-brown areas hadn't been blended properly and left lines where the graphic repeated across and down the page. I fixed that by flipping it multiple times and joining the whole thing together: the result is four times the size of the original, but "tiles" properly.

Then, instead of my usual central panel with a fancy border, I decided to use a sort of triptych design with panels of coloured church-style windows on either side of the story. This meant that I had to be careful when specifying the size of all the sections (and I haven't tried it out on different browsers); but I hope it works okay.

At the top, I added a picture of partly ground pigment. I got it from Wikimedia Commons, and then wiped out the background in the photo. I think I got it pretty well, especially since it's been scaled down quite a bit. The protagonist is a monk illuminating a manuscript; and the process is sketched in as the story progresses. I was lucky enough to find a picture in which the heap of pigment is red (like the demon the monk is painting). Almost the entire pile is in the photo; so I only had to shift a few grains around to get it to look right.

The monk is never named in the story. In fact, brightknightie contacted me to check if this was an accidental omission. However, I assured her it was deliberate: I wanted readers to figure it out as they read. She was very careful not to let the secret out!   :)   Comments on AO3 suggest that the stratagem was effective.

Prompt 4: the Furies
The Furies, also known as the Erinyes, are a trio of vengeance deities whose immortal task is to hear complaints of insolence from mortals—and to punish those crimes by hounding the culprits relentlessly. They are said to focus on punishment for lying, killing, or sinning against the gods, but any lawbreaking was indeed punishable by them.

“Alecto was the oldest, unceasing in anger. Megaera was next, retaliator of jealousy, and Tisiphone, the last, regarded as the avenger of murder.”
― Elisabeth Naughton, Stolen Fury

Maybe you are inspired by Alecto (“the implacable one”, incites war), or perhaps Megaera (“the envious one”, vengeance) speaks to you, or maybe even Tisiphone (“avenger of murder”, guards the gates to Tartarus) – however you want to interpret the prompt, we’d love to hear from you!

On consideration, I decided to do another self-rec for this prompt. (I notice that several other participants are self-reccing this year.)

One would think that, among my various Forever Knight based stories, there'd be plenty that fit this motif. We are, after all, talking not only about vampires but a dysfunctional family where Divia slew her own master Q'ara, LaCroix slew Divia, and Nick did his level best to slay LaCroix. Shades of Greek mythology! However, where these characters are concerned, I tend to try to look beneath the obvious to unpick deeper psychological causes than mere revenge.

So instead I'm going to turn to war.

For those who don't know Forever Knight, there's a bit of backstory to "The Siege of Hastings". The protagonist of the show, Nick Knight, was turned into a vampire in 1228. This every writer ought to know, since the voiceover to the opening credits tells you so each week. Nevertheless, what is obvious to a fan writer is not necessarily so to a scriptwriter, especially in a show that apparently had no proper book—and definitely had a loosey goosey attitude to continuity. At any rate, in the episode "Forward Into the Past", Nick calls in a favour from another vampire whom he saved "at the Battle of Hastings". Which took place in 1066.

Fans have, of course, written fix-its ever since: they range from time-travel to bar fights in a Hastings pub. I was asked for a story with a new approach. If you're curious, you can read the comments on AO3 here.

It is obviously pure coincidence that the story stars three vampires and there are three Furies. Which is who is up to you.

Prompt 3: Hecate
Otherworldly and mysterious, Hecate is best known for her association with magic, ghosts, and the night. If you hear the baying of hounds in the dark, she's likely near as they were ever at her side. She is traditionally depicted as bearing two torches to light her way or as a triple goddess of the crossroads. In mythology she is known for helping Demeter search for her daughter Persephone, a theme that ties her even more to the Underworld and spirits she is associated with. Today she is often considered a representative of those liminal places where reality bends and all manner of events may unfold...

For this prompt, I'm self-reccing a Forever Knight fic I wrote for Yuletide in 2016, "The Father, the Son, and the Unholy Ghost", which was a treat for astolat.

True, the "ghost" of the title is not a real ghost: it's Divia, the evil-seed vampire daughter of Nick's master, LaCroix, who turns her own father into a vampire in the flashback to the episode "A More Permanent Hell" and then returns from the grave in "Ashes to Ashes" to avenge his killing her when she proposed incest. "Ashes to Ashes" ends with Nick saving LaCroix from Divia by beheading her. All that does seems consistent with the Hecate prompt.

I have to admit that Divia was never a favourite of mine. She seemed pretty one-paced in her villainy (though it was intriguing to finally have an origin story for LaCroix). However, when I thought about it, I realized there had to be more to the history between her and her father than could ever have been fitted into a few flashback scenes. After all, a couple of decades separate the two episodes in which Divia appears; and, even in the long life of a vampire, much can happen in twenty years.

Prompt 1: Hades
Hades is the god of the dead and the king of the Underworld with which his name became synonymous. Despite modern connotations of death as evil, Hades was actually more altruistically inclined in mythology; his role was often maintaining relative balance between the realms. He was often depicted as cold and stern in his judgement, and he held all of his subjects equally accountable to his laws. Above all else, Hades ensured the finality of death and that none of his subjects ever left the Underworld.

This prompt promptly prompted <g> me to think of Forever Knight, particularly the episode "Near Death", whose flashback shows us Nick's experience in 1228 after the vampire LaCroix drains him to the point of death. He is offered the option of passing through a gateway to a brilliant light, representing death or some afterlife; but instead he chooses to answer LaCroix's call and wake to an altered immortal body.

It is an essential part of the vampire mythos, at least in this series, that they are not dead: being "undead" is something Other. For LaCroix (and most vampires in their community), actual death is The End; and, as such it is to be avoided at all costs. For Nick, whose quest is to reverse his vampiric condition, it is mortal life that he wants desperately to regain.

That death is the inevitable consequence of mortality is something that Nick accepts. Or, at least, in the strength of his current state and the health of his youth when he was brought over, he accepts death in theory. Whether, in the extremity of illness or age, he might alter his view ... well, that is a topic for fan fiction. Admittedly, few authors have tackled it.

Every week, Fanlore features one of its articles on its home page: just the intro, but with a link to the full article so people are enticed to check it out. An article must first be suggested (and often tweaked a bit), and won't be featured until at least four of the editors have voted yes.

This week Fanlore features a Forever Knight article!

The Ger Bear Project dates back to 1997, when Brenda Bell decided to stuff and dress a set of teddy bears in costumes worn by Geraint Wyn Davies. Of the six bears she completed, four are in FK outfits. Most were auctioned off for charity; but one was given to GWD and she kept one for herself.

Check it out!