Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2021: Week 2

The Course of Honour is an original slash novel by Avoliot posted on Archive of Our Own in 2017. The story's early descriptive working title was "Arranged marriage space royalty origfic".

The small fandom has struggled to connect on AO3 because the tag wranglers have synned fandom tag "The Course of Honour - Avoliot" with the "Original Works" fandom tag where The Course of Honour was originally posted. The author does not read fanfiction of their own work because they feel it would be an intrusion on fannish spaces, which are usually author-free. Several works were written for the 2017 Yuletide exchange and it has since been occasionally requested in other exchange fandom events.

The Course of Honour and a related "storylet", And Now A Short Speech, were taken down from Archive of Our Own on April 15th, 2019. Avoliot announced the takedown in advance, saying "It is likely to be available in some form or another in the future, but I can’t give any certainty as to what form," and encouraged fans to save the story by using AO3's download function. Before the takedown, the work had over 3900 kudos and over 1400 bookmarks.

In August 2019 it was announced that The Course of Honour was being published as a novel by Tor Books, now titled Winter's Orbit.