Amenta
| Fandom | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Amenta, Amenta RP |
| Abbreviation(s): | |
| Creator: | Alicorn and many others |
| Date(s): | April 2017 - present |
| Medium: | Fanfic, Fanart, Blog Posts, RP, |
| Country of Origin: | |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Amenta could be considered a Recursive Fandom (Recursive Fanfiction) or a Shared Universe. While some could be argued to be original fiction, it has its beginnings in a genre of Glowfic, where people would imagine putting characters in an imagined alien society (which was implied to be part of the Star Trek Universe) where all people were sorted into harsh hereditary castes that determined the sort of work they could do, associated with a rainbow of hair colors. Some of the first posted fanfiction involving Amenta was Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings fanfiction set in an Amenta AU. One of the most famous, formative, and widely read of these was the In Color series by Lintamande and Alicorn. Many Amenta works can be seen as recursive fic or response fic to In Color.
Much of Amenta content also took place on Tumblr. Specifically one of the main things on Tumblr was the Amenta RP (Roleplay). This was carried out in the #Amenta RP tag on Tumblr. As described previously, Amentan society was described to have a caste system, and was also fairly advanced technologically, with internet etc. In this RP people would create a Tumblr blog in-character as a member of Amentan society and roleplays centered heavily around both daily life and also re-creating "Tumblr style" "SJ" ideologies and arguments and engaging in internet media criticism including Fandom and especially Anti-Fan posting. The shared timeline of "Amentablr" was based on the general events of "In Color", featuring turmoil around the including the untouchable "red" caste into society, culminating in the invention of spaceflight and discovery of other habitable planets. (Warp drive, in a nod to its Star Trek influences.)
Background
Origins of Amenta
Amenta began as a single sentence: "The Rebecca template wants a new alt and this one has to have pink hair." Most of the major worldbuilding decisions ultimately flowed from this. The hair-based caste system exists so that Amenta is not merely humans with anime hair colors. The status of 'reds' as the untouchable caste came to make it easier to put pressure on the Rebecca alt so that she required a rescue kidnapping by the Maglor alt (this pair of templates having a relationship had several earlier examples, and this is a standard part of all of them), and the very high Amentan desire for children likewise (an existing child from rape or dubious consent is also a standard part of Rebecca's circumstances). In order to justify a universal planetary untouchable caste, Amentans have a fanatical instinct for aversion to causes of disease and spoilage, separation of waste from food and other useful things. In order to justify that, the Amentan year lasts Earth 48 months, because when food must be stored in a thirty-six-month gap between growing seasons rather than nine months, extremely strict cleanliness is essential to avoid starvation. The rest was filled in either in ways that the existing structure suggested, in ways that made Amenta not look to be strictly worse than Earth, or according to the whims of authors and/or the needs of individual stories.
Genre Conventions
A common convention of the glowfic genre that originated Amenta is placing alternate versions of the same character (colloquially 'alts') in various different situations; for example, a conventional 'coffee shop AU' takes a story and makes alts of all its characters in a modern, low-stakes setting, the coffee shop. A group of characters who are alts of each other is referred to as a 'template', as they all appear to be copied off from an original (which doesn't necessarily exist in any story) and modified to fit into whatever world and situation is called for. Glowfic does not typically swap a single story and all its characters; the first Amenta story, Like We're Made of Starlight, consists of a high-technology AU of the entirety of Tolkien's Arda encountering Amenta when it first discovers faster than light travel; this is fairly typical.