Charlie Bone

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Fandom
Name: Children of the Red King
Abbreviation(s): CotRK
Creator: Jenny Nimmo
Date(s):
Medium:
Country of Origin: Great Britain
External Links:
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Children of the Red King, more commonly known as the Charlie Bone series, is a series of children's fantasy adventure novels.

Overview

A young boy discovers that he has inherited a power from a sorcerer-king who lived a thousand years earlier and is unwillingly sent to an academy for the artistically or magically gifted by his nefarious relatives. He then must battle evil with the help of his friends, many of whom are also descended from the king and have their own unique gifts.

Discussion and community

The online spaces in which the fandom has been most active have shifted over time. There was once a sizable CotRK community on DeviantArt, but it is now wholly or almost wholly inactive. The majority of published CotRK fanfics are on FanFiction.Net; though in recent years, writers have shifted to posting on Archive of Our Own, the fandom is not as large as it was at its peak, and ff.net was dominant for long enough that it still has many more works. Discussion among members of the fandom mostly takes place on the dedicated Discord server or on Tumblr. The creation of fanfic and fan art is common and encouraged through various community challenges, such as Charlie Bone Bad Fic Bingo. Cultivation of the Charlie Bone wiki is also important to some members of the fandom. The fandom is fairly small and tight-knit, with most active members interacting with each other across multiple platforms, and some fan content stems from this. For example, there are multiple fics with "LK (Our Universe)" as a character tag, including one in which fandom member LK beats two unpopular characters to death and one where he is shipped with minor character Christopher Crowquill. Another consequence of the tight-knit online fandom is that there are certain older fics which virtually everyone there has read, including "Loyal to the End They Say He Was" and "Headmaster Charlie". A recent major fandom event was the CotRK Bad Shipping Fic Bingo run by @cotrk-events[1].

Shipping

The most popular canon ships are LightRead (Julia Ingledew/Paton Yewbeam), PianoGroceries (Amy Bone/Lyell Bone), and ThunderBird (Emma Tolly/Tancred Torsson). The first two are relatively uncontroversial, but Tancremma has stiff competition from StormSpirit (Lysander Sage/Tancred Torsson; also known as Tan{c}sander). A Tumblr poll found that the fandom was evenly divided between the two ships and the highest percentage of people liked both ships. Which non-canon ships are popular has changed dramatically over time. One which has risen to prominence more recently is WaterPainting (Charlie Bone/Dagbert Endless; also known as Charbert), which was first tagged for on Ao3 in September 2023 [2] and is now the fourth most tagged romantic ship and the most tagged non-canon ship in the fandom on the site.

In addition to sincere shipping, the fandom revels in creating intentionally ludicrous but benign crack ships. One of the best-known is Granny-Hell (Grizelda Bone/Maisie Jones), thus named because it involves two older women who have lived in the same house for a decade but despise each other. This is not shipped sincerely but is frequently joked about and has multiple works on Ao3. Another which started as a crack ship is Henliver, the ship between Henry Bloor and Ollie Sparks, but it is now shipped sincerely by a number of people in the fandom.

Fan works

Fan Fiction

Fan Art

External links

Fan communities and archives

Fan pages and sites

Resources

References

  1. ^ The Badfic Bingo official post by @cotrk-events
  2. ^ Got a Future, in the Past by Lingard_and_the_Stars is tagged for "Former Charlie Bone/Dagbert Endless"; the first chapter of a longfic by Lingard, which includes Charbert as a slow-burn ship, was published soon after.
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