Charlie Bone

Children of the Red King, also known as the Charlie Bone series, is a series of eight children's fantasy adventure novels. It is accompanied by a prequel trilogy, Chronicles of the Red King, and standalone novels Henry and the Guardians of the Lost and Gabriel and the Phantom Sleepers. Some members of the CotRK fandom have not read the prequels or standalone, and some who have do not consider the standalones as part of the series canon.
==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 Red 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 the recent CotRK Bad Shipping Fic Bingo run by @cotrk-eventsThe Badfic Bingo official post by @cotrk-events. 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".
== Shipping ==
The most popular canon ships are LightRead (Julia Ingledew/Paton Yewbeam), PianoGroceries (Amy/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). 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 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. and is now the fourth most tagged romantic ship and the most tagged non-canon ship in the fandom on the site. Charlie Bone/Olivia Vertigo used to be more popular but seems to have mostly fallen out of popularity.
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 often 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 ===
* A Step in Time by yunmin 
* And Leaves Still Fall by Etheostoma
* gutter spangles by Fanless
* Headmaster Charlie by BaseballisMyTrueLove
* How To Spot The Differences by lilmisswritergal4eva82719511
* Letters by yunmin
* Letters to Emma by VivaLaVida1704
* MagicKid Productions presents: ENDOWED IN A CUPBOARD (a rather amusing comedy) by wewriteanyshit
* Rather See You Dead by Nobodies Have Hearts
* Spotlights Backstage by DancingSpy (kennys_birthday)
* Strange One from the Sea by Winter Gunhands
* Tell Me a Story: Charlie Does Twilight by ClaireVioletThorpe (WritingPrincess) 
* The Annals of the North by Lingard_and_the_Stars
* The Dress by Suchan and Twelve
* The Sunflower by KM2000 
=== Fan Art ===
* The Flames by @bigjinx
* where's Rembrandt? Burning the house 😊. by @no-life-gen-thank-u-very-much
* happy pride month from Olivia by @rellii-brooks
* i love benjamin brown and his dumbass dog, runner bean. by @mossnrocksnbogwater
==External links==
===Fan communities and archives===
*Stories and crossovers on FanFiction.Net (FFN)
*Charlie Bone Universe - Jenny Nimmo on Ao3
===Fan pages and sites===
* The Charlie Bone Blog of ClaireVioletThorpe
===Resources===
* Children of the Red King Wikipedia page
* Charlie Bone Wiki
==References==
Category:Charlie Bone Universe