More Frozen trouble
18 July 2019 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI'm struggling my way through to the end of my second "Frozen" one-shot without being particularly happy about it -- I'm going to have to go back and fix Hans' characterization again, because it's all over the place. (And his motivations, as well -- why is he yanking Anna's chain so hard at the beginning, if he is supposed to be there for at least slightly unselfish reasons? And what exactly is his real reason, even if Anna never quite works it out?)
Hans-after-sixty-years is effectively an original character who is being constrained by a bit of shared history with the film, which I think is part of my consistency problem. The other part is the old business of am I trying to whitewash him or not — writing him being creepy is entertaining, but it's not actually going to win me any Brownie points with the 'Hans is a psychopath' brigade and it makes less sense with the rest of the story. On the other hand, writing him as a miraculously benevolent uncle is basically ignoring the events of the film, at which point it's pretty pointless calling it 'fan-fiction' — we see enough of that with Dear Erik :-(
I was trying to go for a sort of Charles Muntz feel -- the superannuated explorer who is still quickwitted and dangerous -- but the idea was for the characters to end up in genuine alliance, and maybe the space of a 5–6000 word one-shot is just too brief to make that plausible. (Can Anna really forgive what he did to her a matter of subjective hours earlier? Can Hans really have changed enough to be even slightly altruistic, even with the benefit of a salutory jail experience followed by a few years of the Abbé Faria? Can I get away with the implicit (and anachronistic) Dumas crossover?)
Another problem, of course, is how I'm going to write a plot summary when the idea was for the reader at the beginning to be just as mystified as Anna over what has happened and who Hans is: the selling points of the story are 'Anna wakes up to discover that she has been frozen for sixty years, only to be greeted by Hans', which makes it hard to summarise usefully without actually revealing any of that :-p
And tagging issues: if I tag the story for Anna and Hans, it's probably going to be pretty obvious who the stranger at the start is anyway... or maybe not, given that she doesn't know about the time-lapse and therefore neither she nor the reader have any reason at that point to identify him with a man of over eighty? But that takes us back to the question of how does she identify him, if not -- as currently -- by his being deliberately creepy about their past relationship? Sounds as if we're going to lose the ginger children again....
The whole thing feels like a mess again. You get what seems like a shining clean inspiration (instead of Anna waiting and watching for a frozen Hans, why not a frozen Anna who wakes up to re-encounter Hans?), but when you actually try to write that image, even after it seemed to play out neatly in your head, it just doesn't seem to hang together.
And then currently before I try to tackle any of that I'm still juggling the various bits of the ending round in my head, trying to work out which order they ought to go in :-(
We've done Olaf. There's the sledge run: do they go down together, or does she decide to go back (to prove that she is better than he is)? Possible Everest-style provisions (N.B. current date is circa 1900). And at what point do we get "You still love crazy"? If that's going to be the parting shot it pretty much requires they go down together (or he's not going to have a chance to say it!) But I'm leaning to the view that it probably comes earlier...
The final relationship this weird alliance will take on still seems to be pretty much suspended in the air at the moment, depending on exactly what comes next and what twist ends up getting put on it in the spur of the moment, which is an uncomfortably vague situation to be in — as with the Epilogue to The Choices of Raoul.
And then there's poor Arctic Raoul, who has been completely abandoned for weeks now (and I can't even claim it's because of the totally unsuitable weather, given that I've got Anna fantasizing about pushing Hans into a snowdrift!)
Hans-after-sixty-years is effectively an original character who is being constrained by a bit of shared history with the film, which I think is part of my consistency problem. The other part is the old business of am I trying to whitewash him or not — writing him being creepy is entertaining, but it's not actually going to win me any Brownie points with the 'Hans is a psychopath' brigade and it makes less sense with the rest of the story. On the other hand, writing him as a miraculously benevolent uncle is basically ignoring the events of the film, at which point it's pretty pointless calling it 'fan-fiction' — we see enough of that with Dear Erik :-(
I was trying to go for a sort of Charles Muntz feel -- the superannuated explorer who is still quickwitted and dangerous -- but the idea was for the characters to end up in genuine alliance, and maybe the space of a 5–6000 word one-shot is just too brief to make that plausible. (Can Anna really forgive what he did to her a matter of subjective hours earlier? Can Hans really have changed enough to be even slightly altruistic, even with the benefit of a salutory jail experience followed by a few years of the Abbé Faria? Can I get away with the implicit (and anachronistic) Dumas crossover?)
Another problem, of course, is how I'm going to write a plot summary when the idea was for the reader at the beginning to be just as mystified as Anna over what has happened and who Hans is: the selling points of the story are 'Anna wakes up to discover that she has been frozen for sixty years, only to be greeted by Hans', which makes it hard to summarise usefully without actually revealing any of that :-p
And tagging issues: if I tag the story for Anna and Hans, it's probably going to be pretty obvious who the stranger at the start is anyway... or maybe not, given that she doesn't know about the time-lapse and therefore neither she nor the reader have any reason at that point to identify him with a man of over eighty? But that takes us back to the question of how does she identify him, if not -- as currently -- by his being deliberately creepy about their past relationship? Sounds as if we're going to lose the ginger children again....
The whole thing feels like a mess again. You get what seems like a shining clean inspiration (instead of Anna waiting and watching for a frozen Hans, why not a frozen Anna who wakes up to re-encounter Hans?), but when you actually try to write that image, even after it seemed to play out neatly in your head, it just doesn't seem to hang together.
And then currently before I try to tackle any of that I'm still juggling the various bits of the ending round in my head, trying to work out which order they ought to go in :-(
We've done Olaf. There's the sledge run: do they go down together, or does she decide to go back (to prove that she is better than he is)? Possible Everest-style provisions (N.B. current date is circa 1900). And at what point do we get "You still love crazy"? If that's going to be the parting shot it pretty much requires they go down together (or he's not going to have a chance to say it!) But I'm leaning to the view that it probably comes earlier...
The final relationship this weird alliance will take on still seems to be pretty much suspended in the air at the moment, depending on exactly what comes next and what twist ends up getting put on it in the spur of the moment, which is an uncomfortably vague situation to be in — as with the Epilogue to The Choices of Raoul.
And then there's poor Arctic Raoul, who has been completely abandoned for weeks now (and I can't even claim it's because of the totally unsuitable weather, given that I've got Anna fantasizing about pushing Hans into a snowdrift!)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-19 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-19 02:18 am (UTC)For the Spanish I had to use Google Translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fanfiction.net%2Fs%2F12645586%2F1%2F
The original URL is just in there for my reference, as I'm bound to need it again some time in the future...
The author reviewed one of my stories, which was why I was looking at what she'd written; I don't normally go round trying to translate random bits of fanfic, because machine translation is a pretty painful experience (and the more sophisticated the prose, the more confused the results). In the case of Spanish, the translation obviously has specific problems with pronouns!
But while I can't possibly judge the quality of the writing, the image stuck with me; the statue in the ice palace, and the question over what would happen to it after Elsa's death.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-19 03:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-19 11:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-19 04:15 pm (UTC)