I'd actually decided against the movie version on the grounds of the timeline problems (which is a pain, because it means I have to ditch several of my pre-formed ideas for scenes), so it's the stage musical that Hertha is seeing here, complete with scantily-clad chorus girls and whip-wielding slave-master, but minus the white dress ;-) Her scornful opinions on the bombastic tendencies of French grand opera (and 'Chalumeau'/Meyerbeer in particular) are those of modern opera audiences, who prefer the Italian trajectory of Verdi and Puccini; poor old Meyerbeer and Halévy are completely forgotten, but were extremely successful with French audiences in their day. But my excuse is that Hertha is a foreigner ;-p (And of course most of the people in the opera house wouldn't have been particularly interested in the music anyway, which is why the chandelier and the rest of the house lights were kept blazing throughout, so that the most important part of the production -- the other members of the audience -- remained visible; it was at heart a social occasion.)
I was aiming for Philippe as the decoy narrator; I know he's not in the musical (and indeed he doesn't exist in my backstory!), but since fanfiction.net allows you to select which 'world' the story is set in but doesn't actually display this to the reader, nobody is going to know at the start which setting is being used. What with the references to "Hannibal" I'd have thought it was pretty obvious this isn't Leroux, but the fandom tends to mix and match characters between the two all the time anyway. But yes, I think it's clearly not Christine's voice here -- and it's not particularly obvious that it's female. (There are only a handful of very subtle clues; the fact that the narrator is entertaining the male half of their 'hosts' while Raoul is entertaining the female half, the fact that the flower-seller automatically assumes that she is the intended recipient of the bouquet when Raoul commissions it, and her slightly appalled reaction to half-naked male performers backstage ;-P) But otherwise the suggestion is that it's either Philippe or some male OC friend of Raoul's. I got a PM on fanfiction.net from someone who said she'd assumed it was Philippe, so I think the decoy worked.
(I also got a fandom-blind review from someone who complained that the prose was written with "older language and complex sentence structures" and that she didn't like the French language or literature set in France; I suppose I can sympathise in that I don't really like the anime fandoms with all their stories set in Japan, which just doesn't interest me. At least she didn't complain this time that I was over-using adverbs or had too many occurrences of the word 'I' in my text.... "I didn't notice any SPAG problems" -- I should jolly well hope not :-P)
I'm glad you liked Raoul; I was afraid he was coming out as a bit of a clueless idiot. I mean, from an objective point of view, he is effectively both leading Christine on, and cheating on his wife. His only excuse is that it genuinely hasn't occurred to him that his attentions might be interpreted in a sexual/romantic light...
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2020-11-01 04:36 pm (UTC)Her scornful opinions on the bombastic tendencies of French grand opera (and 'Chalumeau'/Meyerbeer in particular) are those of modern opera audiences, who prefer the Italian trajectory of Verdi and Puccini; poor old Meyerbeer and Halévy are completely forgotten, but were extremely successful with French audiences in their day. But my excuse is that Hertha is a foreigner ;-p
(And of course most of the people in the opera house wouldn't have been particularly interested in the music anyway, which is why the chandelier and the rest of the house lights were kept blazing throughout, so that the most important part of the production -- the other members of the audience -- remained visible; it was at heart a social occasion.)
I was aiming for Philippe as the decoy narrator; I know he's not in the musical (and indeed he doesn't exist in my backstory!), but since fanfiction.net allows you to select which 'world' the story is set in but doesn't actually display this to the reader, nobody is going to know at the start which setting is being used. What with the references to "Hannibal" I'd have thought it was pretty obvious this isn't Leroux, but the fandom tends to mix and match characters between the two all the time anyway.
But yes, I think it's clearly not Christine's voice here -- and it's not particularly obvious that it's female. (There are only a handful of very subtle clues; the fact that the narrator is entertaining the male half of their 'hosts' while Raoul is entertaining the female half, the fact that the flower-seller automatically assumes that she is the intended recipient of the bouquet when Raoul commissions it, and her slightly appalled reaction to half-naked male performers backstage ;-P)
But otherwise the suggestion is that it's either Philippe or some male OC friend of Raoul's. I got a PM on fanfiction.net from someone who said she'd assumed it was Philippe, so I think the decoy worked.
(I also got a fandom-blind review from someone who complained that the prose was written with "older language and complex sentence structures" and that she didn't like the French language or literature set in France; I suppose I can sympathise in that I don't really like the anime fandoms with all their stories set in Japan, which just doesn't interest me. At least she didn't complain this time that I was over-using adverbs or had too many occurrences of the word 'I' in my text.... "I didn't notice any SPAG problems" -- I should jolly well hope not :-P)
I'm glad you liked Raoul; I was afraid he was coming out as a bit of a clueless idiot. I mean, from an objective point of view, he is effectively both leading Christine on, and cheating on his wife. His only excuse is that it genuinely hasn't occurred to him that his attentions might be interpreted in a sexual/romantic light...