Backstory for Christine
2 February 2021 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI think I've worked out a reasonable backstory for Christine in the context of Hertha's story. (Confusingly, I started rereading Stephen King's "Christine", which of course puts the name into a rather different context!)
She meets Raoul at the age of fourteen when she and her father have gone down to the sea for a convalescent holiday after illness -- I'm thinking probably whooping-cough (la coqueluche), which can go on for a long time in adults. Christine would recover faster and be running around, 'all elbows and flying plaits' and in need of feeding up. She loses the red scarf that she is supposed to be wearing to protect her throat :-)
Raoul's mother is a fussy invalid and probably disapproves. Christine promises to write to him (maybe she gets given the Chagny address rather than their town-house in Paris?) and sends off a shy letter, hoping with receding hope month after month for an answer that never comes. She pictures him regretting ever having known her, and doesn't dare write again without some sign of encouragement. But in fact he has never received the letter -- maybe it went astray in the post, maybe his mother confiscated it? So he too has been waiting for her to write as she promised and eventually gives up. Then Christine's father dies, and she has to worry about earning a living (as a dancer, not a singer -- you don't get into the opera with a teenage voice). But neither of them ever consciously made a choice to break off contact, so they both carry wistful memories and regrets for not having had the courage to overcome the fear of rejection and get back in touch; when they finally do meet again it's a case of 'so I finally found you and you're glad to see me too" (implicitly all explained during that first rush of conversation that we don't get to hear from Hertha's perspective, in the dressing-room: Oh Raoul, so it is you!)
I think that will work out; it took me long enough to work it out...
Meanwhile we've acquired another OC and some backstory for Christine's parents; her mother in this story was an aspiring singer who died young, and Lisotte, her mother's former dresser at the theatre, takes over the role of looking after Christine and her father after the young woman's death. She's another Mère Brassard figure; a big working-class Frenchwoman with a heart of gold and decided opinions, and she is a sort of old nanny-cum-maid of all work-cum-chaperone in ALW-Christine's life (since it's hard to imagine Lloyd Webber's rather childlike orphaned Christine running a household on her own)
I got another five minutes' access to fanfiction.net for some reason (I tried it yet again and it just happened to work for once), and was able to 'evacuate' the reviews for four more of my stories -- and then go back and delete the Critics United spam on the local files once access was cut off again! I never attempted to delete the hundreds of spam reviews from the actual site, but since it's trivially easy simply to snip the text out of the files I don't see any point in retaining it for my reference here...
Sixteen stories done -- out of forty-six.
(And I discovered that it has been so long now that fanfiction.net has logged me out, not entirely to my surprise -- but I should think the chances of my being able to log in again are pretty much zero, so I'm no longer likely to get access to my traffic stats or past PMs, for example.)
Traffic on AO3 definitely seems to be lower overall, though it's hard to judge how much of that is because people there have already seen everything I've written before when it was on fanfiction.net; judging by their pseuds and/or the stories on their accounts, the people who have actively left kudos seem to be mostly the same ones who had reviewed my stories on FFnet in the past. Reviewing levels seem to be much lower, although to be fair I struggled to get any reviews at all on the work that I posted as a 'new' author on FFnet for the first few months; on the eleven chapters in six stories that I've uploaded so far, I received a total of six reviews on just two stories (almost all of them on "Count Philippe" -- on this site, sex evidently sells!)
I also got a belated judge's review this month on the first chapter of "An Outsider and a Foreigner", which I'd posted as my "Break the Cliché" challenge entry, and was finally able to see what it said during that blink of FFnet visibility. It tends to confirm the other feedback that I got, to the effect that Hertha's identity (as Raoul's wife) is actually so obvious from so early on in the chapter that making a 'twist' ending of it comes as a bit of an anti-climax :-(
I thought I'd done a rather good job of making the narrator come across plausibly as Raoul's (canon) elder brother rather than as a wife with no canon precedent for her existence -- maybe the misdirection is a lot less effective if you're not aware of Philippe's existence in the first place and thus don't have the wrong assumption available?
(As opposed to the 'twist' in "Count Philippe", where the majority of readers managed to miss the fact that Eustacie is explicitly described at the end of the chapter as Philippe's wife and his Countess, and continued to complain how immoral it was of Raoul to be carrying on with Christine while married to another woman... ironically enough, in the current context! Since I didn't get any feedback one way or the other on that part of the story on AO3 I'll never know what readers there assumed about that one...)
She meets Raoul at the age of fourteen when she and her father have gone down to the sea for a convalescent holiday after illness -- I'm thinking probably whooping-cough (la coqueluche), which can go on for a long time in adults. Christine would recover faster and be running around, 'all elbows and flying plaits' and in need of feeding up. She loses the red scarf that she is supposed to be wearing to protect her throat :-)
Raoul's mother is a fussy invalid and probably disapproves. Christine promises to write to him (maybe she gets given the Chagny address rather than their town-house in Paris?) and sends off a shy letter, hoping with receding hope month after month for an answer that never comes. She pictures him regretting ever having known her, and doesn't dare write again without some sign of encouragement. But in fact he has never received the letter -- maybe it went astray in the post, maybe his mother confiscated it? So he too has been waiting for her to write as she promised and eventually gives up. Then Christine's father dies, and she has to worry about earning a living (as a dancer, not a singer -- you don't get into the opera with a teenage voice). But neither of them ever consciously made a choice to break off contact, so they both carry wistful memories and regrets for not having had the courage to overcome the fear of rejection and get back in touch; when they finally do meet again it's a case of 'so I finally found you and you're glad to see me too" (implicitly all explained during that first rush of conversation that we don't get to hear from Hertha's perspective, in the dressing-room: Oh Raoul, so it is you!)
I think that will work out; it took me long enough to work it out...
Meanwhile we've acquired another OC and some backstory for Christine's parents; her mother in this story was an aspiring singer who died young, and Lisotte, her mother's former dresser at the theatre, takes over the role of looking after Christine and her father after the young woman's death. She's another Mère Brassard figure; a big working-class Frenchwoman with a heart of gold and decided opinions, and she is a sort of old nanny-cum-maid of all work-cum-chaperone in ALW-Christine's life (since it's hard to imagine Lloyd Webber's rather childlike orphaned Christine running a household on her own)
I got another five minutes' access to fanfiction.net for some reason (I tried it yet again and it just happened to work for once), and was able to 'evacuate' the reviews for four more of my stories -- and then go back and delete the Critics United spam on the local files once access was cut off again! I never attempted to delete the hundreds of spam reviews from the actual site, but since it's trivially easy simply to snip the text out of the files I don't see any point in retaining it for my reference here...
Sixteen stories done -- out of forty-six.
(And I discovered that it has been so long now that fanfiction.net has logged me out, not entirely to my surprise -- but I should think the chances of my being able to log in again are pretty much zero, so I'm no longer likely to get access to my traffic stats or past PMs, for example.)
Traffic on AO3 definitely seems to be lower overall, though it's hard to judge how much of that is because people there have already seen everything I've written before when it was on fanfiction.net; judging by their pseuds and/or the stories on their accounts, the people who have actively left kudos seem to be mostly the same ones who had reviewed my stories on FFnet in the past. Reviewing levels seem to be much lower, although to be fair I struggled to get any reviews at all on the work that I posted as a 'new' author on FFnet for the first few months; on the eleven chapters in six stories that I've uploaded so far, I received a total of six reviews on just two stories (almost all of them on "Count Philippe" -- on this site, sex evidently sells!)
I also got a belated judge's review this month on the first chapter of "An Outsider and a Foreigner", which I'd posted as my "Break the Cliché" challenge entry, and was finally able to see what it said during that blink of FFnet visibility. It tends to confirm the other feedback that I got, to the effect that Hertha's identity (as Raoul's wife) is actually so obvious from so early on in the chapter that making a 'twist' ending of it comes as a bit of an anti-climax :-(
I thought I'd done a rather good job of making the narrator come across plausibly as Raoul's (canon) elder brother rather than as a wife with no canon precedent for her existence -- maybe the misdirection is a lot less effective if you're not aware of Philippe's existence in the first place and thus don't have the wrong assumption available?
(As opposed to the 'twist' in "Count Philippe", where the majority of readers managed to miss the fact that Eustacie is explicitly described at the end of the chapter as Philippe's wife and his Countess, and continued to complain how immoral it was of Raoul to be carrying on with Christine while married to another woman... ironically enough, in the current context! Since I didn't get any feedback one way or the other on that part of the story on AO3 I'll never know what readers there assumed about that one...)
no subject
Date: 2021-02-04 03:47 pm (UTC)Ahahaha, POTO Christine would probably be the nicest possessed car in the world. :DDD But Erik would have a hard time if he tried to hijack her.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-04 06:28 pm (UTC)