Story prompts

[igenlode]

I had an idea for a crackfic 'Phantom' one-shot on Saturday while I was cycling, and was going to write it today. Only I didn't :-( (Partly because I was waiting in all day for a delivery that finally arrived at 10.30pm -- and I produce most reliably when I'm out of doors, on the move, and away from distractions -- but mainly because I couldn't be bothered to get round to it, just as I haven't got round to any singing practice all week... and I'm paying quite large sums of money for that!)

I never do sequels, but this would have been a sequel/tie-in to "The Sons of Éléonore" in which a fifteen-year-old Raoul accidentally runs into Perrette and Philippe's illegitimate daughter and totally fails to realise the fact, followed by a section with Perrette -- now a prosperous farmer's wife in her fifties -- having private reflections about the Comte's death and Raoul's status as prime suspect, and her own healthy, happy grandchildren. I even had a title for it: "Chick or Child", or something like that. (Not sure that's as good as I thought, since people aren't going to recognise the origin of the phrase, though it turns up in the dialogue.)

Anyway, I'm setting it down here in an attempt to shame myself into actually writing it, since it had got to more or less the fully-developed stage complete with significant exchanges of speech :-(
If I do write it, it very probably won't end up as humorous at all; 'crackfic' ideas generally don't, as soon as you put characters you actually care about into them...

---

I also had an impulse to rewrite a truly dire piece of 'romance', despite the fact that I don't touch Avon/Blake slash with a bargepole. Especially since it has been graced with the reassurance that "Now that does sound like Avon and Blake to me", and it absolutely doesn't. Not like Avon *or* Blake.

This *is* supposed to be comedy... isn't it?

Avon was engaging in his favorite pastime, sulking, as ORAC continued to instate the signal. He had sulked for about an hour now. (He had sulked for TWO YEARS now, ever since the very first time Tarrant and Dayna had returned from the Liberator, empty-handed.) He sulked some more. Maybe he should move... No. Best to wait.

Finally, Blake spoke up. "You're right, Avon," he said in that mellifluous baritone of his. "I have no intention of cashing in on you. But I do wish to exploit you. I wish to exploit you sexually." Avon's heart skipped a beat. "I wish to exploit the pleasure of your company. I wish to exploit your loyalty. I wish to exploit the balm your presence has on my soul. And I wish to exploit you for the rest of my life."

"Is there ambience? Is there sensuality?"
No, there isn't.

"It seems that the pieces that show Avon as *Avon* are the ones that people object to. Sigh."
No -- it's the fact that your Avon is unrecognisable not only as Avon but as a credibly functioning adult outside the parameters of generic slash fic.

(I don't even know what "Avon is a tsundere. Very tsundere" means...)

---

Also, I've found another bug in my AO3 stats script, which appears to consistently go wrong for the month of January in any year; I can get credible-looking results for 2/2022, for example, or 12/2022, but the results for 1/2022 are rubbish and the results for 1/23 are 'not found'.


[Edit: actually, there weren't any results earlier than January 2022 -- the data file starts on 19th Jan -- so technically speaking the figure of, e.g. 27 favourites on "Count Philippe" during that month is a reasonable conclusion for the program to make, since those were the initial values on record from a presumed value of zero the previous month! But 'not found' for the current January is just wrong: there are plenty of data values recorded. So I need to dive down and see what faulty logic on which received data it is *actually* basing that result on, which will take forever...]

Comments

[meibruges]

I know this one! I came across the excerpt in the WA forum. I was immediately curious to read it because of what you were saying about the Blake/Avon pairing.

While I can't comment on the ooc-ness (before recently googling it, I thought Blake's 7 was an anime show :))), I fully agree with you that the thing doesn't feel natural at all. To be honest, I think my first drafts of 'emotional scenes' pretty much look like that. :P

The comment you quoted really was surprising because... How can something that does not feel like an interaction between real people feel okay at all?

But yeah, the critique threads have been rather awkward lately. I wish I had something meaningful to feedback on the texts posted there, but... I don't. :/

[igenlode]

Well, I don't remember what I can have been saying about Blake and Avon, but it definitely wouldn't have contained badly written slashfic :-p

(Something about trust in analogy with Thor and Loki, probably.)

I shan't respond to the thread, because I never have time -- I was actually in the library today for a snatched half-hour before closing, busy posting review replies (well, a review reply) and scouring several years' worth of my old FFnet outbox, but I didn't have even a spare five minutes to glance at Writers Anonymous -- and I think the moment for critique on that passage has passed. The writer has gone off satisfied that she is doing well, and I can't very well rake it up and contradict the verdict now. Even if I were likely to be in a position to have an alternate version written any time in the near future, which I'm not. (And in any case, writing alternate versions won't usefully teach her anything; it would just be a challenge to me.)



I'm still mildly tempted, because it *would* be an unthinkably massive challenge to me... but quite apart from everything else I can't make head or tail of her intended scenario (if this is Blake rescuing Avon instead of his canon rescue of Tarrant, it still makes no sense to me that he isn't in the least curious about what Blake has been up to and why he isn't dead, and basically doesn't have any of the canon emotions you might expect from such an encounter, only extremely unconvincing uncanonical ones...)
Also, I just can't get my head round Avon fancying Blake, and I'd have to put myself inside it to be able to write it :-p

The comment you quoted really was surprising because... How can something that does not feel like an interaction between real people feel okay at all?

I can only read that as cathrl trying to say tactfully 'well, that's mildly less utterly awful'...
I *don't* know final-episode Avon and final-episode Blake very well (not least because I've never had any desire to rewatch the final episode, because everything goes horribly wrong for everyone in it), but I just can't imagine either of them ever saying those lines of dialogue, and the narrative from inside Avon's head doesn't sound anything like him at all.

(He is *not* a fussy, worried C-3PO or a tut-tutting vague and kindly Aziraphale: he is a lot more like Snape, boiling with coldly contained and cynical resentment against the uncharacteristic role he has been forced to play. Avon is not one of nature's heroes; he is a self-contained survivor who will (it's canon) try to kill his closest friend if it's a straight choice between the two of them. He is bitter and dangerous with a tendency towards acid repartee, and the last thing he is inclined to do is let his emotional guard down -- in his experience, whenever you do that, it comes back to bite you.)

[meibruges]

[I can only read that as cathrl trying to say tactfully 'well, that's mildly less utterly awful'...]

I read that as an honest compliment. I'm just thick. :)) It also has to do with a tiny bit of cultural difference. Not sure if cathrl is British, but, for whatever reason, I always assumed she is. And from what I've noticed from my British work colleagues, there's this peculiar habit of either being painfully candid or veiling criticism in so many layers of politeness that I can't see the intended message anymore. It's strange. And very complicated. :))

[And in any case, writing alternate versions won't usefully teach her anything; it would just be a challenge to me.]

True... I don't think a re-write of the scene, however well-executed, would bring any major insight to the author. ;P

[I'm still mildly tempted, because it *would* be an unthinkably massive challenge to me... ]

I can imagine. :D

[he is a lot more like Snape, boiling with coldly contained and cynical resentment against the uncharacteristic role he has been forced to play.]

There aren't many things, in my perception, that can make a *sexy scene* less sexy than thorwing Snape in it. :)) Not because of the hooked nose or anything like that but simply because of his nature and the way he is written.

[igenlode]

I read that as an honest compliment. I'm just thick. :))

Sorry, bad wording -- when I said "I can only read that as", I meant "that's the only way of reading it I can come up with that would make any kind of sense to me"... :-(

Unless she is a big fan of B/A slash (and if she was a Tarrant fangirl that seems unlikely, Tarrant being Blake's 'replacement' -- in terms of the number of actors under contract rather than in terms of actually taking over the earlier character's role, that is) I find it very hard to imagine anybody reading Blake making a declaration like "I wish to exploit you for the rest of my life" with a straight face, never mind all the stuff about mellifluous baritones and so on.


I mean, this is what is, by canon standards, a touchingly open and affectionate exchange between the characters, in which Avon makes a massive admission towards Blake in the wake of an earlier angry exchange (from Lillian Shepherd's The Machiavelli Factor", which gets more fluffy about the relationship between the two than anything I've ever written):

As I drew closer I saw that it was indeed Avon, sitting and watching me. He made no attempt to get up; I suspected that he couldn't.

I slewed the hovercar to a stop about ten metres away and ran through the sand which swirled and curled about my knees. Avon's eyes lifted to meet mine as I stopped in front of him. He said: "You took your time getting here."

"I..." I was so stunned by this reception that I just stood with my mouth open and stared at him. "You're mad. Why didn't you let Taamo take you home?"

Avon said, very slowly and carefully, "Because I will not put myself into the hands of someone I do not trust."

I could not believe that I had heard him correctly.

"Well," he went on, in the same calm, emotionless voice, "aren't you going to help me up?"

I stared at him incredulously, unable to move, unable to break the spell. It was not until I saw his face freeze in the recognition of imagined rejection that I was able to act. I held out a hand to him. He caught it and I hauled him up, putting my other arm around his back to keep him upright. Let him think of that as purely physical support, if he wished. At that moment, I simply did not care.

"You crazy, stupid... did you have any idea of the risk you were taking?" I demanded.

"You came back, didn't you?" Avon muttered. "Knew you would. Stupid fit of pique. Anyone would have thought-"

"That I believed you meant what you said? I did. I even think you did. Never mind that now. We have to talk - but later. This storm-"

My voice was drowned in an ear-splitting crack of thunder.

As I said, I don't read B/A slash, so I don't know what goes on in that world (probably much the same as goes on in Erik/Christine fics), but otherwise I can't imagine any explanation for why Blake coming up with lines like "the balm your presence has on my soul" would strike anybody as in character, when even a quasi-hug between the two (as implied in the scene above) needs to be rationalised away for Avon to find it acceptable...

Not sure if cathrl is British, but, for whatever reason, I always assumed she is. And from what I've noticed from my British work colleagues, there's this peculiar habit of either being painfully candid or veiling criticism in so many layers of politeness that I can't see the intended message anymore. It's strange. And very complicated. :))

Yes, cathrl is English (which isn't quite the same thing :-p)
And she is usually blunt to the point of inadvertent offence, so... I find it hard to imagine (a) that she would actually mean what she said there and (b) that she would say something she didn't actually mean. *scratches head*


There aren't many things, in my perception, that can make a *sexy scene* less sexy than throwing Snape in it. :)) Not because of the hooked nose or anything like that but simply because of his nature and the way he is written.

Well, I haven't read a lot of sexy scenes with Snape in, either ;-)
I know I've read at least one, because I remember the author providing an 'alternate version' of the chapter with a fade-to-black ending, and remember coming to the conclusion at the time that she would have been better served to stick with the concise version -- but I don't remember any details about it to explain precisely why! She was an excellent writer, so I assume it was tastefully done...

(Apparently it was "Pet Project" by Caeria: https://sshgreview.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/pet-project-by-caeria/
As this reviewer notes, "This fic gets it. He’s not Fanon!Snape or Dark!Snape or SadLonely!Snape or SexyMasculinePowerhouse!Snape or OverlyTortured!Snape – he’s just truly Severus Snape".
And she also writes "I was also a bit disappointed with the romantic content" and "The consummation was a bit awkward for me", so it wasn't just me -- although her reservations appear to have been of an altogether different nature :-p I don't remember anything of the sort, but then I would have been skimming the scene at the time!)

[erimia]

Ahaha, I didn't expect you to engage with the B/A slash! Even in such a short and humorous form.

Tsundere is a type of an anime female character who is both mean and sweet towards her love interest (often hiding her love behind mean actions.) So... people calling Avon this probably imply that's his dynamic with Blake? :D Which is huge oversimplification, of course, even if one likes B/A.

[igenlode]

Oh, I failed to engage with it (as opposed to "Chick nor Child", which I did care about enough to get round to writing!) The quotes there are not my humorous version, but the actual original depiction of the characters :-O

I've pretty much always known that B/A slash goes on -- I've never found it any more credible than 'Christine loves the Phantom', or any other contrived non-canon and canon-contradictory pairings (Draco/Hermione), which are nowadays very popular as an arbitrary fan activity, but in those days had to be justified by earnest and often vicious arguments as to why it was all there in the text, it really was... It's one of the 'ships' I happen to particularly dislike because I see it as reducing a much more interesting relationship to terms of jerking off -- and I don't see anything in that relationship as involving sensual attraction; it's a meeting and clash of minds and world-view and expectations, not one represented by what women find sexy about the idea of men.

So the idea of writing in Avon's viewpoint about an eroticised Blake, even in subtext (sensuality isn't really my strong point anyway), would be a *very* big challenge to pull off...

Tsundere is a type of an anime female character who is both mean and sweet towards her love interest (often hiding her love behind mean actions.)
So it's the infamous "I hate you because I love you" trope? (or is it vice versa...?)