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...

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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...)

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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

[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...?)