End of Hertha

[igenlode]

I uploaded the final chapter of "High City on a Hill" to FFnet, where it sank with a resounding silence. In the course of a week (as of last Friday) the new chapter 15 had received a grand total of twelve page-views, as had chapter 14; of those twelve, three people apparently went back and reread the whole thing from the start. On AO3, the stats registered 32 hits on the story as a whole (a similar number to those who clicked on chapter 1 after the update on FFnet and evidently clicked straight off again without skipping to the new chapter...)

No comments, no favourites, no follows, no kudos. So much for that project...

Comments

[betweensunandmoon]

Sorry about that. It's likely because it's not an Erik-centric fic, and we poor starved R/C shippers aren't terribly interested in him being paired up with someone other than Christine. :P

(Also, hi, I'm not dead, just been on Discord a lot more than Dreamwidth lately.)

[igenlode]

It's likely because it's not an Erik-centric fic, and we poor starved R/C shippers aren't terribly interested in him being paired up with someone other than Christine. :P

But the readers aren't going to *know* that until they reach the final chapter --- Hertha herself doesn't expect it... (And it is, basically, an R/C story; just one with an unhappy ending. But I can't tag it R/C, because by my own rules I use that for stories where the tagged pair actually *end up* together, and not for the "Love Never Dies" stories where Christine is dead, for instance!)

watervole, who is not a POTO fan, had a look at it for me, and her verdict as a fandom-blind reader was that she liked Hertha as a character, but couldn't swallow the gaping plot hole in the story whereby nobody attempts to call the police after the chandelier disaster or comb the Opera House to find the Phantom's hideout, as opposed to engaging in bizarre and expensive plans to entrap him by staging his new opera... which I'm afraid is not a 'plot hole' over which I really have much control in any canon-compliant fic :-O