The Yellow Poppy story
7 March 2024 10:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI am rather struggling with my new Roland/de Brencourt "Yellow Poppy" one-shot, which isn't coming out as well as I had hoped -- partly because I am trying to make it accessible fandom-blind, which my previous story really was not, and since it takes place after the end of a long novel of confused identities and shifting loyalties this involves an awful lot of implicit backstory info-dump! It also doesn't help that the target audience apparently can't even understand the format "M. de Trélan" and needs 'Monsieur' to be written out in full, never mind the concept that one character can have at least three different names: Gaston de Trélan is "Duc de Trélan" when referred to by title and "Monsieur de Trélan" when addressed directly, while they probably don't even realise that "Duc" is a title and not some kind of poncy foreign name... judging by the confusion we had over Mère Brassard in To Ease Your Troubled Mind :-(
But basically I'm spending so much time between lines of dialogue trying to convey the fraught moments of the past that it is throwing off the momentum of the scene, I think. And I'm afraid I seem to be spending more time on the conflicted remorse of the Comte de Brencourt than on Roland's straightforward grief and bewilderment at learning the news... except that unfortunately Roland is the protagonist, and ought to be feeling far more overwhelmed by this sudden disastrous bereavement than by de Brencourt's agony of soul :-(
On rereading the book I actually think that de Brencourt *guesses* Roland's parentage along with the Marquis de Kersaint's identity at a fairly early stage in the plot -- judging by his comments about how the Duc de Trélan had no 'legitimate' children, and that Valentine's compassion towards a wounded Roland "can hardly have been that -- on the contrary!", where 'that' is presumably the boy's resemblance to his real father... But Roland doesn't know that de Brencourt knows, and in order to forestall yet more complicated revelations it is probably simplest not to have the Comte refer to the relationship at all. Roland is a sweet-natured boy but canonically not particularly perceptive.
And the other thing is that by this point in the book de Brencourt has canonically been *through* his epiphany of feeling, and come out into the gratitude and balm of Valentine's friendship -- so while he has presumably been sitting around waiting for Roland with time to brood over his own conduct, one can't have too much revulsion of angst without taking the character somewhere inconsistent with the author's intended vision. And while fanfiction quite happily ignores authorial intent vast swathes of the time, I don't :-p
But basically I'm spending so much time between lines of dialogue trying to convey the fraught moments of the past that it is throwing off the momentum of the scene, I think. And I'm afraid I seem to be spending more time on the conflicted remorse of the Comte de Brencourt than on Roland's straightforward grief and bewilderment at learning the news... except that unfortunately Roland is the protagonist, and ought to be feeling far more overwhelmed by this sudden disastrous bereavement than by de Brencourt's agony of soul :-(
On rereading the book I actually think that de Brencourt *guesses* Roland's parentage along with the Marquis de Kersaint's identity at a fairly early stage in the plot -- judging by his comments about how the Duc de Trélan had no 'legitimate' children, and that Valentine's compassion towards a wounded Roland "can hardly have been that -- on the contrary!", where 'that' is presumably the boy's resemblance to his real father... But Roland doesn't know that de Brencourt knows, and in order to forestall yet more complicated revelations it is probably simplest not to have the Comte refer to the relationship at all. Roland is a sweet-natured boy but canonically not particularly perceptive.
And the other thing is that by this point in the book de Brencourt has canonically been *through* his epiphany of feeling, and come out into the gratitude and balm of Valentine's friendship -- so while he has presumably been sitting around waiting for Roland with time to brood over his own conduct, one can't have too much revulsion of angst without taking the character somewhere inconsistent with the author's intended vision. And while fanfiction quite happily ignores authorial intent vast swathes of the time, I don't :-p