I think it's pretty canonical that LND-Raoul feels himself unworthy of Christine: he has a whole song about it, after all :-)
I don't think Christine has been pining after Erik for ten years (or at least, her lyrics in the musical don't give that impression); unlike the Phantom, she seems to have sought to put all that behind her and escape those unquiet memories. My hypothesis for this version of the character is that she has on the other hand been pining after Raoul -- "the man I was" -- for a long time, as their marriage seems to be going more and more astray from what they had hoped for. ("Un bel dí vedramo" sums up her situation with an accuracy that shook me, once I'd checked the actual translation of the lyric I'd picked for completely different reasons! And the date was perfect, too...)
I have various different explanations for the gambling debts for my three LND-canon stories: in "To Ease Your Troubled Mind", for example, he was an inexperienced boy who fell foul of chevaliers d'industrie and couldn't get his head above water again, while the character of "Waiting in the Wings" is more of the aristocratic stereotype: riding, betting, and unable to refuse a challenge even if it's a stupid one. The version for this story was more complex in that he is actively (and disastrously) thrill-seeking in an attempt to match the excitement that Christine gains from music, where he can't follow her.
'Becoming a jerk' is, I'm afraid, a not usual consequence of unhappiness -- particularly if it is yourself you are unhappy with...
I'm afraid most American teenagers' idea of aristocracy doesn't extend much beyond "let them eat cake" :-( (Although I realised after I'd finished this story that I'd written Raoul here as very much an English gentleman of that period -- an upper-class Edwardian, full of notions about manhood and honour and fairness, and awkward with the memory of raw emotions. I'd forgotten that he was in fact French!)
Christine is very much mentally bracketing Raoul and Gustave together as 'the boys' (after all, she has known Raoul since childhood), and I imagine there will indeed be a certain amount of masculine collusion going on ;-D
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2014-06-13 07:18 pm (UTC)I don't think Christine has been pining after Erik for ten years (or at least, her lyrics in the musical don't give that impression); unlike the Phantom, she seems to have sought to put all that behind her and escape those unquiet memories. My hypothesis for this version of the character is that she has on the other hand been pining after Raoul -- "the man I was" -- for a long time, as their marriage seems to be going more and more astray from what they had hoped for. ("Un bel dí vedramo" sums up her situation with an accuracy that shook me, once I'd checked the actual translation of the lyric I'd picked for completely different reasons! And the date was perfect, too...)
I have various different explanations for the gambling debts for my three LND-canon stories: in "To Ease Your Troubled Mind", for example, he was an inexperienced boy who fell foul of chevaliers d'industrie and couldn't get his head above water again, while the character of "Waiting in the Wings" is more of the aristocratic stereotype: riding, betting, and unable to refuse a challenge even if it's a stupid one. The version for this story was more complex in that he is actively (and disastrously) thrill-seeking in an attempt to match the excitement that Christine gains from music, where he can't follow her.
'Becoming a jerk' is, I'm afraid, a not usual consequence of unhappiness -- particularly if it is yourself you are unhappy with...
I'm afraid most American teenagers' idea of aristocracy doesn't extend much beyond "let them eat cake" :-(
(Although I realised after I'd finished this story that I'd written Raoul here as very much an English gentleman of that period -- an upper-class Edwardian, full of notions about manhood and honour and fairness, and awkward with the memory of raw emotions. I'd forgotten that he was in fact French!)
Christine is very much mentally bracketing Raoul and Gustave together as 'the boys' (after all, she has known Raoul since childhood), and I imagine there will indeed be a certain amount of masculine collusion going on ;-D