Wild Concerto - Erik/Christine
10 June 2014 02:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeA reply to Erik/Christine: Top 10 reasons why it doesn't work:
As you know, I'm not really an expert on E/C shipping, but I always assumed that the majority of people shipped even Leroux' Erik together with Christine — I've certainly seen quite a few fan fictions along those lines. Admittedly the ones I've read were mostly morbid-fic because those are the only ones that are at all plausible to me; there is no way that the original Erik is likely to have a happy ever after existence with anyone, so they tend to end up with two or more of Erik, Christine and Raoul dead and/or insane.
But after all, Christine and Raoul got their happy ending in the novel (although possibly not all that happy, as they both had to go into exile and leave everything they knew behind). There's no need to write fan-fiction in order to 'fix' that, and not much potential plot in "Christine and Raoul live happily ever after": it's probably not surprising that all the married-in-Sweden stories I've seen have been one-shot vignettes. On the other hand, every single E/C story involves a plot to rewrite the original outcome, possibly requiring sixty or seventy chapters to explain just how this can be achieved...
So it doesn't surprise me that this pairing would inspire more fiction: it's more inherently fruitful because not canonical. And my own first-ever Phantom fan-fiction (I'm not sure I can even talk about this, it's too embarrassing) dated from years before my Raoul-enthusiasm and involved what was actually almost a LND scenario with a Christine who agreed to trade one night with the Phantom for the rest of her life free with Raoul. *Her* logic was that she would rather get the unpleasant wedding-night business over in a situation she knew she wasn't going to enjoy, and have the man she actually wanted make it up to her afterwards: so far as I remember Raoul didn't see it that way at all and thought she should have arranged matters in the other order! But even in those days there was no doubt in my mind whatsoever about whom Christine loved: it just didn't occur to me that there was any suggestion that she might have felt love or even lust for the Phantom to make such a bargain, only pity. (Which is why I wrote, back before I'd actually heard the soundtrack of "Love Never Dies", I can easily credit a kind-hearted Christine who goes back on the night before their wedding to learn whether the Phantom truly sacrificed his life to let the young lovers escape, and strangely enough, I can credit a Christine who slept with the Phantom under those circumstances; what I can't conceive of is one who has spent the years since in love with him.)
I wonder how much influence the 2004 film and subsequent 25th anniversary DVD have had in creating the perception that Christine was sexually attracted to the Phantom in certain scenes of the musical, actually; from what I've heard the original stage production didn't contain this element but showed a Christine who was unambiguously afraid of him. But I've only heard this in the context of discussion from irate Raoul-fans in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
phanwank, so it may be biased... (I've certainly heard that the anniversary DVD production was filmed with a more 'obnoxious' Raoul to be more compatible with Love Never Dies.)
As to why serious adult writers might want to construct an E/C story... well, because it's a challenge. (Mind you, so would a Christine/Persian story be, and I haven't seen any of those -- though I'll bet they exist somewhere!) Because they want to come up with a way in which Erik can be 'mended' and see what he might be like afterwards, which is an urge I don't really have the right to dismiss as I've been trying to do it myself with LND-Raoul... although in that case you do at least have a normality template to base it on! Because they feel that Erik deserves the chance that the world never gave him, and which he might have got had circumstances been different (i.e. if he had not been the bogeyman of a Gothic novel :-p)
I'm obviously not the best person to defend E/C writers, but I'm assuming that they tend to write because they feel sorry for Erik not having Christine, rather than because they feel sorry for poor Christine not having Erik... but then again I really can't speak with any authority, because it's not a world I move in much. Partly because it attracts an awful lot of bad writers as well as the very good ones, but chiefly, to be honest, because I'm rather too much enlisted on the other side to be comfortable reading it.
(Don't believe that there aren't bad R/C writers, alas... just a great many fewer of them, there being fewer overall. Also, there tends to be a smaller proportion of teenagers in that fan bracket.)
10. The wedding-dress Christine dummy is certainly intended to be creepy — it's supposed to scare Christine silly, for one thing. (And that's an ALW invention presumably for the specific purpose of alienating Christine — it's not in the novel. So it's in there intentionally to stop Christine pairing up with the Phantom :-p)
The accusation of 'stalking' is actually something I have a lot of difficulty with because this is a concept that has been introduced very recently within my lifetime: before that, you know, we used to consider it romantic behaviour to hang around for hours in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the beloved, to arrange to be ever-so-casually in a place where the love-object might pass by, to cherish dropped gloves (and yes, I've done it...) and scribbled scraps of paper, to try to guess wants before they could happen and to supply them, to slip anonymous gifts into situations where they might give pleasure... this was the behaviour of a passionate but unaccepted lover, not some newly-minted crime. (Leroux-Raoul has been castigated online as a 'stalker', for instance, as has Marius Pontmercy: the authors in question were under the impression at the time that they were depicting heartbroken young heroes.)
9. I'm not actually sure how significant Christine's beauty is as versus her talent — and her kind heart. Raoul doesn't love her because she has grown up beautiful — he has loved her in one way or another since they were children together. Erik doesn't love her because of her looks — he loves her because she is the vessel for an exquisite instrument, and because she has a compassionate and loving nature.
(For my current fan-fiction I've actually made the deliberate choice to have a Christine who isn't beautiful -- she's a washed-out little creature with pale eyelashes -- whom everyone (except Carlotta) likes anyway, because she is just an intrinsically nice person. And her Raoul is generally described as short and slight with a long nose, just to emphasise the point: they fall in love because of who they are and what they mean to each another, not because of any dazzling looks. And they are — I hope — very recognisably the same characters.)
8. It's an interesting point that by the end of the plot Erik cannot trust Christine; after all she has 'betrayed' him repeatedly (she does not do all that the Phantom asks of her... which in Erik's view justifies extreme measures). And yet whether or not he trusts her, he still wants her — after all, what sort of bargain is "marry me if you love your lover, for I'll kill him otherwise"? The only way he is going to get Christine by this stage is if she loves Raoul enough to submit to the unendurable for his sake; so he knows full well that the woman he loves wants another man, and is apparently willing to live with a forcible (and presumably resentful) conquest. So from Erik's point of view at least, not trusting Christine doesn't translate into falling out of love with her: the two feelings don't seem to be related at all...
6. (skipping bits)
Again, I think the 'ten years' is movie-specific; in the original show the whole element of Erik fixating on child-Christine is absent. (I did see discussion of why this was put in -- to fix one perceived problem while inadvertently raising another -- but I can't remember the supposed rationale.)
But I'm not sure in all fairness that you can complain both that Erik was 'stalking' Christine's life and also that he didn't really know her :-) Christine's problem, on the other hand, is that the 'Angel' she thinks she knows isn't the real Erik: notably, he seems to be missing most of the more frightening elements of Erik's personality. Which is not surprising, as this wouldn't have made for a very credible Angel-impersonation...
I don't really see Christine as one-dimensional and Erik as multi-dimensional; in fact I find Christine the more interesting, probably because I've written from her point of view (albeit in LND-era) several times, while Erik has always just been an incomprehensible shadow off on the edge of the story... But then I'm very atypical in phan-terms. Erik doesn't fascinate (in either sense of the term) me.
Leroux-Erik spent two weeks with Christine under the lake, and showed no signs of getting bored with her :-p
I have a suspicion that E/C shippers see Christine as an audience-identification character, i.e. the female readers and writers are intended to imagine that they are Christine and are lavishing all their love upon the Phantom and enjoying his attentions vicariously in return. Is this what you mean by an 'everyman'?
4. I agree with you about the pity... although (playing devil's advocate again) if you think about it in terms of an arranged marriage, it's not so completely unworkable. Erik knows that Christine doesn't love him, but they have agreed to live together and respect one another in the expectation that affection will eventually develop out of familiarity. It's worked for lots of people over the centuries...
3. The lyrics "we never said our love was evergreen..." are certainly present in my 1987 London cast recording of Think of Me: I don't know at what point they were changed, but it can't have been for the benefit of the film. (They may well have been changed after the film came out; reviews of the touring American production mention some lyric alterations from the original.)
Certainly the original novel was intended as a Gothic mystery (and largely narrated through Raoul's perceptions - we never get the Phantom's or Christine's direct view in the way that we are given Raoul's!) and not as a romance: one reason for the way that Christine behaves towards her poor confused young suitor is the necessity to keep the reader in the dark :-)
Erik is the monster under the bed: like Norma Desmond, he is a pitiful monster, but he is not the protagonist.
2. I was surprised on re-reading Leroux to find just how unambiguous the novel is about Christine's feelings: the main reason for ambiguity is, as above, that the novel is being presented via Raoul's perceptions and the plot needs him to be confused about whether Christine loves him or not. But in fact when we finally get Christine's account of events, we learn that she loved Raoul from long before he ever came to her dressing-room, when she had no idea whether he remembered her or not... and that Erik suspected it before she was even aware of it herself. And the Persian, who has been assured by Erik that Christine loves him 'for his own sake', rapidly comes through disinterested observation to the conclusion that, on the contrary, "le cœur de la douce enfant appartenait tout entier au vicomte Raoul de Chagny". It is only in Erik's imagination that he is ever beloved...
I never got any impression from the musical that Christine loved the Phantom there, and certainly not from the finale scene, where she makes it pretty clear that by his actions (and not by his face, for which she might have felt pity) he has forfeited all the affection she used to feel for him as her teacher. "God give me courage to show you/ You are not alone" is scarcely the speech of a woman who is eager to embrace the monster: she has to screw up her courage to do it, and she does it because after all he is pitiful and she is trying to show him that he is human too.
I think you're always going to be disappointed in E/C fanfiction because you feel that any Christine 'with a spine' is out of character, and spineless Christines are never going to make for a satisfactory story. I can't speak in sufficient detail for the musical version, but Leroux' Christine is neither weak nor one-dimensional. She demands that Erik set her free and slams the door in his face, she consciously and deliberately deceives him in order to regain her liberty, and yet she also refuses to betray him to Raoul (she tells Raoul that she has the key to the street entrance, but absolutely refuses to give it to him). She successfully holds Raoul at arm's-length for months despite her love for him -- a weak girl would have swooned into his arms from the first -- and throughout their relationship she is the stronger and more mature of the two: she is touched by his wish to protect her, but it is she who is protecting him. Elle embrassa le pauvre Raoul comme une sœur qui le récompenserait, par un accès de tendresse, d’avoir fermé son petit poing fraternel pour la défendre contre les dangers toujours possibles de la vie.
As you know, I'm not really an expert on E/C shipping, but I always assumed that the majority of people shipped even Leroux' Erik together with Christine — I've certainly seen quite a few fan fictions along those lines. Admittedly the ones I've read were mostly morbid-fic because those are the only ones that are at all plausible to me; there is no way that the original Erik is likely to have a happy ever after existence with anyone, so they tend to end up with two or more of Erik, Christine and Raoul dead and/or insane.
But after all, Christine and Raoul got their happy ending in the novel (although possibly not all that happy, as they both had to go into exile and leave everything they knew behind). There's no need to write fan-fiction in order to 'fix' that, and not much potential plot in "Christine and Raoul live happily ever after": it's probably not surprising that all the married-in-Sweden stories I've seen have been one-shot vignettes. On the other hand, every single E/C story involves a plot to rewrite the original outcome, possibly requiring sixty or seventy chapters to explain just how this can be achieved...
So it doesn't surprise me that this pairing would inspire more fiction: it's more inherently fruitful because not canonical. And my own first-ever Phantom fan-fiction (I'm not sure I can even talk about this, it's too embarrassing) dated from years before my Raoul-enthusiasm and involved what was actually almost a LND scenario with a Christine who agreed to trade one night with the Phantom for the rest of her life free with Raoul. *Her* logic was that she would rather get the unpleasant wedding-night business over in a situation she knew she wasn't going to enjoy, and have the man she actually wanted make it up to her afterwards: so far as I remember Raoul didn't see it that way at all and thought she should have arranged matters in the other order! But even in those days there was no doubt in my mind whatsoever about whom Christine loved: it just didn't occur to me that there was any suggestion that she might have felt love or even lust for the Phantom to make such a bargain, only pity. (Which is why I wrote, back before I'd actually heard the soundtrack of "Love Never Dies", I can easily credit a kind-hearted Christine who goes back on the night before their wedding to learn whether the Phantom truly sacrificed his life to let the young lovers escape, and strangely enough, I can credit a Christine who slept with the Phantom under those circumstances; what I can't conceive of is one who has spent the years since in love with him.)
I wonder how much influence the 2004 film and subsequent 25th anniversary DVD have had in creating the perception that Christine was sexually attracted to the Phantom in certain scenes of the musical, actually; from what I've heard the original stage production didn't contain this element but showed a Christine who was unambiguously afraid of him. But I've only heard this in the context of discussion from irate Raoul-fans in
phanwank, so it may be biased... (I've certainly heard that the anniversary DVD production was filmed with a more 'obnoxious' Raoul to be more compatible with Love Never Dies.)As to why serious adult writers might want to construct an E/C story... well, because it's a challenge. (Mind you, so would a Christine/Persian story be, and I haven't seen any of those -- though I'll bet they exist somewhere!) Because they want to come up with a way in which Erik can be 'mended' and see what he might be like afterwards, which is an urge I don't really have the right to dismiss as I've been trying to do it myself with LND-Raoul... although in that case you do at least have a normality template to base it on! Because they feel that Erik deserves the chance that the world never gave him, and which he might have got had circumstances been different (i.e. if he had not been the bogeyman of a Gothic novel :-p)
I'm obviously not the best person to defend E/C writers, but I'm assuming that they tend to write because they feel sorry for Erik not having Christine, rather than because they feel sorry for poor Christine not having Erik... but then again I really can't speak with any authority, because it's not a world I move in much. Partly because it attracts an awful lot of bad writers as well as the very good ones, but chiefly, to be honest, because I'm rather too much enlisted on the other side to be comfortable reading it.
(Don't believe that there aren't bad R/C writers, alas... just a great many fewer of them, there being fewer overall. Also, there tends to be a smaller proportion of teenagers in that fan bracket.)
10. The wedding-dress Christine dummy is certainly intended to be creepy — it's supposed to scare Christine silly, for one thing. (And that's an ALW invention presumably for the specific purpose of alienating Christine — it's not in the novel. So it's in there intentionally to stop Christine pairing up with the Phantom :-p)
The accusation of 'stalking' is actually something I have a lot of difficulty with because this is a concept that has been introduced very recently within my lifetime: before that, you know, we used to consider it romantic behaviour to hang around for hours in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the beloved, to arrange to be ever-so-casually in a place where the love-object might pass by, to cherish dropped gloves (and yes, I've done it...) and scribbled scraps of paper, to try to guess wants before they could happen and to supply them, to slip anonymous gifts into situations where they might give pleasure... this was the behaviour of a passionate but unaccepted lover, not some newly-minted crime. (Leroux-Raoul has been castigated online as a 'stalker', for instance, as has Marius Pontmercy: the authors in question were under the impression at the time that they were depicting heartbroken young heroes.)
9. I'm not actually sure how significant Christine's beauty is as versus her talent — and her kind heart. Raoul doesn't love her because she has grown up beautiful — he has loved her in one way or another since they were children together. Erik doesn't love her because of her looks — he loves her because she is the vessel for an exquisite instrument, and because she has a compassionate and loving nature.
(For my current fan-fiction I've actually made the deliberate choice to have a Christine who isn't beautiful -- she's a washed-out little creature with pale eyelashes -- whom everyone (except Carlotta) likes anyway, because she is just an intrinsically nice person. And her Raoul is generally described as short and slight with a long nose, just to emphasise the point: they fall in love because of who they are and what they mean to each another, not because of any dazzling looks. And they are — I hope — very recognisably the same characters.)
8. It's an interesting point that by the end of the plot Erik cannot trust Christine; after all she has 'betrayed' him repeatedly (she does not do all that the Phantom asks of her... which in Erik's view justifies extreme measures). And yet whether or not he trusts her, he still wants her — after all, what sort of bargain is "marry me if you love your lover, for I'll kill him otherwise"? The only way he is going to get Christine by this stage is if she loves Raoul enough to submit to the unendurable for his sake; so he knows full well that the woman he loves wants another man, and is apparently willing to live with a forcible (and presumably resentful) conquest. So from Erik's point of view at least, not trusting Christine doesn't translate into falling out of love with her: the two feelings don't seem to be related at all...
6. (skipping bits)
Again, I think the 'ten years' is movie-specific; in the original show the whole element of Erik fixating on child-Christine is absent. (I did see discussion of why this was put in -- to fix one perceived problem while inadvertently raising another -- but I can't remember the supposed rationale.)
But I'm not sure in all fairness that you can complain both that Erik was 'stalking' Christine's life and also that he didn't really know her :-) Christine's problem, on the other hand, is that the 'Angel' she thinks she knows isn't the real Erik: notably, he seems to be missing most of the more frightening elements of Erik's personality. Which is not surprising, as this wouldn't have made for a very credible Angel-impersonation...
I don't really see Christine as one-dimensional and Erik as multi-dimensional; in fact I find Christine the more interesting, probably because I've written from her point of view (albeit in LND-era) several times, while Erik has always just been an incomprehensible shadow off on the edge of the story... But then I'm very atypical in phan-terms. Erik doesn't fascinate (in either sense of the term) me.
Leroux-Erik spent two weeks with Christine under the lake, and showed no signs of getting bored with her :-p
I have a suspicion that E/C shippers see Christine as an audience-identification character, i.e. the female readers and writers are intended to imagine that they are Christine and are lavishing all their love upon the Phantom and enjoying his attentions vicariously in return. Is this what you mean by an 'everyman'?
4. I agree with you about the pity... although (playing devil's advocate again) if you think about it in terms of an arranged marriage, it's not so completely unworkable. Erik knows that Christine doesn't love him, but they have agreed to live together and respect one another in the expectation that affection will eventually develop out of familiarity. It's worked for lots of people over the centuries...
3. The lyrics "we never said our love was evergreen..." are certainly present in my 1987 London cast recording of Think of Me: I don't know at what point they were changed, but it can't have been for the benefit of the film. (They may well have been changed after the film came out; reviews of the touring American production mention some lyric alterations from the original.)
Certainly the original novel was intended as a Gothic mystery (and largely narrated through Raoul's perceptions - we never get the Phantom's or Christine's direct view in the way that we are given Raoul's!) and not as a romance: one reason for the way that Christine behaves towards her poor confused young suitor is the necessity to keep the reader in the dark :-)
Erik is the monster under the bed: like Norma Desmond, he is a pitiful monster, but he is not the protagonist.
2. I was surprised on re-reading Leroux to find just how unambiguous the novel is about Christine's feelings: the main reason for ambiguity is, as above, that the novel is being presented via Raoul's perceptions and the plot needs him to be confused about whether Christine loves him or not. But in fact when we finally get Christine's account of events, we learn that she loved Raoul from long before he ever came to her dressing-room, when she had no idea whether he remembered her or not... and that Erik suspected it before she was even aware of it herself. And the Persian, who has been assured by Erik that Christine loves him 'for his own sake', rapidly comes through disinterested observation to the conclusion that, on the contrary, "le cœur de la douce enfant appartenait tout entier au vicomte Raoul de Chagny". It is only in Erik's imagination that he is ever beloved...
I never got any impression from the musical that Christine loved the Phantom there, and certainly not from the finale scene, where she makes it pretty clear that by his actions (and not by his face, for which she might have felt pity) he has forfeited all the affection she used to feel for him as her teacher. "God give me courage to show you/ You are not alone" is scarcely the speech of a woman who is eager to embrace the monster: she has to screw up her courage to do it, and she does it because after all he is pitiful and she is trying to show him that he is human too.
I think you're always going to be disappointed in E/C fanfiction because you feel that any Christine 'with a spine' is out of character, and spineless Christines are never going to make for a satisfactory story. I can't speak in sufficient detail for the musical version, but Leroux' Christine is neither weak nor one-dimensional. She demands that Erik set her free and slams the door in his face, she consciously and deliberately deceives him in order to regain her liberty, and yet she also refuses to betray him to Raoul (she tells Raoul that she has the key to the street entrance, but absolutely refuses to give it to him). She successfully holds Raoul at arm's-length for months despite her love for him -- a weak girl would have swooned into his arms from the first -- and throughout their relationship she is the stronger and more mature of the two: she is touched by his wish to protect her, but it is she who is protecting him. Elle embrassa le pauvre Raoul comme une sœur qui le récompenserait, par un accès de tendresse, d’avoir fermé son petit poing fraternel pour la défendre contre les dangers toujours possibles de la vie.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-06-30 02:43 pm (UTC)I *could* write eventually a Leroux-based Erik/Christine phanfic… but it’s going to be really morbid, and dark, and tragic. No happy ending. And I don’t think they’ll REALLY be a couple in the proper sense of the word. You know, not a fluffy story AT ALL. But unfortunately, I know by experience the Erik/Christine pairing has more fiction written about it (at the very least for what is of ALW) because “I felt sorry that Christine chose Raoul and not Erik”, since I fell upon a few serious adult writers in my early Fanfiction days that I won’t name...
I can also buy Christine trying to find the Phantom. She’s kind-hearted enough to do that (how she did find him, I frankly have no idea. I have a theory about it, but it’s not quite possible.), but sleeping with the Phantom, no. I don’t think she would bang with him just “because he’s poor unhappy Erik who desperately needs affection”, and despite her signs of lust for him. I’m like Captain Jack, I abhor cheating. Especially when the guy who gets cheated on was ready to commit a misalliance by marrying you and was ready to die for your happiness. I rather tend to see Christine and Erik settling things on that night (as much as they can settle things…). And I don’t buy her pining after her Angel of Music either (I had that feeling during “Beneath a Moonless Sky”). Okay, yes, she would think of him from time to time, and he was an important figure in her childhood and teenage, but… you know, she should know that they had their chance and that they blew it. It only seems to occur to her finally during “Once Upon Another Time”. A bit too late, unfortunately.
Sierra Boggess, on an interview for the 25th anniversary, clearly stated that the Christine she was interpreted was meant to be closer to LND-Christine (and I kind of hate her for that, because, gosh, this is the 25th anniversary, not some sort of LND-promo, because ALW has explicitly stated in an interview that LND IS NOT A SEQUEL, BUT A SPIN-OFF). But still, the Christine she played was border-line crazy, and I just didn’t understand her point of singing “Say you share with me one love, one lifetime” to the Phantom during the Final Lair. It just doesn’t make sense after that she just follows Raoul instead of staying with the Phantom. I can buy ALW-Christine having lust for ALW-Erik, but lust is not love.
(Sidenote: my ideal ALW-Raoul is Hadley Fraser with Patrick Wilson’s overall portrayal of Raoul… I just have so much trouble with Wilson’s hair… but apparently you said it was anachronistic? And I just love Fraser’s boyish look)
Christine/Daroga? CHRISTINE/DAROGA? I already saw once Meg/Daroga (meh?), Madame/Daroga (on Tumblr, I’ll give you the link to it if you want, it’s hilarious, and I kind of ashamed to admit that that pairing actually kinda works), but CHRISTINE/DAROGA? Okay, I’ll be looking for that.
I do think Erik does deserve his chance, but you know, not with Christine.
I know there are a few bad Raoul/Christine writers, unfortunately. Like for every pairing possible, and not just in POTO…
no subject
Date: 2014-06-30 02:44 pm (UTC)9. I kind of insisted on “beautiful” because, well, yes, the voice is Erik’s #1 reason for his Christine-obsession, but I don’t think he would have clung that much to her if she wasn’t pretty. Not that Erik is shallow, but let me explain. It was actually while I was writing this rant that I once read somewhere on the Net that Christine was some sort of faraway idol to Erik. I gave it a great deed of thought, and that brought me to the conclusion that Christine represents everything Erik will never get to be. Just the perfect puppet-toy, so to say…
But I must admit I’m very curious to read your upcoming phanfiction…
8. Erik just wanted to trust Christine so bad, you can feel that. But unfortunately, I don’t think he ever thought of their relationship in a longer term… He probably just thinks that once he could get rid of Raoul, there will be no problem… but unfortunately, no.
6. Now that I think about it, yes, Leroux-Christine has more of a spine and is rather resourceful. I need to re-read Leroux… But ALW-Christine… no, unfortunately. LND-Christine is pretty different from ALW-Christine because of her spine. On certain moments, not always. ALW-Christine seemed to never know what she wanted, never seemed to want to do anything to help herself, and always relied on Raoul… until the very end. LND-Christine… it depended. She was more in-character than anyone else, but she had more of a spine in a way to make the E/C pairing more believable. I can buy that from her rough experience, she decided to stop being a whiny teenager, but if you’re that weak-willed at sixteen, you’ll still be weak-willed at twenty-six.
When I say that Erik could get bored of Christine, I’m talking about Kay-Erik and ALW-Erik. And gosh, I think you’re the first phan I meet who doesn’t love Erik.
I would have been quite curious of knowing what happened during those two weeks… An author on FF.net, redeaths, has started writing about it (Fourteen Nights), but unfortunately, the story seems abandoned…
And yes, that’s exactly what I mean by everyman.
4. Arranged marriages… yes, a lot of them worked like that. But I don’t think ALW-Erik would have contented himself with such conditions. Because, well, for this rant, I was mainly basing myself on ALW since it’s especially in that context that we find Erik/Christine pairings.
3. “God give me courage to show you/You are not alone”, some E/C shippers fix that by saying that when Christine kissed the Phantom, she realized at that moment that she actually loved him. That’s just stupid. No further comments.
2. As I said before, I do admit Leroux-Christine has more of a spine. But ALW-Christine… no.
no subject
Date: 2014-07-05 06:32 pm (UTC)I came across an AU fanfic once where as a side-effect of his deformities Erik was blind... which actually made quite a bit of sense! It explains why he lives underground and moves around so confidently in the dark, it explains why he relies so heavily on overhearing people, it explains why he finds music such an important form of self-expression, and of course it explains why he would fixate on Christine because of her voice. (And in the context of this E/C story, of course, it proved that he was the only person who loved her 'truly' and not just because of her pretty face...)
My forthcoming phanfiction is pretty much stuck -- despite existing in manuscript all the way to the final page. I'm just getting totally disheartened in my attempts to get it beta-read (it's been over six months now, and I'm still almost nowhere). Meanwhile the typing-up process is getting so interminably stretched out as a result that I don't trust myself to pick up internal consistencies in the course of the process as I normally would: it's getting to the stage where I'm just tempted to "publish and be damned" in the hopes of getting at least some feedback, because trying to get people to help polish it beforehand is like getting water out of a stone :-(
8. Yes, Raoul's existence is a rather convenient excuse for Erik, from that point of view. While he has a 'rival', he can blame Christine's failure to commit herself to him on Raoul's influence, and not to any deficiencies in himself... Although he has a tendency to blame everything that goes wrong with his life on his own face, anyway :-p Anything, rather than face the idea that he might have a personality problem!
6. Now that I have a complete libretto (see http://igenlode.livejournal.com/40957.html ), I can confirm that no time-scheme is specified at all for how long the Phantom has known Christine, other than Meg's reference to a "new" tutor. In the absence of any sugestion to the contrary Meg's remark would tend to suggest that the Leroux timing was intended, in which Christine has only known her Angel for a few months before Raoul returns... We cannot, of course, say that he has not been watching her for much longer than that, but nothing is stated to that effect.
No, I don't love Erik -- which makes me not a phan :-D
I don't hate him -- see the first chapter of Safe in His Arms for an R/C fan who goes in for Erik-bashing in a big way (and with an almost hilariously overwrought -- no, definitely hilariously overwrought!) writing style... but I don't yearn to spend hours in analysing and redeeming him. I don't rejoice at his happiness or weep for his tragedy: I'm just not that interested in him. <hides>
(As witness the difference between our reactions to "Fourteen Nights": you were sorry for poor Erik being lied to, while I was nervous as to whether she had ruined her chances for future lies to be believed!)
Apparently by invoking the name of "Fourteen Nights" you managed to revive the story! :-D
I'm very glad to see it back, as I thought it must have been one of those all-too-frequent cases where an author got a one-chapter inspiration and then didn't know where to take it any further: after all, she has done the easy bit, namely the events summarised by Leroux, and is left with the terra incognita of the two weeks of which all we know is that Christine lied and lied again in an attempt to regain her freedom: "Mon mensonge fut aussi affreux que le monstre qui me l'inspirait, et à ce prix j'ai pu acquérir ma liberté".
no subject
Date: 2014-07-16 10:14 pm (UTC)And for your story… what do you mean by “polishing”? Maybe I could help… You can say no, since I’m not really English-speaking, I’ll understand. ;)
I thought Phan meant just the people who like POTO, not the Erik-lovers… *goes and shoots herself*
What I love about Erik is when he’s not whining after Christine. A bit like Éponine, she could get really interesting if she stopped clinging on Marius. Well, to be frank (and I give you permission to turn away from me with disgust), it’s actually Gerik that I like. You know, the boy who has been mistreated during his childhood, who ends up in the wonderful world of music and opera, evolves there, he’s incredibly gifted, and most especially, he has this hyperactive imagination and wild artistic side. And so, he has created himself this parallel world where no one is ever going to mock him again, and where he’s the king (Erik does mean “Eternal Ruler”)…
I am curious to see what the author is going to do with Fourteen Nights, since she obviously can’t become too redundant either…
no subject
Date: 2014-07-27 03:25 pm (UTC)Though in fact 'Phan' isn't a term I actually adopt for myself, partly because it sounds a bit silly (trying too hard to be clever) and partly because I'm not really a joiner of societies; I'm never in the 'in-group' for anything and I'm actually deterred from activities that are too popular. So if you had a group of Phans in costume and facepaint hanging around outside a theatre, I'd be the smartly-dressed one standing on the other side of the road and trying to pretend I was nothing to do with them :-)
You speak very eloquently and winningly of Gerik! :-D
In that scenario, I think his problem is that Christine bridges the gap between the two worlds for him: she takes on an existence in his own empire of the imagination, and in a sense she is his creation too... but unfortunately she has a prosaic real-life existence of sunlight and cheap furs, and violets and biscuits in the afternoon. She is, when all is said and done, only a very ordinary girl of flesh and blood, and her imagination seems to be of the receptive rather than the creative variety. She believes in tales of the spiritual and supernatural, but she doesn't make up stories herself; she sings, but she doesn't compose music.
In that respect she fits better with Leroux-Erik, whose ultimate desire is simply to be normal and live a domestic, suburban existence...
no subject
Date: 2014-07-27 07:55 pm (UTC)Leroux!Christine could end up with ALW!Erik, having more of a spine... But unfortunately, she's already taken...
no subject
Date: 2014-07-05 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-06 12:26 am (UTC)The idea that Christine was trying to escape this binary choice and and stop the Phantom from killing Raoul without actually accepting his bargain does not enter into the equation: to authors of that age-group, if you kiss a boy that means you love him and are going to have his babies :-p
The novel is absolutely unambiguous that Christine chooses Raoul -- not even that she chooses him, that there was never any choice for her in the first place: it was 'admit that I love Raoul and put his life in danger' or 'pretend that I care nothing for Raoul in order to keep both of us safe', not 'love Raoul' versus 'love Erik'. But the vast -- the overwhelming -- majority of novel-based fan-fiction is still centred around the idea of 'Erik and his living bride' and Christine learning to appreciate her shrinking and worshipful husband.
I have no plans whatsoever to write any Erik/Christine based fan-fiction, morbid, Leroux-based or not :-p
The world is over-supplied with it, and I don't get ideas for Erik-based stories: I don't hypothesise about Erik.
Does Jack Sparrow really abhor cheating? He seems to me the type who would consider it to add an additional savour to the dish, stolen fruit being all the sweeter and his own charms thus definitively proved to be the superior.
I'm no expert in French hairstyles, but Patrick Wilson's hair looks pre-Revolutionary to me -- which puts it a hundred years or so out of date. Fops and dandies of the Napoleonic wars in England wore their hair short and brushed up over the forehead, not long and tied back in a queue: and nobody wore long hair hanging loose that I can think of except for unkempt peasants :-p (One reason why movie-Raoul looks better during the masquerade scene: the old-fashioned military costume makes some sort of sense with the properly-tied-back hair...)
As for late-nineteenth-century gentlemen... the 1990 Kopit/Yeaston Philippe (a.k.a Raoul) de Chagny has hair that is wavering over the outside edge of credible: if he was a member of the much-mocked Aesthetic Movement (imitating Oscar Wilde, for example) then that style might just be authentic. Anything longer than that -- no. Absolutely not!
It was you who proposed Christine/Daroga as parents for a half-Indian Gustave :-)
no subject
Date: 2014-07-16 10:13 pm (UTC)Well, I must admit that love-triangles have always made a lot of ink fall… This isn’t the case at all in Leroux, in ALW… well, sort of, if you include lust in this,
It will take quite a while before I actually write E/C Leroux-based morbid fics… I don’t have a great idea for it either, and I have much better ideas for other phanfics. Anyway, there are more than enough E/C phics out there.
And I was talking about Captain Jack Harkness, not Sparrow, of course. ;P
Patrick Wilson’s hairstyle is actually one of the 1830’s… You know, the Romantisme movement, with the guy with his hair in the wind cursing at Heaven, in the Chateaubriand style (or in your case, Byron), the hand in the vest like Napoleon since he was the hero in those years (actually, the reason why Napolean had his hand in his vest was because he had ulcers in his stomach XD)… In the 1870’s-1880’s, the hairstyle was a lot more like in the musical (at least in the 25th anniversary…) But his hairstyle did fit well with his masquerade costume… (And by the way… do you have ANY idea what is Christine’s costume in the movie? I mean, her dress is lovely, but what is she supposed to be? A rose? That’s kind of sending the wrong message to rose-sending Erik…)
But sheesh, it’s true you can’t get worse than the 1990 version!
About Christine/Daroga, it was a joke. Really. I can’t believe people could be taking this seriously. Meh, it already makes more sense than Erik/Raoul, anyway.
Patrick Wilson's hair
Date: 2014-07-27 05:50 pm (UTC)Just look at it... (Hurrah, this is a comment on my own journal, so I can post links!)
http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/kirsten-dunst/images/96218/title/interview-with-vampire-photo?ir=true
Though while Louis was originally an adult in the pre-Revolutionary era I believe the photo here is supposed to be from the scenes set in Paris in the 1870s: vampires clearly can't cut their hair, any more than they can grow up ;-)
Lord Byron (who was very vain) certainly didn't have long hair: there are lots of pictures of him dressed in the fashion of his day. I don't know anything about Chateaubriand's hair, but his portraits seem to show him with a tousled crop of a conventional length: I can't see any sign in a quick Web search that anyone was wearing long hair as late as the 1870s, Romantisme or not...
Here's a selection of hairstyles from paintings across the relevant period: http://www.thefashionhistorian.com/2010/05/cravat.html
Oscar Wilde and his aesthetes were about the only people who had even collar-length hair, as mentioned in my comment about the unfortunate Philippe (for whom I have a lot more time than apparently anyone else!), and everyone laughed at them... I really don't think Patrick Wilson's Raoul could have gone out in the street like that without people staring at him as if he were some kind of savage :-P
no subject
Date: 2014-08-03 12:03 pm (UTC)It's very confusing that there are two irrepressibly flirtatious Captain Jacks :-p
I haven't come across any Christine/Daroga fiction, but I did encounter one Raoul/Daroga crack-fic challenge... ironically, the writer actually managed to make it plausible for both characters. (Set during the descent into the cellars: they get lost and stop to rest, and the older man basically taunts Raoul about his inexperience and/or Erik's influence over Christine -- "you shall never be first for her". The suggestion is that the Persian drugs him with his opium pipe and seduces him while Raoul really doesn't know what is going on: he insists on continuing in search of Christine -- "I may be her second but she will always be my first".)