Wild Concerto - Erik/Christine

[igenlode]

A 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 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.

Comments

[igenlode.livejournal.com]

E/C fanfics: the one I tried to recommend (only for the link to be spam-trapped out) was Fraternité. I don't know if this Christine meets your specifications: Mme Giry comments that she has grown up a lot in a few short years... As to why it is in my Raoul-collection, you will see :-)