Approaching the end
25 April 2025 01:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI embarked upon the final episode of "Twenty Years After" (it has just dawned on me that the elegaic title/theme music is in fact a slowed-down version of Nasha chest', which is effectively appropriate!) Again, this section proved unexpectedly easy to understand, even at three a.m. without subtitles or dictionary -- but I'm not sure I would have been able to follow where we'd got to without prior knowledge of the plot, because it did feel very compressed and chunky. (I'm still not clear that it was ever explained in the previous episode what d'Artagnan and Porthos are doing turning up in the middle of the Roundhead armies, though we saw Athos and Aramis being sent off as bodyguards to the English King.)
I have to say that this was the biggest, hairiest Charles I that I have ever seen :-p The poor man was famously small and neat, and this one more or less blunders around like a bewildered bear; it took me a while (and the dialogue) to work out who he was intended to be!
But unless I was missing out on some subtleties, the dynamic between the four friends seemed oddly absent in the middle of the compressed action, as opposed to the Duc de Beaufort scene in the previous episode, where it really hits hard. Athos and Aramis attempt to get the King out of the camp (and, with bitter foreknowledge, it is nice to see Aramis acting selflessly here, even if it is only for the sake of Athos' good opinion), and then Porthos and d'Artagnan --in full Roundhead armour!-- suddenly turn up and arrest them without resistance while the King is taken away. No explanations or reactions are offered either to the audience or between the characters, so it's not clear whether this is regarded as an act of betrayal or of mutual collusion. We are somewhat reassured when d'Artagnan mounts a spirited defence against any attempt to claim 'his' prisoners, and all four then escape together -- but we basically don't get any interaction between them at all (I think they literally don't even speak to one another until after the escape), despite the fact that this is basically a parallel to the scene where it is Athos and Aramis 'rescuing' the other two by insisting that they surrender against overwhelming odds. It felt as if there was something missing.
I think what has happened here is that the director has made the decision to focus on Mordaunt's activities -- and that part is effective. The scene where he casually shoots his uncle in the back of the head has a shock value that nothing else does (slightly undermined by the fact that we never see Lord Winter's face and so have no idea of the prisoner's identity until the dialogue reveals it; again, probably a conscious choice to make the act more bewilderingly random). This section is very much about Mordaunt finally discovering the identities of the men he has been hunting, and the resulting threat to their lives....
I think I have finished† my "Three Musketeers"/"Twenty years After" one-shot, after a vast amount of struggle with the end; the final paragraph or two are constituted of about 70% crossing-out, after every sentence I carefully and laboriously formulated in my head turned out to be all wrong when I set it down on the page :-( I think I may still have a rhythm problem with this section, where I seem to have kept repeatedly coming out with similar sentence structures; too many aphorisms, I suspect.
I also appear to have managed to write my first-ever M-rated fan-fiction, in that it goes that little bit further than I think I'd be comfortable giving to a thirteen-year-old, which is the definition of the "Teen" rating. (Which will of course do it no good in terms of audience, because FFnet hides 'Mature'-rated fics by default, and the people who actively seek them out are generally expecting rather more explicit material; but I feel this one does fall into the narrow 'not suitable for under-16s/not showing outright porn' window that is 'M' according to the rules.)
But I simply cannot see Athos, who is quite severely traumatised when it comes to the female sex (to the degree that he recoils from bawdy talk: il fût facile de voir que ce genre de conversation... lui était parfaitement désagréable), responding in any positive way to the sort of blatant audience-directed porn moves that constitute fanfic's depiction of this episode; I don't think that what he would see as trollop's tricks would arouse anything in him but disgust. And Madame de Chevreuse has I think more than enough experience to work out very quickly whether she is attempting to take the wrong line -- she is, after all, under the impression that she is attempting to seduce a shy celibate priest!
On the other hand, I don't think the righteous fandom line that this is a female-on-male violation holds up either; Athos' memory of the episode, fifteen years later, appears to hold a mixture of mild amusement and appreciation, without a hint of resentment for the manner of Raoul's conception (a quite unanticipated happy outcome from his point of view). Whatever she did, I think she managed to give him at least the impression that he had some say in the matter. She also appears to have been one of those women with the rare gift of retaining her lovers as friends after she has moved on elsewhere (not to mention happily maintaining several at once, according to the Epilogue to Les trois mousquetaires!)
[† no, I need to do some rewriting, since I had decided to give Athos a mission in Montauban in order to account for his presence travelling South -- it turns out that Rousillon is a lot further east than I thought it was, and in fact was actually a Spanish province in this era! So he presumably *was* travelling directly from Paris, but not for the reason I'd used in my version...]
I have to say that this was the biggest, hairiest Charles I that I have ever seen :-p The poor man was famously small and neat, and this one more or less blunders around like a bewildered bear; it took me a while (and the dialogue) to work out who he was intended to be!
But unless I was missing out on some subtleties, the dynamic between the four friends seemed oddly absent in the middle of the compressed action, as opposed to the Duc de Beaufort scene in the previous episode, where it really hits hard. Athos and Aramis attempt to get the King out of the camp (and, with bitter foreknowledge, it is nice to see Aramis acting selflessly here, even if it is only for the sake of Athos' good opinion), and then Porthos and d'Artagnan --in full Roundhead armour!-- suddenly turn up and arrest them without resistance while the King is taken away. No explanations or reactions are offered either to the audience or between the characters, so it's not clear whether this is regarded as an act of betrayal or of mutual collusion. We are somewhat reassured when d'Artagnan mounts a spirited defence against any attempt to claim 'his' prisoners, and all four then escape together -- but we basically don't get any interaction between them at all (I think they literally don't even speak to one another until after the escape), despite the fact that this is basically a parallel to the scene where it is Athos and Aramis 'rescuing' the other two by insisting that they surrender against overwhelming odds. It felt as if there was something missing.
I think what has happened here is that the director has made the decision to focus on Mordaunt's activities -- and that part is effective. The scene where he casually shoots his uncle in the back of the head has a shock value that nothing else does (slightly undermined by the fact that we never see Lord Winter's face and so have no idea of the prisoner's identity until the dialogue reveals it; again, probably a conscious choice to make the act more bewilderingly random). This section is very much about Mordaunt finally discovering the identities of the men he has been hunting, and the resulting threat to their lives....
I think I have finished† my "Three Musketeers"/"Twenty years After" one-shot, after a vast amount of struggle with the end; the final paragraph or two are constituted of about 70% crossing-out, after every sentence I carefully and laboriously formulated in my head turned out to be all wrong when I set it down on the page :-( I think I may still have a rhythm problem with this section, where I seem to have kept repeatedly coming out with similar sentence structures; too many aphorisms, I suspect.
I also appear to have managed to write my first-ever M-rated fan-fiction, in that it goes that little bit further than I think I'd be comfortable giving to a thirteen-year-old, which is the definition of the "Teen" rating. (Which will of course do it no good in terms of audience, because FFnet hides 'Mature'-rated fics by default, and the people who actively seek them out are generally expecting rather more explicit material; but I feel this one does fall into the narrow 'not suitable for under-16s/not showing outright porn' window that is 'M' according to the rules.)
But I simply cannot see Athos, who is quite severely traumatised when it comes to the female sex (to the degree that he recoils from bawdy talk: il fût facile de voir que ce genre de conversation... lui était parfaitement désagréable), responding in any positive way to the sort of blatant audience-directed porn moves that constitute fanfic's depiction of this episode; I don't think that what he would see as trollop's tricks would arouse anything in him but disgust. And Madame de Chevreuse has I think more than enough experience to work out very quickly whether she is attempting to take the wrong line -- she is, after all, under the impression that she is attempting to seduce a shy celibate priest!
On the other hand, I don't think the righteous fandom line that this is a female-on-male violation holds up either; Athos' memory of the episode, fifteen years later, appears to hold a mixture of mild amusement and appreciation, without a hint of resentment for the manner of Raoul's conception (a quite unanticipated happy outcome from his point of view). Whatever she did, I think she managed to give him at least the impression that he had some say in the matter. She also appears to have been one of those women with the rare gift of retaining her lovers as friends after she has moved on elsewhere (not to mention happily maintaining several at once, according to the Epilogue to Les trois mousquetaires!)
[† no, I need to do some rewriting, since I had decided to give Athos a mission in Montauban in order to account for his presence travelling South -- it turns out that Rousillon is a lot further east than I thought it was, and in fact was actually a Spanish province in this era! So he presumably *was* travelling directly from Paris, but not for the reason I'd used in my version...]