New 'Love Never Dies' story
11 July 2014 01:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI really didn't intend to subject myself (or Raoul) to any more 'Love Never Dies'-based plots... but I was testing the Fanfiction.net search engine to see if it threw up any of my stories, as one does, and came across a bizarre fiction in which a grown-up Gustave falls in love with Raoul's daughter by a second marriage — who, by some genetic fluke, happens to look exactly like Raoul's first wife, to whom she is totally unrelated. Then the Phantom murders Raoul and rapes his daughter under the impression that she is Christine, but this is fine because he dies of a heart attack due to all the excitement and Gustave is happy to bring up the baby who is his half-sister and to marry his step-sister...
What's rather worrying is that I actually thought it was pretty well-written (with Raoul in character :-p) until it got to that last jaw-dropping plot development :-P
And some trace of this got weirdly cross-fertilised with emeraldphan's idea about a story with Raoul looking back from the deck of the ship as he returns alone to Paris, giving me the idea for what I believe is an entirely new twist on the ending of "Love Never Dies"...
Given its genesis, I did actually wonder if this was going to end up as a humorous fanfic! But in fact it has come out as straight angst, the only other real option given the subject matter. The main trouble is that it is practically all angst and no plot: this is a Raoul who is taking his wife's dead body home and who has learnt from a reluctant Phantom more or less all the truth of what happened between them, and who is having to face up to what he sees as ten years of a lie while coping with an upset Gustave without any real bond with the child. In the end he's almost glad to escape... but I have some more angst planned for him on board the ship, the poor chap, so that I can work another vital piece of backstory in.
The whole thing so far consists of about 2,700 words in two(?) scenes covering his farewell to Gustave before boarding the steamer home, including an intervention by the Phantom. Although the entirety of the first 900-word 'scene' has ended up as a diversion into thoughts about Christine, all of which are nominally going on in the space between Gustave's first hesitant sentence and Raoul's response after an unspecified delay... not entirely sure I can get away with that. But having written it in logical progression as it now stands, making any change becomes, as always, rather difficult :-(
I'm currently trying both to hint at and to keep the pivotal secret of this story -- rather tricky, as it's something that Raoul would naturally think about under the circumstances, and it would certainly be unnatural to unveil it in the last scene/line without any prior mention. On the other hand, it is the sole original plot idea and hence justification of the story (inasmuch as one can call it plot at all!)
The rest is simply random scraps of backstory -- and yes, this does seem to be yet another slightly different version of What Happened Between POTO and LND: it more or less has to be, since the big reveal rules out any continuity between the new story and "Waiting in the Wings", while my other two stories both fork off before this point and use the original soundtrack continuity -- plus character analysis, the latter occasionally (and visibly, I hope) self-deceiving.
At the moment I'm planning two chapters (since the first scene can't really stand alone), though the second chapter is likely to be much shorter than the first, consisting of more musings on board the ship plus a brief arriving-home sequence and plot reveal. The provisional title is "Left Behind" ("The Girl He Left Behind Him" is a little tasteless in the one meaning and a little too specific in the other, I think) with the first quayside chapter entitled "Help Me Say Goodbye".
What's rather worrying is that I actually thought it was pretty well-written (with Raoul in character :-p) until it got to that last jaw-dropping plot development :-P
And some trace of this got weirdly cross-fertilised with emeraldphan's idea about a story with Raoul looking back from the deck of the ship as he returns alone to Paris, giving me the idea for what I believe is an entirely new twist on the ending of "Love Never Dies"...
Given its genesis, I did actually wonder if this was going to end up as a humorous fanfic! But in fact it has come out as straight angst, the only other real option given the subject matter. The main trouble is that it is practically all angst and no plot: this is a Raoul who is taking his wife's dead body home and who has learnt from a reluctant Phantom more or less all the truth of what happened between them, and who is having to face up to what he sees as ten years of a lie while coping with an upset Gustave without any real bond with the child. In the end he's almost glad to escape... but I have some more angst planned for him on board the ship, the poor chap, so that I can work another vital piece of backstory in.
The whole thing so far consists of about 2,700 words in two(?) scenes covering his farewell to Gustave before boarding the steamer home, including an intervention by the Phantom. Although the entirety of the first 900-word 'scene' has ended up as a diversion into thoughts about Christine, all of which are nominally going on in the space between Gustave's first hesitant sentence and Raoul's response after an unspecified delay... not entirely sure I can get away with that. But having written it in logical progression as it now stands, making any change becomes, as always, rather difficult :-(
I'm currently trying both to hint at and to keep the pivotal secret of this story -- rather tricky, as it's something that Raoul would naturally think about under the circumstances, and it would certainly be unnatural to unveil it in the last scene/line without any prior mention. On the other hand, it is the sole original plot idea and hence justification of the story (inasmuch as one can call it plot at all!)
The rest is simply random scraps of backstory -- and yes, this does seem to be yet another slightly different version of What Happened Between POTO and LND: it more or less has to be, since the big reveal rules out any continuity between the new story and "Waiting in the Wings", while my other two stories both fork off before this point and use the original soundtrack continuity -- plus character analysis, the latter occasionally (and visibly, I hope) self-deceiving.
At the moment I'm planning two chapters (since the first scene can't really stand alone), though the second chapter is likely to be much shorter than the first, consisting of more musings on board the ship plus a brief arriving-home sequence and plot reveal. The provisional title is "Left Behind" ("The Girl He Left Behind Him" is a little tasteless in the one meaning and a little too specific in the other, I think) with the first quayside chapter entitled "Help Me Say Goodbye".
