Fic conclusion
21 June 2025 07:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI *think* I've finished my Porthos-fic (which is of course going to need a title, although its filename is clearly going to be 'Porthos'!) I'm not sure that I've entirely captured Porthos' 'voice', either in speech or in thought-patterns, although there were intermittent bits that I was pleased with in that respect -- I may need to go through and try to simplify my convoluted syntax a *lot*...
I'm thinking of running this together with "If I Should Die" as an AO3 'series' under the name of "To Save the King", since they are basically both in the same continuity, although this one is much more obviously AU -- ironically enough, given the genesis of the fic, I'm afraid that in this situation Aramis probably *doesn't* ever carry out his commission to pass on Athos' farewells, because the story turned out to be very much about a rift between d'Artagnan and Aramis that hadn't even existed at the point when I set out to write it, and which would have made any such interaction feel impossible :-( I did know that Aramis was busy 'having a life-crisis moment', part of the idea for this fic being that maybe you could 'save' Aramis, in the same way that I did for Javert, by inflicting a canon trauma -- in Aramis' case, losing a friend -- on him at a much earlier point in his character arc, when he still has the moral and mental flexibility to change. But I didn't 'know' (until d'Artagnan unexpectedly threw it into conversation...) that this was because the Gascon was blaming him for not having prevented Athos' death :-(
Speaking as an atheist, one of the things that saddens me about Aramis is that in the original novel ("The Three Musketeers") he comes across as genuinely drawn to religious belief, even if he also uses it as an automatic cloak for whatever other peccadilloes he gets up to; he does actually see himself as a would-be priest who is only ever a temporary musketeer -- I don't think that's a hypocritical act -- despite the fact that the date of that future tends to depend entirely on how appealing the secular life is to him at the current moment. By the time of "Twenty Years After", however, Dumas strongly suggests that he has stopped believing at all; he has been ordained, as he once desired, but has found that he no longer has any vocation. It's not so much that the now-Abbé d'Herblay is happy to ignore any inconvenient vows of poverty, chastity or obedience, but that the author portrays him as openly insincere in his invocation of religious matters, avec ce ton d’insoucieuse philosophie qu’il avait pris depuis qu’il était d’église, et dans lequel il y avait bien plus d’athéisme que de confiance en Dieu.
The one time that we see him genuinely fall back on his faith is in his outcry to Bishop Juxon when he learns that the King is to be executed after all: Oh, monseigneur, où est Dieu? où est Dieu? In this story, of course, *that moment doesn't happen* (because they do successfully get Charles I away), but it does suggest that at that point in his character arc he is still open to divine intervention, as it were. So I wanted to write an AU in which Aramis steps back from the fatal decision to use religion simply as a route into politics, in canon with unhappy and ultimately disastrous effects, and is at least able to find some fulfilment in the choice he made for himself (and in consequence ceases his trajectory of becoming more and more unlikeable...)
The length of the fic ended up being pretty much dictated by the number of pages left in this tiny notebook -- I managed to reach the last line at the very bottom of the final page (although that is not quite as artificial as it might sound, because I have always tended to shape my chapters according to an arbitrary sense of what is 'too long' in terms of word count, and in this case simply had the assistance of a very visual guide as to how much space was left in terms of needing to 'wind down' while fitting in everything I'd planned!) I think it's actually going to be longer than "If I Should Die" (2500 words), or at least it seems to take up more pages; I'd assumed there would be room to fit in a second one-shot as I was less than halfway through the book, but under-estimated. But if necessary I would have gone over onto the back cover for a handful more sentences, or simply pasted in a folded sheet or two. (I think that what happened was that the fic acquired a whole lot of extra material about d'Artagnan and Aramis, and about how Athos fell and what happened as a result, that wasn't in my mental dialogue-outline at all: the original premise was simply "Athos is dead, as he anticipated" without any specifics as to how that happened!)
Estimate from page-counting: probably about 4,000 words, which is on the long side for a one-shot, but by no means unreasonable.
As predicted, I found myself somewhat adrift after Porthos finishes his anecdote about how he and Athos first got to know one another, because I simply hadn't thought up any more to the sequel past that point; normally I only start to write down a fic when it comes to a good end, and with this one I had instead stopped short in the middle of the 'telling myself a story' stage. And I only had four pages left at that point, with no idea where the story was going to go :-(
But d'Artagnan then came out with something completely unexpected (for the second time), and I had a fresh development that tied satisfactorily into what had gone before, and could --on the very last page of the notebook! -- both be linked back into Porthos' previous memories of Athos in his very first days in the musketeers, and sort out some of the extra complications I'd set in the way of a happy ending. The main trouble is that it *is* a pretty random reaction, even if it was genuinely something that came up without planning as an in-character response, rather than the author desperately trying to perform a segue to an arbitrary plot point...
I'm thinking of running this together with "If I Should Die" as an AO3 'series' under the name of "To Save the King", since they are basically both in the same continuity, although this one is much more obviously AU -- ironically enough, given the genesis of the fic, I'm afraid that in this situation Aramis probably *doesn't* ever carry out his commission to pass on Athos' farewells, because the story turned out to be very much about a rift between d'Artagnan and Aramis that hadn't even existed at the point when I set out to write it, and which would have made any such interaction feel impossible :-( I did know that Aramis was busy 'having a life-crisis moment', part of the idea for this fic being that maybe you could 'save' Aramis, in the same way that I did for Javert, by inflicting a canon trauma -- in Aramis' case, losing a friend -- on him at a much earlier point in his character arc, when he still has the moral and mental flexibility to change. But I didn't 'know' (until d'Artagnan unexpectedly threw it into conversation...) that this was because the Gascon was blaming him for not having prevented Athos' death :-(
Speaking as an atheist, one of the things that saddens me about Aramis is that in the original novel ("The Three Musketeers") he comes across as genuinely drawn to religious belief, even if he also uses it as an automatic cloak for whatever other peccadilloes he gets up to; he does actually see himself as a would-be priest who is only ever a temporary musketeer -- I don't think that's a hypocritical act -- despite the fact that the date of that future tends to depend entirely on how appealing the secular life is to him at the current moment. By the time of "Twenty Years After", however, Dumas strongly suggests that he has stopped believing at all; he has been ordained, as he once desired, but has found that he no longer has any vocation. It's not so much that the now-Abbé d'Herblay is happy to ignore any inconvenient vows of poverty, chastity or obedience, but that the author portrays him as openly insincere in his invocation of religious matters, avec ce ton d’insoucieuse philosophie qu’il avait pris depuis qu’il était d’église, et dans lequel il y avait bien plus d’athéisme que de confiance en Dieu.
The one time that we see him genuinely fall back on his faith is in his outcry to Bishop Juxon when he learns that the King is to be executed after all: Oh, monseigneur, où est Dieu? où est Dieu? In this story, of course, *that moment doesn't happen* (because they do successfully get Charles I away), but it does suggest that at that point in his character arc he is still open to divine intervention, as it were. So I wanted to write an AU in which Aramis steps back from the fatal decision to use religion simply as a route into politics, in canon with unhappy and ultimately disastrous effects, and is at least able to find some fulfilment in the choice he made for himself (and in consequence ceases his trajectory of becoming more and more unlikeable...)
The length of the fic ended up being pretty much dictated by the number of pages left in this tiny notebook -- I managed to reach the last line at the very bottom of the final page (although that is not quite as artificial as it might sound, because I have always tended to shape my chapters according to an arbitrary sense of what is 'too long' in terms of word count, and in this case simply had the assistance of a very visual guide as to how much space was left in terms of needing to 'wind down' while fitting in everything I'd planned!) I think it's actually going to be longer than "If I Should Die" (2500 words), or at least it seems to take up more pages; I'd assumed there would be room to fit in a second one-shot as I was less than halfway through the book, but under-estimated. But if necessary I would have gone over onto the back cover for a handful more sentences, or simply pasted in a folded sheet or two. (I think that what happened was that the fic acquired a whole lot of extra material about d'Artagnan and Aramis, and about how Athos fell and what happened as a result, that wasn't in my mental dialogue-outline at all: the original premise was simply "Athos is dead, as he anticipated" without any specifics as to how that happened!)
Estimate from page-counting: probably about 4,000 words, which is on the long side for a one-shot, but by no means unreasonable.
As predicted, I found myself somewhat adrift after Porthos finishes his anecdote about how he and Athos first got to know one another, because I simply hadn't thought up any more to the sequel past that point; normally I only start to write down a fic when it comes to a good end, and with this one I had instead stopped short in the middle of the 'telling myself a story' stage. And I only had four pages left at that point, with no idea where the story was going to go :-(
But d'Artagnan then came out with something completely unexpected (for the second time), and I had a fresh development that tied satisfactorily into what had gone before, and could --on the very last page of the notebook! -- both be linked back into Porthos' previous memories of Athos in his very first days in the musketeers, and sort out some of the extra complications I'd set in the way of a happy ending. The main trouble is that it *is* a pretty random reaction, even if it was genuinely something that came up without planning as an in-character response, rather than the author desperately trying to perform a segue to an arbitrary plot point...