Christmas challenge
20 December 2016 02:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeManaged to work an acknowledgement of Philippe's fate into the last chapter of my Christmas challenge fan-fic (I really need to hurry up on that one; even if I posted the four chapters daily I wouldn't be able to get them out before the 25th! Fortunately only the first chapter is actually eligible for the challenge, and it's reasonably standalone...)
It really didn't seem to make much sense to have a happy fluffy final chapter when one of the major characters in the previous chapter had died under traumatic circumstances in the interim. But it wasn't until Christine came up with an unfortunate comparison when trying to keep Raoul out of danger of drowning that this occurred to me.
I don't actually think I shall be using that dialogue prompt, since I didn't come up with any satisfactory resolution to it; however, I managed to cover the subject sufficiently by adopting my usual approach of diving into random moments of backstory mid-chapter, and seeing where it went :-p
Anyway, the result is that I've now got yet another attempt at 'fluff' with unintended angst developments in the middle of it! I'm not sure if it's the canon or just my subconscious that really doesn't lend itself to fluff-fic; probably the latter. But since the theme of the story is more or less "Unhappy Christmases" (coded as angst/family) it's not inappropriate... even if I'd intended it to be more "three times when Raoul didn't enjoy Christmas and one when he did".
Which reminds me that I still need a title and summary :-p
I also remembered with a jolt that I had managed to completely forget the part of canon where Christine goes back to bury the Phantom three weeks later -- I had the couple already in Sweden by this point, implied never to have returned to France. Ironic, given that this scene is such a fanfic favourite (reminds me of the time when I somehow managed to entirely forget that Gustave was supposed to be the Phantom's illegitimate son and not Raoul's, in a story which revolved heavily around Raoul's damaged relationship with the boy...)
Apparently my subconscious really isn't interested in the Phantom :-p
In my defence, this is one of the points at which Leroux seems to give two mutually contradictory accounts; that Raoul and Christine married at once and fled Paris immediately for the farthest North, but that Christine was present in Paris three weeks later to return Erik his ring before burying him. (And I'm aware that he doesn't say they went to Sweden, but suggests that Christine's voice may still be heard in Norway instead; the narrator of the book doesn't actually know for certain, however, and having them returning to the country of Christine's birth requires less elaborate explanation for the purposes of this story than going off to a country that is foreign to both of them!)
It really didn't seem to make much sense to have a happy fluffy final chapter when one of the major characters in the previous chapter had died under traumatic circumstances in the interim. But it wasn't until Christine came up with an unfortunate comparison when trying to keep Raoul out of danger of drowning that this occurred to me.
I don't actually think I shall be using that dialogue prompt, since I didn't come up with any satisfactory resolution to it; however, I managed to cover the subject sufficiently by adopting my usual approach of diving into random moments of backstory mid-chapter, and seeing where it went :-p
Anyway, the result is that I've now got yet another attempt at 'fluff' with unintended angst developments in the middle of it! I'm not sure if it's the canon or just my subconscious that really doesn't lend itself to fluff-fic; probably the latter. But since the theme of the story is more or less "Unhappy Christmases" (coded as angst/family) it's not inappropriate... even if I'd intended it to be more "three times when Raoul didn't enjoy Christmas and one when he did".
Which reminds me that I still need a title and summary :-p
I also remembered with a jolt that I had managed to completely forget the part of canon where Christine goes back to bury the Phantom three weeks later -- I had the couple already in Sweden by this point, implied never to have returned to France. Ironic, given that this scene is such a fanfic favourite (reminds me of the time when I somehow managed to entirely forget that Gustave was supposed to be the Phantom's illegitimate son and not Raoul's, in a story which revolved heavily around Raoul's damaged relationship with the boy...)
Apparently my subconscious really isn't interested in the Phantom :-p
In my defence, this is one of the points at which Leroux seems to give two mutually contradictory accounts; that Raoul and Christine married at once and fled Paris immediately for the farthest North, but that Christine was present in Paris three weeks later to return Erik his ring before burying him. (And I'm aware that he doesn't say they went to Sweden, but suggests that Christine's voice may still be heard in Norway instead; the narrator of the book doesn't actually know for certain, however, and having them returning to the country of Christine's birth requires less elaborate explanation for the purposes of this story than going off to a country that is foreign to both of them!)