Fic commentary meme

[petronia]

The Berchtesgaden Debriefing! Which is ongoing, so herein lie spoilers. Of a sort.

You have to understand that I've been writing this thing off and on for three years, so at this point the existence of the universe is a fait accompli - I don't remember at all why I thought this was a good idea, as opposed to, say, writing a series of standalone PWPs if I was so addicted to the Brad x Schu smut. Which I was. (Still am.) I can tell you some of the conscious decisions I made in the planning stages, because I'm still living with them. Firstly, I wanted it to be really fanon. I thought the idea of doggedly referencing WK canon like it was LoGH or something was just risible, so I'd take what everyone else was writing to be my canon, and have Schu be a teenage heroin addict that Crawford picks up off the streets and all that. Unlike Jaida, I was far too lazy to consider creating a backstory from scratch. (Eventually I did anyway, for Crawford, because no one else's backstory supplied an adequate explanation for the Crawford who'd sprung into existence fully-formed in VoT, complete with Swiss herb lozenges - d'you know every time I'm in a Euro grocery I have to forcibly keep myself from buying a packet of the schtuff? Have to remind myself that I don't like the taste. Because I'm evil and still lazy, none of said backstory has shown up in the fic proper, though I blab about it on the lj at times. I think bits of it may be laterally inspired by Poppy Z. Brite.) I also decided to completely disregard the WK canon continuity outside the anime series, simply because I had no interest in tracking down spoilers and trying to reconcile the various bits of timeline. It transpired later that I got it mostly right anyhow. ^^;

Secondly, tBD is a movie. It is only a short story because I am not a California-residing billionaire, which I think we can agree is tragic. The damned thing is filled and will continue to be filled with literal cinematographic cues - panning shot! fade to black! - which is only marginally less wanky than if I'd chosen to write it in script format. To be more precise, tBD is film noir with a touch of supernatural and espionage, half X-Files and half Raymond Chandler in tone – those being formative influences. Elements of Hong Kong gangland filmography eventually infiltrated the unpublished bits as well. It started off as an exercise in genre for the sake of smut, and ended up as… an exercise in genre, period. ^^; As such – and this probably accounts for why I haven't just sat down and finished it – I have grave reservations about my ability to pull it off. I hate the fact that I don't know enough about drugs or guns or European politics circa 1990; I really hate the fact that everything happens indoors and there's no wider setting to speak of, because my writing is all about detailed setting. The fact that German WK fans send me complimentary emails about it just makes me curl up in a ball and weep. What I'd like to do is go to Berlin and Amsterdam and London to tromp around in character, John Le Carre style – and then I realise that I'm seriously considering leaving the continent in order to research fanfiction. It's a measure of how much I care about this particular piece that I've never managed to convince myself emotionally that it would be going overboard.

Being a movie, tBD also has a soundtrack – the first soundtrack I ever made independently for anything – which I might post in its entirety someday. It's got Garbage and Guniw Tools and Lili Fatale and a bit of Faye Wong. Blast to the past. (And, of course, it's really bloody ironic to be asked for DVD-style commentary to it, as it has DVD extras. No, in all seriousness. My mania knows no bounds. I was going to put up a flash-navigable site for it when it was done, laid out like a DVD main menu. Can't do it now, as I've lost the original Photoshop files, but that was the idea.)

Thirdly... the character development, I guess? It should be reasonably obvious from reading the sequels that tBD taken in and of itself is a tragedy. ...Well. Tragedy is too strong a word. But it's film noir, and it ends in betrayal. Sometime between when the story was conceived and the present, though, the details of Crawford's motivation changed. I mean, he never had a real choice about turning Schuldich in to the Institut, because he couldn't train him, and he couldn't hide him forever – though he was prepared to try, at least unconsciously. But in the first version the clincher was that their relationship itself was spiralling out of control. It was... likely to end in Oshima-esque murder-suicide (she says, laughing nervously). Something of that is still in the story, but eventually it came to be external factors that forced the issue. Very grosso modo, Crawford had the choice between two factions, neither of which would have left them a speck of personal liberty – and picked the one less likely to get him and Schu killed, as well as offering the best opportunity to turn it to his own eventual future advantage (because while the Crawford I write may not be as much of an asshole as he used to be, he's still a few parsecs away from altruistic impulse). In fact – in either version of events – he got a lot more advantage out of it than he expected, because he had no idea the Institut had "lost" Schuldich and had been searching for him for a decade.

So Schuldich goes back to the glass cage, and Crawford gets promoted (the jerk). And then Estet – with the weird selective blindness that I found typical of that organisation in the series – decides to make Crawford's life hell, aka assign them to the same team. And then I show up err I mean Nagi shows up, and then Farfarello, who really deserves a side story of his own, and I'm well out of noir lit and well into crackwhore Final Fantasy crossover territory.

The last two pages of tBD are written, and have been written for a couple of years. Those won't change. ^_^

Randomness: Baba is a really weird funhouse-distortion of my friend T and her propensity for fortune-telling. Crawford's oversensitized "allergy" to games of chance is probably the most interesting character detail I made up, more so than the death-visions which are out of the X-Files. The clubs and bars and expensive hotels are all more or less derived from my personal experiences with clubs and bars and expensive hotels, so I'm content with those. What else? Oh yeah, the serendipitous item I wail about in terror every once in a while, which is that Hitler's summer chalet or something was in Berchtesgaden so it totally makes it sound intentional and subtextual and shit, when really I took one of my dad's old photobooks and picked a random town that looked quaint and pretty and had ski lodges.