Notes on Senza Fine (multimedia included ahaha)

[petronia]

Link back to Part IX, for reference.


Small white cabbage butterfly (Pieris rapae).

Gino Paoli - Senza Fine: surprisingly, I was able to find an mp3 of this by searching on the Hype Machine. One of these days I may write a fic to Ono Lisa's Spanish albums too! (...It occurred to me five paragraphs from the end that I was aiming for the same bittersweet magic-realist button as Flor de Yemanjà, at which point I was like screw it, if this is a schtick there are worse ones. orz)

Why I started writing this fic: because of Bruno, surprise surprise. In the same way as "Honour" was supposed to have been about Giorno. ^^; Probably I am the only person to get stuck on this, but near the end of part 5 there's a scene where Doppio (for reasons of his own) is helping Bruno get around, and Bruno thinks he's Trish because their psychic signatures are so similar - his body is giving out on him so he's pretty much deaf and blind at this point. He starts telling "Trish" about how he owns a safe house outside the city that no one knows about, and he wants her to go live there after things die down: it's a nice neighbourhood, close to a local school, there are flowers, you can see the sea (I actually don't remember if he said all this or if I made it up in my head XD;). And it was the saddest thing. Not even so much that he wasn't really talking to Trish, but that no one would ever find out.

So... orz

Too, part 5 left a metric crapton of loose ends that demanded closure as well as stuff that was just elided because Araki wasn't interested in dealing with it. Such as:

• What happens to Fugo? (Only partially dealt with in the novel.)
• Trish doesn't appear in the final scene, so what happens to her?
• Does Giorno ever get back in touch with Koichi?
• Does Polnareff figure out Giorno's heritage? Does he tell Giorno? Does Koichi? Do Polnareff and Jotaro reunite?
• What do they do with the bodies? And the apartments? I WORRY ABOUT STUFF LIKE THIS OK.
• So how does Giorno take over the gang?

I was pondering point #5 when the scenes with the key and the butterflies just popped into my head. So that gave me a beginning, a climax, and an ending. Sometime before I'd gotten the idea of using Pink Dark Boy as a kind of wireframe to string all the disparate bits together (I didn't want to write, like, five different fics to address the various points XD). But once I knew what to do about the Buccellati bit, I could start writing. IIRC I planned over-optimistically to work on it during my Shanghai vacation, but I got sick and couldn't go anywhere for a week. XD; So I did in fact end up writing.

When I got back from China I drew a chart that looked a bit like this:

--> 1) unfinished business
| --> 2) the organization (Pink Dark Boy I)
| | --> 3) Trish and Mista go shopping
| | | --> 4) Giorno learns about the Joestars and Dio (PDB II)
| | | | 5) flashback: Buccellati / Polnareff / Giorno
| | --> 6) Trish and Mista go to a movie
| |   --> 7) Jotaro and Koichi visit (PDB III)
| --> 8) Rohan's exhibition
--> 9) Fugo / Buccellati's house

In other words, part 1 sets up part 9, part 2 sets up part 8, and so on. This is probably the most symmetrical and orderly story I've ever written. XD

The Pink Dark Boy stuff is based on JoJo itself, obviously (Italian fandom included XD), as well as a sort of meta-ideal of WJ/shounen/mystery manga in general - there's some Conan there, some Lupin, some Urasawa Naoki. And commentary on the visual tropes of the fic itself. All this stuff kind of appeared organically out of nowhere, every time I needed a linking paragraph. It's not like I need an excuse to be meta-tastic. XD; Oh, and it's Giorno/Mista because I wanted it to be ahaha. In a certain sense it could've just as well not been but I, uh. orz

Writing this didn't actually take as long as it seems. I wrote parts I-III in October, IV-VII in November, and then I skipped three months because December I was writing Christmas ficlets and January-February I was studying for the GMAT. Wrote VIII in March, half of IX in April, got stuck on the Fugo scene, went to Italy. Came back, continued to be stuck, wasted two months mostly not-writing the SSBB entry, skipped the Fugo scene, wrote the rest of IX in three days. =_= So really, it would have taken less than four months if I'd had the balls to disregard all other commitments. This was what I wanted to be writing the entire time anyway.

Random stuff:

• I came up with the idea of a labyrinth stand by pondering what Shindou Hikaru's stand would be. ...Yeah. (Before you ask: no I'm not writing this for blind_go.)
• In my original mental draft the picture of Beatrice in the tomb with the butterflies gets damaged in the crossfire and Giorno ends up purchasing it. XD;
• Beatrice looks sort of like Reimi. Yuichi Wesley, as mentioned, looks a lot like Koichi - intentionally on Rohan's part.
• Three hours of horticultural research to one paragraph of text = sure sign of my fic. This tendency to feature random flowering shrubs goes straight back to VampChron, GW etc.
• I don't usually have moments where characters "do things I don't expect" (more like I expect and expect but they don't deliver), but I had no idea Mista was going to do that at the end. XD;; I mean, it's the Mafia oath, he's not proposing marriage to Giorno, but in context... Then I woke up the next morning and realized it made sense, because the entire story takes place before the final scene of part 5, so Mista would have been the first to formally pledge loyalty to Giorno.
• When sub_divided asked me about my personal fanon I forgot to mention that I'm sure Mista is a Laura Pausini fan. To the point where I listen to Laura Pausini to get back into the headspace for writing him. XD;

Thanks to everyone who read and commented on this at various stages of development (assuming any of you made it this far down the post, which I kind of doubt XD;;). It couldn't have been done alone, especially the stand battle bit which would've been incoherent without the beta-readerly input.

***

Whenever I finish a fic I experience a bizarre fandom resurgence, like I have trouble letting go of the characters in some sense. Usually I read a lot of other people's fics (which is why a communal event like blind_go is so much fun), but in JoJo this is pretty much impossible, so I end up reading Japanese fanartists' 4koma instead. They have plots like "someone stole Giorno's pudding out of the fridge, suspicion falls on all"; it's pretty awesome. XD

Comments

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

I gotta read this story through again from the beginning. (That flow chart! omg.)

it's a nice neighbourhood...you can see the sea

Well, that explains that line. ^^; I thought it was a non sequitur. It actually worked really well as one since everything else in that section is kind of...rising tension. I mean, it feels like it's building up to something. XD; Actually, I think Mista's pledge comes too soon -- the real culmination of that scene is the moment when Giorno accepts that Bruno is gone/Part 5 is over. The oath is a kind of "what comes after". XD; Though I guess it's kind of hard to write someone else's (not the viewpoint character's) moment of acceptance as the climax of the story. And by putting them so close together, the emotional intensity from one kind of bleeds over into the other.

I came up with the idea of a labyrinth stand by pondering what Shindou Hikaru's stand would be.

Why would Shindou Hikaru have a labyrinth Stand, though? I always thought his greatest/deepest/most heartfelt desire to be seen/acknowledged -- for people (but especially Akira) to see him and not Sai. And the reason he feels so guilty about Sai's disappearance is because he knows that it was this desire that caused it. He's protective of Sai's memory and their time together but...hiding? (This is the major issue I have with issen's Next to Net Go series. XD;)

In my original mental draft the picture of Beatrice in the tomb with the butterflies gets damaged in the crossfire and Giorno ends up purchasing it.

I'm gonna take that as extra-canonical "canon" if you don't mind. XD;

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm going to need to pad out the ending probably. It has the same problem as Una Musica, where you can tell I'm steamrollering toward the end without a care for pacing. ^^; Probably Giorno needs to talk more; I had to go back and pad out part IV for the same reason.

Actually, I think Mista's pledge comes too soon -- the real culmination of that scene is the moment when Giorno accepts that Bruno is gone/Part 5 is over.

Suspect that my usual horror of the obvious is more of a liability in this story than usual, because you're right - I hadn't thought about it this way, but most of the emotional growth/change/reversal takes place on Giorno's part, not Mista's, and mostly Mista plays catch-up as he tries to figure out what's going on. XD; I can't bring myself to write Giorno as even temporarily emo so this is how it ends up. But I can't figure out if any of this stuff makes sense to The Reader without, like, instituting a quiz or something.

The bit about the sea does break the tension, that's intentional... I guess, obscurely, because the physical action taking place is that they're climbing a hill to get a view, but there's never anything at a scenic point except the view, the place itself is empty. And it's a significant emptiness, or so I've always experienced it. XD; Like dude in Hachikuro who bikes all the way to the northernmost point of Japan, stands on the lookout point and looks out; then... he turns around and goes home.

I don't think Shindou would have a labyrinth stand - I meant I came up with the idea while pondering it. I was trying to figure out how go could be turned into a stand power but it just hurt my brain. XD;; It's true that Shindou's deepest desires/guilt/motivations would probably fuel something not quite so... mechanical, though. Like in one of the question memes I said he wouldn't get anything special from D's pet shop but that's not really the case, is it.

So per Hikaru, emotionally at least, Sai disappears because he wants to be acknowledged in lieu of Sai; and per Sai (or at least, per dijeron's "For Wanting Nails"), Sai disappears because he learns to see himself as part of a continuity, i.e. comes to value Hikaru before his own desire to advance as a player. ^^;

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

most of the emotional growth/change/reversal takes place on Giorno's part, not Mista's...I can't bring myself to write Giorno as even temporarily emo

I think it's like...Giorno doesn't waste his time obsessing over how things make him feel, he's too controlled for that. But at the same time, he is reflexive, he does contemplate the future and the past, and he evaluates them them in terms of larger goals. Unlike Mista, who doesn't think any further than "I wonder what's for dinner?" ^^; If anyone is going to be experiencing emotional development here, it has to be Giorno. But at the same time...it's tricky. You know?

Go turned into a Stand. XD. I guess I always saw Hikaru no Go as not being about Go, more about a group of people who are after something and Go is the method they use to reach it. (But at the same time, you can't switch Go with something else, because different paths are absolutely not interchangeable.) Go is a metaphor, Stands are also a metaphor, so if you have a Stand representing Go, you have a metaphor standing in (haha) for another metaphor, which doesn't work -- actually, I don't think the characters in Hikaru no Go should have Stands, because the Stand would have to replace Go, and how can you replace Go?

OH MY GOD MY STATS FINAL STARTS IN TEN MINUTES.