[Fic] "Sacrifices (Backwards and in High Heels)" -- Batman (Nolan!verse)

Remix reveal day! I wrote three stories this year: Sacrifices (Backwards and in High Heels for aviss, Problems and Solutions (All Things in Time) for cofax, and Down in the Deep (The Index of Refraction) for significantowl.

I am going to talk about each in a separate post.

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Sacrifices (Backwards and in High Heels): 1,850 words, April 2012. Barbara Kean has been making sacrifices for a very long time. Her marriage and her children are the latest tithe to the city that owns her heart. Barbara Kean-Gordon/Jim Gordon.

Remixed from Sacrifices, a fic by aviss.

Aviss and I matched on Inception and Naruto. You will notice I failed to write in either of those fandoms. This is partly because she is a strong KakaIru shipper, and as I have said before and will doubtless say again, the logic of that pairing escapes me (though I love both characters individually!), and because she is also an Arthur/Eames shipper and... I don't know, I just wasn't feeling romantic when I first looked through her stories and particularly not slash romantic. I was feeling very, very gen, and also very female-centric. This was almost certainly a reaction to my Narnia Big Bang fic, which I was fighting at the time -- it only has three female characters and they don't even meet each other, let alone talk, and I just really, really wanted to write something that wasn't all about men.

This is in no way a negative comment on Aviss's work! It's just the mood I was in for reasons completely external to Remix.

And I happened to open Aviss's one Nolanverse Batman fic while in that mood, and Barbara Kean-Gordon practically leaped off the page, grabbed me, shook me, and said, "Write MY story, dammit!"

So I did.

At first I thought I'd keep the story the same and write Barbara's perspective on the divorce, and what it felt like to have Jim abandon her for Gotham and for Batman, but I didn't start remixing immediately. (As I said, I was busy fighting my Narnia Big Bang, which was due first.) And when I came back, I was even more preoccupied with the limitations of gender roles and stuff, and I thought to myself, "What if Barbara was the police commissioner, and Jim was the civilian spouse? What would that do to the implications of their marriage and their divorce?"

So I wrote that instead.

Because I was switching something as major as basic story roles, I kept pretty much everything else exactly the same, just expanded a bit and altered where I thought the gender of the POV character would change things. So Barbara thinks about Rachel Dawes and about her daughter, as well as about Harvey Dent, Jim, and the Batman. And she's clearly had more opposition in her rise to power than Jim did, and has more understanding of what it's like to play the role of scapegoat -- because that is what happens to women in positions of power, more so than to men. Which sucks.

In retrospect, this was a mean thing to write as a remix. My story carries the implication that I disliked Aviss's work and wanted to 'fix' it. Which is not true! Her story is a very good character study! I just, for unrelated reasons, was in a mood where I really needed to say things about women in power and gender roles and I used her story as a vehicle for my own issues.

Sorry about that. :-(

[Fic] "Problems and Solutions (All Things in Time)" -- Chronicles of Narnia/Stargate SG-1

Remix reveal day! I wrote three stories this year: Sacrifices (Backwards and in High Heels for aviss, Problems and Solutions (All Things in Time) for cofax, and Down in the Deep (The Index of Refraction) for significantowl.

I am going to talk about each in a separate post.

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Problems and Solutions (All Things in Time): 1,250 words, April 2012. How the Goa'uld Therem came to infiltrate Stargate Command and make an attempt to commandeer the Gate, as told by Susan Pevensie to SG-1 (with necessary omissions).

Remixed from An Alternate Solution to the Problem of Susan, a fic by cofax7.

I wrote this one for fun, because Cofax's original story is such a neat idea. :-)

I also wrote it because as a child, I never saw Susan's survival of the series as a problem. How could it be? Everyone else dies! She's the only one who lives! Since I am not Christian and do not believe in a heaven, I could not (and cannot) see death as a happy ending. Susan's ending is obviously not happy, since she has to deal with the loss of her entire family (barring her unpleasant aunt and uncle), but she's the only one who has the possibility of future happiness, and also of future change, growth, and agency.

I have never understood how the Lewis who wrote that wonderful line in HHB -- "if you live, you may yet have good fortune but all the dead are dead alike" -- could be the same man who insisted the death of almost all his main characters was a good thing. But I have never understood the appeal of a theology of death in any application, so I tend to ignore most of TLB in order to keep myself from frothing fits of rage. *wry*

This will, alas, never be expanded because all I know about SG-1 comes from other people's fanfiction, a handful of episode reviews and meta posts, and some still pictures of the cast. Which is just barely enough to write this kind of idea-centric crossover, but not anywhere near the kind of familiarity one needs to write proper character-centric epics.

[Fic] "Down in the Deep (The Index of Refraction)" -- Merlin

Remix reveal day! I wrote three stories this year: Sacrifices (Backwards and in High Heels) for aviss, Problems and Solutions (All Things in Time) for cofax, and Down in the Deep (The Index of Refraction) for significantowl.

I am going to talk about each in a separate post.

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Down in the Deep (The Index of Refraction): 450 words, April 2012. Now her breath is water. And they are still not the same. Freya/Merlin.

Remixed from Down in the Deep, a fic by significantowl.

Confession: I have only ever seen four episodes of Merlin, and they were the first four of series one. So I have never actually seen Freya. But! significantowl's fic is so lovely, and I wanted to say thank you for her beta job on my assigned remix, so I dashed this off in a hurry.

It's about miscommunication, I think, between two people who genuinely care about and for each other but who come from different backgrounds and don't see the world the same way even when they use the same words. It's also an excuse to play with language and elemental symbolism and stuff -- sometimes, I just want to write something pretty. Hopefully I succeeded!

(The remix subtitle is something I am very happy about in this case, because I spent about half an hour trying to think of some water-related quote before I finally hit on the idea that miscommunication is similar to the way objects appear to disjoint and bend at the interface between water and air. Hence refraction. *grin*)