![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Today is Betapalooza reveal day! I did not write any treats, alas, but I did complete my assigned story and I think it's pretty good. :-)
The Snow Queen: A Story in Six Parts: Back in the days when meteors still fell from the sky in dozens at a time, a girl and a boy grew up next door to each other in the shadow of a fallen city. They were as close as sister and brother (And maybe they were! It's hard to say, since so many people lost their families back then and were taken in by strangers), and in three seasons of the year they played together every day in the garden around the girl's house, where nothing grew but roses and even they were mostly thorns.
Of course, it couldn't last. (6,650 words, for![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
light_rises)
-----
So, thoughts!
My recipient,light_rises, made the following prompt: Fairy tale crossovers? Fairy tale crossovers. This time featuring our kids in "The Snow Queen", with Jade filling Gerda's role and John Kai's. I'm not firm on Rose and Dave, and in fact I'd love to see what you come up with there! I’m DEF cool with looseness to the retelling - e.g. combine a couple characters? HELL yes, go for it - just so long as the core plot of TSQ remains more or less intact. Bonus points for: working in some Homestuck canon mythos where appropriate; making some other sweet role matches with other HS characters; ending it with all the kids together (John not being able to meet the others is too /sad/, dammit).
People who haven't been following me long may not be aware of this, but fairy-tales are one of my oldest, deepest, and most abiding loves. I overdosed on them as a child, I write retellings of them for fun, I write original fairy-tales of my own, and I love excuses to work fairy-tale elements into fanfiction. (Check the fable/fairy-tale tag on my journal if you want proof.) OBVIOUSLY this was the prompt I picked to work with!
I spent a week or so rereading Anderson's story and figuring out how to fit Rose and Dave into roles that would be both thematically relevant and also get them to the Snow Queen's palace along with Jade, the latter being trickier since Gerda's helpers tend to remain in their own sub-stories rather than accompany her. Rose was relatively easy, mostly because of her name: you see, the way Gerda recovers her memories while living with the old woman learned in magic is by spotting a fake rose on the woman's hat, which she forgot to hide, and which reminds Gerda of her own rosebushes and thus of Kai. Clearly this time the spell would break when Jade learned Rose's name. I decided not to make Rose a witch herself, but to make her the witch's daughter; Mom Lalonde therefore enchants Jade because she wants to give Rose a friend. (That's mostly there because of Rose's canonical family issues.)
Dave was trickier. I knew immediately that the robber girl had to be a combination of Vriska and Terezi (though the exact way they split the role didn't come clear until I wrote the section in question), which meant Dave was narratively equivalent to the captive reindeer. Which is. Um. Kind of structurally awkward? But there was really no other way to fit him in, so I had to do some logistical juggling around their transportation from that point onward.
Anyway, I had a basic rough outline several weeks before the due date, but I had the damndest time actually making myself sit down and write. (Depression sucks like that.) Fortunately I got an extension and at least for me, the adrenaline of deadline pressure does a lot to mitigate any lack of spoons and concentration I am otherwise experiencing, plus I was on the tail end upswing of that particular blue funk so I was able to meet my revised deadline and then make useful edits -- sticking more rose-and-crow foreshadowing into the second scene, tidying logistical loose ends, adding some vague gestures toward emotional character arcs, etc. -- before the stories went live.
There are some further notes about structural choices and character cameos in the endnotes of the story itself, which I won't reproduce here on account of spoilers. I will say, though, that I am tickled pink that AO3 has a 'Friendship Is Magic' tag and that I got to use it, because in this fic that statement is absolutely literally true. :-D
The Snow Queen: A Story in Six Parts: Back in the days when meteors still fell from the sky in dozens at a time, a girl and a boy grew up next door to each other in the shadow of a fallen city. They were as close as sister and brother (And maybe they were! It's hard to say, since so many people lost their families back then and were taken in by strangers), and in three seasons of the year they played together every day in the garden around the girl's house, where nothing grew but roses and even they were mostly thorns.
Of course, it couldn't last. (6,650 words, for
-----
So, thoughts!
My recipient,
People who haven't been following me long may not be aware of this, but fairy-tales are one of my oldest, deepest, and most abiding loves. I overdosed on them as a child, I write retellings of them for fun, I write original fairy-tales of my own, and I love excuses to work fairy-tale elements into fanfiction. (Check the fable/fairy-tale tag on my journal if you want proof.) OBVIOUSLY this was the prompt I picked to work with!
I spent a week or so rereading Anderson's story and figuring out how to fit Rose and Dave into roles that would be both thematically relevant and also get them to the Snow Queen's palace along with Jade, the latter being trickier since Gerda's helpers tend to remain in their own sub-stories rather than accompany her. Rose was relatively easy, mostly because of her name: you see, the way Gerda recovers her memories while living with the old woman learned in magic is by spotting a fake rose on the woman's hat, which she forgot to hide, and which reminds Gerda of her own rosebushes and thus of Kai. Clearly this time the spell would break when Jade learned Rose's name. I decided not to make Rose a witch herself, but to make her the witch's daughter; Mom Lalonde therefore enchants Jade because she wants to give Rose a friend. (That's mostly there because of Rose's canonical family issues.)
Dave was trickier. I knew immediately that the robber girl had to be a combination of Vriska and Terezi (though the exact way they split the role didn't come clear until I wrote the section in question), which meant Dave was narratively equivalent to the captive reindeer. Which is. Um. Kind of structurally awkward? But there was really no other way to fit him in, so I had to do some logistical juggling around their transportation from that point onward.
Anyway, I had a basic rough outline several weeks before the due date, but I had the damndest time actually making myself sit down and write. (Depression sucks like that.) Fortunately I got an extension and at least for me, the adrenaline of deadline pressure does a lot to mitigate any lack of spoons and concentration I am otherwise experiencing, plus I was on the tail end upswing of that particular blue funk so I was able to meet my revised deadline and then make useful edits -- sticking more rose-and-crow foreshadowing into the second scene, tidying logistical loose ends, adding some vague gestures toward emotional character arcs, etc. -- before the stories went live.
There are some further notes about structural choices and character cameos in the endnotes of the story itself, which I won't reproduce here on account of spoilers. I will say, though, that I am tickled pink that AO3 has a 'Friendship Is Magic' tag and that I got to use it, because in this fic that statement is absolutely literally true. :-D
