[Meme] DVD fic commentary

[edenfalling]

What the heck, on the off chance anyone is interested:

Pick any passage of 500 words or less from anything I've written and paste it into a comment to this post. Then I'll flail, flounder and provide the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, and anything else that you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

All my stories are listed in my master fic post. (Which is also available on LJ.)

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Responses!

--from the final chapter of "Tides", for branchandroot

--from "Do not stand at my grave and weep", for rthstewart

--from "Any Sentry from His Post", for lady_songsmith

--from "Sasuke and the Seven Leaves", for hungrytiger11

Comments

Re: From the end of "Tides"

[edenfalling]

First of all: oh my god, the commas, they burn! Aaaaah. *claws face, resists urge to edit*

I am generally okay with reading my work several years later -- there are always points I think I could say better with hindsight, but overall I did the best I could and am content with that. Commas are the one exception. Somehow I never notice at the time just how many of them I habitually use. This is particularly bad with stories I post soon after completion, rather than printing them out to hack up with red pen, or even just letting them sit for a couple days and rereading with fresh eyes. And when I see the comma infestations later on, OUCH.

That said!

Sasuke draws chakra, and more chakra, and still more, until Sakura almost feels like a miniature thunderstorm is building around him. Naruto leans against the port railing, deceptively relaxed; his eyes are red and his fingers clawed, and Sakura hopes that neither of her boys loses control, not out here on the water, miles from shore. Her scrolls are ready in her pockets, but if they fight, there's no way she can seal them before they wreck the boat.

Sakura's awesome, but her strength is in control and precision (and sometimes common sense), not in the sheer raw chakra reservoirs both Naruto and Sasuke have. There is no way she wouldn't be aware of that.

She's never seen the transformation, but it's fascinating to watch, in a gruesome way. Sasuke's body darkens, strains, and deforms. Giant things burst from his back, like malformed hands or shrunken wings, and suddenly the source of those twin scars is clear. Horns twist down over his dead white hair, and claws and fangs grow to match Naruto's.

Mostly I find Sasuke's curse seal form hilarious, but also I confess I like the idea of "wing scars" from the bat-hand things running down either side of his spine. There's something kind of sexy about that.

Oni, Inner Sakura murmurs. He's an oni! A night-haunt! How could he do this to himself?

I always think there should be more gods and youkai and random supernatural stuff in the manga. More power-as-myth and less power-as-science.

But underneath the monster, she can still see Sasuke. Same face, same stance, same I'm-too-proud-to-admit-that-I'm-uneasy expression in his eyes. She can see that Naruto's not moving to attack. And she can see twenty-seven strands of sickly green chakra leading out from Sasuke's tenketsu, shackles that bind him to Orochimaru.

Twenty-seven senbon. Twenty-seven wards. Twenty-seven strikes. Sakura dissolves her seals, and steps back to watch her boys.

And that's the end of the "let me stop the plot for a lecture on my theory of chakra mechanics" portion of this chapter. My world-building got away from me here. I should have been paying more attention to the emotional stuff between the characters and less to the details of Sakura breaking the seal -- that or I should have signalled harder in earlier chapters that the seal-breaking was going to be a Big Important Thing -- but I guess that's a hazard of serial writing and posting.

Naruto and Sasuke look at each other, considering. "So," Naruto says eventually, "you're still special." He lets go of the railing and saunters over to poke at one of the misshapen hands. "Can you do anything with those things on your back?"

Sasuke blinks. "...I have no idea."

Naruto grins, a white flash of fangs against his tanned face. "Hey, hey, I dare you to try flying!"

Because Sasuke is the king of tunnel vision, swear to god, whereas Naruto (while also prone to tunnel vision on certain topics) does at least have a prankster's background in thinking around corners and just trying crazy things for the hell of it.

Sasuke blinks again. "Moron. Why should I?"

"'Cause it'd be cool!"

"No."

"Come on."

"No."

"Scaredy-cat."

They are such idiot teenage boys. I love that about them, and I wanted to bring them back to that sort of functional bickering, after the years apart and the tension of the first chapter and the way Sasuke has been fighting against letting Naruto and Sakura in. So of course they end up in a "yes-no-yes-no-yes-no-dumbass" sort of argument. :-)

Ten minutes later, Sakura finishes mopping up puddled ink, tosses her broken senbon overboard, and leans back against the stern rail. Naruto perches on the tip of the main mast, waving his arms and yelling as he weaves and throws one incomplete Rasengan after another. Sasuke dives and soars, dancing over the choppy winds the same way he slips through trees and shadows, with eerie, effortless grace.

No lie, that image -- Sasuke flying over a boat out in the middle of the sea, with Naruto egging him on and Sakura laughing at them both -- is basically what I was aiming for ever since I sent them off to Wave Country.

This is the way they were always meant to be. Three of them, together, against the world.

Sakura closes her eyes to bask in the afternoon sun, and smiles.

Because Team 7 forever. All other arguments are invalid. *angelic smile*

If I were rewriting "Tides" from the ground up, I would signal harder from the start that the main plot arc is about Team 7 rebuilding their friendship and partnership, and all the stuff about being missing-nin and hunting Akatsuki was basically background pretext. In practice, I don't think I ended the story it looked like I was writing, even though this is, as I said, the final scene I was aiming for from quite early on.