[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

[lady_songsmith]

In Anvard, people chase Shasta out of the kitchens and insist on filling tubs and pitchers for him. There's nothing for him to mend, no animals for him to look after, nothing that he can set to work fixing and point to afterward and say, "There, I made that." He's grateful people don't try to dress him like he saw a lady doing to Aravis when he rushed into her room once without knocking. (Now he always knocks.)

In Calormen, he used to daydream now and then about joining the army, doing very brave deeds that eventually won him the notice of the Tisroc -- may he choke on a sweetmeat and die, Shasta thinks, still feeling the bubbling fizz of breaking the rules and getting away with it -- and being raised up and rewarded with a lot of money and a huge estate. He thought it would be brilliant fun to have no work at all. The trouble is that he never thought about what he'd be doing instead.

[edenfalling]

In Anvard, people chase Shasta out of the kitchens and insist on filling tubs and pitchers for him. There's nothing for him to mend, no animals for him to look after, nothing that he can set to work fixing and point to afterward and say, "There, I made that." He's grateful people don't try to dress him like he saw a lady doing to Aravis when he rushed into her room once without knocking. (Now he always knocks.)

It is a lot harder to do nothing than people tend to expect when they are busy! I can't manage it for more than a day or so, and I am a naturally lazy person. To someone who's more prone to doing things -- even if his direction of activity was usually dictated by someone else -- leisure must seem like a horrible, gaping emptiness to Shasta. The bit about pointing to something and saying, "There, I made that," is basically my own reaction to writing a story, drawing a picture, or doing some kind of work with my hands. It seems to be a basic human urge to put our stamp on the world and say, "That thing is different because of me." Maybe it's a form of territorial marking. *wry*

And of course Shasta would barge into Aravis's room. He doesn't have any social training telling him not to... until he gets yelled at and/or hideously embarrassed in Anvard.

In Calormen, he used to daydream now and then about joining the army, doing very brave deeds that eventually won him the notice of the Tisroc -- may he choke on a sweetmeat and die, Shasta thinks, still feeling the bubbling fizz of breaking the rules and getting away with it -- and being raised up and rewarded with a lot of money and a huge estate. He thought it would be brilliant fun to have no work at all. The trouble is that he never thought about what he'd be doing instead.

Calormen is a highly stratified society. Outside of court society in Tashbaan, there are only two ways up: commerce and war. Of those two, war is the faster route, and also the one that will win you the most social respect. (Soldiers may be named Tarkaans; merchants never are.) In my head canon, Axartha Tarkaan won his nobility and his position as Vizier by serving with Rishti Tisroc in the army, and saving the then-prince's life. (Ahoshta Tarkaan rose through court society as a scribe and then an adviser to various members of the royal family, and was ennobled because he was high in Malindra Takhun's favor, but that is a method only available to a few men with good educations, and in any case does not win true respect the way battlefield promotions do.) So if a Calormene boy dreams of bettering his life, of course he's going to dream of war. Shasta is no exception.

I also like the way he appends a phrase of disrespect to his thought of the Tisroc. It's hard to abandon a habit of thought or speech, and when changing a pattern of behavior people often overcompensate in the opposite direction for a while. So Shasta is still focussed on rejecting parts of his Calormene upbringing instead of letting any mention of the Tisroc just pass unmarked.