[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

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

Okay, I know it was for (my) prompt, but I'm so curious about this from Sasuke and the Seven Leaves:

Six rebels stare back, jammed shoulder to shoulder in the tiniest excuse for a med-bay he's seen since he was eight years old. The leftmost one is tall with prematurely gray hair, a cyborg implant in his left eye, and some kind of mechanical contraption over his mouth and chest. Probably a breath regulator; cloned organs are expensive in the outer colonies. The man next to him wears an interface headset over his shaggy black hair; his face is nearly as hard to read despite being uncovered. They wear rank insignia marking them as a captain and a commander, respectively.

The other four are younger: the blue-eyed blond who kidnapped Sasuke, a quiet-looking woman with long black hair and white contact lenses (some kind of VR interface, Sasuke bets; she must be a computer tech), a skinny man with black hair and the hacked-up clothes that say he spends a lot of time around overheating generators, and a woman with pink hair (dye or gene-mod? hard to say) who grins, hard-edged, and says, "Good boy." She presses a couple points on a remote in her left hand and the straps holding Sasuke's chest and legs retract. His wrists are still cuffed to the rails, though, he discovers when he tries to move. There's just enough give for him to sit up, not nearly enough to stand or reach more than a foot from the gurney.

"Who are you, what do you want, and why am I alive?" Sasuke says.

The pink-haired woman's grin widens. "We're your people, who you betrayed when you joined the landlords and their corrupted dogs. We want you to betray them in turn. And you're alive because traitors are so much less politically useful than martyrs, don't you think?"

[edenfalling]

The thing about Sasuke and the Seven Leaves is that it's only masquerading as a standalone oneshot. In reality, it is the opening chapter of a much longer story I am not writing, and therefore this excerpt is the "meet the other main characters" scene -- we've already had some exposition on Orochimaru and Kabuto (two main villains) earlier and met Naruto during the offscreen space battle, but now we meet the rest of the Konoha transplants. Notice that Sakura and Naruto are the ones who speak the most -- because Team 7 OT3 forever! (*cough* Sorry, I just love them, platonic, romantic, or whatever works for them as long as they stick together.)

Six rebels stare back, jammed shoulder to shoulder in the tiniest excuse for a med-bay he's seen since he was eight years old. The leftmost one is tall with prematurely gray hair, a cyborg implant in his left eye, and some kind of mechanical contraption over his mouth and chest. Probably a breath regulator; cloned organs are expensive in the outer colonies. The man next to him wears an interface headset over his shaggy black hair; his face is nearly as hard to read despite being uncovered. They wear rank insignia marking them as a captain and a commander, respectively.

These roles are an obvious translation from canon, where Kakashi was the first leader of Team 7 and also Yamato's... senpai, I guess, in Anbu. And this leaves space for the council and the Kages to be higher up in the rebel military command and civilian authority structures. Since the Sharingan isn't a thing in this universe, and neither is chakra, I turned some of their identifying gear into machinery -- this is also a convenient way to signal the tech level of this universe and a sort of cyberpunk feel. (Also note that Sasuke zeros in on their military ranks, because he is military himself.)

The other four are younger: the blue-eyed blond who kidnapped Sasuke, a quiet-looking woman with long black hair and white contact lenses (some kind of VR interface, Sasuke bets; she must be a computer tech), a skinny man with black hair and the hacked-up clothes that say he spends a lot of time around overheating generators, and a woman with pink hair (dye or gene-mod? hard to say) who grins, hard-edged, and says, "Good boy." She presses a couple points on a remote in her left hand and the straps holding Sasuke's chest and legs retract. His wrists are still cuffed to the rails, though, he discovers when he tries to move. There's just enough give for him to sit up, not nearly enough to stand or reach more than a foot from the gurney.

Hinata is the only person in this scene who has not been a member of Team 7 at some point! This is partly because I just like her, and partly because I wanted another female character on-page to make the gender balance less Sakura-and-her-harem. Team 8 and Team 10 are the rest of the crew, by the way. Team Gai are either a special forces unit, on a different ship, or something; I dunno exactly, but NOBODY wants Kakashi and Gai on the same spaceship. Terrible things would happen.

In my original AU sketch, I thought Sakura would be the pilot, but once I started writing it was blindingly obvious that she was the medical officer. And Sai is the engineer, because all sci-fi engineers are crazy; it's practically a genre tradition. *grin* (Shikamaru does tactics, Hinata is the computer support person, Shino does navigation, Ino is the hotshot pilot, and Chouji does human resources and also commando raids along with Naruto. They are all cross-trained to a high degree because it's a small ship, but those are their specialties. Yamato is the communications officer because he can be trusted not to freak out their bosses.)

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

This is so fun to find out a bit more about the others and the world-building you put into this!

[edenfalling]

[continued from comment #1]

Sakura's hair is a gene-mod, incidentally. She did it herself in med school. The remote-control medical bay gimmick is another quick way to signal the level and integration of technology in this world. Automation is particularly important on a small ship with a small crew. Quite a lot of things are done by computer and machine, which is one reason Hinata's job in keeping the systems working smoothly is so important.

And of course Sakura keeps Sasuke strapped to the gurney. The rebels want to recruit him, but they're not stupid. They know he's not going to do an about-face on the defining drive of his life without a lot of time and persuasion, and cold hard proof that the system he's been working within is in fact aggravating the problems (piracy) that he wants to stamp out. (Well, okay, Naruto might think Sasuke should join them right now because it's stupid not to, but that's because Naruto's an idealist and also impatient. Kakashi, Yamato, and Sakura are either realists or cynics, and they all outrank him.)

"Who are you, what do you want, and why am I alive?" Sasuke says.

He has no tact whatsoever. That's okay! It means he'll fit right in. :-)

The pink-haired woman's grin widens. "We're your people, who you betrayed when you joined the landlords and their corrupted dogs. We want you to betray them in turn. And you're alive because traitors are so much less politically useful than martyrs, don't you think?"

The colonists call the inner systems government and corporations "landlords" because property rights are one of their chief grievances. It costs a LOT of money to settle the outer system, and the organizations that sponsored that settlement and development want a full return on their investment. The colonists are perfectly willing to keep mining and selling raw materials to the inner system, but they want to do so on their own terms, and to be recognized as citizens of the places they live, rather than... permanent migrant renters, I guess? It's more complicated than that, because life is always more complicated, but that's the base issue.

The bit about traitors and martyrs ties directly into Sasuke being used as a poster boy by the inner system military. If he gets killed by the rebels, the government can make a huge stink and paint the rebels as so fanatical they'd kill "one of their own" just for daring to have a different opinion from the one their "terrorist leaders" enforce. But if Sasuke defects... well, then it's the colonists who get to have the media field day. *evil smile*