[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

[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*