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Down There In The Reeperbahn dvd commentary
A long time ago, I offered to take requests for dvd commentaries. (You can still ask, if you like. I'll do 'em for chapters of WIPs, too.) ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
semby requested I do Down There In The Reeperbahn, a historical Fanged Four (actually Three) fic I did some time ago.
As with the commentary I did for the first part of Bodiless Within The Bodies, this is really talky, and dense, and specific. It also has a lot to do with how I think about writing and stuff like that. I don't really recommend it for anyone who is faint of heart, easily bored, or averse to getting down into stuff like the writing process and what makes stuff in fiction tick and random crap. I only did the first part, otherwise I'd've probably written a novel.
The commentary is in bold. Yes, there is more commentary than fic.
Because fandom is smart like that, much has been made of Angel's family structures and the way they mirror each other. A great place to find out more about this is Kita's essay, Him For All In All, at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
idol_reflection. I wanted to play with that, particularly with Connor and the way his Daddy issues relate to Angel's. The best way seemed to be to invent a boy who was a vessel for these reflections.
At the time I was also interested in seeing the Fanged Four in action, but not so much because their actual historical activities interest me. They only interest me in how they effect the present characters. Angelus frankly bores me, but Angel fascinates. So I was presented with the idea of trying to say something about their past while trying to talk about their future at the same time. Of course, you can always set the fic in present and flashback to past. But let's face it, we've all seen that a million times, and Drusilla is such an interesting vehicle. She allows us to set in the past and flashforward to the future.
What ended up connecting these two ideas was the song by the same title by Tom Waits (lyrics here). There's a verse about a boy who likes to cross-dress and how he only fit in in the Reeperbahn (which was like the red light district of Hamburg). Since, um, for some reason the idea of Connor "in women's underthings" presents itself very readily in my mind, bam! The boy in the song was the vessel to reflect Connor, and the song was the setting for the historical I wanted to do anyway.
The year below is absolutely arbitrary. I only wanted it after Dru's turning and before Spike's. Okay, here, now, the fic finally starts:
~Hamburg, 1867~
Lift your skirts ladies, when walking the Reeperbahn; the cobblestones, they’re infants’ heads. The word for "cobblestones" actually does mean "baby's heads" in Dutch. Creepy, right? Heels go clickety-clack to tap them flat, and a face disappears from a window. Someone needs to write an essay; I've never seen faces disappearing from windows discussed as a cliche or common trope of horror, but it really is. Under the sign you’ll find a washed out mother, spreading her legs for the bread and butter; don’t mind, don’t mind, she was past her prime, and Daddy likes them new.
The word "Daddy" got changed a lot. This is actually not supposed to be Drusilla's voice. You will note that there is never an "I" in this fic. I never felt I could write a fic in her voice; I do not believe Dru could actually tell a narrative. The voice in this is of course very convoluted and rhymey and garbled and generally insane, all things we associate with Dru, but in the end it is more conclusive than the tale she would tell. It is, however, Drusilla's POV.
I sort of thought of it as...there was the narrator, getting all set up for a very very close third person. To do a close 3rd person, you get in a character's head. So Mr. Narrator got in Dru's, went mad, and then wrote this. The one redeeming thing about first person is that the best first person writers get inside the narrator's head, as well as the character's (because duh! They are the same. Usually). In most 3rd person these days, authors don't bother to do that. They assume the author is the narrator, but I think that's a mistake. It makes for less layered and nuanced writing.
Note on the next sentence: I tried to start with the subject of the sentence as rarely as possibly. I did this because I was steadily thinking about the song, trying to hold it in my head as I wrote this. I noticed many of the phrases in the song didn't start with the subject, either. As soon as I started trying to start with verbs, things started getting rhythmic. It's amazing, really. I like to impose rules on myself; I recently tried to write a fic never beginning a sentence with "It" (unless in dialogue). This produced interesting results. I do not think, however, that imposing absolutely arbitrary rules is a good idea. Start with verbs to produce a sense of motion and immediacy; leave out "it" because it so often becomes a pronoun that doesn't actually get defined. But I do not believe in writing a novel without the letter "e", because there's no real meaningful reason for doing that other than to see if you can. Which makes me hmph.
Born on a Tuesday, the boy’s fresh to the block, wearing pantalets and a chemise. With shy thighs and blue sky eyes he summons the sailors, bids them bring their muscled arms in tow. Obviously I was reading Wallace Stevens. Down from the docks, salty and raw, they’ll ram in his port I thought this was almost too vulgar. So I kept it; the world is nothing but meat. Take yours tonight, so you can buy some tomorrow: mutton and scraps for the family, children. I think it was Stultiloquentia who mentioned she loved the ambiguity of the punctuation here. Iirc, I was too embarrassed to admit I didn't even notice that ambiguity when I wrote it. And the next night will come, and more men will pay to pound the babes, pound them right into the floor. Told you about those cobbles, sweet.
Heart beat like hare’s legs, he waits to be hips to fill another man’s hands. It’s for the money, but his father still calls him a queer. The idea of the father is from the Wait's song, which is why the song was so perfect; it played into the father theme I had going. And of course, on the next sentence, there was also a lengthy internal debate about how to refer to Darla. Granmummy’s eyes light up when they light on him, and she won’t do any such thing. She’ll call him dear—dear, dear boy, this is of course a reference to Darla calling Angel "dear boy" and he will be hers, her own. “See-saw, Margery Daw, Jacky shall have a new master”; that’s how we say it in England, but Mummy won’t pay, not a penny a day, because Jacky can’t fuck faster than she can kill. She will inherit him proper, she will, her little boy warm in her belly for free.
Okay, here we come to something that's a big idea of the piece: Dru's use of nursery rhymes. Again, this isn't supposed to be Dru's voice, but it is her POV, and she uses nursery rhymes in canon. It makes her creepy because she makes horror childish and decorates it with what're supposed to be harmless ditties. That is also what the Fanged Four did; murder and mayhem was just plain a party for them. That's also supposed to be what the narrator is doing here--this is story. It's not a snapshot, it's not a horrific event, it's a fun tale, a song to sing, a happy memory--except of course it's not. Keeping that idea intact was made easier by the idea that the idea for this was based on a song. The song itself is in some sense bawdy, like a sea chanty or something sung by dirty old men deep in their cups. But it's also a tragedy, and creepy, and that dichotomy makes it work.
Anywho, I had a devil of a time making these nursery rhymes fit in. You can't just quote the rhyme, because that calls a halt, takes you out. But the reader has to recognize it as a nursery rhyme, or else it won't have the effect you want. So you can't overhaul the rhyme completely, especially because you're not going to use very much of it. And if you're like me, you're not well versed in nursery rhymes. Most of the time spent writing this fic was actually spent looking for the appropriate rhymes to put in the appropriate spot. I must've read hundreds of them, and tried to hold them in my head so I would be able to recognize when one might fit. This is the rhyme itself, if you're interested.
So anyway, in this very first one I called specific attention to the fact that it was something that is "said", that it's a quote. Also, I was mistaken--there's an inherent "I" in the we here. But it refers to Dru and the narrator, possibly the Fanged Four, possibly to the English, possibly to anyone who's off her rocker. So, you too!
Will the dear, dear boy come in out of the cold? Daddy’s coaxing tender, and the boy, mouth-watering, follows, side by side inside the broken down bar This phrase if very similar to something in the actual song. with nothing but birds in the rafters. Will the dear, dear boy sit down and rest? . . .Will the dear, dear boy take off his dress? This is supposed to be reminicent of the Big Bad Wolf talking to Red Riding Hood, which of course in the next paragraph gets driven home harder.
Up goes the garment, up off his chest; up goes the cock, and tightening balls; up pop two demon faces—peek-a-boo, young man. My, my, what big bumps on their faces; my, my what large teeth. The little boy ogles, to see such a sight, and with a cry he runs from the room. Mummy grabs; he’s eel-wet, slick; he kicks hard, vicious fists his way free from her grasp. Daddy lunges, but he was too far, and the boy runs out to the moon.
Perhaps obviously, the above references the Hey, Diddle Diddle rhyme. Two lines of that worked here "the little dog laughed to see such a sight" and "the cow jumped over the moon". But they happened in the wrong order, and more stuff had to happen in between, so that the whole paragraph had to be a little more rhythmic and rhymey, I thought, too make the plays on those two lines not feel too out of place.
The rhyming words in this fic are kind of haphazard. Whenever I write with a strong rhythm, or try to rhyme a few things in the beginning, other rhymes just start falling into place. It is still not easy; you really have to tackle some sentences down and beat them over the head so that the rhythm makes the rhyme fall in the right place. But coming up with the actual words themselves isn't as difficult as one might think it would be, and the relaxing thing about prose poetry is you don't have to have a rhyme. (You don't in poetry either, but when a poem is constantly rhyming and then doesn't, I get thrown off. In prose it's far more sporadic, make-shift, piece-meil, spur of the moment).
And of course, like gets talked about in poetry classes, sometimes structure just makes you more articulate. Just like how imposing rules on yourself can make you do more creative things. Sometimes, to achieve a rhyme, I use a word I might not use for such a meaning. You've got to be careful not to stretch too far, to use a word that doesn't really work just for the sake of rhyme, but in general you can apply words in extraordinary ways, and rhyming is just a way to jog the way you standardly connect words and meaning.
When I was doing a nursery rhyme adaptation however, I definitely wanted rhymes so that they sounded like the nursery rhymes. This could be an absolute bitch, but here it was easy. Like I was talking about, the rhyme for "moon" ("room", which I guess is a slant rhyme) came easily. Also, "grabs" and "grasp" sort of rhyme (forgot the name of that sort of rhyme), but that just came really easily because they mean similar things. And yet I never noticed the way those two words play off each other before I wrote that sentence, and then it just came to me. It was fun.
Struck by their failure: I thought you had him; no, it was you. Your fault, not mine; he was yours. He was yours; not mine; he was yours. Mummy says: you gave him to me; you served him up to me; you brought him inside—
Okay, on the issue of the paragraphs that follow: all of Drusilla's dialogue in this fic, in case you didn't notice, is directly taken from canon, not a word changed (at least, not changed from Buffyworld transcripts and the Buffy Dialogue Database). The point is supposed to be, as I mentioned in the beginning, that Angel repeats his family structures. So does Darla, but also in life, as in canon, scenes reflect each other, moments of our lives. It's dealing in fractals, I guess, a term I didn't think of applying until Stultiloquentia did in a comment.
It's also playing on something I realized while writing an original piece, and then got reiterated to me in a creative writing class: one of the most powerful things in fiction (because it is so irl, too) is the echo. The way to really show how a character has developed is to present them with a similar scenario to before, and make them make a different choice. But that is one of the crudest forms of echo. It can be done subtly. It's important to echo concept. Sometimes you don't do more than that. But to really emphasize the power of echo it's best to draw nuanced parallels, preferrably parallels the reader/viewer/experiencer (it's done in painting, and drama, and every kind of art) doesn't even notice. You can do it with rhymth, language, imagery, metaphor, concrete objects, character gestures, posture, dialogue. Consider Angel in the portal of hell after Acathla and Angel at the portal of Quor'Toth. In one he's going into the portal, in the other he's lost Connor to it. Despite the differences the parallels to these scenes creates a bridge: Angel is in hell after both.
Anywho, echo is imo what makes fanfic so special, and sometimes easily stronger than some profic even when sometimes the skill of the fanfic writer is lesser. Canon draws from real life, and in fanfic we draw from canon. We have two bases everyone is familiar with to echo off of. Canon, or profic, only has one--RL, because there's nothing else everyone has in common. Well, there are some things *most* people have: history, for instance. And you'll note how often the Bible is quoted in literature. And literary giants like T.S. Eliot partially gets his power by tapping into all the other literary giants that came before him, his literary "canon". BtVS used pop culture to make things resonate (usually humorously). But fanfic gets all those to bounce off of too, and canon. For instance, I used nursery rhymes also in this for the resonance, echo, effect.
It adds weight when the reader recognizes something. Maybe because it makes them actively think, make connections in their mind that call up other situations. This may have something to do with what I think makes metaphors work, too.
So, I digress. Echoes happen in both literature and RL, and it's something I wanted to play with here. And because this is supposed to be a piece almost more about Angel and Darla's future than their past, I wanted to show how things they say in the future could be the same as things they said in the past, and yet apply differently. Many of Drusilla's lines are about humanity, and family, something Angel and Darla don't understand until souls and Connor come. The result is sort of a dialoge between the past and future.
I wanted Drusilla's lines to be recognizably from canon, and I thought that changing them or adding on to them would cheapen the effect of what I was going for, as if it would add conditions: this scene only mirrors that scene if I change what was said. So I tried to keep the actual words of character dialogue intact, but I did mess with them a lot by changing their order, their context, and making it Drusilla who says most of it (though at the end, Angelus repeats exactly some lines of Connor's from the future).
But getting to the point where these lines of dialogue could mean something was a difficulty. For instance, in this case, Dru quotes something Darla tells Angel when she's pregnant: she tries to blame Connor's conception on Angel. Bringing this up doesn't make sense unless there's an argument about "whose fault is it?" going on. And yet, I didn't want there to be a whole bunch of dialogue in which Angel and Darla were not interacting with Drusilla, because what's important here is how Drusilla's line interacts with what's going on; what's going on itself is almost a side thing. So I smooshed up what would've been a relatively longish A/D dialogue by not putting quotes or signifiers or anything on it.
I didn't put signifiers on any of the dialogue, actually. There were lots of reasons for this: I didn't want to choose whether to use "I say" or "she says" when Dru talked, and I wanted to use Daddy and Grandmummy as little as possible, because those names make it seem as if Dru is talking. I also wanted to allude to the fact that Dru's words are not her own, and even Angel and Darla are playing "roles" that will be switched when they replay these scenes in the future. That is, anyone could say these lines, in a million different scenes that repeat over and over.
I also felt that not saying "he says" added to a sense of intimacy. I would say immediacy, but again, this is supposed to be a story you tell, a song you sing. You're not supposed to be in it, in the here and now. The place you are supposed to be is somewhere a little mad and lost, though, and that made lostness is supposed to parallel the twistedness of the Reeperbahn. So the lack of "he says" was supposed to be a like someone talking about the three voices in his head when he is one person, a little elbow in the ribs at a mental institution, a little "oh, you know who's saying it" when actually you've got no idea. It's even a little intentionally confusing, though I myself resent and often HATE being intentionally confused by the author as the reader.
To clear things up I made all Drusilla's lines, the quotes from canon, in italics. I also tried to use names when Darla and Angel are talking to clearly mark who's who. I'm still kinda unhappy about the confusion it might've caused, though.
of me—This is the bridge between the boy and Connor. Darla's just talking about inside the "broken down bar", but these words of course refer to inside of Darla. Later this idea gets played up even more, when Darla's having sex with the boy--he is inside her physically, like Connor. And that's a weird comparison, how sex and pregnancy can be linked--obviously by conception--but also, if you've got a son and if you're having sex with a man both are men inside of you. In different ways. And both can make you feel more human.
Later, Dru says Darla feels more human with the boy inside her, just like Darla says Connor inside her makes her human. Of course historic!Darla is disgusted by this idea, and in denial, but she's also disturbed. Sex can be violent but of course it can be loving, and however violent Darla is with the boy, Dru is saying it's love. And, you know, Darla maybe does have the potential to be more human, even at this stage of her life. Spike, after all, was able to fall in love, and feel more of a man because he did. Maybe Darla can't do that, but the fact that Spike could suggests that every vamp has the potential.
(eta: Which is why both Darla and Angelus are shown as getting very angry here, when Dru's quotes about Connor suggest they can be more human, can change. They FEAR that. Which is why in the end, Angelus becomes Connor: Connor thought he didn't have a choice, couldn't be anything other than what he was.)
“You're the one that came in here all 'the world is a cold and lonely place.'”
“Is she saying this is my fault?”
“She’s having a vision.” This line is to very explicitly say that Dru's lines are from another time and place.
“About me?”
“You always think they’re about you.”
“I’m the one that came in her—first. Angelus makes lame and crude puns. Such a boor. Except she was warm the first—”
“He’s getting away. Do you want Dru’s riddles or the man-child’s neck? Your choice, my darling boy.”
On a final note, we can talk about structure. This fic is in three parts. This first part is the intro. It's to set up what's going on, get the reader used to the crazy style, introduce the idea of Dru's visions as a future dialoge with the past. It also involves Angelus and Darla equally; it's significant that they have a back and forth argument to wrap this one up. It's also significant that it's about blame.
The next part is about Darla. It's Darla interacting with the boy, and Dru bringing up the parallels of her actions with Connor through that. Angelus just kinda stands back and makes fun of her. The last part is about Angelus. It's Angelus interacting with the boy, and Dru bringing up both parallels to Connor and to Liam's father (which Angelus recognizes, and becomes Connor in response), and Darla kinda stands back and makes fun of him.
These two parts mirror each other, and the first part kind of encapsulates them both: it has both Angel and Darla, both of them trying to sort of...inflict the boy on each other. When in the end Connor is a destiny they mutually accept (with open arms, if they could. But instead Darla has to kill herself and Angel has to kill Connor. Because this is AtS and it's fucking sad).
I actually started the idea for this fic with just the Darla part and the Angel part, mirroring each other (echoing. Because you can echo inside of a fic always, makes scenes echo and that. The exterior echo--the way fanfic calls on canon, or profic calls on the Bible sometimes, etc, is not always as easy, because it has to be recognized as an echo by the reader). In a simple fic like this, you really can just juxtapose mirroring scene against each other. But because this fic is so stylistically challenging, and there's so much potential for confusion, I felt that an intro which kind of fortells what will happen ("in this fic, we will discuss both Angel and Darla as they relate to the boy, who Drusilla points out is a version of Connor. And now we begin"), so the reader starts feeling settled before some of the deeper digging occurs.
Some day I might do the rest of the fic. Probably not, after this lengthy dissertation that at times bored even me. Gah!
semby requested I do Down There In The Reeperbahn, a historical Fanged Four (actually Three) fic I did some time ago.As with the commentary I did for the first part of Bodiless Within The Bodies, this is really talky, and dense, and specific. It also has a lot to do with how I think about writing and stuff like that. I don't really recommend it for anyone who is faint of heart, easily bored, or averse to getting down into stuff like the writing process and what makes stuff in fiction tick and random crap. I only did the first part, otherwise I'd've probably written a novel.
The commentary is in bold. Yes, there is more commentary than fic.
Down There In The Reeperbahn DVD commentary thingy, complete with writing and some canon meta
Because fandom is smart like that, much has been made of Angel's family structures and the way they mirror each other. A great place to find out more about this is Kita's essay, Him For All In All, at
idol_reflection. I wanted to play with that, particularly with Connor and the way his Daddy issues relate to Angel's. The best way seemed to be to invent a boy who was a vessel for these reflections. At the time I was also interested in seeing the Fanged Four in action, but not so much because their actual historical activities interest me. They only interest me in how they effect the present characters. Angelus frankly bores me, but Angel fascinates. So I was presented with the idea of trying to say something about their past while trying to talk about their future at the same time. Of course, you can always set the fic in present and flashback to past. But let's face it, we've all seen that a million times, and Drusilla is such an interesting vehicle. She allows us to set in the past and flashforward to the future.
What ended up connecting these two ideas was the song by the same title by Tom Waits (lyrics here). There's a verse about a boy who likes to cross-dress and how he only fit in in the Reeperbahn (which was like the red light district of Hamburg). Since, um, for some reason the idea of Connor "in women's underthings" presents itself very readily in my mind, bam! The boy in the song was the vessel to reflect Connor, and the song was the setting for the historical I wanted to do anyway.
The year below is absolutely arbitrary. I only wanted it after Dru's turning and before Spike's. Okay, here, now, the fic finally starts:
~Hamburg, 1867~
Lift your skirts ladies, when walking the Reeperbahn; the cobblestones, they’re infants’ heads. The word for "cobblestones" actually does mean "baby's heads" in Dutch. Creepy, right? Heels go clickety-clack to tap them flat, and a face disappears from a window. Someone needs to write an essay; I've never seen faces disappearing from windows discussed as a cliche or common trope of horror, but it really is. Under the sign you’ll find a washed out mother, spreading her legs for the bread and butter; don’t mind, don’t mind, she was past her prime, and Daddy likes them new.
The word "Daddy" got changed a lot. This is actually not supposed to be Drusilla's voice. You will note that there is never an "I" in this fic. I never felt I could write a fic in her voice; I do not believe Dru could actually tell a narrative. The voice in this is of course very convoluted and rhymey and garbled and generally insane, all things we associate with Dru, but in the end it is more conclusive than the tale she would tell. It is, however, Drusilla's POV.
I sort of thought of it as...there was the narrator, getting all set up for a very very close third person. To do a close 3rd person, you get in a character's head. So Mr. Narrator got in Dru's, went mad, and then wrote this. The one redeeming thing about first person is that the best first person writers get inside the narrator's head, as well as the character's (because duh! They are the same. Usually). In most 3rd person these days, authors don't bother to do that. They assume the author is the narrator, but I think that's a mistake. It makes for less layered and nuanced writing.
Note on the next sentence: I tried to start with the subject of the sentence as rarely as possibly. I did this because I was steadily thinking about the song, trying to hold it in my head as I wrote this. I noticed many of the phrases in the song didn't start with the subject, either. As soon as I started trying to start with verbs, things started getting rhythmic. It's amazing, really. I like to impose rules on myself; I recently tried to write a fic never beginning a sentence with "It" (unless in dialogue). This produced interesting results. I do not think, however, that imposing absolutely arbitrary rules is a good idea. Start with verbs to produce a sense of motion and immediacy; leave out "it" because it so often becomes a pronoun that doesn't actually get defined. But I do not believe in writing a novel without the letter "e", because there's no real meaningful reason for doing that other than to see if you can. Which makes me hmph.
Born on a Tuesday, the boy’s fresh to the block, wearing pantalets and a chemise. With shy thighs and blue sky eyes he summons the sailors, bids them bring their muscled arms in tow. Obviously I was reading Wallace Stevens. Down from the docks, salty and raw, they’ll ram in his port I thought this was almost too vulgar. So I kept it; the world is nothing but meat. Take yours tonight, so you can buy some tomorrow: mutton and scraps for the family, children. I think it was Stultiloquentia who mentioned she loved the ambiguity of the punctuation here. Iirc, I was too embarrassed to admit I didn't even notice that ambiguity when I wrote it. And the next night will come, and more men will pay to pound the babes, pound them right into the floor. Told you about those cobbles, sweet.
Heart beat like hare’s legs, he waits to be hips to fill another man’s hands. It’s for the money, but his father still calls him a queer. The idea of the father is from the Wait's song, which is why the song was so perfect; it played into the father theme I had going. And of course, on the next sentence, there was also a lengthy internal debate about how to refer to Darla. Granmummy’s eyes light up when they light on him, and she won’t do any such thing. She’ll call him dear—dear, dear boy, this is of course a reference to Darla calling Angel "dear boy" and he will be hers, her own. “See-saw, Margery Daw, Jacky shall have a new master”; that’s how we say it in England, but Mummy won’t pay, not a penny a day, because Jacky can’t fuck faster than she can kill. She will inherit him proper, she will, her little boy warm in her belly for free.
Okay, here we come to something that's a big idea of the piece: Dru's use of nursery rhymes. Again, this isn't supposed to be Dru's voice, but it is her POV, and she uses nursery rhymes in canon. It makes her creepy because she makes horror childish and decorates it with what're supposed to be harmless ditties. That is also what the Fanged Four did; murder and mayhem was just plain a party for them. That's also supposed to be what the narrator is doing here--this is story. It's not a snapshot, it's not a horrific event, it's a fun tale, a song to sing, a happy memory--except of course it's not. Keeping that idea intact was made easier by the idea that the idea for this was based on a song. The song itself is in some sense bawdy, like a sea chanty or something sung by dirty old men deep in their cups. But it's also a tragedy, and creepy, and that dichotomy makes it work.
Anywho, I had a devil of a time making these nursery rhymes fit in. You can't just quote the rhyme, because that calls a halt, takes you out. But the reader has to recognize it as a nursery rhyme, or else it won't have the effect you want. So you can't overhaul the rhyme completely, especially because you're not going to use very much of it. And if you're like me, you're not well versed in nursery rhymes. Most of the time spent writing this fic was actually spent looking for the appropriate rhymes to put in the appropriate spot. I must've read hundreds of them, and tried to hold them in my head so I would be able to recognize when one might fit. This is the rhyme itself, if you're interested.
So anyway, in this very first one I called specific attention to the fact that it was something that is "said", that it's a quote. Also, I was mistaken--there's an inherent "I" in the we here. But it refers to Dru and the narrator, possibly the Fanged Four, possibly to the English, possibly to anyone who's off her rocker. So, you too!
Will the dear, dear boy come in out of the cold? Daddy’s coaxing tender, and the boy, mouth-watering, follows, side by side inside the broken down bar This phrase if very similar to something in the actual song. with nothing but birds in the rafters. Will the dear, dear boy sit down and rest? . . .Will the dear, dear boy take off his dress? This is supposed to be reminicent of the Big Bad Wolf talking to Red Riding Hood, which of course in the next paragraph gets driven home harder.
Up goes the garment, up off his chest; up goes the cock, and tightening balls; up pop two demon faces—peek-a-boo, young man. My, my, what big bumps on their faces; my, my what large teeth. The little boy ogles, to see such a sight, and with a cry he runs from the room. Mummy grabs; he’s eel-wet, slick; he kicks hard, vicious fists his way free from her grasp. Daddy lunges, but he was too far, and the boy runs out to the moon.
Perhaps obviously, the above references the Hey, Diddle Diddle rhyme. Two lines of that worked here "the little dog laughed to see such a sight" and "the cow jumped over the moon". But they happened in the wrong order, and more stuff had to happen in between, so that the whole paragraph had to be a little more rhythmic and rhymey, I thought, too make the plays on those two lines not feel too out of place.
The rhyming words in this fic are kind of haphazard. Whenever I write with a strong rhythm, or try to rhyme a few things in the beginning, other rhymes just start falling into place. It is still not easy; you really have to tackle some sentences down and beat them over the head so that the rhythm makes the rhyme fall in the right place. But coming up with the actual words themselves isn't as difficult as one might think it would be, and the relaxing thing about prose poetry is you don't have to have a rhyme. (You don't in poetry either, but when a poem is constantly rhyming and then doesn't, I get thrown off. In prose it's far more sporadic, make-shift, piece-meil, spur of the moment).
And of course, like gets talked about in poetry classes, sometimes structure just makes you more articulate. Just like how imposing rules on yourself can make you do more creative things. Sometimes, to achieve a rhyme, I use a word I might not use for such a meaning. You've got to be careful not to stretch too far, to use a word that doesn't really work just for the sake of rhyme, but in general you can apply words in extraordinary ways, and rhyming is just a way to jog the way you standardly connect words and meaning.
When I was doing a nursery rhyme adaptation however, I definitely wanted rhymes so that they sounded like the nursery rhymes. This could be an absolute bitch, but here it was easy. Like I was talking about, the rhyme for "moon" ("room", which I guess is a slant rhyme) came easily. Also, "grabs" and "grasp" sort of rhyme (forgot the name of that sort of rhyme), but that just came really easily because they mean similar things. And yet I never noticed the way those two words play off each other before I wrote that sentence, and then it just came to me. It was fun.
Struck by their failure: I thought you had him; no, it was you. Your fault, not mine; he was yours. He was yours; not mine; he was yours. Mummy says: you gave him to me; you served him up to me; you brought him inside—
Okay, on the issue of the paragraphs that follow: all of Drusilla's dialogue in this fic, in case you didn't notice, is directly taken from canon, not a word changed (at least, not changed from Buffyworld transcripts and the Buffy Dialogue Database). The point is supposed to be, as I mentioned in the beginning, that Angel repeats his family structures. So does Darla, but also in life, as in canon, scenes reflect each other, moments of our lives. It's dealing in fractals, I guess, a term I didn't think of applying until Stultiloquentia did in a comment.
It's also playing on something I realized while writing an original piece, and then got reiterated to me in a creative writing class: one of the most powerful things in fiction (because it is so irl, too) is the echo. The way to really show how a character has developed is to present them with a similar scenario to before, and make them make a different choice. But that is one of the crudest forms of echo. It can be done subtly. It's important to echo concept. Sometimes you don't do more than that. But to really emphasize the power of echo it's best to draw nuanced parallels, preferrably parallels the reader/viewer/experiencer (it's done in painting, and drama, and every kind of art) doesn't even notice. You can do it with rhymth, language, imagery, metaphor, concrete objects, character gestures, posture, dialogue. Consider Angel in the portal of hell after Acathla and Angel at the portal of Quor'Toth. In one he's going into the portal, in the other he's lost Connor to it. Despite the differences the parallels to these scenes creates a bridge: Angel is in hell after both.
Anywho, echo is imo what makes fanfic so special, and sometimes easily stronger than some profic even when sometimes the skill of the fanfic writer is lesser. Canon draws from real life, and in fanfic we draw from canon. We have two bases everyone is familiar with to echo off of. Canon, or profic, only has one--RL, because there's nothing else everyone has in common. Well, there are some things *most* people have: history, for instance. And you'll note how often the Bible is quoted in literature. And literary giants like T.S. Eliot partially gets his power by tapping into all the other literary giants that came before him, his literary "canon". BtVS used pop culture to make things resonate (usually humorously). But fanfic gets all those to bounce off of too, and canon. For instance, I used nursery rhymes also in this for the resonance, echo, effect.
It adds weight when the reader recognizes something. Maybe because it makes them actively think, make connections in their mind that call up other situations. This may have something to do with what I think makes metaphors work, too.
So, I digress. Echoes happen in both literature and RL, and it's something I wanted to play with here. And because this is supposed to be a piece almost more about Angel and Darla's future than their past, I wanted to show how things they say in the future could be the same as things they said in the past, and yet apply differently. Many of Drusilla's lines are about humanity, and family, something Angel and Darla don't understand until souls and Connor come. The result is sort of a dialoge between the past and future.
I wanted Drusilla's lines to be recognizably from canon, and I thought that changing them or adding on to them would cheapen the effect of what I was going for, as if it would add conditions: this scene only mirrors that scene if I change what was said. So I tried to keep the actual words of character dialogue intact, but I did mess with them a lot by changing their order, their context, and making it Drusilla who says most of it (though at the end, Angelus repeats exactly some lines of Connor's from the future).
But getting to the point where these lines of dialogue could mean something was a difficulty. For instance, in this case, Dru quotes something Darla tells Angel when she's pregnant: she tries to blame Connor's conception on Angel. Bringing this up doesn't make sense unless there's an argument about "whose fault is it?" going on. And yet, I didn't want there to be a whole bunch of dialogue in which Angel and Darla were not interacting with Drusilla, because what's important here is how Drusilla's line interacts with what's going on; what's going on itself is almost a side thing. So I smooshed up what would've been a relatively longish A/D dialogue by not putting quotes or signifiers or anything on it.
I didn't put signifiers on any of the dialogue, actually. There were lots of reasons for this: I didn't want to choose whether to use "I say" or "she says" when Dru talked, and I wanted to use Daddy and Grandmummy as little as possible, because those names make it seem as if Dru is talking. I also wanted to allude to the fact that Dru's words are not her own, and even Angel and Darla are playing "roles" that will be switched when they replay these scenes in the future. That is, anyone could say these lines, in a million different scenes that repeat over and over.
I also felt that not saying "he says" added to a sense of intimacy. I would say immediacy, but again, this is supposed to be a story you tell, a song you sing. You're not supposed to be in it, in the here and now. The place you are supposed to be is somewhere a little mad and lost, though, and that made lostness is supposed to parallel the twistedness of the Reeperbahn. So the lack of "he says" was supposed to be a like someone talking about the three voices in his head when he is one person, a little elbow in the ribs at a mental institution, a little "oh, you know who's saying it" when actually you've got no idea. It's even a little intentionally confusing, though I myself resent and often HATE being intentionally confused by the author as the reader.
To clear things up I made all Drusilla's lines, the quotes from canon, in italics. I also tried to use names when Darla and Angel are talking to clearly mark who's who. I'm still kinda unhappy about the confusion it might've caused, though.
of me—This is the bridge between the boy and Connor. Darla's just talking about inside the "broken down bar", but these words of course refer to inside of Darla. Later this idea gets played up even more, when Darla's having sex with the boy--he is inside her physically, like Connor. And that's a weird comparison, how sex and pregnancy can be linked--obviously by conception--but also, if you've got a son and if you're having sex with a man both are men inside of you. In different ways. And both can make you feel more human.
Later, Dru says Darla feels more human with the boy inside her, just like Darla says Connor inside her makes her human. Of course historic!Darla is disgusted by this idea, and in denial, but she's also disturbed. Sex can be violent but of course it can be loving, and however violent Darla is with the boy, Dru is saying it's love. And, you know, Darla maybe does have the potential to be more human, even at this stage of her life. Spike, after all, was able to fall in love, and feel more of a man because he did. Maybe Darla can't do that, but the fact that Spike could suggests that every vamp has the potential.
(eta: Which is why both Darla and Angelus are shown as getting very angry here, when Dru's quotes about Connor suggest they can be more human, can change. They FEAR that. Which is why in the end, Angelus becomes Connor: Connor thought he didn't have a choice, couldn't be anything other than what he was.)
“You're the one that came in here all 'the world is a cold and lonely place.'”
“Is she saying this is my fault?”
“She’s having a vision.” This line is to very explicitly say that Dru's lines are from another time and place.
“About me?”
“You always think they’re about you.”
“I’m the one that came in her—first. Angelus makes lame and crude puns. Such a boor. Except she was warm the first—”
“He’s getting away. Do you want Dru’s riddles or the man-child’s neck? Your choice, my darling boy.”
On a final note, we can talk about structure. This fic is in three parts. This first part is the intro. It's to set up what's going on, get the reader used to the crazy style, introduce the idea of Dru's visions as a future dialoge with the past. It also involves Angelus and Darla equally; it's significant that they have a back and forth argument to wrap this one up. It's also significant that it's about blame.
The next part is about Darla. It's Darla interacting with the boy, and Dru bringing up the parallels of her actions with Connor through that. Angelus just kinda stands back and makes fun of her. The last part is about Angelus. It's Angelus interacting with the boy, and Dru bringing up both parallels to Connor and to Liam's father (which Angelus recognizes, and becomes Connor in response), and Darla kinda stands back and makes fun of him.
These two parts mirror each other, and the first part kind of encapsulates them both: it has both Angel and Darla, both of them trying to sort of...inflict the boy on each other. When in the end Connor is a destiny they mutually accept (with open arms, if they could. But instead Darla has to kill herself and Angel has to kill Connor. Because this is AtS and it's fucking sad).
I actually started the idea for this fic with just the Darla part and the Angel part, mirroring each other (echoing. Because you can echo inside of a fic always, makes scenes echo and that. The exterior echo--the way fanfic calls on canon, or profic calls on the Bible sometimes, etc, is not always as easy, because it has to be recognized as an echo by the reader). In a simple fic like this, you really can just juxtapose mirroring scene against each other. But because this fic is so stylistically challenging, and there's so much potential for confusion, I felt that an intro which kind of fortells what will happen ("in this fic, we will discuss both Angel and Darla as they relate to the boy, who Drusilla points out is a version of Connor. And now we begin"), so the reader starts feeling settled before some of the deeper digging occurs.
Some day I might do the rest of the fic. Probably not, after this lengthy dissertation that at times bored even me. Gah!
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The nursery rhymes were supposed to be subtle, mostly because the whole thing was supposed to be nursery rhymey--just like you say! Thanks for requesting this piece. It was fun to return to it, and although I suspect few people are interested, it's nice to be able to point out how creative and thoughtful I am! Ha! I'm only half kidding.