work avoidance-- i mean, uh, dvd commentary meme.
DVD commentary meme: xsmoonshine asked about Like Love in the Movies, my fic for Yuletide 2008.
I shall keep copying-and-pasting to a minimum. It is a long fic, at least by my standards. (But not my longest! That goes to my Yuletide 2006 fic, which was also a Suzumiya Haruhi one.)
So. Yuletide 2008. The request I received was for fluffy, shippy Kyon/Haruhi, a la the Garden State movie. I agonised over this for a bit, remembering nothing about Garden State except that it was very indie and had very indie music and so on. I even looked at the movie quotes on imdb. They rang no bells. In the end, I fell back on the Haruhi-messes-with-reality plot framework. My original idea was that various movie clichés would happen to Kyon, but I am a person of limited imagination and couldn't think of enough clichés, let alone ways to write them. Also, I had no time.
Like Love in the Movies
The title is a lyric from the Kent demo of Socker, which I'd posted to my lj just a while before Yuletide: som kärleken på film.
Despite my crippling fear of first-person POV, I like writing Kyon, because one gets to complain about one's own fic in the fic itself. And, in this case, express authorial desperation. I admit that I didn't have the time to review canon this year, so I did wonder if I was getting the tone right. The purple-prose narration in Kyon's head was fun, though.
First you must understand that despite the conventions of film noir, the phenomenology of thought is very different from that of having a mental narrator.
I desperately wanted to fit in references to phenomenology. It is my favourite new word from university.
It was like hearing a familiar song played in another key.
I swear that I've used this line before. Several times, even. Yet I tried searching my folder of past fic and nothing turned up, so I kept the line in.
It had no obvious melody; if anything, it sounded a bit like the BGM to an Urasawa Naoki anime, or maybe some obscure German film, the notes spaced precisely the right emotive pauses apart.
Requisite mention of Urasawa Naoki, and a reference to Goodbye! Lenin and/or Lichter. I should note that most of the references were self-indulgent rather than meant-to-be-understood.
I included Itsuki because I always include Itsuki he is very convenient as a sounding-board for Kyon. Also, I haven't actually watched any Dogme 95 films.
What Koizumi got wrong, of course, was his assumption that Haruhi wanted a happy ending.
This is one of the reasons I do not read fluffy Kyon/Haruhi fic.
It was day two of Kyon's Life, The Movie, and the background music was now some English rock song, driven by fuzzy guitars and a plaintive male voice.
Reference to Garden State and generic indie bands.
"That's it!" she announced, tossing her hair -- when had she undone that ponytail? -- and giving the room one sweeping, imperious glance. "We might as well become the Go Home Club if we waste all our activity hours playing games. SOS Brigade, dismissed!"
I think the Japanese term 帰宅部 needs to be used more in fic.
So this was it, then. Time to advance the narrative.
Why yes, my desperation is indeed showing.
Her shoulders felt oddly delicate beneath my fingers. I knew they weren't, of course. Haruhi is deadly on the baseball field and judo mat alike, and I'd been dragged around by those formidable arms often enough for my neck to recognise the choking embrace of a tugged school tie.
I generally resent references to 'delicate' characters, unless they are very clearly portrayed that way in canon.
A bit of a tangent: for the game Assassins, which I play from time to time at university, we have to write kill reports. Some of my kill reports are, well:Against a sepia-toned flashback montage of happier, brighter days, filled with bloodthirsty grins and the murders of people who were not me, I broke into a desperate run. "If I could just make it back to my room--!" thought I, in dramatic sentence-fragment fashion. But of course, that was not to be. Above the sweeping orchestral music playing in the background, I heard his swiftly nearing steps -- I could not outrun death this time. Before I could round the corner of the Deer Park I felt the sudden shock of cold steel sinking into my back.
So references to montage sequences and background music were something that I was fairly used to writing.
There is a requisite Little Mermaid reference, but the menancing black-suited men are generic.
What genre should I be playing to? Tragic doomed romance, shoujo comedy, action thriller?
These lines wrote themselves, and suggested the obvious answer. For which I was glad.
Quite run-of-the-mill, as sunsets go: no flares of deep red and gold, no dramatic salmon-bellied clouds.
I am going to shoehorn the phrase 'salmon-bellied clouds' into as many pieces of writing as I can.
...probably no aliens in the park, though there had been a suspicious-looking white cat with odd-coloured eyes.
Strangely enough, my post-fic-writing travels did include the appearance of a white cat with odd-coloured eyes. dundundunDUN.
The phenomenology of free will is part of the "hard problem of free will", as they call it in academia. If it feels very much as if one has free will, can we still argue that free will might be an illusion? And if we cannot, does that mean that we do have free will?
I'd initially wanted to include much, much more about free will and determinism, having written essays about that very topic. Like I said, the original plot was much more event-based, and would have lent itself to such philosophical digressions. I think it was best for all involved that I did not.
I shall keep copying-and-pasting to a minimum. It is a long fic, at least by my standards. (But not my longest! That goes to my Yuletide 2006 fic, which was also a Suzumiya Haruhi one.)
So. Yuletide 2008. The request I received was for fluffy, shippy Kyon/Haruhi, a la the Garden State movie. I agonised over this for a bit, remembering nothing about Garden State except that it was very indie and had very indie music and so on. I even looked at the movie quotes on imdb. They rang no bells. In the end, I fell back on the Haruhi-messes-with-reality plot framework. My original idea was that various movie clichés would happen to Kyon, but I am a person of limited imagination and couldn't think of enough clichés, let alone ways to write them. Also, I had no time.
Like Love in the Movies
The title is a lyric from the Kent demo of Socker, which I'd posted to my lj just a while before Yuletide: som kärleken på film.
Despite my crippling fear of first-person POV, I like writing Kyon, because one gets to complain about one's own fic in the fic itself. And, in this case, express authorial desperation. I admit that I didn't have the time to review canon this year, so I did wonder if I was getting the tone right. The purple-prose narration in Kyon's head was fun, though.
First you must understand that despite the conventions of film noir, the phenomenology of thought is very different from that of having a mental narrator.
I desperately wanted to fit in references to phenomenology. It is my favourite new word from university.
It was like hearing a familiar song played in another key.
I swear that I've used this line before. Several times, even. Yet I tried searching my folder of past fic and nothing turned up, so I kept the line in.
It had no obvious melody; if anything, it sounded a bit like the BGM to an Urasawa Naoki anime, or maybe some obscure German film, the notes spaced precisely the right emotive pauses apart.
Requisite mention of Urasawa Naoki, and a reference to Goodbye! Lenin and/or Lichter. I should note that most of the references were self-indulgent rather than meant-to-be-understood.
I included Itsuki because I always include Itsuki he is very convenient as a sounding-board for Kyon. Also, I haven't actually watched any Dogme 95 films.
What Koizumi got wrong, of course, was his assumption that Haruhi wanted a happy ending.
This is one of the reasons I do not read fluffy Kyon/Haruhi fic.
It was day two of Kyon's Life, The Movie, and the background music was now some English rock song, driven by fuzzy guitars and a plaintive male voice.
Reference to Garden State and generic indie bands.
"That's it!" she announced, tossing her hair -- when had she undone that ponytail? -- and giving the room one sweeping, imperious glance. "We might as well become the Go Home Club if we waste all our activity hours playing games. SOS Brigade, dismissed!"
I think the Japanese term 帰宅部 needs to be used more in fic.
So this was it, then. Time to advance the narrative.
Why yes, my desperation is indeed showing.
Her shoulders felt oddly delicate beneath my fingers. I knew they weren't, of course. Haruhi is deadly on the baseball field and judo mat alike, and I'd been dragged around by those formidable arms often enough for my neck to recognise the choking embrace of a tugged school tie.
I generally resent references to 'delicate' characters, unless they are very clearly portrayed that way in canon.
A bit of a tangent: for the game Assassins, which I play from time to time at university, we have to write kill reports. Some of my kill reports are, well:Against a sepia-toned flashback montage of happier, brighter days, filled with bloodthirsty grins and the murders of people who were not me, I broke into a desperate run. "If I could just make it back to my room--!" thought I, in dramatic sentence-fragment fashion. But of course, that was not to be. Above the sweeping orchestral music playing in the background, I heard his swiftly nearing steps -- I could not outrun death this time. Before I could round the corner of the Deer Park I felt the sudden shock of cold steel sinking into my back.
So references to montage sequences and background music were something that I was fairly used to writing.
There is a requisite Little Mermaid reference, but the menancing black-suited men are generic.
What genre should I be playing to? Tragic doomed romance, shoujo comedy, action thriller?
These lines wrote themselves, and suggested the obvious answer. For which I was glad.
Quite run-of-the-mill, as sunsets go: no flares of deep red and gold, no dramatic salmon-bellied clouds.
I am going to shoehorn the phrase 'salmon-bellied clouds' into as many pieces of writing as I can.
...probably no aliens in the park, though there had been a suspicious-looking white cat with odd-coloured eyes.
Strangely enough, my post-fic-writing travels did include the appearance of a white cat with odd-coloured eyes. dundundunDUN.
The phenomenology of free will is part of the "hard problem of free will", as they call it in academia. If it feels very much as if one has free will, can we still argue that free will might be an illusion? And if we cannot, does that mean that we do have free will?
I'd initially wanted to include much, much more about free will and determinism, having written essays about that very topic. Like I said, the original plot was much more event-based, and would have lent itself to such philosophical digressions. I think it was best for all involved that I did not.