[Fic] "Hold the Line (As Dreamers Do)" -- Homestuck
Today is Ladystuck Remix reveal day! I wrote two fics: my assignment and a pinch hit. I will talk about each in a separate post.
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Hold the Line (As Dreamers Do): 1994: The Betty Crocker conglomerate invites Dr. Jade English, celebrated astrophysicist and CEO of Skaianet Technologies, to teach one year of classes at their first foray into private education, Marjorie Husted University in Houston, Texas.
Jade says yes.
Meanwhile, the Condesce is staging a corporate takeover of Disney. [2,475 words]
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This is a pinch hit, written for
dashery! It is a remix of Hold the Line.
I nabbed this pinch hit because dashery is a lovely person who writes great stories, and because I adore Hold the Line and wanted to remix that fic in particular. I spent the first day afterward tossing ideas into the air and watching the patterns they made as they fell, at the end of which I decided I wanted to do a POV shift rather than the other potential changes, and specifically that I wanted to talk about the person who shaped the entire plot but wasn't actually a character-as-such in dashery's fic: namely, the Condesce, and what exactly she was thinking all through that year.
I did toy with the idea of switching to Rose's POV, but I decided that this wouldn't change the story enough because her motives are not mysterious in the original. The Condesce, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any intelligible plan and I wanted to see if I could render her actions coherent from her own perspective.
I started writing without any conceptual target beyond 'figure out the Condesce,' hit the Snow White reference, and suddenly everything was about Disney. *hands* What can I say; I like fairy-tales. Anyway, I vaguely remembered there being some business kerfuffling between Disney executives in the mid-90s, so I did a quick Wikipedia check to see what the exact timeframe was on that and discovered Frank Wells's death in April 1994. When life hands you a coincidence that beautiful, how can you possibly say no?
Disney also ended up being a metonymy for the process of cultural assimilation, and the Condesce's takeover of the company is both part of her general secret invasion plan and a symbol of her fierce refusal to give in to anything ever, whether that be Lord English's destruction of her species, accepting that humans reproduce differently from trolls, or conceding that other people have a right to live their lives as they wish regardless of her disapproval.
She is a terrible person, but the thing is, she's still Meenah somewhere deep underneath generations of cruelty (both careless and careful) -- she has a sense of humor and a need for companionship -- and she is also a hell of a survivor. In a lot of ways, her trip back to Alternia on a dead spaceship that was probably doing its best to fall apart every minute mirrors beta!Jade's isolated childhood on Hellmurder Island and her two years alone on the Yellow Yard after John and Davesprite died. Obviously that's not something alpha!Jade knows about, nor is it something the Condesce would care about, but I find it interesting and so I wanted to stress the empress-and-heiress aspect of their relationship, and the Condesce's weird there/not-there respect for her unwanted alien daughter.
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Hold the Line (As Dreamers Do): 1994: The Betty Crocker conglomerate invites Dr. Jade English, celebrated astrophysicist and CEO of Skaianet Technologies, to teach one year of classes at their first foray into private education, Marjorie Husted University in Houston, Texas.
Jade says yes.
Meanwhile, the Condesce is staging a corporate takeover of Disney. [2,475 words]
-----
This is a pinch hit, written for
dashery! It is a remix of Hold the Line.
I nabbed this pinch hit because dashery is a lovely person who writes great stories, and because I adore Hold the Line and wanted to remix that fic in particular. I spent the first day afterward tossing ideas into the air and watching the patterns they made as they fell, at the end of which I decided I wanted to do a POV shift rather than the other potential changes, and specifically that I wanted to talk about the person who shaped the entire plot but wasn't actually a character-as-such in dashery's fic: namely, the Condesce, and what exactly she was thinking all through that year.
I did toy with the idea of switching to Rose's POV, but I decided that this wouldn't change the story enough because her motives are not mysterious in the original. The Condesce, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any intelligible plan and I wanted to see if I could render her actions coherent from her own perspective.
I started writing without any conceptual target beyond 'figure out the Condesce,' hit the Snow White reference, and suddenly everything was about Disney. *hands* What can I say; I like fairy-tales. Anyway, I vaguely remembered there being some business kerfuffling between Disney executives in the mid-90s, so I did a quick Wikipedia check to see what the exact timeframe was on that and discovered Frank Wells's death in April 1994. When life hands you a coincidence that beautiful, how can you possibly say no?
Disney also ended up being a metonymy for the process of cultural assimilation, and the Condesce's takeover of the company is both part of her general secret invasion plan and a symbol of her fierce refusal to give in to anything ever, whether that be Lord English's destruction of her species, accepting that humans reproduce differently from trolls, or conceding that other people have a right to live their lives as they wish regardless of her disapproval.
She is a terrible person, but the thing is, she's still Meenah somewhere deep underneath generations of cruelty (both careless and careful) -- she has a sense of humor and a need for companionship -- and she is also a hell of a survivor. In a lot of ways, her trip back to Alternia on a dead spaceship that was probably doing its best to fall apart every minute mirrors beta!Jade's isolated childhood on Hellmurder Island and her two years alone on the Yellow Yard after John and Davesprite died. Obviously that's not something alpha!Jade knows about, nor is it something the Condesce would care about, but I find it interesting and so I wanted to stress the empress-and-heiress aspect of their relationship, and the Condesce's weird there/not-there respect for her unwanted alien daughter.
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)