PtQ, the Dark Jewels 'verse, crossovers, and just random musings
There's an ongoing thread on WIKTT about abandoned fics people wish the authors would pick back up. Needless to say, this has led to multiple mentions of the infamous Pawn to Queen. I've already talked a little about that story months ago, but there's one thought about it that's been percolating in my head ever since, which I think sums up a huge chunk of why it ended up so controversial.
If what you're wanting to do is a crossover, just do it already. Yes, you'll lose people who just generally don't like crossovers or don't know or don't like the 'verse you've crossed in. However, by taking elements of the other 'verse, altering and renaming them, and then working them in ... all you're going to do is confuse people. By the time I read it, the kerfuffle was long finished and there were author's notes saying, "These are themes I've worked in from the Dark Jewels Trilogy." Being a fan of said trilogy, this gave me an "a-ha" moment and some things began to fit into place that otherwise did not. I get the impression these author's notes were added after people started freaking out though.
It would, of course, have been a drastically different story as a straight-up crossover. You can't make Hermione Witch the way Jaenelle was Witch without rewriting her character entirely. She wouldn't have been the first person to make Wingardium Leviosa work, she'd have been the last. Or possibly she would have levitated every other feather in the room besides her own. Very possibly she'd have atomized that troll and spent the rest of the year catatonic in fear of her own power.
But you can make Hermione Witch without making her Jaenelle. Draca made it very clear that Witch can come in many forms and is not always what people expect. You could even argue for Lily being Witch, maybe, though their lifespans do overlap by a couple of years, and that's awkward. However, once you start expanding it to the Zabini family, the Snape family (or I guess really the Prince family, I don't remember if she ever gave SS's mother a maiden name), you're not so much talking about Witch as a whole class of witches such as Queens or Black Widows. Since you then run into the problem of there being nothing in the Potterverse (that we've seen) remotely like Queens' Courts, that gets messy. It could be done, with the Ministry seen as a sort of Dark Council (ready-made with corruption and everything), but it'd be messy.
So I get the idea of modifying the notion of Witch. Calling her Strega probably alienated a whole 'nother set of readers, but let's leave Pagan politics out of it for the moment, if for no other reason than that I don't remember the issues involved, just that there are lots of them.
Turning Snape into a hybrid Saetan/Daemon was another issue, though a lesser one. For all that "the son is the father's mirror," they really are two separate characters, and neither of them is Snape. Let's just start with the fact they're both devastatingly gorgeous. He's got a bit more in common with Daemon, what with the being stuck in the Death Eaters and trying to work against them however he can. The Dark Mark is sort of a parallel to the Ring, though at least it's in a far less sensitive spot. (Really, what guy had pissed Anne Bishop off the day she invented that device? It makes me shudder, and I lack the appropriate equipment for a real understanding of the pain involved.) But then he gets turned into something of a kindly father-figure, which is much more like Saetan (when he's not pissed off, anyway, and I guess that goes for both of them). At least he's not a Guardian or some vampire-esque permutation of one. But the blending of the two into Snape's character just made him confusing, imo. Sticking with Daemon might have worked better, because no doubt generations of Hogwarts students call Snape "The Sadist" anyway.
Of course, if we want to talk age differences, morphing it all into the Potterverse certainly toned them all down a bit. There's what, two decades between Hermione and Snape? Whereas Daemon's almost 2000 years older than Jaenelle and Saetan's more than 50,000 years old.
Then we get to the big issue: sexual politics and just plain sex.
A huge chunk of the point in the Dark Jewels 'verse is that Tereille is a matriarchal dystopia and it's contrasted with Kaeleer's matriarchal mostly-utopia. So again we have the problem of making this work for the Potterverse. I see what Riley was trying to do to work around this, but I just don't think it worked. Starting with a longish prologue that perhaps looked at a wizarding society organized along similar lines might have been enough to make the difference. We wouldn't have needed to actually see much in the way of Courts after that. It might have helped if the initial assault had happened in the context of Lucius subverting Narcissa's Court to his own purposes, though I have a hard time conceiving of Narcissa as a Queen. Maybe they could have been Inner Circle members of Bella's Court? Because Bella would definitely make a great Dorothea analogue.
Then there's the balance of power between the sexes. On the one hand, the weakest Queen is stronger than any Warlord Prince by a large order of magnitude. On the other hand, "a witch's power hangs by a hymenal thread." Raping a virgin is the easiest way to steal her power, and it's done very purposefully in the Dark Jewels 'verse. It's done very young, too. Pedophiles are cultivated for the express purpose of breaking strong witches before they are old enough to be a "problem." Fortunately, even that wasn't enough to completely break Jaenelle, and in fact she used it to trigger the perfect revenge. "Briarwood is the pretty poison. There is no cure for Briarwood."
What Daemon had to do to get her to heal her body after Greer had raped her, though, is actually more disturbing than anything Riley cooked up. He had one tool in his kit to get this 12yo girl who has just been raped to heal her own body: seduction. Or as Riley called it, "the power of pleasure." Unlike Kartane, Greer, and "uncle Bobby," Daemon is very decidedly not a pedophile. While Jaenelle points out later that she "wasn't twelve in the Abyss," her reactions and responses were very clearly immature curiosity, not mature desire. That, I think, even more than diving too far into the Abyss, is what broke Daemon's mind. Even though neither of them were really physical in the Abyss, even though nothing really happened.
In PtQ, SS is the one who assaulted Hermione. Yes, it was set up so that he was forced to. It's still a drastic difference. Even more to the point, it comes out that he used to do this to control and break female Aurors. That is, again, somewhat Daemonesque: using pleasure but not actual intercourse to manipulate women. I don't remember if Riley went so far as to imply that he can't actually get it up for such occasions or not. With Daemon, that's part of what makes him The Sadist: he gets these women who have made him a sex slave all hot and bothered and then throws it in their faces that they very obviously do nothing for him.
And then there's one of the things that really probably broke most people's brains: Hermione asking Snape to basically handle her Virgin Night.
In the Dark Jewels 'verse, this is traditional. Usually the male who sees a witch through her Virgin Night is an older, experienced male who has no sexual or romantic interest in her whatsoever. After the deed is done, he is essentially looked on as a sort of favored uncle. Only very rarely is any romantic relationship involved, and in fact that seems to be frowned upon. This is part of how the dangers to a witch's power when she first allows a male into her body are handled in this society.
No parallel to this was created. It was put forward as Hermione basically asking to be shown "how it should be," and Snape reluctantly admitting that she has the right to ask anything of him because of what he did to her. It really doesn't work. It might have worked better if Blaise or someone had described a similar rite of passage among purebloods or something. Maybe. But there's still the problem of Snape having previously assaulted her by a method intended to addict her to his touch. I'm not sure that's solvable.
That's about as far as my thoughts have gone with it. Thankfully. Any further and it might turn into a plot bunny, and I've got my hands full of those at the moment. I won't say I'll never try a HP/Dark Jewels crossover, because saying never leads to behemoth fics that eat my life. For now, though, this one does pull me back every so often to pick it over and look at what worked, what really didn't, and what could make it work.
As far as my own Dark Jewels crossover with the Vorkosiverse, "Wormhole Jump to Hell," it's still kind of stuck. Even deciding to just make it a two-shot PWP hasn't helped it move forward at all. It is, at least, somewhat easier to cross over one 'verse with magic and one 'verse without it, rather than two 'verses with magic that follows very different rules. And if I could just find the right angle, throwing a couple of Barrayarans into the post-Queen of the Darkness matriarchal utopia of Kaeleer should be very amusing. So should tossing Bel in there, because what is any sexually striated society going to make of a Betan hermaphrodite, really? And what is an uber-egalitarian Betan going to make of Kaeleer? Will it seem every bit as fundamentally unjust as Barrayar?
I don't know. At the moment I'd be happy if I could just get Ivan into bed with Lucivar's daughter (who still has no name except it obviously has to end in "ian" as all Eyrien female names do, no personality, nada) and Karla into bed with Bel. The latter has serious problems of sexual logistics that were actually not solved at all by the snail porn we watched in bio class, because that'd only work with two true hermaphrodites. It's very tempting to make Bel analogous to the inhabitants of the planet Winter from LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, but even leaving aside the auto-het programming that would seriously not work for Karla at all, that'd take away the whole point of the female/herm pairing in the first place.
Now that I've managed to dump all this out of my head, maybe I can get back to what I'm supposed to be doing, which is rewriting some stuff in TKWIA and playing with my summer_of_giles fic. That one may end up following the [quantity][plural noun][character][verb phrase] format that seems so popular in Buffy fandom. It still hasn't gelled, though. Oh, and thinking about what I want to submit for prompts and what I will/won't write for the bujold_fic ficathon. It might be interesting to try writing something in the Chalion-verse.
If what you're wanting to do is a crossover, just do it already. Yes, you'll lose people who just generally don't like crossovers or don't know or don't like the 'verse you've crossed in. However, by taking elements of the other 'verse, altering and renaming them, and then working them in ... all you're going to do is confuse people. By the time I read it, the kerfuffle was long finished and there were author's notes saying, "These are themes I've worked in from the Dark Jewels Trilogy." Being a fan of said trilogy, this gave me an "a-ha" moment and some things began to fit into place that otherwise did not. I get the impression these author's notes were added after people started freaking out though.
It would, of course, have been a drastically different story as a straight-up crossover. You can't make Hermione Witch the way Jaenelle was Witch without rewriting her character entirely. She wouldn't have been the first person to make Wingardium Leviosa work, she'd have been the last. Or possibly she would have levitated every other feather in the room besides her own. Very possibly she'd have atomized that troll and spent the rest of the year catatonic in fear of her own power.
But you can make Hermione Witch without making her Jaenelle. Draca made it very clear that Witch can come in many forms and is not always what people expect. You could even argue for Lily being Witch, maybe, though their lifespans do overlap by a couple of years, and that's awkward. However, once you start expanding it to the Zabini family, the Snape family (or I guess really the Prince family, I don't remember if she ever gave SS's mother a maiden name), you're not so much talking about Witch as a whole class of witches such as Queens or Black Widows. Since you then run into the problem of there being nothing in the Potterverse (that we've seen) remotely like Queens' Courts, that gets messy. It could be done, with the Ministry seen as a sort of Dark Council (ready-made with corruption and everything), but it'd be messy.
So I get the idea of modifying the notion of Witch. Calling her Strega probably alienated a whole 'nother set of readers, but let's leave Pagan politics out of it for the moment, if for no other reason than that I don't remember the issues involved, just that there are lots of them.
Turning Snape into a hybrid Saetan/Daemon was another issue, though a lesser one. For all that "the son is the father's mirror," they really are two separate characters, and neither of them is Snape. Let's just start with the fact they're both devastatingly gorgeous. He's got a bit more in common with Daemon, what with the being stuck in the Death Eaters and trying to work against them however he can. The Dark Mark is sort of a parallel to the Ring, though at least it's in a far less sensitive spot. (Really, what guy had pissed Anne Bishop off the day she invented that device? It makes me shudder, and I lack the appropriate equipment for a real understanding of the pain involved.) But then he gets turned into something of a kindly father-figure, which is much more like Saetan (when he's not pissed off, anyway, and I guess that goes for both of them). At least he's not a Guardian or some vampire-esque permutation of one. But the blending of the two into Snape's character just made him confusing, imo. Sticking with Daemon might have worked better, because no doubt generations of Hogwarts students call Snape "The Sadist" anyway.
Of course, if we want to talk age differences, morphing it all into the Potterverse certainly toned them all down a bit. There's what, two decades between Hermione and Snape? Whereas Daemon's almost 2000 years older than Jaenelle and Saetan's more than 50,000 years old.
Then we get to the big issue: sexual politics and just plain sex.
A huge chunk of the point in the Dark Jewels 'verse is that Tereille is a matriarchal dystopia and it's contrasted with Kaeleer's matriarchal mostly-utopia. So again we have the problem of making this work for the Potterverse. I see what Riley was trying to do to work around this, but I just don't think it worked. Starting with a longish prologue that perhaps looked at a wizarding society organized along similar lines might have been enough to make the difference. We wouldn't have needed to actually see much in the way of Courts after that. It might have helped if the initial assault had happened in the context of Lucius subverting Narcissa's Court to his own purposes, though I have a hard time conceiving of Narcissa as a Queen. Maybe they could have been Inner Circle members of Bella's Court? Because Bella would definitely make a great Dorothea analogue.
Then there's the balance of power between the sexes. On the one hand, the weakest Queen is stronger than any Warlord Prince by a large order of magnitude. On the other hand, "a witch's power hangs by a hymenal thread." Raping a virgin is the easiest way to steal her power, and it's done very purposefully in the Dark Jewels 'verse. It's done very young, too. Pedophiles are cultivated for the express purpose of breaking strong witches before they are old enough to be a "problem." Fortunately, even that wasn't enough to completely break Jaenelle, and in fact she used it to trigger the perfect revenge. "Briarwood is the pretty poison. There is no cure for Briarwood."
What Daemon had to do to get her to heal her body after Greer had raped her, though, is actually more disturbing than anything Riley cooked up. He had one tool in his kit to get this 12yo girl who has just been raped to heal her own body: seduction. Or as Riley called it, "the power of pleasure." Unlike Kartane, Greer, and "uncle Bobby," Daemon is very decidedly not a pedophile. While Jaenelle points out later that she "wasn't twelve in the Abyss," her reactions and responses were very clearly immature curiosity, not mature desire. That, I think, even more than diving too far into the Abyss, is what broke Daemon's mind. Even though neither of them were really physical in the Abyss, even though nothing really happened.
In PtQ, SS is the one who assaulted Hermione. Yes, it was set up so that he was forced to. It's still a drastic difference. Even more to the point, it comes out that he used to do this to control and break female Aurors. That is, again, somewhat Daemonesque: using pleasure but not actual intercourse to manipulate women. I don't remember if Riley went so far as to imply that he can't actually get it up for such occasions or not. With Daemon, that's part of what makes him The Sadist: he gets these women who have made him a sex slave all hot and bothered and then throws it in their faces that they very obviously do nothing for him.
And then there's one of the things that really probably broke most people's brains: Hermione asking Snape to basically handle her Virgin Night.
In the Dark Jewels 'verse, this is traditional. Usually the male who sees a witch through her Virgin Night is an older, experienced male who has no sexual or romantic interest in her whatsoever. After the deed is done, he is essentially looked on as a sort of favored uncle. Only very rarely is any romantic relationship involved, and in fact that seems to be frowned upon. This is part of how the dangers to a witch's power when she first allows a male into her body are handled in this society.
No parallel to this was created. It was put forward as Hermione basically asking to be shown "how it should be," and Snape reluctantly admitting that she has the right to ask anything of him because of what he did to her. It really doesn't work. It might have worked better if Blaise or someone had described a similar rite of passage among purebloods or something. Maybe. But there's still the problem of Snape having previously assaulted her by a method intended to addict her to his touch. I'm not sure that's solvable.
That's about as far as my thoughts have gone with it. Thankfully. Any further and it might turn into a plot bunny, and I've got my hands full of those at the moment. I won't say I'll never try a HP/Dark Jewels crossover, because saying never leads to behemoth fics that eat my life. For now, though, this one does pull me back every so often to pick it over and look at what worked, what really didn't, and what could make it work.
As far as my own Dark Jewels crossover with the Vorkosiverse, "Wormhole Jump to Hell," it's still kind of stuck. Even deciding to just make it a two-shot PWP hasn't helped it move forward at all. It is, at least, somewhat easier to cross over one 'verse with magic and one 'verse without it, rather than two 'verses with magic that follows very different rules. And if I could just find the right angle, throwing a couple of Barrayarans into the post-Queen of the Darkness matriarchal utopia of Kaeleer should be very amusing. So should tossing Bel in there, because what is any sexually striated society going to make of a Betan hermaphrodite, really? And what is an uber-egalitarian Betan going to make of Kaeleer? Will it seem every bit as fundamentally unjust as Barrayar?
I don't know. At the moment I'd be happy if I could just get Ivan into bed with Lucivar's daughter (who still has no name except it obviously has to end in "ian" as all Eyrien female names do, no personality, nada) and Karla into bed with Bel. The latter has serious problems of sexual logistics that were actually not solved at all by the snail porn we watched in bio class, because that'd only work with two true hermaphrodites. It's very tempting to make Bel analogous to the inhabitants of the planet Winter from LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, but even leaving aside the auto-het programming that would seriously not work for Karla at all, that'd take away the whole point of the female/herm pairing in the first place.
Now that I've managed to dump all this out of my head, maybe I can get back to what I'm supposed to be doing, which is rewriting some stuff in TKWIA and playing with my summer_of_giles fic. That one may end up following the [quantity][plural noun][character][verb phrase] format that seems so popular in Buffy fandom. It still hasn't gelled, though. Oh, and thinking about what I want to submit for prompts and what I will/won't write for the bujold_fic ficathon. It might be interesting to try writing something in the Chalion-verse.