FIC: Farscape, Disruption Commentary
The Webmaster of johnskeedvabbq had asked me to do a “from the author” explanation of the process of writing “Disruption” - sort of a DVD commentary, before there were such things. This is what I wrote:
Teri has graciously asked me to say a few words about the process of writing "Disruption." A few words? She didn't know what she was getting into. Which, I suppose, is fitting, because I didn't know what I was getting into when I started writing the thing.
If I had to reduce it to one thing, I'd say that "Disruption" is about ignorance. Or rather, making a virtue of ignorance.
The story had its initial inspiration in two basic realizations, both having to do with cluelessness. First of all, after "Fractures," I realized how little I knew. I don't know what Aeryn's thinking. She reveals little, says less. I don't know anything about John's plan to take on Scorpius. I don't know if anyone besides Aeryn and Crais will help him. I don't know if Crais is even trustworthy, or whether he's following his own agenda. Second, I was talking to a friend who has only recently started to watch the show. As I explained about the two Johns, the Talyn arc, the Moya arc, the neural chip, Harvey, Chiana's visions... I wondered how anyone who didn't have a dedicated Scaper to guide them could dive in in the middle of the third season.
What would an outsider make of the Moya crew now, given all this deep background material that was inaccessible to them? I realized if I wrote something that played with that ignorance, I didn't have to know where things were going, climb inside Aeryn's head, or figure out whether or not Crais was on the level. Those ambiguities could be the point of the story, rather than being solved by the story.
I needed an outside character to be a stand-in for those new viewers, and ambiguities made me think of Jenavian Chatto, who has always fascinated me. I'd had an unfinished snippet lying around since the second season; I resurrected it, repositioning it to fit the post-Fractures situation.
As a writer, the exciting thing about the uninformed narrator was the potential to work on two levels. If it works, the tension in the story should not be just in linear plot progression, but in the gap between what the narrator knows and what the readers know. One thing I love about Farscape is that they're content for the characters to misunderstand each other. There's never an "I had thought, but now I realize..." moment when the characters bare their souls and make everything clear between them. Resolving disputes is, at best, like the end of "Revenging Angel," when a character comes to a deeper understanding of him or herself. They don't have to understand each other; it's enough that they just stop trying to kill each other.
I knew that acceptance of misunderstanding could work well in my fic. The narrator could report on events without understanding their importance, because I knew the audience would understand their importance without having it spelled out for them. I liked the idea of the plot of the main characters - the tension between John and Aeryn, the upcoming assault on the command carrier - moving forward almost in the background, in concert with my narrator, yet without her knowledge. My narrator, who is a secondary character at best, though she doesn't realize that, either.
So I started by listing things that Jena wouldn't know - those things that a new viewer wouldn't know. She wouldn't know about Harvey, so I knew I had to include a moment where John speaks to the clone. Of course Jena misses it; the fun is that the readers will notice. Moya's biggest secret is the two Johns; the twinning and the fallout from the twinning underscores the action in a way that Jena can't comprehend. The first new scene I wrote was the hallway conversation between John and D'Argo - I wanted to see if I could connect with the readers over the head of my narrator. Once I realized that it worked, I hit on the idea that Jena could actually help Crichton in his quest to bring down Scorpius without knowing she was doing so. So Crichton maneuvers Jena into agreeing to share information about Scorpius, and in the end, when he gets her to teach him code-breaking techniques.
Given all of this, I was risking making my narrator look like an idiot. In more ways than one. Some of the most valuable feedback I received was in a very early stage, and my reaction to it shaped the entire direction of the story. My unfinished snippet had been set not long after the events of "Look at the Princess," and Jena's memories of Crichton were considerably warmer, and fresher. Moving the story in time to post-Fractures without changing that affectionate tone, my beta pointed out, meant that Jena had been carrying a torch for John for a cycle and a half. The romantic attachment was simply unrealistic. So I scaled back the romance, which meant that Jena was suddenly colder, more manipulative... and her character suddenly came into sharp focus for me.
I thought about it from the other side. Of course the crew of Moya (and the readers) have information that Jena doesn't. But it works both ways. Jena's going to have information that the crew of Moya doesn't. I liked the idea of adding details that suggested that our heroes played a similarly unwitting role in larger events. Since most of what we know is through the lens of Crichton and the crew of Moya, this involved several pure inventions on my part. The Peacekeepers being furious at F'Tor's death because they relied on the organized crime networks to rein in chaos on the local level was one example. The biggest throwaway was the idea that Scorpius' methods of extracting the data from John's mind altered the information he was trying to retrieve. If this is true, Scorpius is himself working with unreliable data, and it's unnecessary for John to go after the command carrier. But Chiana missed the clue, luckily for the author... tackling that can of worms would have been entirely too much work! It was enough fun to suggest it. It wasn't necessary to spell out Jena's hidden knowledge - it was enough to drop enough hints to convey the fact that they were there, in her head.
Thinking about Jena's secrets prompted the different sections of the PK organization working independently, and perhaps even against each other. The idea that PK Command was keeping Jena in the dark on some topics, or that she was receiving conflicting instructions and information from PK Command and from her division makes her untrustworthy not only because she might be lying, but because she might have been lied to. My rule of thumb was that nothing that she said out loud was necessarily true - and even the things she thought might be based on misleading information from above.
For her interaction with the crew, I followed the onscreen pattern in the LATP trilogy, where she presents a different face in each scene, depending on who she's talking to and what she wants. She treats Crichton one way when she thinks he's a disruptor, another when she thinks he's a threat, and another when she sees he could be an ally. She finally settles on her "help me save lives" appeal when she gets a firm read of Crichton. Is she on the level with that appeal? Who knows? But the line that I did seize upon as a glimpse of the "real" Jena was her saying that dealing with the unexpected is what makes her job fun - her sense of humor and mischief is apparent through the trilogy. Following the onscreen pattern, I gave Jena a series of confrontations with the Moya crew. In each she tells a slightly different story, tailored to who she's talking to, but not so different that comparing the stories will reveal her as a liar. The only time I made the question of lie vs. truth overt to the reader was in Jena's story about human pheremones. The pheremone thing was an invention of mine, obviously, but I wanted to leave it ambiguous, not answer the question of whether or not Jena was inventing it. By this point in the story, I knew that most readers would have picked up on Jena's unreliability, and know to make the choice themselves. But if there were readers who hadn't, this "Let her wonder" moment was a key to unraveling the rest of the story - an obvious clue that at this or any time in the story, Jena might be lying.
What gave me a great deal of pleasure was working in details. For example, making sure that Jena always uses "John" when speaking, playing on their personal connection, yet in her mind, he is always "Crichton." This was intended to underscore the disconnect between her behavior and her thoughts. That split between surface and interior is the basis of my portrayal of Jena. Her chatty internal monologues are in contrast to what goes on on the surface. She has no relationships - all her interaction with others is done with an eye toward effect, and so inside her head is the only place where she is ever "real." Above all, she is a product of the Peacekeepers, part of the system that Aeryn and Crais have escaped. I tried to reinforce this with small moments - how rare it is for her to be completely alone, and free from surveillance. Simply enjoying a walk with a man she finds attractive, rather than someone that she pretends to tolerate because of her job. She's always watched, she's always held accountable - and anyone around her might be a spy as well, waiting to trip her up (this informs her conversation with Crais, especially). Self-expression is not an option for her, it's too dangerous. Everyone outside of herself is a subject to be manipulated.
That was something I felt was important to carry through to "that scene," as one reader called it in her feedback. "That scene" would be the seduction. I wanted her seduction of John to be manipulation, not desire. I've never written a love scene before, and this was certainly a weird one to start with. Trained to use sex as a weapon, Jena is clinical in her application of hands, fingers, mouth. (I have this bizarre mental image of disruptor trainees sitting in a classroom with an anatomy poster on the wall, with little arrows and step-by-step instructions...) There's no passion in her technique, but she knows the triggers, and pushes them deliberately. I tried to reflect that in describing John responding "as if I had touched a mechanical control" - John isn't a lover to be aroused, he's a mechanism to be activated. And to me, there was a sadness to that scene... Jena is even more emotionally crippled than Aeryn, because she doesn't even see the bars of her cage. I used the word "hollow" to describe Jena's feelings twice - both in relation to her observing the connection, however damaged, between John and Aeryn. In "The Way We Weren't," Aeryn rejected the word "empty" to describe her past relationships, settling instead on "painful." Jena is different. Her relationships are empty, because she isn't even emotionally aware enough to feel pain. John's rejection of her causes injured pride, but no emotional hurt.
This, to me, was the essence of Peacekeeper "recreation." No-strings sex isn't a bad thing - what's bad is when someone doesn't know that there's any other kind. Jena just doesn't have the tools to understand the difference between what she elicits from John and what Aeryn offers. Whether or not John succumbed to Jena's charms (and it took me a very long time to decide whether or not he would), it was important that the temptation was real, and difficult for him to resist, to make his choice a real and important one. And one that Jena just doesn't understand. She still thinks that she could get to him, if she wanted to.
I wanted to deal with that difference between love and sex, and the corresponding difference between the two women and their relationship with Crichton. Again, Aeryn grapples with the question; Jena doesn't know enough to even see that there's a question to be asked. Aeryn comes to her own conclusion about love vs. sex - what matters, and what doesn't. Sex with Jena doesn't threaten the J/A relationship, the implications of John taking the compatibility test with her does. By the end of the Princess arc, sex = sex, but the vial = love and commitment. John has had sex with Jena, but refused the vial; he hasn't had sex with Aeryn, but accepted the test without hesitation.
But I still didn't need to solve Aeryn's peculiar "Fractures" dilemma. Her "I understand" moment at the end refers to her alone; I intentionally kept her conclusion vague. Her "I understand, so it doesn't matter whether or not you do" refers to the readers (and the author!) as much as Jena. Depending on how the reader chooses to interpret it, Aeryn's personal resolution could be hopeful for her relationship with John, or it could simply be her putting to rest doubts that Jena had raised regarding her relationship with the late JohnT. I don't know what's in her head, so I let her keep her secrets.
So there you have it. “Disruption” is about general cluelessness. Looking back on it, it's strange ... very little actually happens in “Disruption” - neither characters nor plot advance from where we left them at the end of "Fractures." I really have left them in the condition I found them, Mr. Kemper. I'll let you and the rest of the crew show me where you're going to take them next!
~~huzzlewhat
Teri has graciously asked me to say a few words about the process of writing "Disruption." A few words? She didn't know what she was getting into. Which, I suppose, is fitting, because I didn't know what I was getting into when I started writing the thing.
If I had to reduce it to one thing, I'd say that "Disruption" is about ignorance. Or rather, making a virtue of ignorance.
The story had its initial inspiration in two basic realizations, both having to do with cluelessness. First of all, after "Fractures," I realized how little I knew. I don't know what Aeryn's thinking. She reveals little, says less. I don't know anything about John's plan to take on Scorpius. I don't know if anyone besides Aeryn and Crais will help him. I don't know if Crais is even trustworthy, or whether he's following his own agenda. Second, I was talking to a friend who has only recently started to watch the show. As I explained about the two Johns, the Talyn arc, the Moya arc, the neural chip, Harvey, Chiana's visions... I wondered how anyone who didn't have a dedicated Scaper to guide them could dive in in the middle of the third season.
What would an outsider make of the Moya crew now, given all this deep background material that was inaccessible to them? I realized if I wrote something that played with that ignorance, I didn't have to know where things were going, climb inside Aeryn's head, or figure out whether or not Crais was on the level. Those ambiguities could be the point of the story, rather than being solved by the story.
I needed an outside character to be a stand-in for those new viewers, and ambiguities made me think of Jenavian Chatto, who has always fascinated me. I'd had an unfinished snippet lying around since the second season; I resurrected it, repositioning it to fit the post-Fractures situation.
As a writer, the exciting thing about the uninformed narrator was the potential to work on two levels. If it works, the tension in the story should not be just in linear plot progression, but in the gap between what the narrator knows and what the readers know. One thing I love about Farscape is that they're content for the characters to misunderstand each other. There's never an "I had thought, but now I realize..." moment when the characters bare their souls and make everything clear between them. Resolving disputes is, at best, like the end of "Revenging Angel," when a character comes to a deeper understanding of him or herself. They don't have to understand each other; it's enough that they just stop trying to kill each other.
I knew that acceptance of misunderstanding could work well in my fic. The narrator could report on events without understanding their importance, because I knew the audience would understand their importance without having it spelled out for them. I liked the idea of the plot of the main characters - the tension between John and Aeryn, the upcoming assault on the command carrier - moving forward almost in the background, in concert with my narrator, yet without her knowledge. My narrator, who is a secondary character at best, though she doesn't realize that, either.
So I started by listing things that Jena wouldn't know - those things that a new viewer wouldn't know. She wouldn't know about Harvey, so I knew I had to include a moment where John speaks to the clone. Of course Jena misses it; the fun is that the readers will notice. Moya's biggest secret is the two Johns; the twinning and the fallout from the twinning underscores the action in a way that Jena can't comprehend. The first new scene I wrote was the hallway conversation between John and D'Argo - I wanted to see if I could connect with the readers over the head of my narrator. Once I realized that it worked, I hit on the idea that Jena could actually help Crichton in his quest to bring down Scorpius without knowing she was doing so. So Crichton maneuvers Jena into agreeing to share information about Scorpius, and in the end, when he gets her to teach him code-breaking techniques.
Given all of this, I was risking making my narrator look like an idiot. In more ways than one. Some of the most valuable feedback I received was in a very early stage, and my reaction to it shaped the entire direction of the story. My unfinished snippet had been set not long after the events of "Look at the Princess," and Jena's memories of Crichton were considerably warmer, and fresher. Moving the story in time to post-Fractures without changing that affectionate tone, my beta pointed out, meant that Jena had been carrying a torch for John for a cycle and a half. The romantic attachment was simply unrealistic. So I scaled back the romance, which meant that Jena was suddenly colder, more manipulative... and her character suddenly came into sharp focus for me.
I thought about it from the other side. Of course the crew of Moya (and the readers) have information that Jena doesn't. But it works both ways. Jena's going to have information that the crew of Moya doesn't. I liked the idea of adding details that suggested that our heroes played a similarly unwitting role in larger events. Since most of what we know is through the lens of Crichton and the crew of Moya, this involved several pure inventions on my part. The Peacekeepers being furious at F'Tor's death because they relied on the organized crime networks to rein in chaos on the local level was one example. The biggest throwaway was the idea that Scorpius' methods of extracting the data from John's mind altered the information he was trying to retrieve. If this is true, Scorpius is himself working with unreliable data, and it's unnecessary for John to go after the command carrier. But Chiana missed the clue, luckily for the author... tackling that can of worms would have been entirely too much work! It was enough fun to suggest it. It wasn't necessary to spell out Jena's hidden knowledge - it was enough to drop enough hints to convey the fact that they were there, in her head.
Thinking about Jena's secrets prompted the different sections of the PK organization working independently, and perhaps even against each other. The idea that PK Command was keeping Jena in the dark on some topics, or that she was receiving conflicting instructions and information from PK Command and from her division makes her untrustworthy not only because she might be lying, but because she might have been lied to. My rule of thumb was that nothing that she said out loud was necessarily true - and even the things she thought might be based on misleading information from above.
For her interaction with the crew, I followed the onscreen pattern in the LATP trilogy, where she presents a different face in each scene, depending on who she's talking to and what she wants. She treats Crichton one way when she thinks he's a disruptor, another when she thinks he's a threat, and another when she sees he could be an ally. She finally settles on her "help me save lives" appeal when she gets a firm read of Crichton. Is she on the level with that appeal? Who knows? But the line that I did seize upon as a glimpse of the "real" Jena was her saying that dealing with the unexpected is what makes her job fun - her sense of humor and mischief is apparent through the trilogy. Following the onscreen pattern, I gave Jena a series of confrontations with the Moya crew. In each she tells a slightly different story, tailored to who she's talking to, but not so different that comparing the stories will reveal her as a liar. The only time I made the question of lie vs. truth overt to the reader was in Jena's story about human pheremones. The pheremone thing was an invention of mine, obviously, but I wanted to leave it ambiguous, not answer the question of whether or not Jena was inventing it. By this point in the story, I knew that most readers would have picked up on Jena's unreliability, and know to make the choice themselves. But if there were readers who hadn't, this "Let her wonder" moment was a key to unraveling the rest of the story - an obvious clue that at this or any time in the story, Jena might be lying.
What gave me a great deal of pleasure was working in details. For example, making sure that Jena always uses "John" when speaking, playing on their personal connection, yet in her mind, he is always "Crichton." This was intended to underscore the disconnect between her behavior and her thoughts. That split between surface and interior is the basis of my portrayal of Jena. Her chatty internal monologues are in contrast to what goes on on the surface. She has no relationships - all her interaction with others is done with an eye toward effect, and so inside her head is the only place where she is ever "real." Above all, she is a product of the Peacekeepers, part of the system that Aeryn and Crais have escaped. I tried to reinforce this with small moments - how rare it is for her to be completely alone, and free from surveillance. Simply enjoying a walk with a man she finds attractive, rather than someone that she pretends to tolerate because of her job. She's always watched, she's always held accountable - and anyone around her might be a spy as well, waiting to trip her up (this informs her conversation with Crais, especially). Self-expression is not an option for her, it's too dangerous. Everyone outside of herself is a subject to be manipulated.
That was something I felt was important to carry through to "that scene," as one reader called it in her feedback. "That scene" would be the seduction. I wanted her seduction of John to be manipulation, not desire. I've never written a love scene before, and this was certainly a weird one to start with. Trained to use sex as a weapon, Jena is clinical in her application of hands, fingers, mouth. (I have this bizarre mental image of disruptor trainees sitting in a classroom with an anatomy poster on the wall, with little arrows and step-by-step instructions...) There's no passion in her technique, but she knows the triggers, and pushes them deliberately. I tried to reflect that in describing John responding "as if I had touched a mechanical control" - John isn't a lover to be aroused, he's a mechanism to be activated. And to me, there was a sadness to that scene... Jena is even more emotionally crippled than Aeryn, because she doesn't even see the bars of her cage. I used the word "hollow" to describe Jena's feelings twice - both in relation to her observing the connection, however damaged, between John and Aeryn. In "The Way We Weren't," Aeryn rejected the word "empty" to describe her past relationships, settling instead on "painful." Jena is different. Her relationships are empty, because she isn't even emotionally aware enough to feel pain. John's rejection of her causes injured pride, but no emotional hurt.
This, to me, was the essence of Peacekeeper "recreation." No-strings sex isn't a bad thing - what's bad is when someone doesn't know that there's any other kind. Jena just doesn't have the tools to understand the difference between what she elicits from John and what Aeryn offers. Whether or not John succumbed to Jena's charms (and it took me a very long time to decide whether or not he would), it was important that the temptation was real, and difficult for him to resist, to make his choice a real and important one. And one that Jena just doesn't understand. She still thinks that she could get to him, if she wanted to.
I wanted to deal with that difference between love and sex, and the corresponding difference between the two women and their relationship with Crichton. Again, Aeryn grapples with the question; Jena doesn't know enough to even see that there's a question to be asked. Aeryn comes to her own conclusion about love vs. sex - what matters, and what doesn't. Sex with Jena doesn't threaten the J/A relationship, the implications of John taking the compatibility test with her does. By the end of the Princess arc, sex = sex, but the vial = love and commitment. John has had sex with Jena, but refused the vial; he hasn't had sex with Aeryn, but accepted the test without hesitation.
But I still didn't need to solve Aeryn's peculiar "Fractures" dilemma. Her "I understand" moment at the end refers to her alone; I intentionally kept her conclusion vague. Her "I understand, so it doesn't matter whether or not you do" refers to the readers (and the author!) as much as Jena. Depending on how the reader chooses to interpret it, Aeryn's personal resolution could be hopeful for her relationship with John, or it could simply be her putting to rest doubts that Jena had raised regarding her relationship with the late JohnT. I don't know what's in her head, so I let her keep her secrets.
So there you have it. “Disruption” is about general cluelessness. Looking back on it, it's strange ... very little actually happens in “Disruption” - neither characters nor plot advance from where we left them at the end of "Fractures." I really have left them in the condition I found them, Mr. Kemper. I'll let you and the rest of the crew show me where you're going to take them next!
~~huzzlewhat