Midnight Mass (Caution: contains fannish rambling. Yes, faith and fandom can comingle...)
Partly an addendum to my last post... Just been watching the televised version of Midnight Mass at the Vatican. At least for the recessional, they stepped up security: four men in suits, one of them the commander of the Swiss Guard, surrounded His Holiness, keeping eagle eyes on the crowd. Now, if they'd just done this to begin with...
This has inspired two things in me: the first and more serious (and more obvious) is to pray for the healing of that disturbed (and disturbing) woman. The second ties into one of the 12 Days of Fanfic ideas I'm tossing around: I'd decided to write a plotless sketch set in the Trinity Blood universe, centering around midnight Mass at the Vatican, with some mild Esther/Abel sweetness (mostly just friends, though I have a feeling the Church in the TB-verse may have relaxed the rule of celibacy in the clergy and the religious since the human population was partly wiped out). Now I'm holding a tracer bullet on a plot-bunny inspired by this evening's real-world incident; my concern though, would this fic be a little too close for comfort for some people, and would it come off like one of those wonkily-written "X disaster happens in the Y universe" fanfics that pop up every time there's some catastrophe, with X being the disaster/tragedy of the moment and Y representing the fanficer's pet fandom. Granted, my first publicly posted fanfic *ever* was a Matrix fic that I wrote during the aftermath of 9/11, when I was still trying to get my head around what was going on (the fic isn't my best effort, but one has to start somewhere...), I still hold some mental reservations about this kind of story: Does it take advantage or capitalize on a tragedy or a catastrophe? Or am I just overthinking things (as usual)?
Sidetrack: I've also confirmed my hunch that the creator of Trinity Blood, the late Sunao Yoshida, attended a Catholic high school; I'd suspected he was either raised Catholic or gone to a Catholic school, given how much he gets right about Catholicism (alongside how much he got sideways, not necessarily wrong. "Wrong" implies ignorance or coloring the facts or just plain ignoring the facts. For the last, see also "Dan Browned" on TVTropes.org). I've come to so much of an appreciation of the TB-verse that while re-watching the anime, I said under my breath, "If you're going to write about fictitious Vatican assassins -- and I swear, if you believed Hollywood and novelists of that bend, then the Vatican has more covert ops agents than the CIA, the KGB and MI6 combined -- this is the way to do it."
Also, there was a passage in His Holiness's sermon which made the Matrix fan side of me perk up its ears (yes, it still exists, even if the Matrix series doesn't quite hold the center of my fannish fixations right now). He spoke of "sleepers awakening from a dream world" and of course that made me think people awakening from the Matrix. I'm waiting for the translated text of the sermon to turn up on the Vatican's official website so I can share the exact words; I tried to find it elsewhere and I hit a couple of pages that made my anti-virus software go into defense mode. :: Growls::
And yes, I am up this late because I am waiting for someone rattling around the living room to Go To Bed so I can take my turn at being the Christmas Angel...
This has inspired two things in me: the first and more serious (and more obvious) is to pray for the healing of that disturbed (and disturbing) woman. The second ties into one of the 12 Days of Fanfic ideas I'm tossing around: I'd decided to write a plotless sketch set in the Trinity Blood universe, centering around midnight Mass at the Vatican, with some mild Esther/Abel sweetness (mostly just friends, though I have a feeling the Church in the TB-verse may have relaxed the rule of celibacy in the clergy and the religious since the human population was partly wiped out). Now I'm holding a tracer bullet on a plot-bunny inspired by this evening's real-world incident; my concern though, would this fic be a little too close for comfort for some people, and would it come off like one of those wonkily-written "X disaster happens in the Y universe" fanfics that pop up every time there's some catastrophe, with X being the disaster/tragedy of the moment and Y representing the fanficer's pet fandom. Granted, my first publicly posted fanfic *ever* was a Matrix fic that I wrote during the aftermath of 9/11, when I was still trying to get my head around what was going on (the fic isn't my best effort, but one has to start somewhere...), I still hold some mental reservations about this kind of story: Does it take advantage or capitalize on a tragedy or a catastrophe? Or am I just overthinking things (as usual)?
Sidetrack: I've also confirmed my hunch that the creator of Trinity Blood, the late Sunao Yoshida, attended a Catholic high school; I'd suspected he was either raised Catholic or gone to a Catholic school, given how much he gets right about Catholicism (alongside how much he got sideways, not necessarily wrong. "Wrong" implies ignorance or coloring the facts or just plain ignoring the facts. For the last, see also "Dan Browned" on TVTropes.org). I've come to so much of an appreciation of the TB-verse that while re-watching the anime, I said under my breath, "If you're going to write about fictitious Vatican assassins -- and I swear, if you believed Hollywood and novelists of that bend, then the Vatican has more covert ops agents than the CIA, the KGB and MI6 combined -- this is the way to do it."
Also, there was a passage in His Holiness's sermon which made the Matrix fan side of me perk up its ears (yes, it still exists, even if the Matrix series doesn't quite hold the center of my fannish fixations right now). He spoke of "sleepers awakening from a dream world" and of course that made me think people awakening from the Matrix. I'm waiting for the translated text of the sermon to turn up on the Vatican's official website so I can share the exact words; I tried to find it elsewhere and I hit a couple of pages that made my anti-virus software go into defense mode. :: Growls::
And yes, I am up this late because I am waiting for someone rattling around the living room to Go To Bed so I can take my turn at being the Christmas Angel...