Stray
Stray - For What Can Change
“Oh, no.” Teeth bared in the yellow of jaundiced bone. “I'm afraid you've got the wrong idea. We're going back together.”
“Oh, no.” Teeth bared in the yellow of jaundiced bone. “I'm afraid you've got the wrong idea. We're going back together.”
Likewise, Ocelot can go on his Christmas Carol tour through alternate realities and not freak out about the fact that something strange and supernatural is happening to him. We cut right to the chase where he rejects the alternates as fiction. We get the confrontation with his older self with no awkwardness at all.
In other words, you handled the weirdness really well. :D
And damn, there were some really chilling parts. Like here, the Sorrow's words:
“You see,” the gray man said, “of the two...”
The memory of color leeched from the room.
“Changing the world...”
The edges blurred.
“...is much easier.”
Nicely done. Understated, yet powerful.
I've been thinking about this - perhaps around it - for a while now, but didn't quite know how to articulate it, but it seems like you pay attention to the way paragraphs are shaped, the lengths of sentences and how the flow of the actual printed words looks on the screen, in addition to word choice and imagery and all that jazz. Is that true? It seems like it, but I can't tell for sure. Because I'm thinking that the particular outline that a paragraph makes does evoke a certain mood, and the use of no caps, italics, and sentence fragments without ending punctuation also does, as well. It's interesting, and I'm wondering how deliberate it is on your part, because it really serves the story so well, given that a lot of it really is about the fragmentation of consciousness and reality...which are the same thing, in a way.
Anyway, I noticed that, especially so in this last chapter with the interaction between Revolver Ocelot and Adamska.
And holy cow, talk about that interaction. Freaking intense. It literally gave me chills, especially right here:
Ocelot leaned forward, eager that he shouldn't miss a word.
“Love.”
Because it's so, so true. That's damn honest writing, so insightful and psychologically complex. But it just rings true on an instinctive level. You've tapped in to the core of the characters and exposed all the inner workings and guts, things that I never really examined that deeply, but now that you have, I can see you're right.
And wow...the ending. Now that's a cliffhanger all right, but the delicious thing is that I don't even know where you're going to go from here. But holy cow, what a ride to get there. The Ocelot/Ocelot confrontation was chilling, so intense. So well done.
Anyway, great stuff. I'm sorry I had to play catch-up again and comment on several chapters at once, but I've gotten a bit more free time as of late, whew. But it's actually better for me...less agonizing waits between chapters, wondering what's going to happen!
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"Grey Fox? He died in Zanzibar."
"Yes. But they revived him."
And the conversation just goes blithely on. Er, okay, lady, whatever you say.
To tell the truth, the bit of AU touristry might have been inspired by my favorite part of one of the old Wheel of Time books, back when Robert Jordan's creepy preoccupation with "oh my god humanity has two genders and they act different" was balanced with more actual stuff happening. There's a part where, through some magical mishap, a character gets a series of brief glimpses into what might have happened, had his life taken a different path. It's stayed with me, long after the names of all the eight billion other characters have faded. It's me indulging an enduring fascination with "What if?" games; the effect events and environment have on a person's heart and behavior, and moreover, what that person himself might feel on confronting that, yeah, it didn't have to be this way.
Which may just be another way of saying that I'm a sucker for AUs ^_^ I'm not sure how much of it is just self-indulgence, but that chapter is one of my personal favorite bits of the story so far.
I tend to think more in words, emotions, and sensations than in actual images. Whenever something is set very strongly in my head, like the Ocelot versus Ocelot standoff, what's clearest to me is the feel of it. Part of my, er, process I suppose they call it, is just to try to find a way to impart that 'feel'. Obssessive attention to structure quirks, use (and deliberate misuse, heh) of punctuation and such is how I try to do that, especially in cases like this, when saying "He felt panicked, as though he were backed into a corner" doesn't seem to cover it.
(In retrospect, I wish I'd taken some more time to polish that chapter. Lots of things cry out for tweaking, though it was sitting around a long time before the midnight, "Dammit, I will get this finished up and posted" scramble, heh.)
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to review. I always look forward to your input.
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