DVD commentary meme
I got one vote for Anomaly and one for my favorite Death Note fic. Since I don’t have a favorite (lies! it’s I'm Your Greatest Fan), Anomaly it is.
I spent a few days thinking about Anomaly before I wrote it -- not because it took that long to work out the concept, but because I hadn’t done any fiction for a while. What got me to finally sit down and write was the realization that I could use it for the 31_days prompt "I claim proud kinship for your race and blood". Those prompts have to be done on a certain day, so I had to finish the story by then. Of course, I didn’t finish on time, and I ended up posting it for the next prompt "man or astroman" instead.
I’m sorry if it seems like I’m only talking about me here. I’d talk more about Legend of the Galactic Heroes, but the fact is that Anomaly is not really a LoGH fic.
..."Not really a LoGH fic" is a harsh way of putting it. What I mean is that the basic tension in Anomaly is the contrast between the identity Rahoul chooses for himself and the identity he was born with. This is not only NOT a major tension in LoGH, it actually runs COUNTER to LoGH, at least as far as there are characters like the Rosenritter and Reinhard who break out of the place they were born into, and make their own choices re: what’s right or wrong, and what’s the best course of action. Then again, they aren’t betraying their sense of self to do this, so maybe it would be better if I just said that the concerns of Anomaly and the concerns of LoGH have nothing to do with each other. Usually I do try to match the themes of a series when I write fanfiction for it, so this case is an exception (an anomaly! okay, that was lame).
Back to the story. Identity you choose for yourself vs. the identity you’re born with is something I think about a lot. This isn’t surprising -- like I said before, hello, Caucasian Japanophile here! Last summer I was thinking about it because physics, like being an animanga fan, is an identity I chose for myself. No one else in my family is a scientist. (Well, I suppose there’s my aunt, who’s a doctor, and my younger brother, who wants to be an engineer.) In contrast, everyone else in my lab that summer had at least or physicist or mathematician parent, and most had two.
LoGH came in because I still hadn’t gotten over the fact that everyone in the Empire who wasn’t a noble was a yokel with a stick. It’s strange to have antique people in a futuristic series. Strange from my perspective, anyway -- I know it’s common in anime, but name one Western movie that does anything like that. The closest you’ll come is Dune. I was thinking about Dune too, because it’s a series that assumes that the most logical, natural form of interstellar government is aristocratic fiefdoms. Because, you know, there’s so much space in between planets, it makes more sense for them to be self-governing. Again, though, these are my concerns, and not the concerns of the series. In LoGH, the rise of the Galactic Empire is paralleled to the fascist movements of the 1930s, which is a whole other kettle of fish.
Anyway, to sum up, I thought it would be neat to introduce choice into the life of one of these stick-carrying yokels. My original character, who didn’t have a name yet, was going to have to choose between the Empire and the Alliance. I hadn’t had a television set for about a year at this point, so I decided to use TV as the catalyst. I actually had the whole progression worked out -- boy watches television, latches on to the political culture of his "enemies" mostly as a form of protest against local politics, or maybe just to be different (more on this later), but in the moment of truth realizes that he belongs to his roots, after all. As a bonus, I’d get to say something about Alliance propaganda television, which you see discussed in one episode, I don’t remember which one.
Then I realized that it wouldn’t work, because the EM broadcasts wouldn’t make it that far out into space. And even if they did, they’d be years behind current events. (Actually, that could have been a pretty interesting story too -- imagine arriving on Heinessen expected everyone in period clothing!)
What convinced me that I could still write the story was petronia’s comment about wand-waving. According to her The rule is this: you get to wave the magic wand once, usually right at the beginning, and that is your allotment of ridiculous premises and dei ex machina for the duration of the story, no matter how long.
…wait. That post was made in November. I couldn’t possibly have used it as justification for an August fic. What the heck? I totally misremembered that. (This is your cue to STOP READING, because obviously, my memory on these issues is completely unreliable. Who knows how much of the following commentary I've invented in the year since writing this fic?!)
Right, then. Completely not inspired by petronia in any way, because I have many skills but the ability to read livejournal entries before they’re written isn’t one of them, I decided that the best way to handle an impossible situation like this one would be to not even try to explain. The harder I tried, the more implausible it would seem; better to just wave it away at the beginning. And that’s how I came up with Grenz.
COMMENTARY (ABOUT TIME)
Grenz was an anomaly. Less than a week by military frigate from Neu Sansoucci, it was astronomically in the heart of the Galactic Empire; however the difficulty of rendering it inhabitable had left it undeveloped for most of Imperial history. It wasn’t until 378 Imperial and the invention of atomic-level heat exchangers that Grenz was classified as a possession of the Empire.
I remember spending a lot of time working out the dates -- I re-watched most of the "history lesson" episodes -- but I probably still got them wrong. Bah. Thematically, I wanted to make Grenz a part of the Empire, but not a part of the Empire. So it’s physically close, but for some reason only recently colonized. The easiest way to do that was to blame it on the terraforming -- I’m not sure what atomic-level heat exchangers are, but somehow they regulate the temperature. By the way, this is why I love sci fi -- if you want to set up a certain situation, all you need to do is invent some random gadget, etc. to explain it.
It is said that Emperor Otto VII’s penultimate act was signing the order to transform it from a molten lump of glass into a human-inhabitable planet, and that his last was act was proclaiming a weeklong feast in celebration.
Just some throwaway fun. Otto VII is an original character. He could care less about Grenz, it’s just an excuse to throw a party. He likes parties. And alcohol. And debauchery. He’s your typical fat guy in a toga, in other words.
(Otto VII died of liver failure.)
Because he drank too much.
As if to make up for their newness, Grenz’s High Nobles consumed more exotic delicacies, patronized more art, produced more bastard offspring, and in short were responsible for more popular discontent in a single century than the nobility of surrounding planets had been able to manage in five.
I had to make Grenz a very bad place to live so that Rahoul would want to switch sides. IMO some of the worst excesses are committed by people whose status is new. The Grenz nobles are trying to match the behavior of nobles on other planets, but they lack understanding of the reasons for it, so they go overboard. (This is another case of my concerns not matching the concerns of the series, because I think in LoGH it is, if anything, the opposite: the nobility is based on the Chinese model of dynastic decay, and their corruption is due to their not having to work for their place for so long.)
Even worse, a peculiar fold in the fabric of local space
MAGIC WAND MAGIC WAND MAGIC WAND.
For this reason, Grenz was the only planet in the Imperial sphere to forbid transistor radios. The ruling family, having made this proclamation in a stirring show of patriotic self-interest, felt free to ignore it themselves.
This part still amuses me. XD. Contrast between pretty words and unglamorous reality.
(One of the themes of this story is "anomaly." Grenz’ position in space, the way it receives EM broadcasts, and the law against radios are all signs of uniqueness. The idea, of course, is that Rahoul is even more unique. This makes the ending even more poignant, because if even he ends up on the side of the Empire, then obviously, all that Alliance propaganda about "all we have to do is show them the light of Democracy and they will strew flowers at our feet" is a bunch of crap. This is not unlike the situation in Iraq. "Welcome us with open arms," yeah right.)
Home-made or smuggled transistor radios flourished despite the heavy punishments they incurred, and enforcement became increasingly impractical. In February 400 the ruling family was forced to make concessions: the ban was revoked, replaced with a set of regulations… headed by the brother of the chief magistrate…For smuggling: death, seizure of property…Needless to say the ruling family was quite satisfied with this state of affairs, as were Grenz's (exponentially wealthier) customs officials..
More black humor. I think Yang has a sense of humor like this, but I could be projecting. Some other points of interest:
1) There’s a limit to how far the ruling family’s power extends -- they can make laws, but they can’t make people follow unpopular laws. The only people put to death are those from other planets, because if they start killing their own citizens for this it will make them too unpopular.
2) Ultimately, their goal isn’t to establish law, it’s to extract resources. This is how I’ve always understood nobility -- hands off, except when it comes to collecting taxes.
3) Nepotism XD.
It was with all of this in mind that Rahoul Brangarde, mechanic’s son, used to sit with his arms around his knees under a sheet in the attic, watching bad English movies and trying not to sneeze.
Enter hero, stage left. He’s a mechanic’s son because I thought this was a social position that might encourage bad thoughts against the nobles -- it’s real physical work, which none of them do, the useless parasites. It also requires at least some education, and it probably pays better and requires fewer hours than farm work, which leaves time for holding virulent political opinions which can be passed on to your son. Thinking about it, it’s possible that Rahoul’s dad was involved in illegal radio stuff. I wasn’t thinking about that at the time, though.
In the Alliance, they speak English, and in the Empire, they speak German. I had actually forgotten this point when I was working out the storyline. It’s explained away a few lines down.
He’d found what he thought must be the last of the smuggled video sets, tucked under the false bottom of an antique chest along with a spool of lace that came apart in his hands and some money. (Not much -- changing currency rates had reduced it to barely enough to buy a wooden replica battle cruiser and some candy.)
You find buried treasure in the attic, but instead of being worth more than modern money, there’s inflation, and it’s worth less. I thought that was funny. The television set is the real treasure, but Rahoul doesn’t realize this right away, and he spends the money on something trivial. I spent a long time wondering what Rahoul should buy. It had to be something childish, and I thought it would be neat if it was also military, so at first it was a set of toy soldiers. But I didn’t know if they still had toy soldiers, so I made it a battle cruiser. I am probably the only one who also thinks it funny that it’s a wooden battle cruiser, a high-tech futuristic thing that in this world is a very traditional, old-fashioned child’s toy.
A lot of physical details in this paragraph, there is some stylistic reason for this but I don’t know what it is. Maybe to evoke nostalgia? The lace conveys age.
Rahoul was seven and old enough to know what his discovery meant. Here was something he wasn’t supposed to have…(He was good at keeping secrets. For instance no one ever found out about the battle cruiser, either.)
Hmm, didn’t take him long to realize though. Maybe I should change that. I had to emphasize the "wasn’t supposed to have" part so that I could explain why this kid was watching movies in a foreign language instead of playing outside with the other kids. "Good at keeping secrets" is, of course, foreshadowing his life as a spy. The battle cruiser brings us back to childishness. Actually, I don’t think my writing in this paragraph is very effective. It’s sort of blunt, isn’t it? But I couldn’t imply this part because it’s not the sort of logic you’d expect from a seven year old, and implication only works when your audience can guess what you’re trying to say. I go on in this (very blunt) vein for a while.
Eventually it occurred to him that if he was going to watch only because it was something wasn’t supposed to do, he ought to watch the things he wasn’t supposed to watch. That meant, he supposed, the political broadcasts.
I think I promised a "more on this later" further up. Um, but there isn’t much to say: Rahoul doesn’t know much about the Alliance, so his love for them isn’t really love for them, it’s a reaction against his own culture. I know a lot of people like this.
Luckily for Rahoul the Alliance was at this time looking to escalate their eternal war with the Empire, which meant that there were more political broadcasts than usual….Sometimes the politicians’ words were lost to static, but they tended to repeat themselves so Rahoul didn’t really mind.
Ah, back to ironic humor! My favorite kind of writing, even if I couldn’t keep it up for the whole fic. The audience is in on a joke here, because we know that Alliance propaganda TV is garbage.
There was another (not very good) attempt at detailed physical description between those two lines; I think I was using it for nostalgia after all. Rahoul’s sense-memory of watching elicit TV in the attic merges with his feelings for the Alliance, and his good feeling from one gets transferred to the other. I think this is a pretty human thing to do.
In his ignorance he’d hated only the High Nobles of Grenz; now he hated High Nobles in general. At sixteen he joined the Imperial Officer’s Corps with the slogans "freedom of choice," "government by the people," and "shackled to the yoke of despotism" at the front of his mind.
Socialist rhetoric. Now that I consider it, Alliance broadcasts probably didn’t sound like this. But I needed to throw in some (discredited) stock phrases, and they were the first things that came to mind.
His greatest desire was to work as a spy and saboteur for the Alliance. But how does one become a spy?
I wonder about this too.
The military seemed a good place to start.
According to the action movies and political thrillers I’ve seen.
He reached the height of his promotions at Captain. Beyond that he would be expected to deploy troops in large numbers, and Rahoul had no head for strategy. He had a passion for detail that always obscured the over-arching plan.
What I image Rahoul’s personality would have to be like, for him to have made the decisions he’s made. It fits in with him being pretty good at languages and with his detail-oriented approach to spying (namely, write down everything). But that’s mostly a coincidence: it wasn’t until I got here, physically to this paragraph, that Rahoul developed this kind of personality. Basically, I had a situation, and I had an ending. Rahoul’s personality grew out of his actions (which had been decided in advance) and not the other way around. This is how it typically is with me and original characters. I can’t do this to canon characters, of course, because they already have personalities.
June 7, 490. Weaving though corridors on his way back from a private party; head down and stumble into his room (his room, Captain's room, no roommate thank God for that. Here was one privilege of rank he was not going to protest). Some tea to clear his head. While the pot was brewing, Rahoul stood flipping idly through his notebooks.
I bet you think there is some great reason for the stylistic change here, but actually it was just easier to write it this way. I’m not sure why I decided to switch to incomplete sentences here. Possibly it was to evoke a drunken officier, which is what Rahoul definitely is in this scene. The style abruptly switches back to the semi-formal language and bluntness in the next paragraph. I suppose this echoes Rahoul’s changing state of mind. But to be honest, I don’t remember doing anything like that on purpose. By this point it was about five in the morning and I’d been writing for the last six hours.
He’d blame Herr Reinhardt and his reforms, except that they didn't address the fundamentals.
I don’t know whether this part is obvious. Like on Grenz, there are certain things people are willing to put up with, and certain things they aren’t. It’s harder for Rahoul to keep up his revolutionary zeal when things are getting better. At the same time, Reinhardt hasn’t touched the underlying (aristocratic) political system, except to appoint better aristocrats. Anger at progress because it removes the impetus for violent radical change is another one of those socialist ideas.
…if Rahoul’s a socialist it’s no wonder he doesn’t take to the Alliance, when he finally sees it first hand. I wasn’t thinking anything like this when I wrote Anomaly, by the way. At least, I don’t remember thinking anything like this.
When Raoul was 27, and the first in his squadron to grind Alliance soil beneath his boot -- he hastily moved aside, leaving a space for the rest of his men to disembark behind him --- when he was 27, and on Heinessen, and he looked across the city park to the crowd eying them warily, tiredly from the street, nothing but women and children and old people, then he understood the answer. It was so simple he wondered why he hadn’t realized earlier.
Those broadcasts were never meant for me.
Throughout the war, the Alliance and the Empire have been suffering equal losses (or the Alliance has had heavier losses), but there are more people in the Empire. Therefore, it makes sense that by the very end of the war, the only people left on Heinissen would be the women, children, old people, and politicians. The politicians aren’t standing in the middle of the street, though.
I wasn’t very far into the series when I wrote this. I’d heard that Heinessen falls, but I didn’t know how. Here, there is an actual ground invasion. In the series, I believe the Alliance surrenders before it reaches that point. I spent some time thinking about where Rahoul’s shuttle could land, since Heinissen is a city the size of an entire planet. I decided it would have to be a park. The fact that Rahoul gets to "grind Alliance soil beneath his boot," but has to move so that the men behind him can disembark, is a joke. The joke is that Rahoul's dramatic moment is interrupted by reality. What can I say, I have a strange sense of humor.
The final line is what I based the fic around. It wasn’t the first thing I put into the story -- that was Rahoul and the television set, and Rahoul’s complicated relationship with the Alliance he invents in his head -- but it was one of the first. It always makes me happier to be able to decisively end a story. This one was about choosing between the culture you were born into and one you choose for yourself, and it ends with Rahoul choosing his own.
The way I see it, there was no other way this particular story could have ended, but if circumstances had been different -- if Reinhardt hadn’t started his reforms, if Rahoul had had company, if Alliance television wasn’t garbage, etc -- then the ending could have been different, too.
I spent a few days thinking about Anomaly before I wrote it -- not because it took that long to work out the concept, but because I hadn’t done any fiction for a while. What got me to finally sit down and write was the realization that I could use it for the 31_days prompt "I claim proud kinship for your race and blood". Those prompts have to be done on a certain day, so I had to finish the story by then. Of course, I didn’t finish on time, and I ended up posting it for the next prompt "man or astroman" instead.
I’m sorry if it seems like I’m only talking about me here. I’d talk more about Legend of the Galactic Heroes, but the fact is that Anomaly is not really a LoGH fic.
..."Not really a LoGH fic" is a harsh way of putting it. What I mean is that the basic tension in Anomaly is the contrast between the identity Rahoul chooses for himself and the identity he was born with. This is not only NOT a major tension in LoGH, it actually runs COUNTER to LoGH, at least as far as there are characters like the Rosenritter and Reinhard who break out of the place they were born into, and make their own choices re: what’s right or wrong, and what’s the best course of action. Then again, they aren’t betraying their sense of self to do this, so maybe it would be better if I just said that the concerns of Anomaly and the concerns of LoGH have nothing to do with each other. Usually I do try to match the themes of a series when I write fanfiction for it, so this case is an exception (an anomaly! okay, that was lame).
Back to the story. Identity you choose for yourself vs. the identity you’re born with is something I think about a lot. This isn’t surprising -- like I said before, hello, Caucasian Japanophile here! Last summer I was thinking about it because physics, like being an animanga fan, is an identity I chose for myself. No one else in my family is a scientist. (Well, I suppose there’s my aunt, who’s a doctor, and my younger brother, who wants to be an engineer.) In contrast, everyone else in my lab that summer had at least or physicist or mathematician parent, and most had two.
LoGH came in because I still hadn’t gotten over the fact that everyone in the Empire who wasn’t a noble was a yokel with a stick. It’s strange to have antique people in a futuristic series. Strange from my perspective, anyway -- I know it’s common in anime, but name one Western movie that does anything like that. The closest you’ll come is Dune. I was thinking about Dune too, because it’s a series that assumes that the most logical, natural form of interstellar government is aristocratic fiefdoms. Because, you know, there’s so much space in between planets, it makes more sense for them to be self-governing. Again, though, these are my concerns, and not the concerns of the series. In LoGH, the rise of the Galactic Empire is paralleled to the fascist movements of the 1930s, which is a whole other kettle of fish.
Anyway, to sum up, I thought it would be neat to introduce choice into the life of one of these stick-carrying yokels. My original character, who didn’t have a name yet, was going to have to choose between the Empire and the Alliance. I hadn’t had a television set for about a year at this point, so I decided to use TV as the catalyst. I actually had the whole progression worked out -- boy watches television, latches on to the political culture of his "enemies" mostly as a form of protest against local politics, or maybe just to be different (more on this later), but in the moment of truth realizes that he belongs to his roots, after all. As a bonus, I’d get to say something about Alliance propaganda television, which you see discussed in one episode, I don’t remember which one.
Then I realized that it wouldn’t work, because the EM broadcasts wouldn’t make it that far out into space. And even if they did, they’d be years behind current events. (Actually, that could have been a pretty interesting story too -- imagine arriving on Heinessen expected everyone in period clothing!)
What convinced me that I could still write the story was petronia’s comment about wand-waving. According to her The rule is this: you get to wave the magic wand once, usually right at the beginning, and that is your allotment of ridiculous premises and dei ex machina for the duration of the story, no matter how long.
…wait. That post was made in November. I couldn’t possibly have used it as justification for an August fic. What the heck? I totally misremembered that. (This is your cue to STOP READING, because obviously, my memory on these issues is completely unreliable. Who knows how much of the following commentary I've invented in the year since writing this fic?!)
Right, then. Completely not inspired by petronia in any way, because I have many skills but the ability to read livejournal entries before they’re written isn’t one of them, I decided that the best way to handle an impossible situation like this one would be to not even try to explain. The harder I tried, the more implausible it would seem; better to just wave it away at the beginning. And that’s how I came up with Grenz.
COMMENTARY (ABOUT TIME)
Grenz was an anomaly. Less than a week by military frigate from Neu Sansoucci, it was astronomically in the heart of the Galactic Empire; however the difficulty of rendering it inhabitable had left it undeveloped for most of Imperial history. It wasn’t until 378 Imperial and the invention of atomic-level heat exchangers that Grenz was classified as a possession of the Empire.
I remember spending a lot of time working out the dates -- I re-watched most of the "history lesson" episodes -- but I probably still got them wrong. Bah. Thematically, I wanted to make Grenz a part of the Empire, but not a part of the Empire. So it’s physically close, but for some reason only recently colonized. The easiest way to do that was to blame it on the terraforming -- I’m not sure what atomic-level heat exchangers are, but somehow they regulate the temperature. By the way, this is why I love sci fi -- if you want to set up a certain situation, all you need to do is invent some random gadget, etc. to explain it.
It is said that Emperor Otto VII’s penultimate act was signing the order to transform it from a molten lump of glass into a human-inhabitable planet, and that his last was act was proclaiming a weeklong feast in celebration.
Just some throwaway fun. Otto VII is an original character. He could care less about Grenz, it’s just an excuse to throw a party. He likes parties. And alcohol. And debauchery. He’s your typical fat guy in a toga, in other words.
(Otto VII died of liver failure.)
Because he drank too much.
As if to make up for their newness, Grenz’s High Nobles consumed more exotic delicacies, patronized more art, produced more bastard offspring, and in short were responsible for more popular discontent in a single century than the nobility of surrounding planets had been able to manage in five.
I had to make Grenz a very bad place to live so that Rahoul would want to switch sides. IMO some of the worst excesses are committed by people whose status is new. The Grenz nobles are trying to match the behavior of nobles on other planets, but they lack understanding of the reasons for it, so they go overboard. (This is another case of my concerns not matching the concerns of the series, because I think in LoGH it is, if anything, the opposite: the nobility is based on the Chinese model of dynastic decay, and their corruption is due to their not having to work for their place for so long.)
Even worse, a peculiar fold in the fabric of local space
MAGIC WAND MAGIC WAND MAGIC WAND.
For this reason, Grenz was the only planet in the Imperial sphere to forbid transistor radios. The ruling family, having made this proclamation in a stirring show of patriotic self-interest, felt free to ignore it themselves.
This part still amuses me. XD. Contrast between pretty words and unglamorous reality.
(One of the themes of this story is "anomaly." Grenz’ position in space, the way it receives EM broadcasts, and the law against radios are all signs of uniqueness. The idea, of course, is that Rahoul is even more unique. This makes the ending even more poignant, because if even he ends up on the side of the Empire, then obviously, all that Alliance propaganda about "all we have to do is show them the light of Democracy and they will strew flowers at our feet" is a bunch of crap. This is not unlike the situation in Iraq. "Welcome us with open arms," yeah right.)
Home-made or smuggled transistor radios flourished despite the heavy punishments they incurred, and enforcement became increasingly impractical. In February 400 the ruling family was forced to make concessions: the ban was revoked, replaced with a set of regulations… headed by the brother of the chief magistrate…For smuggling: death, seizure of property…Needless to say the ruling family was quite satisfied with this state of affairs, as were Grenz's (exponentially wealthier) customs officials..
More black humor. I think Yang has a sense of humor like this, but I could be projecting. Some other points of interest:
1) There’s a limit to how far the ruling family’s power extends -- they can make laws, but they can’t make people follow unpopular laws. The only people put to death are those from other planets, because if they start killing their own citizens for this it will make them too unpopular.
2) Ultimately, their goal isn’t to establish law, it’s to extract resources. This is how I’ve always understood nobility -- hands off, except when it comes to collecting taxes.
3) Nepotism XD.
It was with all of this in mind that Rahoul Brangarde, mechanic’s son, used to sit with his arms around his knees under a sheet in the attic, watching bad English movies and trying not to sneeze.
Enter hero, stage left. He’s a mechanic’s son because I thought this was a social position that might encourage bad thoughts against the nobles -- it’s real physical work, which none of them do, the useless parasites. It also requires at least some education, and it probably pays better and requires fewer hours than farm work, which leaves time for holding virulent political opinions which can be passed on to your son. Thinking about it, it’s possible that Rahoul’s dad was involved in illegal radio stuff. I wasn’t thinking about that at the time, though.
In the Alliance, they speak English, and in the Empire, they speak German. I had actually forgotten this point when I was working out the storyline. It’s explained away a few lines down.
He’d found what he thought must be the last of the smuggled video sets, tucked under the false bottom of an antique chest along with a spool of lace that came apart in his hands and some money. (Not much -- changing currency rates had reduced it to barely enough to buy a wooden replica battle cruiser and some candy.)
You find buried treasure in the attic, but instead of being worth more than modern money, there’s inflation, and it’s worth less. I thought that was funny. The television set is the real treasure, but Rahoul doesn’t realize this right away, and he spends the money on something trivial. I spent a long time wondering what Rahoul should buy. It had to be something childish, and I thought it would be neat if it was also military, so at first it was a set of toy soldiers. But I didn’t know if they still had toy soldiers, so I made it a battle cruiser. I am probably the only one who also thinks it funny that it’s a wooden battle cruiser, a high-tech futuristic thing that in this world is a very traditional, old-fashioned child’s toy.
A lot of physical details in this paragraph, there is some stylistic reason for this but I don’t know what it is. Maybe to evoke nostalgia? The lace conveys age.
Rahoul was seven and old enough to know what his discovery meant. Here was something he wasn’t supposed to have…(He was good at keeping secrets. For instance no one ever found out about the battle cruiser, either.)
Hmm, didn’t take him long to realize though. Maybe I should change that. I had to emphasize the "wasn’t supposed to have" part so that I could explain why this kid was watching movies in a foreign language instead of playing outside with the other kids. "Good at keeping secrets" is, of course, foreshadowing his life as a spy. The battle cruiser brings us back to childishness. Actually, I don’t think my writing in this paragraph is very effective. It’s sort of blunt, isn’t it? But I couldn’t imply this part because it’s not the sort of logic you’d expect from a seven year old, and implication only works when your audience can guess what you’re trying to say. I go on in this (very blunt) vein for a while.
Eventually it occurred to him that if he was going to watch only because it was something wasn’t supposed to do, he ought to watch the things he wasn’t supposed to watch. That meant, he supposed, the political broadcasts.
I think I promised a "more on this later" further up. Um, but there isn’t much to say: Rahoul doesn’t know much about the Alliance, so his love for them isn’t really love for them, it’s a reaction against his own culture. I know a lot of people like this.
Luckily for Rahoul the Alliance was at this time looking to escalate their eternal war with the Empire, which meant that there were more political broadcasts than usual….Sometimes the politicians’ words were lost to static, but they tended to repeat themselves so Rahoul didn’t really mind.
Ah, back to ironic humor! My favorite kind of writing, even if I couldn’t keep it up for the whole fic. The audience is in on a joke here, because we know that Alliance propaganda TV is garbage.
There was another (not very good) attempt at detailed physical description between those two lines; I think I was using it for nostalgia after all. Rahoul’s sense-memory of watching elicit TV in the attic merges with his feelings for the Alliance, and his good feeling from one gets transferred to the other. I think this is a pretty human thing to do.
In his ignorance he’d hated only the High Nobles of Grenz; now he hated High Nobles in general. At sixteen he joined the Imperial Officer’s Corps with the slogans "freedom of choice," "government by the people," and "shackled to the yoke of despotism" at the front of his mind.
Socialist rhetoric. Now that I consider it, Alliance broadcasts probably didn’t sound like this. But I needed to throw in some (discredited) stock phrases, and they were the first things that came to mind.
His greatest desire was to work as a spy and saboteur for the Alliance. But how does one become a spy?
I wonder about this too.
The military seemed a good place to start.
According to the action movies and political thrillers I’ve seen.
He reached the height of his promotions at Captain. Beyond that he would be expected to deploy troops in large numbers, and Rahoul had no head for strategy. He had a passion for detail that always obscured the over-arching plan.
What I image Rahoul’s personality would have to be like, for him to have made the decisions he’s made. It fits in with him being pretty good at languages and with his detail-oriented approach to spying (namely, write down everything). But that’s mostly a coincidence: it wasn’t until I got here, physically to this paragraph, that Rahoul developed this kind of personality. Basically, I had a situation, and I had an ending. Rahoul’s personality grew out of his actions (which had been decided in advance) and not the other way around. This is how it typically is with me and original characters. I can’t do this to canon characters, of course, because they already have personalities.
June 7, 490. Weaving though corridors on his way back from a private party; head down and stumble into his room (his room, Captain's room, no roommate thank God for that. Here was one privilege of rank he was not going to protest). Some tea to clear his head. While the pot was brewing, Rahoul stood flipping idly through his notebooks.
I bet you think there is some great reason for the stylistic change here, but actually it was just easier to write it this way. I’m not sure why I decided to switch to incomplete sentences here. Possibly it was to evoke a drunken officier, which is what Rahoul definitely is in this scene. The style abruptly switches back to the semi-formal language and bluntness in the next paragraph. I suppose this echoes Rahoul’s changing state of mind. But to be honest, I don’t remember doing anything like that on purpose. By this point it was about five in the morning and I’d been writing for the last six hours.
He’d blame Herr Reinhardt and his reforms, except that they didn't address the fundamentals.
I don’t know whether this part is obvious. Like on Grenz, there are certain things people are willing to put up with, and certain things they aren’t. It’s harder for Rahoul to keep up his revolutionary zeal when things are getting better. At the same time, Reinhardt hasn’t touched the underlying (aristocratic) political system, except to appoint better aristocrats. Anger at progress because it removes the impetus for violent radical change is another one of those socialist ideas.
…if Rahoul’s a socialist it’s no wonder he doesn’t take to the Alliance, when he finally sees it first hand. I wasn’t thinking anything like this when I wrote Anomaly, by the way. At least, I don’t remember thinking anything like this.
When Raoul was 27, and the first in his squadron to grind Alliance soil beneath his boot -- he hastily moved aside, leaving a space for the rest of his men to disembark behind him --- when he was 27, and on Heinessen, and he looked across the city park to the crowd eying them warily, tiredly from the street, nothing but women and children and old people, then he understood the answer. It was so simple he wondered why he hadn’t realized earlier.
Those broadcasts were never meant for me.
Throughout the war, the Alliance and the Empire have been suffering equal losses (or the Alliance has had heavier losses), but there are more people in the Empire. Therefore, it makes sense that by the very end of the war, the only people left on Heinissen would be the women, children, old people, and politicians. The politicians aren’t standing in the middle of the street, though.
I wasn’t very far into the series when I wrote this. I’d heard that Heinessen falls, but I didn’t know how. Here, there is an actual ground invasion. In the series, I believe the Alliance surrenders before it reaches that point. I spent some time thinking about where Rahoul’s shuttle could land, since Heinissen is a city the size of an entire planet. I decided it would have to be a park. The fact that Rahoul gets to "grind Alliance soil beneath his boot," but has to move so that the men behind him can disembark, is a joke. The joke is that Rahoul's dramatic moment is interrupted by reality. What can I say, I have a strange sense of humor.
The final line is what I based the fic around. It wasn’t the first thing I put into the story -- that was Rahoul and the television set, and Rahoul’s complicated relationship with the Alliance he invents in his head -- but it was one of the first. It always makes me happier to be able to decisively end a story. This one was about choosing between the culture you were born into and one you choose for yourself, and it ends with Rahoul choosing his own.
The way I see it, there was no other way this particular story could have ended, but if circumstances had been different -- if Reinhardt hadn’t started his reforms, if Rahoul had had company, if Alliance television wasn’t garbage, etc -- then the ending could have been different, too.