30 days of babble, dec 14 - original fic babble
i am as per usual behind on the december babble meme. for december 14, ignipes asked me to ramble about one of my original fics, something i've already written or something i haven't written yet, either is good. and i'm all "what do i talk about??" i mean, i finished my nanonovel and while i can think of a bit of sequel, the story as written says pretty much everything i wanted to say. there isn't a whole lot else. i'm kind of thinking about my bigbang but i can't talk about it in public, and i have a story to write for writing group that i haven't started thinking about yet, and i should be writing a fic for insmallpackages but haven't started thinking about that yet either. well, actually, i kind of have started to think about my story for writing group, but there isn't nearly enough to talk about with other people. but i was kindofsortof thinking about the friar and the heretic this morning, so i shall talk about them.
we will first of all ignore the fact that neither of them has a name yet. >.< and the fact that so far there isn't a story so much as there are two characters and one of them has a crisis of faith. because i'm more likely to start with a character than with a plot. if the story is ever written it will be set in a more-or-less fictional country that looks and feels suspiciously like southern france, so everyone will probably have more-or-less fictionalized languedoc names (all hail the onomastikon). but aside from some research into friaries and monasteries and maybe a little bit more about heresies and small-i inquisition - as opposed to big-i spanish inquisition - which no one expects :D - it's not supposed to be a very historically-accurate story. for one thing, i want to make up a lot of religious stuff. and for another, if i spend too much time researching i won't spend any time writing.
altho they do need names.
the friar looks like george blagden in the earlier episodes of vikings - before the unattractive facial hair altho without a tonsure - so he's got curly hair and a perpetually vaguely baffled expression. and he's adorable. i kind of think of him as an only child but if he takes holy orders i don't think he could be - i mean, if he was the only son he'd inherit dad's farm or business or trade or whatever, like i don't think his dad would allow him to become a friar. but i don't know. (and anyway this is my world and i can do what i want with it.) in any case, his mom dies when he's like four or five and the local priest in their little village comforts him (because his dad isn't that kind of guy, and wee!friar is kind of distraught because come on, he's five) and tells him, i dunno, his mom is with god, she's not in pain any more, she's watching him from heaven, whatever kinds of things you tell a kid who's all freaked out because his mom is dead and his dad doesn't know what to do with him. and the friar totally imprints on the local priest and the guy's faith and love for god, and eventually he ends up in a friary in a largeish city. and because everything i know about catholic heresies and small-i inquisition i learned from the friar of carcassonne: revolt against the inquisition in the last days of the cathars - and it's not that much - the largeish city looks like carcassonne, or at least how i imagine it might have looked in the thirteenth century. (i have never been there and have no idea what it looks like in person. it's on my bucket list, tho.)
so we have this friar who's totally devoted to his order and his god and his dogma and all those fun things, and his church is conducting an inquisition to ferret out any heretics in the vicinity, and they've got their torture devices and their instruction books [1] and their inquisitors, and the friar actually gets to interrogate a heretic. who is - surprise - the heretic of the title. :D and who somehow convinces the friar to do something or say something or just think something that somehow gets him freed - maybe the friar sneaks him out of prison in the middle of the night, or argues his case in court and gets him off - i have absolutely no idea what happens but the end result is that the friar is kicked out of his order.
which is really, really not what he was planning on. and he's kind of freaked out now because what's he going to do? all his life all he ever wanted was to serve god, and how can he do that by himself? he has no purpose, no path, just crisis. and he has a heretic. who says hey, you have nowhere to live and nowhere to go, and you may have actually saved my life, come home with me. so the friar ends up living with a bunch of hippie heretics on their hippie heretic commune, because what else is he going to do? and they're all into communal living and free love and a genderless god (or a god who's both male and female) and women preaching, and they grow crops and make cheese and raise chickens and livestock and small children, and they preach on the down-low in town to acquire converts. they live way outside the city limits in an old abandoned monastery on land that may or may not belong to a fairly powerful and wealthy noble who isn't a converted heretic but does support them on account of he's not a big fan of the church and the church's tendency to insinuate itself into every damn thing and to take other people's land and money whenever it feels like doing so.
the friar gets his own little cell - which is something he can actually relate to, altho his cell on the commune is nicer than his cell at the friary - and they put him to work and he spends a lot of time trying to reconcile his order's dogma with the heretics', er, heresy. and also he occasionally has sex with the heretic because come on, it's me. and the heretics are pretty open-minded when it comes to who has sex with who and how. (the heretic always refers to the friar as "friar", rather than by name. the friar can't decide if he minds or not.) and the friar has this ongoing crisis of faith and the heretic tries to talk him through it and bring him into the fold. basically it's an excuse to write angst and buttsex and random religious tenets. i mean, most of the bits i wrote in my head have the friar asking god to help him figure out what to do and how he's going to make sense of the fact that he's living with heretics now, and there's just a lot of "i don't know what to do" and "i'm so confused" and "please show me the right path" and that kind of thing. occasionally he has moments of feeling that if he's been damned by his order he may as well act like it, and that usually ends with him drinking too much (which isn't hard, as he has almost no tolerance) and fucking the heretic and waking up hating himself.
(the heretics on the commune occasionally like to party. they drink, they dance, they eat, they celebrate, sometimes they have sex in the fields, it's a good time.)
and meanwhile the heretic is all "why can't he just accept that he's one of us by default now, we like having him, everything will be fine". but the story is from the friar's pov, so that only comes out when they're talking about it.
oh, and also there's a girl in the commune who thinks the friar is cute and fairly intelligent and would contribute good genes to a baby, so she asks him to father a kid by her. and he's shocked and appalled and says no, of course not, he can't do that! as he doesn't believe that anything good can come of single mothers. (even tho the kids are communally raised and the baby would have lots of parents.) and he's not actually that sexually attracted to girls. she convinces him and eventually he manages to get her pregnant, and she's thrilled. she wants a baby, for one thing, and she wants an excuse to boink the friar, for another, and she really does think he'd make a good father biologically speaking. she doesn't care if he helps raise the kid or not, she just wants his genes. i haven't thought what happens or how he reacts after the kid is born, but he's continually freaked out as the girl gets bigger and bigger and closer and closer to giving birth.
[1] these were apparently real things! like, if you were inquisiting, there were books that would tell you how to conduct your inquisition, what kinds of sermons to preach in public to get the locals whipped up enough to sell out their neighbors, how to torture, what logic to use against heretics, what were the various things that you could accuse someone of and what were the appropriate punishments, and basically what the whole process was. you didn't have to wing it.
well that was a lot of babble. someday i might even have an actual story to go with it.
we will first of all ignore the fact that neither of them has a name yet. >.< and the fact that so far there isn't a story so much as there are two characters and one of them has a crisis of faith. because i'm more likely to start with a character than with a plot. if the story is ever written it will be set in a more-or-less fictional country that looks and feels suspiciously like southern france, so everyone will probably have more-or-less fictionalized languedoc names (all hail the onomastikon). but aside from some research into friaries and monasteries and maybe a little bit more about heresies and small-i inquisition - as opposed to big-i spanish inquisition - which no one expects :D - it's not supposed to be a very historically-accurate story. for one thing, i want to make up a lot of religious stuff. and for another, if i spend too much time researching i won't spend any time writing.
altho they do need names.
the friar looks like george blagden in the earlier episodes of vikings - before the unattractive facial hair altho without a tonsure - so he's got curly hair and a perpetually vaguely baffled expression. and he's adorable. i kind of think of him as an only child but if he takes holy orders i don't think he could be - i mean, if he was the only son he'd inherit dad's farm or business or trade or whatever, like i don't think his dad would allow him to become a friar. but i don't know. (and anyway this is my world and i can do what i want with it.) in any case, his mom dies when he's like four or five and the local priest in their little village comforts him (because his dad isn't that kind of guy, and wee!friar is kind of distraught because come on, he's five) and tells him, i dunno, his mom is with god, she's not in pain any more, she's watching him from heaven, whatever kinds of things you tell a kid who's all freaked out because his mom is dead and his dad doesn't know what to do with him. and the friar totally imprints on the local priest and the guy's faith and love for god, and eventually he ends up in a friary in a largeish city. and because everything i know about catholic heresies and small-i inquisition i learned from the friar of carcassonne: revolt against the inquisition in the last days of the cathars - and it's not that much - the largeish city looks like carcassonne, or at least how i imagine it might have looked in the thirteenth century. (i have never been there and have no idea what it looks like in person. it's on my bucket list, tho.)
so we have this friar who's totally devoted to his order and his god and his dogma and all those fun things, and his church is conducting an inquisition to ferret out any heretics in the vicinity, and they've got their torture devices and their instruction books [1] and their inquisitors, and the friar actually gets to interrogate a heretic. who is - surprise - the heretic of the title. :D and who somehow convinces the friar to do something or say something or just think something that somehow gets him freed - maybe the friar sneaks him out of prison in the middle of the night, or argues his case in court and gets him off - i have absolutely no idea what happens but the end result is that the friar is kicked out of his order.
which is really, really not what he was planning on. and he's kind of freaked out now because what's he going to do? all his life all he ever wanted was to serve god, and how can he do that by himself? he has no purpose, no path, just crisis. and he has a heretic. who says hey, you have nowhere to live and nowhere to go, and you may have actually saved my life, come home with me. so the friar ends up living with a bunch of hippie heretics on their hippie heretic commune, because what else is he going to do? and they're all into communal living and free love and a genderless god (or a god who's both male and female) and women preaching, and they grow crops and make cheese and raise chickens and livestock and small children, and they preach on the down-low in town to acquire converts. they live way outside the city limits in an old abandoned monastery on land that may or may not belong to a fairly powerful and wealthy noble who isn't a converted heretic but does support them on account of he's not a big fan of the church and the church's tendency to insinuate itself into every damn thing and to take other people's land and money whenever it feels like doing so.
the friar gets his own little cell - which is something he can actually relate to, altho his cell on the commune is nicer than his cell at the friary - and they put him to work and he spends a lot of time trying to reconcile his order's dogma with the heretics', er, heresy. and also he occasionally has sex with the heretic because come on, it's me. and the heretics are pretty open-minded when it comes to who has sex with who and how. (the heretic always refers to the friar as "friar", rather than by name. the friar can't decide if he minds or not.) and the friar has this ongoing crisis of faith and the heretic tries to talk him through it and bring him into the fold. basically it's an excuse to write angst and buttsex and random religious tenets. i mean, most of the bits i wrote in my head have the friar asking god to help him figure out what to do and how he's going to make sense of the fact that he's living with heretics now, and there's just a lot of "i don't know what to do" and "i'm so confused" and "please show me the right path" and that kind of thing. occasionally he has moments of feeling that if he's been damned by his order he may as well act like it, and that usually ends with him drinking too much (which isn't hard, as he has almost no tolerance) and fucking the heretic and waking up hating himself.
(the heretics on the commune occasionally like to party. they drink, they dance, they eat, they celebrate, sometimes they have sex in the fields, it's a good time.)
and meanwhile the heretic is all "why can't he just accept that he's one of us by default now, we like having him, everything will be fine". but the story is from the friar's pov, so that only comes out when they're talking about it.
oh, and also there's a girl in the commune who thinks the friar is cute and fairly intelligent and would contribute good genes to a baby, so she asks him to father a kid by her. and he's shocked and appalled and says no, of course not, he can't do that! as he doesn't believe that anything good can come of single mothers. (even tho the kids are communally raised and the baby would have lots of parents.) and he's not actually that sexually attracted to girls. she convinces him and eventually he manages to get her pregnant, and she's thrilled. she wants a baby, for one thing, and she wants an excuse to boink the friar, for another, and she really does think he'd make a good father biologically speaking. she doesn't care if he helps raise the kid or not, she just wants his genes. i haven't thought what happens or how he reacts after the kid is born, but he's continually freaked out as the girl gets bigger and bigger and closer and closer to giving birth.
[1] these were apparently real things! like, if you were inquisiting, there were books that would tell you how to conduct your inquisition, what kinds of sermons to preach in public to get the locals whipped up enough to sell out their neighbors, how to torture, what logic to use against heretics, what were the various things that you could accuse someone of and what were the appropriate punishments, and basically what the whole process was. you didn't have to wing it.
well that was a lot of babble. someday i might even have an actual story to go with it.