Comments | rs_games: Day 26 - Fic: Team Sirius: Elegy of the Spheres

rsgamesmods in rs_games

Day 26 - Fic: Team Sirius: Elegy of the Spheres

Oct 26, 2012 11:50

Team: Sirius
Title: Elegy of the Spheres
Rating: R
Warnings: Astrophysics. Playing fast and loose with the laws of science. Technically character death, not that it stops anyone. Background Remus/Tonks. Language and sexual content.
Word Count: ~48,000
Summary: "It's like falling asleep," he said. "Then you wake up." Sirius Black's awesome ( ( Read more... )

team sirius, rs_games 2012, fic

Comments 29

(The comment has been removed)

adistantsun November 26 2012, 05:31:56 UTC

Thank you so much! Even with all the requisite stress and anxiety that comes with tackling a project this big to a deadline, building this crazy, posthumous 'verse around my understanding of the physics (limited, though I learned a lot!) and then weaving the canon through was more fun than it had any right to be ^_~

TEAM SIRIUS rewrites24 October 26 2012, 21:24:43 UTC

Well...I have no clue where to begin except to say, I think "Meet the Doctor" should be higher on that list ( ... )

adistantsun November 26 2012, 05:37:18 UTC

You know, I'd probably never have started watching 'Doctor Who' if not for this project - that alone made the whole thing worth it! ;D

Blood, sweat, and tears went into this and it shows. You should be enormously proud of yourself
Yes, yes they did. In the case of sweat, quite literally, since I wrote the bulk of this in August when Japan turns into a humid tropical hell XD;;. But at the end this is the longest thing I've written in more years than I care to count, and I'm pretty chuffed with it, just quietly ^_~

SPACE BIKE!!!
Hehe, it's Sirius. There must be a bike somewhere. And since a) it had to exist before his fall, and b) I wanted to write a capable, kick-ass Lily, it became her space bike.

Your take on the afterlife here is unlike anything I've read.The idea first seeded while I was reading Italo Calvino's 'Cosmicomics', and also I guess I was a bit tired of reading afterlife fics where everything is exactly the same as in life? There's so much scope for world-building in an afterlife setting, and for all the cosmological ( ... )

adistantsun November 26 2012, 05:37:56 UTC

how Remus and Sirius's love just fucking TRANSCENDS time/space/death
I admit it freely, I'm a sucker for any trope that deals in enduring love and the concept of soulmates. I love it, and I will eat up any fic that affirms it with a silver spoon. My only real goal in writing this was to give Remus and Sirius a happy ending, one that not even JK and Pottermore could take away from them, and in that at least, I think it succeeds ( ^-^)♥(^-^ )

You made me really love Remus/Tonks.
Mission accomplished! \(^_^)/
Really, I don't get the antipathy between the two 'ships. I mean I understand it, people like absolutes, but it is possible to love more than one person in the span of a lifetime, and to love two people at the same time in different ways. A second love doesn't cheapen or invalidate the first. And isn't it so much more interesting to explore the relationships between Sirius, Remus, and Tonks than to put one relationship on a pedestal and try to denigrate or deny the other? Human hearts are not that simple.

it was super effective ( ... )

so_jayded October 27 2012, 20:01:43 UTC

I was totally undone by this. I just finished reading it on my phone and will be back when I have a keyboard to tell you precisely what I loved about it but for now, I'm off to find some tissues.

Team Sirius so_jayded October 31 2012, 05:46:19 UTC

This took me hours to read. I'm usually cautious, jumping in to something this, because character death is actually a dealbreaker for me (odd, I know, in a ship with two dead people), but I've never dabbled in afterlife fic before. Now I'm kind of wondering why I haven't because, holy cannoli, this was awesome ( ... )

adistantsun November 26 2012, 05:38:25 UTC

some tissues
I hope by the end they were happy tears? I'm so sorry, I never mean to write these things that leave a trail of wet tissues in their wake, they just... happen. A happy ending has to be earned, right? T_T

afterlife fic
Afterlife fic is wonderful! It and Bring Back Black are two of my favourite fandom tropes! One of the best afterlife fics I can recall off the top of my head is brighty18's 'The Beginner's Guide to Being Dead', if you feel inclined to read more of Sirius being posthumously awesome ^_~

I love, love, love how it isn't all harps and clouds.
Looking at it from a writerly perspective, if it were all harps and clouds and nothing else, there would be no story XD. Death was never going to be a peach garden for Sirius, since his soulmate is decidedly absent - again. Also one of the big what-ifs that shaped this behemoth in its infancy was what if Lily and James had no idea what was going down on earth? What if they were just as much in the dark as everyone else? How did they come to understand what it was Harry had to do? ( ... )

Team Sirius dustmouth October 28 2012, 00:02:15 UTC

I LOVED THIS STORY. I read it last night when I was hoenstly far too tired to be doing such a thing, and then fell so in love with it that I just couldn't stop until it was done ( ... )

Re: Team Sirius dustmouth October 28 2012, 00:03:53 UTC

I forgot to mention, with the scene with Dumbledore in the library he said that, "it wasn't very effective..." and my mind immediately went to Pokemon and then you just slipped that Magikarp in a few sentences later haha :D
Well, it made my night anyway-

adistantsun November 26 2012, 05:39:38 UTC

ESSAY COMMENT! HOW DO I LOVE THEE ♥__♥

there was such care in the writing of this, every little sentence felt like it had been weighed in turn
Heh, that's a pretty fair summary of how I edit - checking each sentence's clarity and rhythm, on its own and as part of the greater paragraph, and in the end judging whether it's necessary, or if it's just more words bogging down the story. I ran out of time and didn't get to comb through the final chapters as much as I would have liked, but ah well. No one's said yet that the thing fell apart at the end, so I'm taking that as a good sign.

mean, it should seem ridiculous or like a flight of fancy. At no point while reading this did I even question the fact that they were in space
No better compliment could a writer receive: that the world was drawn convincingly enough that you believed it from start to finish and never once tripped over the sheer insanity of the whole thing! XD

Your characters aren't separate at all from the world that they live inOne thing I will give all the time I've ( ... )

adistantsun November 26 2012, 05:40:32 UTC

Remus' relationship with Tonks
You know, I hadn't planned to deal all that much with it in the beginning. Then I showed my outlines to a friend over from Australia. She asked what was happening in the bg with Remus and Tonks, and sort of begged me to let them be in love. I don't really see it in the books, but writing their relationship as a moment of whiskey-fuelled loneliness and a shotgun wedding felt too much like the easy way out (are you seeing a pattern here? XD). Far more interesting to explore how they might have loved each other, even with everything else taken into consideration. I actually quite like Remus/Tonks. I don't see R/S and R/T as mutually exclusive -- quite the opposite, tbh -- and I did take a certain quiet delight in writing something that defied the binaries: that Remus and Tonks first started falling for each other because they were both in love with Sirius, in different ways.
I did flirt with the idea of labelling this as "Sirius/Remus/Tonks, but not in the way you think" for awhile there ^_~

how much you ( ... )

TEAM REMUS pavlablack October 28 2012, 05:27:04 UTC

Wow, what an undertaking! This is a really interesting take on the afterlife, but what could have pressed my suspension of disbelief to its limits really worked, and I think that's due to the deep connections between characters and your beautiful writing style. I loved the interactions between Lily and Sirius and the fact that they had to find James together, and of course I loved, as rewrites24 put it, that Remus's and Sirius's relationship really does transcend space and time. The letters passed between them were really heartbreakingly poignant, and I like how you interpreted Remus's feelings about Tonks and Teddy and Sirius's reaction-how they were all family, and Teddy was his too, just like Harry belonged to all of them. And your portrayal of Tonks, and her letter to Sirius, was wonderful too.

Again, your writing was so elegant; as dustmouth said, every sentence seemed carefully chosen. I love the imagery in sentences like this one:

The not-grass crinkled like newsprint under his feet.

And the humor you create in sentences like this one:

You' ( ... )

adistantsun November 26 2012, 05:41:21 UTC

Thank you so much!

what could have pressed my suspension of disbelief to its limits really worked, and I think that's due to the deep connections between characters
I did quite a bit of research for this fic, not just on the science side of things, but also devouring quite a bit of British TV sci-fi, and one thing I did notice from something like 12 combined seasons of 'Red Dwarf' and 'Doctor Who' is that they're both very strongly character-driven. That's what keeps the insane space operatics grounded and in perspective: the human lives and human relationships at the centre. Character is my favourite element of fiction anyway, so it was no hardship at all to put the primary focus of the fic on them :D
and your beautiful writing style.
Thank you! The density of the prose in this particular fic was exhausting to write at times, but it seems the effort paid off!

I loved the interactions between Lily and Sirius and the fact that they had to find James togetherLily and Sirius' friendship is probably one my favourite things in this fic ( ... )