Angelic's post made me think about why I love Escaflowne so much.
When I first watched Escaflowne, I watched it on this little tv in my dorm, wearing a set of crappy headphones so I wouldn't disturb my roommates, because I watched it the whole way through in one session... At the end of this 13 hour marathon, I was sad and angry--sad because Hitomi had to leave, and angry because Hitomi had to leave.
Since then, I've probably watched it five or six more times. Now, at the end, I understand why the anime creators had to make Hitomi leave, but it still doesn't make it easier for me. I understand that Hitomi has finished her part on Gaea, and needs to return to Japan to move on with her own life. She's fifteen, hardly the age to decide the direction of her future. I understand, but I'm sad and angry, because the ending makes the outcome of their relationship so vague. Even though they helped each other through all these experiences, there's nothing to prevent me from being afraid that the love between Hitomi and Van would become the one that Leon and Hitomi's grandmother shared.
And this uncertainty, through expectations from my training from Hollywood and fairy tales, is frightening. Although, why should it be? In all the examples of love in the series, Leon and Encia, Leon and Hitomi's grandma, Goau and Varie, they are all enduring and romantic. Why should I prefer one to the others?
Hard question to answer.
Easier to answer: If the series wanted to end with the certainty of love and the uncertainty of love outcomes (Van+Hitomi, Dryden+Millerna, Allen+?), would it be horrible of me to close the uncertainty?
The answer, I feel, is no. It's the basis of fanfiction.
1 comment:
Hi there!
I mosied on over to your ff.net profile and found this site. Cool, a blog about writing. Neat idea. I love talking about writing, myself, only I don't have many people to discuss it with.
From reading your fic on ff.net and your blog entries, I'd say that writing style is not really something you need to worry about. You're very articulate and your thoughts come across very clearly. I understand that you probably don't want to stop at simply getting the point across, but when you find yourself doing too much word tweaking (also one of my faults), sometimes it's good to just let it lie, even if it sounds terribly uninspired. (Unless your beta readers tell you otherwise, and then it's up to you to take their suggestions seriously or not.) I do have one criticism, however: in your ff.net fic, you often switch between present tense and past tense, and you should pick one and stick with it. Otherwise, it’s kind of confusing and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, grammatically speaking. It’s not something you need to go back and change if you don’t feel like it, but you should keep that in mind in writing your current fic.
Coming up with a reasonable plot and maintaining momentum is the real challenge, as you are already well aware. I don't know if I can offer you much advice here, having never completed anything longer than a one-shot. My Escaflowne fic is the only one that stands a chance of seeing an ending, and even that is questionable since I start working in a few weeks, and my job will totally eat up my life. However, I will try to keep at it for as long as I can, because it's the most fully realized fic I've ever written, and I actually think it’s a story worth telling. Anyway, I digress.
When it comes to pacing, I ascribe to the rule that everything in life takes longer to accomplish than you originally intend. As a result, I have been trying to keep the premises of my fics as uncomplicated as possible. One-shots are easy, because the story is short and the premise is incredibly simple. Long fics are tougher, and I found myself asking what the point of my Escaflowne fic is. Yes, I wanted to answer the question of “What next?” regarding the love story between Van and Hitomi, like you talked about in your entry. But more than that, I wanted to answer the question of “What happens when life happens, and people are caught between a rock and a hard place? When things have gone beyond anyone’s control and nobody is really right or wrong?” After I figured that out, the rest of the fic still took some working out, but it was easier now that it was only the flesh on the skeleton.
Unlike Sapphirefly, I’m not a planner, but more of a by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of writer. But since you seem pretty serious about bringing your fic to completion, putting time into planning it is probably not a bad thing. I’m impressed with how much research you’ve been doing. I think Escaflowne Compendium is very useful as well, but I’ve only really looked at it out of my obsessive fan tendencies, and not all that carefully it seems.
All this from someone who has never written anything longer than a one-shot. I hope that you were able to find something in here that was useful ;) Good luck with your fic, and I look forward to reading it!
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