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Liner Notes
I try to frame most of my stories on one or two underlying themes. Quotes help, to an extent, but the sad fact of the matter is that if I don't keep a really tight leash on what I'm doing, I end up creating a monster that's about ten pages long and going nowhere fast.
These notes are for the longest fics I've written, or the most aggravating to write. Mostly the latter.
Death Note
The fandom that stole my heart for a fair few years.
A Subtle Kind --Depersonalization, transforming yourself in order to fit someone else's ideal. Psychosomatic illness. Misa's only doing the same thing Wammy's House counseled anyway; she's just redirecting her energy from becoming L to becoming Mello('s). I wanted to get at what she saw in Mello and what Matt would see in Light. They're both holding onto a single memory.
Angel Sanctuary (in no particular order)
The fandom that never really let go. I'm one of the last people you'd ever find worshiping at the Kaori Yuki altar, but this convoluted mess of a manga ended up producing some very fascinating characters and very dismal pairings.
While I won't say there's absolute internal consistency within these stories, there are a few points and references that crop up repeatedly. None of them are anywhere near intriguing enough to be considered Easter Eggs, but if you find them, more power to you.
Mainsprings --Being technically dead but still able to think. Being too caught up in memories versus trying to clutch what memories you still have. I really didn't want Katou to explicitly have a crush on Kira in this fic because it made his reasoning for trying to sleep with Kira much more pathetic. Anyway, they're at cross-purposes here; Kira spends the whole time pretending to be a philosopher with the whole death= sex deal, while Katou takes it as an insult. Which it is, but I don't think Katou really understood what Kira was getting at.
---
Cast it to Dogs --Unfortunately it's all in the quote. Kira is a really creepy kid.
---
Light Pollution --The "light" (as in not heavy) pollution is cigarette smoke, and it's also a not-so-veiled reference to Lucifer the light-bearer (bringing Katou a light, as in the fic and toward the end of canon). Lots of weird introspection, lots of layers that Katou is never aware of, like Kira brushing her hair and the birthmark on Kira's chest. I wanted to try and dwell on what a girl would stereotypically do to rebel against her parents versus what a guy would stereotypically do. Kira gets off easier than she would normally, but only because it's all from Katou's naive perception. This fic was kind of hard because I didn't want things to go exactly the same as canon, with the genders swapped, but I didn't want to go too far off-track either.
---
Exclusion Criteria --Even when I first read the series, I thought that Raphael managed to figure out the Sara/Jibril situation so quickly that I thought for sure he'd turn out to have something to do with it. And, yeah, you can write it off as an infodump, but that's not nearly as much fun as the vague suggestion that Raphael already knew a good deal more, for a great deal longer, than he ever let on about Sevotharte's silencing her.
Exclusion criteria is what determines whether a patient can participate in a clinical trial or not. Picking and choosing, who meets qualifications and who doesn't. Raph, to Jibril, obviously doesn't.
... This is pretty much my attempt at explaining why Raphael can't stand Jibril, and vice-versa. Basically, ficwise Raphael thinks 1) that Jibril's self-righteous, cold, and a hypocrite and 2) that she's afraid of him. He also can't get over her believing that he was a willing party in the scandal with Belial. Jibril thinks that 1) Raphael's a lech, which he is and 2) Raphael could be doing something useful, i.e., rebel against Sevi's dictatorship, but he won't. Pass the boxing gloves and pour in a little UST.
The gray-eyed baby at the beginning is Lucifel. The healer may or may not be real.
Raphael interests me in canon because it seems like he should have been cast out of heaven or at least branded as fallen for what happened to him, but he wasn't. This might have a lot to do with being raped by Lucifer's most devoted follower, but I don't think Heaven at large took that into consideration when they decided not to throw him out. What I do think was given consideration, though, was the way he stepped right into Michael's flames, sacrificing himself to force Michael to stop.
His relationship with Jibril in canon is problematic because we basically only see his and Sevi's take on it, neither of which is flattering. Sevi says that Jibril couldn't stand the sight of him-- five minutes before Raphael claims he saved Sara "because of your looks." But those aren't Sara's looks. They're Jibril's, and judging from proximity I don't think either of those was meant as a throwaway line. Raphael starts out trying to get at Jibril as soon as he meets Sara.
This fic is pushing an agenda. Essentially, if you're going to campaign for a better heaven, you can't pick and choose who you intend to save. And despite Jibril's feelings about heaven's corruption, she's almost as much of a byproduct of the system as Raphael is. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this story because most of said agenda is pushed by Raphael, who is not in the right with his actions at all. I felt like I was in danger of making Raphael seem far too sympathetic (despite forcing a kiss on Jibril), right up until the end when he refuses to help her out of pure spite.
---
Calendar Hanging --The tired old themes of not-really-living-to-live and denial. I find this piece funny, at least up until near the end, because even though Raph spends the entire fic trashing everyone, the narrative trashes him badly. Raphael's his old sexist self with a overly elegant apartment... and a pin-up calendar on the wall. Metaphor for his whole life. He's also (probably) talked himself into a lot of medical problems he doesn't really have, while running after someone else's teenage girlfriend. And he's sleeping with a grad student whose name is Biblical-- it's Sara. Basically he's trying to recreate the same empty existence he had in Heaven before Sevi's overthrow, in Assiah, but it falls flat.
Meanwhile, Sara (Mudo, that is) is trying to forge ahead. Ostensibly. This fic probably says more about my own downer tendencies than anything but I just find it incredibly hard to swallow that Sara would jump right back into Setsuna's arms after being driven insane by Sandalphon-posing-as-Setsuna. But what I don't find hard to swallow is that she'd try to pretend it was all right anyway when it clearly wasn't, out of guilt issues. (I mean, this is the guy who destroyed the world when you died, not to mention ended up dying himself while trying to rescue you from Hades.)
Raphael always struck me as the character least prepared for the sweeping changes the near-apocalypse brought about-- no regime to bend before means he'll have to assume responsibilities, and no God means no sin. No sin makes even his rebellious lust completely meaningless. This doesn't even factor in the frank fact that he never fully recovered from the scandal in canon and instead relied on first Sara, and then Barbiel as his means of rescue. The system might have ruined him, but take that system away and he ends up floundering.
Lots of water imagery, lots of wind imagery, an oblique reference to the language of Enoch. Lots of potshots toward Raphael. Not-so-subtle hints that Raphael's seeing Jibril in Sara and that's fueling some of his semi-animosity. And so on and so forth.
---
Salt of the Earth --Biblical quote, and one of the more obvious ones-- ye are the salt of the earth, but if the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. I was also listening to the Rolling Stones' admittedly tongue-in-cheek "Salt of the Earth" a fair amount.
Obviously, Kira and Raphael are the salt, and they both realize it. An extremely leeching (if you'll pardon the bad pun) relationship between two emotionally disturbed people; Kira uses Raphael in a desperate bid to feel, even vicariously (as well as in an effort to avoid becoming like Katou... only half-aware that who he's really becoming is what he already is, which is Lucifer); Raphael uses Kira as a means of punishing himself. It's a study in contrasts: Raphael faces reality head-on, albeit only because he doesn't have any other option; Kira avoids it entirely-- he brushes Katou's dementia away, pushes back thoughts of Setsuna, avoids thinking about Sara past as a means to hurt Raphael, and even ignores Raphael when they sleep together. Sterility, light imagery, knife imagery. Raphael ends up running completely away with this fic despite it being from Kira's point of view, and appears not only more solid, but more alive.
I was really torn on this one even when I was writing it-- I think Raphael's ICness is possibly the one saving grace this fic possesses. I never thought there was enough buildup or description at the end, but couldn't incorporate it in a way that fit with the intentionally deadened tone, and so every attempt at extending the scene came off like pandering. I half-wanted there to be a scene where Sara/Sandalphon actually spoke, instead of just casting a shadow over all the proceedings, but cut it out in the end as one of the things the reader knows that Kira just doesn't mention and doesn't exactly want to face. I'm not sure if that really worked or not.
---
Astral Weeks --Right up until about half an hour prior to posting the first chapter (there will only be one more), I was dead set on titling this one "The White Feather," but given the fandom, I thought the title was just a little too ordinary, regardless of the actual implications. The white feather is a British symbol of cowardice (most famous in movies like "The Four Feathers;" most infamous in wars like World War I, in which actual campaigns went on where ladies would dole out the feathers to shame their men into service in the trenches). It's an American symbol of heroism, too, but Raphael's only pretending to be American. There's a small amount of intimations and suggestions of war, albeit very far into the background. It's easy to think of this story as a matched set with "Calendar Hanging," although that wasn't quite my intention.
"Astral Weeks," quoted at the beginning of the fic, predictably centers around the question of whether love will survive the wrath of hea-- I mean, reincarnation.
There is a very brief throwback to "Mainsprings." Raphael watches Charlotte Corday's execution-- or rather, Lucifer's reaction to it.
Raphael's backstory has a lot of holes, all of which are intentional-- the French Huguenot slip-up is probably the worst (Huguenots were Protestant, and almost as likely to settle in New Orleans as they were to reconvert to Catholicism), though luckily, Sara doesn't know much about American history.
This is honestly my attempt at churning out a more normal, more plot-driven, and less pretentiously experimental piece. It is also my attempt at a love story. Yes. Really. Thus far it's (still) failing on all accounts.
---
All the Pleasures Proved --Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove. Thank you, Christopher Marlowe.
Raphael's callousness in and out of bed has been done repeatedly, and on rare occasion overdone, but I had to give it a shot myself. Lots of focus on time-- wasted time, weeks, months, years. This fic was a little weird to do because as Raphael degrades into what he considers more corrupt/base acts and desires (puppy love with Jibril, sex with Barbiel, sex with a man, Jophiel, sex with a student, and then culminating with lust over Sara, a human), not only is he deriving less pleasure from each, up until Sara, but he's also losing his conscience.
Evangelion
Evangelion, arguably, has had enough overanalysis already that I really ought not to have anything to add. But I tried.
Bitter My Heart --Title from a mishmash of John Donne's "Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God," which Mari briefly references, and Stephen Crane's "In the Desert" (better known for its last two lines: "but I like it, because it is bitter/and because it is my heart"). Mari's inclusion in the Evangelion movies is pretty at odds with all other established canon unless you subscribe to the more offbeat fantheories, such as her being the egg donor for Tabris/Kaworu Nagisa, which this fic runs with.
Mari's development from sour but brilliant '90's teenage girl to, nearly twenty years later, a happy-go-lucky, junk food guzzling oddity is honestly difficult to explain without a mental breakdown. Nothing like axing 1/3rd of the world's population with your egg donorship to do it. Mari's fascination with ELO is semi-symbolic: ELO was known from its inception as being a band very heavy on imitation (of the Beatles); Mari ends up eventually imitating what Yui wants out of her in the movies-- becoming, in a lopsided fashion, the high school girl Yui said she was. ELO's Time album as well is a concept album where the songs' narrator time-travels to 2095. Mari ends up similarly out of time, both physically and mentally: never aging due to the Curse of Eva, and trapped in a future (2015 and then 2029) that's pretty depressing.
Lots of sacrilege (Mary and Christ vs. Mari and Tabris, the slanderous Trinity comparisons) and rudeness mixed with the pain of a teenage crush and the burden of having destroyed a fair chunk of the world.
These notes are for the longest fics I've written, or the most aggravating to write. Mostly the latter.
Death Note
The fandom that stole my heart for a fair few years.
A Subtle Kind --Depersonalization, transforming yourself in order to fit someone else's ideal. Psychosomatic illness. Misa's only doing the same thing Wammy's House counseled anyway; she's just redirecting her energy from becoming L to becoming Mello('s). I wanted to get at what she saw in Mello and what Matt would see in Light. They're both holding onto a single memory.
Angel Sanctuary (in no particular order)
The fandom that never really let go. I'm one of the last people you'd ever find worshiping at the Kaori Yuki altar, but this convoluted mess of a manga ended up producing some very fascinating characters and very dismal pairings.
While I won't say there's absolute internal consistency within these stories, there are a few points and references that crop up repeatedly. None of them are anywhere near intriguing enough to be considered Easter Eggs, but if you find them, more power to you.
Mainsprings --Being technically dead but still able to think. Being too caught up in memories versus trying to clutch what memories you still have. I really didn't want Katou to explicitly have a crush on Kira in this fic because it made his reasoning for trying to sleep with Kira much more pathetic. Anyway, they're at cross-purposes here; Kira spends the whole time pretending to be a philosopher with the whole death= sex deal, while Katou takes it as an insult. Which it is, but I don't think Katou really understood what Kira was getting at.
---
Cast it to Dogs --Unfortunately it's all in the quote. Kira is a really creepy kid.
---
Light Pollution --The "light" (as in not heavy) pollution is cigarette smoke, and it's also a not-so-veiled reference to Lucifer the light-bearer (bringing Katou a light, as in the fic and toward the end of canon). Lots of weird introspection, lots of layers that Katou is never aware of, like Kira brushing her hair and the birthmark on Kira's chest. I wanted to try and dwell on what a girl would stereotypically do to rebel against her parents versus what a guy would stereotypically do. Kira gets off easier than she would normally, but only because it's all from Katou's naive perception. This fic was kind of hard because I didn't want things to go exactly the same as canon, with the genders swapped, but I didn't want to go too far off-track either.
---
Exclusion Criteria --Even when I first read the series, I thought that Raphael managed to figure out the Sara/Jibril situation so quickly that I thought for sure he'd turn out to have something to do with it. And, yeah, you can write it off as an infodump, but that's not nearly as much fun as the vague suggestion that Raphael already knew a good deal more, for a great deal longer, than he ever let on about Sevotharte's silencing her.
Exclusion criteria is what determines whether a patient can participate in a clinical trial or not. Picking and choosing, who meets qualifications and who doesn't. Raph, to Jibril, obviously doesn't.
... This is pretty much my attempt at explaining why Raphael can't stand Jibril, and vice-versa. Basically, ficwise Raphael thinks 1) that Jibril's self-righteous, cold, and a hypocrite and 2) that she's afraid of him. He also can't get over her believing that he was a willing party in the scandal with Belial. Jibril thinks that 1) Raphael's a lech, which he is and 2) Raphael could be doing something useful, i.e., rebel against Sevi's dictatorship, but he won't. Pass the boxing gloves and pour in a little UST.
The gray-eyed baby at the beginning is Lucifel. The healer may or may not be real.
Raphael interests me in canon because it seems like he should have been cast out of heaven or at least branded as fallen for what happened to him, but he wasn't. This might have a lot to do with being raped by Lucifer's most devoted follower, but I don't think Heaven at large took that into consideration when they decided not to throw him out. What I do think was given consideration, though, was the way he stepped right into Michael's flames, sacrificing himself to force Michael to stop.
His relationship with Jibril in canon is problematic because we basically only see his and Sevi's take on it, neither of which is flattering. Sevi says that Jibril couldn't stand the sight of him-- five minutes before Raphael claims he saved Sara "because of your looks." But those aren't Sara's looks. They're Jibril's, and judging from proximity I don't think either of those was meant as a throwaway line. Raphael starts out trying to get at Jibril as soon as he meets Sara.
This fic is pushing an agenda. Essentially, if you're going to campaign for a better heaven, you can't pick and choose who you intend to save. And despite Jibril's feelings about heaven's corruption, she's almost as much of a byproduct of the system as Raphael is. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this story because most of said agenda is pushed by Raphael, who is not in the right with his actions at all. I felt like I was in danger of making Raphael seem far too sympathetic (despite forcing a kiss on Jibril), right up until the end when he refuses to help her out of pure spite.
---
Calendar Hanging --The tired old themes of not-really-living-to-live and denial. I find this piece funny, at least up until near the end, because even though Raph spends the entire fic trashing everyone, the narrative trashes him badly. Raphael's his old sexist self with a overly elegant apartment... and a pin-up calendar on the wall. Metaphor for his whole life. He's also (probably) talked himself into a lot of medical problems he doesn't really have, while running after someone else's teenage girlfriend. And he's sleeping with a grad student whose name is Biblical-- it's Sara. Basically he's trying to recreate the same empty existence he had in Heaven before Sevi's overthrow, in Assiah, but it falls flat.
Meanwhile, Sara (Mudo, that is) is trying to forge ahead. Ostensibly. This fic probably says more about my own downer tendencies than anything but I just find it incredibly hard to swallow that Sara would jump right back into Setsuna's arms after being driven insane by Sandalphon-posing-as-Setsuna. But what I don't find hard to swallow is that she'd try to pretend it was all right anyway when it clearly wasn't, out of guilt issues. (I mean, this is the guy who destroyed the world when you died, not to mention ended up dying himself while trying to rescue you from Hades.)
Raphael always struck me as the character least prepared for the sweeping changes the near-apocalypse brought about-- no regime to bend before means he'll have to assume responsibilities, and no God means no sin. No sin makes even his rebellious lust completely meaningless. This doesn't even factor in the frank fact that he never fully recovered from the scandal in canon and instead relied on first Sara, and then Barbiel as his means of rescue. The system might have ruined him, but take that system away and he ends up floundering.
Lots of water imagery, lots of wind imagery, an oblique reference to the language of Enoch. Lots of potshots toward Raphael. Not-so-subtle hints that Raphael's seeing Jibril in Sara and that's fueling some of his semi-animosity. And so on and so forth.
---
Salt of the Earth --Biblical quote, and one of the more obvious ones-- ye are the salt of the earth, but if the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. I was also listening to the Rolling Stones' admittedly tongue-in-cheek "Salt of the Earth" a fair amount.
Obviously, Kira and Raphael are the salt, and they both realize it. An extremely leeching (if you'll pardon the bad pun) relationship between two emotionally disturbed people; Kira uses Raphael in a desperate bid to feel, even vicariously (as well as in an effort to avoid becoming like Katou... only half-aware that who he's really becoming is what he already is, which is Lucifer); Raphael uses Kira as a means of punishing himself. It's a study in contrasts: Raphael faces reality head-on, albeit only because he doesn't have any other option; Kira avoids it entirely-- he brushes Katou's dementia away, pushes back thoughts of Setsuna, avoids thinking about Sara past as a means to hurt Raphael, and even ignores Raphael when they sleep together. Sterility, light imagery, knife imagery. Raphael ends up running completely away with this fic despite it being from Kira's point of view, and appears not only more solid, but more alive.
I was really torn on this one even when I was writing it-- I think Raphael's ICness is possibly the one saving grace this fic possesses. I never thought there was enough buildup or description at the end, but couldn't incorporate it in a way that fit with the intentionally deadened tone, and so every attempt at extending the scene came off like pandering. I half-wanted there to be a scene where Sara/Sandalphon actually spoke, instead of just casting a shadow over all the proceedings, but cut it out in the end as one of the things the reader knows that Kira just doesn't mention and doesn't exactly want to face. I'm not sure if that really worked or not.
---
Astral Weeks --Right up until about half an hour prior to posting the first chapter (there will only be one more), I was dead set on titling this one "The White Feather," but given the fandom, I thought the title was just a little too ordinary, regardless of the actual implications. The white feather is a British symbol of cowardice (most famous in movies like "The Four Feathers;" most infamous in wars like World War I, in which actual campaigns went on where ladies would dole out the feathers to shame their men into service in the trenches). It's an American symbol of heroism, too, but Raphael's only pretending to be American. There's a small amount of intimations and suggestions of war, albeit very far into the background. It's easy to think of this story as a matched set with "Calendar Hanging," although that wasn't quite my intention.
"Astral Weeks," quoted at the beginning of the fic, predictably centers around the question of whether love will survive the wrath of hea-- I mean, reincarnation.
There is a very brief throwback to "Mainsprings." Raphael watches Charlotte Corday's execution-- or rather, Lucifer's reaction to it.
Raphael's backstory has a lot of holes, all of which are intentional-- the French Huguenot slip-up is probably the worst (Huguenots were Protestant, and almost as likely to settle in New Orleans as they were to reconvert to Catholicism), though luckily, Sara doesn't know much about American history.
This is honestly my attempt at churning out a more normal, more plot-driven, and less pretentiously experimental piece. It is also my attempt at a love story. Yes. Really. Thus far it's (still) failing on all accounts.
---
All the Pleasures Proved --Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove. Thank you, Christopher Marlowe.
Raphael's callousness in and out of bed has been done repeatedly, and on rare occasion overdone, but I had to give it a shot myself. Lots of focus on time-- wasted time, weeks, months, years. This fic was a little weird to do because as Raphael degrades into what he considers more corrupt/base acts and desires (puppy love with Jibril, sex with Barbiel, sex with a man, Jophiel, sex with a student, and then culminating with lust over Sara, a human), not only is he deriving less pleasure from each, up until Sara, but he's also losing his conscience.
Evangelion
Evangelion, arguably, has had enough overanalysis already that I really ought not to have anything to add. But I tried.
Bitter My Heart --Title from a mishmash of John Donne's "Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God," which Mari briefly references, and Stephen Crane's "In the Desert" (better known for its last two lines: "but I like it, because it is bitter/and because it is my heart"). Mari's inclusion in the Evangelion movies is pretty at odds with all other established canon unless you subscribe to the more offbeat fantheories, such as her being the egg donor for Tabris/Kaworu Nagisa, which this fic runs with.
Mari's development from sour but brilliant '90's teenage girl to, nearly twenty years later, a happy-go-lucky, junk food guzzling oddity is honestly difficult to explain without a mental breakdown. Nothing like axing 1/3rd of the world's population with your egg donorship to do it. Mari's fascination with ELO is semi-symbolic: ELO was known from its inception as being a band very heavy on imitation (of the Beatles); Mari ends up eventually imitating what Yui wants out of her in the movies-- becoming, in a lopsided fashion, the high school girl Yui said she was. ELO's Time album as well is a concept album where the songs' narrator time-travels to 2095. Mari ends up similarly out of time, both physically and mentally: never aging due to the Curse of Eva, and trapped in a future (2015 and then 2029) that's pretty depressing.
Lots of sacrilege (Mary and Christ vs. Mari and Tabris, the slanderous Trinity comparisons) and rudeness mixed with the pain of a teenage crush and the burden of having destroyed a fair chunk of the world.