MISC: Analysis, The Waste Land, What the Thunder Said, lines 400-410...

[etherati]

...as loosely related to eventual zombie!porn. D: D: YES I'M GOING TO GO THERE. BLAME LIODAIN. Well no that's not fair. Blame me. It's my freaking AU.  D|

11 lines from Eliot's Waste Land, analyzed, free associated, dumped into the stream of consciousness. Thought it might be of vague interest. If not, feel free to ignore.

Transcribed from paper!journal:

---

"Then spoke the thunder                                                          400
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed."

Eliot is for once (and only once) condoning and accepting our lust and our surrender to it as conditional to existence. Sinful action at least signifies existence, and is therefore better than inaction, which signifies nothing. Reference? Earlier work, covered this already. Moving on.

Moments that hang on past themselves and give a sense of self, of a position within time; surrender to ourselves shows us who we are. I exist I exist I exist. He says 'friend'; contrast this with the anonymous encounter in the fire sermon so roundly condemned. (Ref to Jean possibly? Am I seeing slash in everything?) Is the end goal(life vs satisfaction of base desires) the important part, or is the context more significant - lust wrapped in love rather than more lust. Water a constant theme. Water is a symbol for life all throughout but water is also a common cultural symbol for love. Condoning surrender to emotion perhaps, rather than surrender to physical sensation, with the goal irrelevant.

"Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms."                                                               410

Imagery speaks very solidly - that after we have gone to dust, the existence we have cultivated in the space between ourselves evaporates, with no one ever the wiser - no one understanding our motivations, our reasons, our excuses, our follies. Why we chose to make our home amongst these strewn moments of dissonance and fear. We become bodies in empty rooms and the intangible connections between us do not linger. There is value in these connections, or the language describing their dissipation would not read like mourning.

What have we given? We give the only thing that is ours to give. We give connection, we give self, we give sin and evil and grace and surrender, we give sympathy and control and isn't that the rest of the story? Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata. Give, sympathize, control. We give when we cannot bear to take, accept when we cannot ask. Control when sympathy is not enough to quell the chorus in our heads. Sympathize when control shatters. Give of ourselves and hope that it is enough, that blood shakes the heart in relief rather than fear, that the daring is worth its risk, that the surrender is received as the fragile gift it is, handled lightly, unbroken. That we do not wish to retract it. That the giving does not diminish the greater scope of our existence. My friend. My friend. Blood shaking my heart - "My friend," he says. "Love," he does not say, as friends never do, as no one who really should ever does, because there are too many kinds and only one word and language cows the spirit every time. My friend.

Eventually all the rooms will be empty, all surrenders forgotten with the reasons and the excuses and the guilt - all friends dead and gone. Will it have been worth it? And would an age of prudence have been worth it? At death's door, would any of us ask for the memory of a pure life and in the bargain, trade away a hand, a breath, a voice in the darkness, tears to fall on a numb cheek, arms to die in? These connections hum in our hearts and if the giving is base and vulgar, it is still better than giving nothing at all.

My friend.

---

Yeah, so. THIS IS THE KIND OF SHIT I THINK ABOUT WHILE PLANNING FICS. Brought to you by Bic and Moleskine, and by the letter C. For CRAAAAAZY.

Comments

[tuff-ghost.livejournal.com]

eventual zombie!porn. D: D: YES I'M GOING TO GO THERE

!!!!!!!!!
&hearts

[etherati.livejournal.com]

VERY ELOQUENT RESPONSE.

Heh. I may not have wanted to derail the directed narrative of the main story arc, but that doesn't mean I wasn't eventually going to be tempted to do a little something on the side. XD Here is the thread where I WENT TEMPORARILY INSANE ACKNOWLEDGED THE DRAMATIC POTENTIAL OF BORDERLINE NECROPHILIA gah seriously what is wrong with me (starts with one of liodain's art posts and degenerates rapidly from there, BUT it might make the above nonsense make some more sense: THREAD (http://liodain.livejournal.com/26178.html?thread=175426#t175426)

[tuff-ghost.livejournal.com]

aww, your worry hurts. It's not broken and dysfunctional, you won't ruin the fandom. It's just weird, which is the very best kind of romantic ;)

Your Dan and Ror are so far away from dysfunctional; they're such a good couple. Risking lives for each other, supervising puking at the sink, cuddles and counsel and rescues from insanity...they're a highly functional efficient MACHINE of a couple, so there.

in which i invalidate any serious points i may have made above

[tuff-ghost.livejournal.com]

PS: zombie boners are extremely relevant to my interests

[etherati.livejournal.com]

Bizarrely enough, that makes me feel like such a hack. D: Like I'm not writing them correctly unless they're miserable and broken and always on the edge of someone getting socked in the face. I didn't actually INTEND for a zombie apocalypse to improve their lives, it just sort of happened. D: And now it alters the entire course of the original story, and it probably screams 'horrible fangirl fixit crap that totally misses the point of the original text because the point was that he was broken and crazy and alone and LOL DESCONSTRUCTION.'

and all I can think is... did the articulate and intelligent person pre-Roche who really just wanted to help people actually deserve to fall that far? Is it really fangirlish and wrong to want to give him something better? Post-Roche Ror might have been hard to justify having much sympathy for but that wasn't always who he was. :\

OKAY TOO MUCH SERIOUSNESS: ZOMBIE!PORN ZOMBIE!PORN

Re: in which i invalidate any serious points i may have made above

[etherati.livejournal.com]

SEE THREAD LINKED TO ABOVE IN REGARDS TO SUCH MATTERS. D:

[brancher.livejournal.com]

OMFG YOU ARE GOING TO WRITE MORE ZOMBIE FIC

AND PORN


ILU FOREVER

[etherati.livejournal.com]

I was ALWAYS going to write more Zombie!fic haha I have two separate non-porn pieces in the works right now with other ideas stewing in my head. It's just the porn thing that's new D:

BTW: Triage. WHEN WILL IT BE UPDATED. D:

[brancher.livejournal.com]

No, see, the brilliantness of that fic is that it may take a village to raise a child but it TAKES A FUCKING ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE to make Rorschach borderline functional.


and I love that at best, it's *borderline.*

You absolutely keep them true to character. I mean, the canon characters, imho, are as fucked as they are because, while Dan is easygoing enough to tolerate R. much longer than anyone else would, by the same token, without a catalyst like a FUCKING ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, he doesn't have to chutzpah to take Rorschach, um, in hand the way he needs to be, um, taken. You don't warp the characters out of true, you just provide one hell of a catalyst.

As for crack: god, this fandom is nothing if not on crack. It's been on crack from the beginning. And your zombie epic is practically canon compared to, say, the Wanda Kovacs babymama epic, or the High-School-Phantom-of-the-Opera epic, and I'm currently loving the latter more than life itself.

So go forth and write porn.

[brancher.livejournal.com]

I'm working on it! Rorschach is being recalcitrant.

[etherati.livejournal.com]

They do sort of deserve it at this point, after everything I've put them through, don't they? D:

And yeah I mean if I had to actually defend it myself I'd pretty much say exactly that; that something crazy huge had to happen to get them into the right positions in their friendship that Ror could be gotten through to after Roche and Dan would be willing to do the getting-through-to. Something had to make them less willing to give up on each other.

and... god. babymama? What? Do I even want to know? (I appreciate the hypocrisy, in that I'm sure people have said 'what? zombies? do I even want to know?' but... still.)

I will say that yes, it seems like there is a lot more crack here than in most other fandoms I've written in, and the crack is generally taken more seriously by the people writing it (ie, you get epic!crack in WM, whereas in most other places you get cracky drabbles and whatnot). I wonder why that is.

[brancher.livejournal.com]

I wonder why that is.


Heh. I'll have to write a paper.

I do enjoy the fact that all the craziest kinkmeme prompts - the ones I read and thought "god what a waste of time, I hope no one responds" - end up being epic, beautifully written, emotionally moving character studies. I have my theories ... it may have to do with the sheer crackiness of the original canon premise, and it may have to do with the type of fans who have been attracted to this fandom. In any case, it makes me exceedingly happy.

what a knot you've got, sword plz

[tuff-ghost.livejournal.com]

never too much seriousness, and it's not exclusive from porn ;)

I know canon has pre-Roche Ror as all chatty and put-together, but I do prefer fanon (ha ha, a lot of it is yours) where his messed up life and childhood does show a little more realistically even if he's not yet insane and speaking without pronouns. Canon also has every hero-like male character shaped like a Ken doll, even Rorschach.

It's a bit fangirlish, in the sense of "dubious artistic integrity", to think that bad things shouldn't happen to characters you love. I feel this way all the time, of course, and I adore good fixit fics. What do you think Spy's stories are anyway :D

But a point that's hugely important in this fandom is that the canon doesn't have perfect artistic integrity. It's not perfectly coherent and watertight. That's why we can have such a big, busy, crazy fandom. And anyone can write their own interpretation into their own fanfic; there's no mandatory level of /literal/ (I say literal because I mean that it's sufficient if your fic INVOKES the canon characters or themes in a way that's compelling and recognizable to readers; it doesn't have to parrot the canon exactly) canon-fidelity required for a fic to be counted as good. Who could even measure that fidelity anyway, Alan Moore?

Think about anyone who actually calls anyone else a "horrible fangirl" in earnest. You wouldn't seriously give half a crap for the opinion of a person like that would you? (tbh, I've only seen such opinions voiced on Fandom Secrets, but I'm convinced those people are trolls and thus the supposed Watchmen Fandom Police are actually mythical creatures, though loathsome to imagine) Never worry about A) stupid spiteful people B) stupid spiteful people WHO PROBABLY DON'T EVEN EXIST.

- No one deserves Rorschach's life, it just happened that way..."deserves" is kind of an odd angle, IMO
- It's probably fangirlish to want to give him something better. It's definitely plausible and fair to imagine that he'd have come out of it better - not crazy and broken - if only he had someone with him who knew and cared...that's how regular people deal with trauma, right?
- It's also plausible that Dan could have been that person. That's like a foundational tenet of our fandom, so no one will ever call you a hack for following it through.
- I had sympathy for him at first ronch (possibly it was "schlorp lep", I can't recall exactly ;), if only as a campy bombastic quirky protagonist in a genre that usually abhors quirkiness and is too oblivious to its own campiness. Then, the handshake, the lift shoes, the unmasking and psychologist interviews -- sympathy was EASY.


...see, this post, KIND OF like a sword in the sense that it goes into point form towards the end. hurr hurr hurr, GET IT?

don't mind me, it's late.

[tuff-ghost.livejournal.com]

hahahaha I am so freaking glad you asked that because I was too scared to

non-author can't ask authors such questions

[etherati.livejournal.com]

Iiiii dono. Because I never wrote zombie!fic before. Or zombie PORN for crying out loud. It can't just be 'types of fans' because before I fell into the online WM fandom it never occurred to me to do anything like any of this. D: NOT THAT I'M COMPLAINING. It's actually been very enjoyable and liberating and satisfying. But still sort of creepy twilight zone-ish.

[tuff-ghost.livejournal.com]

take Rorschach, um, in hand the way he needs to be, um, taken

/You/ may have just said that and just left it, but /I'm/ going to quote it just so I can view it in marvelous isolation and snerk like an 11 year-old boy

Re: what a knot you've got, sword plz

[etherati.livejournal.com]

All valid points. It's FREAKING LATE and I tend to get sentimental and weird on sleep-deprivation. Again I didn't really set out to fix things for him, it just sort of happened over the course of writing the rest of it, a bunch of rotating pieces gradually slotting together until I realized that I only had a few ways forward, and only one that wouldn't completely gut me to write.

And yes, heh, I personally had a ton of sympathy for everything he'd gone through and all of the issues he was still clearly dealing with despite claiming otherwise. I meant more like what the more serious elements of the fandom want/expect, where if you don't denounce him as a sociopathic barely-human almost-villian then you're missing the point and deserve to be run out on a rail. Which I never understood, because wasn't the whole point that 'real' masked heroes would just be human? The sort of fanatical need to avoid misaimed fandom ends up bordering on demonizing, to me at least.

That said, again: late. So probably not making a ton of sense.

[etherati.livejournal.com]

I ALMOST remarked on it. Almost. But I couldn't think of any witty way to do it that wouldn't just look like. Well. An 11-year-old boy. D:

[liodain.livejournal.com]

I HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE HAPPY TO TAKE THE BLAME FOR SOMETHING :D

[xiangru-yan.livejournal.com]

Hello! Like many others, I have read and loved your Zombie fic. I know many others have said it in lengthier words, but I found your fic very heartwarming. What I would like to ask is, how do you plan your fics? I want to write some, also for the Watchmen fandom, but so far I only deal with drabbles as more lengthy fics tend to go awry along the way.

Be waiting for your future ficlets for the Zombie AU =)

[etherati.livejournal.com]

*HEAPS BLAME THEN*

REALLY THOUGH. You drew something unbelievably hot and then made a completely offhanded joke that made me unable to see anything other than zombie!porn in said image because I'm pathetic and sad like that - TOTALLY YOUR FAULT. ALL OF IT.

(end self-deprecating sarcasm)

[etherati.livejournal.com]

Ehhhhh to be honest, the zombie!fic was mostly written linearly on the fly without a lot of planning at first. I had a collection of scenes in my head that I started stringing together in a way that made sense and about halfway through the rest of the story had pretty much come together in my head, so I was able to start foreshadowing and backshadowing and sidewaysshadowing and using extended metaphors etc etc but there wasn't a lot of formal planning; mostly just a lot of thinking. And sometimes for fic I do stuff like what's posted here; pick apart a quote or a segment from another source that resonates with what I feel like I'm trying to do, break it apart into WHY it resonates and use that to source imagery and themes. WOW THAT'S PRETENTIOUS. SORRY.

I'm glad you liked the fic. :)

Re: what a knot you've got, sword plz

[etherati.livejournal.com]

Geh and now all night I could only think about dubious artistic integrity and fangirlishness and hack hack hack and like I've said the wrong thing and let you down and I can tell finals are next week because I only ever get this stressed and wound up by small things when I'm already at max stress level. D: More coherency later.

[xiangru-yan.livejournal.com]

That's a great idea, especially for writing songfics and stuff aha. Source imagery and themes as in to reharsh the ideas in the original source into your own fic?

moar point form

[tuff-ghost.livejournal.com]

No, fuck, I was trying to encourage D:

I meant

- Fangirlishness and "dubious artistic integrity" are not crimes if you are smart about them, ESPECIALLY considering the size, complexity, and less-than-perfect integrity of the canon.
- YOU ARE SMART. You have been more than competent in expressing fangirlish fixit inclinations in a way that's respectable, not hackish or cheesy or silly at all.
- The scenarios and characters you have written are entirely plausible, and they don't betray or trivialize the canon in any way.


stop worrying about this, go study :P
I wasted a hell of a lot of studying time during my finals because I was fooling around in fandom; let me tell you, it is a bad idea