(no subject)

[rynne]

remixredux09 authors have been revealed! I'm going to post my stories a bit later tonight, but I wanted to say a few things about them first.

Anyway, I wrote:

Battle (Cast Out the Shadows Mix) [Doctor Who, Ten/Rose, PG]

This was my assignment, and I am very fond of it. I had to get an extension for it, because I worked a lot the entire month we were given for Remix, and the story just kept growing. It was 6500 words when I sent it to beta, and 9000 when finished. Second-longest one-shot I've ever written. XD Also, I think anyone who read this fic and who also knew anything about me would have been able to tell I was the author. :p

It wasn't very difficult for me to pick a fic to remix. My author was very prolific, but mostly in fandoms I didn't know, and a lot of what she wrote that I did know just wasn't my thing (like some Doctor/Donna stuff). I think I still could have done stuff with that if I'd had to, but once I read "Shadows Cast", I saw how much I could do with that, and I wanted to do it.

The original fic was a 700-word Doctor introspective on an AU of The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit where Rose was possessed by the Beast, not Toby. For such a short fic, it was very nuanced, and I wanted to explore some of those nuances. Also, the story had a very open ending, with the Doctor determined to find a way to save Rose but no idea how to do it.

Basically what I wanted to do with the fic was explore the backstory, explore Rose's side of things, and give a solution. There were a lot of small details in the original that I needed to explain--for instance, the original mentioned Mr. Jefferson being among the crew that escaped the planet, so I had a figure out a sequence of events where he didn't die. Also, the planet was still there, so I had to figure that out too. The Doctor is implied to have looked for the solution for so long that his hair is starting to gray, which would take a lot longer for a Time Lord than a human, so I had to figure out how Rose's human body wasn't already dead of old age.

But the big thing about the original story for me was that it was so much about the Doctor. On the other hand, though, so much of TIP/TSP is about Rose, and how much she's grown since meeting the Doctor. She was the one who ultimately got rid of the Beast and saved the day, after all. And I thought, on reading the original fic, how it would be both ironic and appropriate for Rose to be the one to save herself here, rather than the Doctor saving her. So that was what I knew when I started writing--this was going to be a story about Rose saving herself when everyone is waiting for the Doctor to be the hero.

Also, a very great deal of TIP/TSP is about the Doctor/Rose relationship, and so really was the original fic, because the Doctor was spending so much time tied to one planet just to save one person. That kind of subtle recognition of the strength of the Doctor's love for Rose just blew me away, and I bet my creative writing professor from last year would be angry at me for acknowledging that love more explicitly in my fic, but I don't care. :p

Originally my fic ended when Rose figured out how to save herself. It was an open-ish ending to sort of match the original, and it also meant I could get the thing done before my extension was up. XD But then, when mrv3000 looked at the story for me, she was like "does this have a point?" XD And I realized that it rather didn't, that its point was bound up entirely in the story as a response to the original fic. And I mean, it's nice for it to work as a remix, but I wanted it to be able to stand alone as well. I'd originally meant to post the story with the open ending and then write a sequel, with the actual battle and also the aftermath, but it was more important to me for it to be able to stand alone, so I wrote the battle scene, and now I'm glad I did, because I love that bit.

The story might still end up with a sequel, because there is a lot more I can say in this universe, but it might not. And if it doesn't, I do think that it can stand by itself, which makes me happy.

I also wrote:

Poor Little Lamb (The Draco's Choice Remix) [Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy and others, PG-13]

This was my pinch hit, and I'm rather fond of it as well, though I didn't have as much time to spend on it and this is actually only about the second time I've ever written Draco Malfoy. Also I haven't written HP fic since last year's Remix, and had to reread parts of the books to refresh my memory.

I'm not entirely sure why I latched onto the fic that I did to remix. Normally Draco just doesn't interest me, and my author has written a lot of fic, several in different fandoms it might have been fun to write in, and most of her HP fic was about characters and pairings that interest me more than Draco tends to--the author wrote both Remus/Sirius and Harry/Ginny. I thought about doing a Harry/Ginny fic, but the Draco one just kept bugging me to write it.

This fic sort of pushes the bounds of what a remix is, I think. The original was set at the end of HBP, and this starts in DH, which makes my fic almost more of a sequel than a remix. On the other hand, though, what I saw as a central theme in the original ficlet was the idea that Draco had to make a choice. The ficlet was Snape presenting several choices to Draco after HBP, and ended with him telling Draco he had to make a choice.

So Draco making choices was the central theme behind my fic as well. The original ficlet was written before DH came out, which I didn't know until the author told me, but I just was struck by how many things he could have chosen, and wanted to know why he picked the way we saw he did in DH. And the answer, of course, made just as obvious by DH, was his family. Everything he did, he did for his family.

In my fic, Draco is constantly making choices--to not warn a Muggleborn, to torture Neville and other classmates, to not reveal Harry--basically to give into his fear. Most of the fic he spends uncertain of the choice he made, and sometimes regrets it, but I knew I wanted him to understand exactly what he chose. It seemed like he picked the Dark Lord, but that was just camoflauge--in reality he picked his parents. That was one thing I appreciated about DH--so many fics written pre-DH had Lucius and Narcissa being cold and distant to Draco at best, and abusive at worst, but DH showed that they really cared about Draco more than anything else, even Voldemort, and I wanted to show Draco being the same way.

The original story was a ficlet about 400 words of Snape telling Draco to choose, and though my story is a lot of sequel, it's also the way I would have told the story of Draco needing to make choices. I have remembering dialogue of the original to tie them together more tightly, but the point of the original story, as I saw it, was Draco's choices, so that's what I wrote about, and I'm pretty pleased with it.

I'll post the stories in a bit. Need to go eat dinner now.