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This Is Me Doing the Meposian Dance of Joy...
What a lovely surpirse!
*wibble*
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remixredux stories are up and...
Mine is awesome. Honestly, I'm wibbling with quivering lip, so if it's one of you, thank you, thank you, thank you!
Your awesome hard work and your lovely story construction alone made me happy. Your take on it made me doubly happy.
My lovely remixer chose my first-ever published Buffy fanfic, Revelations. I put it up on the Pit of Voles in November 2002, which technically makes it first, although I started writing Whisper much earlier.
The remixer took it and wrote The Ballad of Charles Whitman, which, IMHO, is a technically better-written and better-constructed story than mine is.
(A.N. Note: I'm the first to say that Revelations falls on the bloodless side and my uncertainty about what I'm doing and my lack of confidence really shows.)
Best of all, The Ballard of Charles Whitman author brilliantly fills in the blanks to such an extent that I'd swear he or she sat in the room with me while I wrote the original piece.
I deliberately painted Xander to be viewed by the people around him as a serial killer and had even gone so far as to research serial killers. In the end, I didn't use much of my research, except in the broad brush strokes of Xander's serial killing spree. The Ballard author creepily extracts my own clumsy way of going about it and actually puts Xander right at the edge of the serial killer mindset.
I wasn't confident enough to do it, so thank you for doing it for me.
The result is creepy and heartbreaking. Hell, I was the original author and up until Xander finally shows in L.A. at the Hyperion, I was pretty convinced that Xander had simply gone insane and was justifying his actions to himself, especially because of his odd fasciation for Charles Whitman as he stalks his victims around Sunnydale.
Yet for all that, Xander is still solidly Xander in the remix. He doesn't read about the murders, but he obsessively reads the human interest stories. He refuses to keep the newspapers, but makes fun of the cliché-ridden morning news stories with dark humor.
And the conversation between Lorne and Xander...*wibble.* It never even occured to me that Lorne assumed Xander knew what he was, but the remixer did and the assumption works beautifully here, especially in how the planted seed of doubt carries through to the end.
Giles is shown in a slightly more sympathetic light in the remix (for which I am glad). I admit, my own characterization of Giles in Revelations, while not bash-y (although one piece of FB I had on the story accused me of it), definitely puts Giles in the "by any means necessary" camp. The remixer had a tough piece of granite to work with on that, and did a good job adding a little bit more dimension to Giles's role.
And, oooooh, Xander's revenge against Giles is sufficiently cruel and includes collateral damage (ahhhh, the famous Harris quick tongue). What makes it even more delicious is that Xander's revenge plays so beautifully into canon and actually foreshadows Buffy's own feelings of betrayal with respect to Giles. So, a happy dance that Xander actually warns all of them that it was coming, even if he doesn't realize it at the time. Nicely played, remixer!
I'm not done being happy yet.
The best part about the story is this part: that all apocalypses are, in the end, personal. It isn't that the world ends. It's that your world has ended.
This story is a lovely snapshot of a personal apocalypse, and what happens after.
So, please, go and read. Give the author much lovely feedback.
ETA: Ooooo, much relief for me, too! The original author of my remix likes it! YAY! (Gmail, I love you.)
I won't make anyone guess which one I wrote. I can't even begin to figure out who wrote what in the Remix archive. If you want to give it a shot, you'll have to send me private email. :-)
*wibble*
The
remixredux stories are up and...Mine is awesome. Honestly, I'm wibbling with quivering lip, so if it's one of you, thank you, thank you, thank you!
Your awesome hard work and your lovely story construction alone made me happy. Your take on it made me doubly happy.
My lovely remixer chose my first-ever published Buffy fanfic, Revelations. I put it up on the Pit of Voles in November 2002, which technically makes it first, although I started writing Whisper much earlier.
The remixer took it and wrote The Ballad of Charles Whitman, which, IMHO, is a technically better-written and better-constructed story than mine is.
(A.N. Note: I'm the first to say that Revelations falls on the bloodless side and my uncertainty about what I'm doing and my lack of confidence really shows.)
Best of all, The Ballard of Charles Whitman author brilliantly fills in the blanks to such an extent that I'd swear he or she sat in the room with me while I wrote the original piece.
I deliberately painted Xander to be viewed by the people around him as a serial killer and had even gone so far as to research serial killers. In the end, I didn't use much of my research, except in the broad brush strokes of Xander's serial killing spree. The Ballard author creepily extracts my own clumsy way of going about it and actually puts Xander right at the edge of the serial killer mindset.
I wasn't confident enough to do it, so thank you for doing it for me.
The result is creepy and heartbreaking. Hell, I was the original author and up until Xander finally shows in L.A. at the Hyperion, I was pretty convinced that Xander had simply gone insane and was justifying his actions to himself, especially because of his odd fasciation for Charles Whitman as he stalks his victims around Sunnydale.
Yet for all that, Xander is still solidly Xander in the remix. He doesn't read about the murders, but he obsessively reads the human interest stories. He refuses to keep the newspapers, but makes fun of the cliché-ridden morning news stories with dark humor.
And the conversation between Lorne and Xander...*wibble.* It never even occured to me that Lorne assumed Xander knew what he was, but the remixer did and the assumption works beautifully here, especially in how the planted seed of doubt carries through to the end.
Giles is shown in a slightly more sympathetic light in the remix (for which I am glad). I admit, my own characterization of Giles in Revelations, while not bash-y (although one piece of FB I had on the story accused me of it), definitely puts Giles in the "by any means necessary" camp. The remixer had a tough piece of granite to work with on that, and did a good job adding a little bit more dimension to Giles's role.
And, oooooh, Xander's revenge against Giles is sufficiently cruel and includes collateral damage (ahhhh, the famous Harris quick tongue). What makes it even more delicious is that Xander's revenge plays so beautifully into canon and actually foreshadows Buffy's own feelings of betrayal with respect to Giles. So, a happy dance that Xander actually warns all of them that it was coming, even if he doesn't realize it at the time. Nicely played, remixer!
I'm not done being happy yet.
The best part about the story is this part: that all apocalypses are, in the end, personal. It isn't that the world ends. It's that your world has ended.
This story is a lovely snapshot of a personal apocalypse, and what happens after.
So, please, go and read. Give the author much lovely feedback.
ETA: Ooooo, much relief for me, too! The original author of my remix likes it! YAY! (Gmail, I love you.)
I won't make anyone guess which one I wrote. I can't even begin to figure out who wrote what in the Remix archive. If you want to give it a shot, you'll have to send me private email. :-)
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It's easily the most true-to-the-character 'Xander gets a super-power' fic I've ever read.
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just finished reading the remix and girl, are you right! It IS awesome to see the other side of the equation so beautifully and tragically rendered. You really lucked out. It's still one of my all-time favorite stories and this just...
Speechless.
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(And the Pit, they do have their Giles fans. The only time I ever was accused of character bashing, it was by a Giles fan at the Pit.)
Weird planet