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Oct. 30th, 2003 02:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bktheirregularHow odd. Fanfic thoughts in a livejournal established as an offshoot of fanfic writing.
Anyhoo, I got a review tonight for "The Scarab" that brought up a concern the reader had - and that cut into the one part of the fic that I'd had real concerns over:
Larry.
The reviewer had misgivings about Larry dying because "too many gay people die in fiction." (I did a count - not counting villains and redshirts in the Buffyverse, straight victims still outnumber gay ones by a fair margin. Jenny Calendar, Doyle, Forrest, Jonathan, and a lot more I probably missed. I would mention Kendra except we knew hardly anything about her aside from being a Slayer...)
Also, the ending didn't sit well with the reviewer - that the Big Bad survived Larry's last act only to be dispatched by Buffy "in a way we've seen before somewhat more than seventeen times cheapens Larry's sacrifice."
That worried me too - though the sexuality of characters hadn't even entered my head - but the concern that the last act would be futile, that it was doing wrong by one of Joss's characters, never really went away even when I finished writing it all. I knew how the story was going to end - it had been one of the first scenes I'd visualized, actually, Buffy and Kheper and the ribbon and the stake, and that stayed pretty consistent throughout. And somewhere in the back of my head, the defeat of the Big Bad wasn't something to leave to a secondary character ... not to mention that a huge smoking hole in the ground leaves too many possibilities for the survival of the villain, and that was one loose end I wanted tied up, definitively, no-doubt-about-it grind-the-dead-bones-into-flour.
One thing I should point out: the review wasn't a flame. It just brought up a concern, and it hit a nerve because I'd been concerned about it myself, once upon a time.
Close entry.
Anyhoo, I got a review tonight for "The Scarab" that brought up a concern the reader had - and that cut into the one part of the fic that I'd had real concerns over:
Larry.
The reviewer had misgivings about Larry dying because "too many gay people die in fiction." (I did a count - not counting villains and redshirts in the Buffyverse, straight victims still outnumber gay ones by a fair margin. Jenny Calendar, Doyle, Forrest, Jonathan, and a lot more I probably missed. I would mention Kendra except we knew hardly anything about her aside from being a Slayer...)
Also, the ending didn't sit well with the reviewer - that the Big Bad survived Larry's last act only to be dispatched by Buffy "in a way we've seen before somewhat more than seventeen times cheapens Larry's sacrifice."
That worried me too - though the sexuality of characters hadn't even entered my head - but the concern that the last act would be futile, that it was doing wrong by one of Joss's characters, never really went away even when I finished writing it all. I knew how the story was going to end - it had been one of the first scenes I'd visualized, actually, Buffy and Kheper and the ribbon and the stake, and that stayed pretty consistent throughout. And somewhere in the back of my head, the defeat of the Big Bad wasn't something to leave to a secondary character ... not to mention that a huge smoking hole in the ground leaves too many possibilities for the survival of the villain, and that was one loose end I wanted tied up, definitively, no-doubt-about-it grind-the-dead-bones-into-flour.
One thing I should point out: the review wasn't a flame. It just brought up a concern, and it hit a nerve because I'd been concerned about it myself, once upon a time.
Close entry.
