A good tragic antiheroine is hard to find
Dec. 28th, 2021 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mobiusstripperI swear, Lucrecia is the most exhausting character I've ever written. I keep wanting to write a longer fic from her POV but every time I try, I am BONE-FUCKING-WEARY after like 500 words. And then it becomes hard to keep writing because I'm so sure that the reader will also be bone-fucking-weary after 500 words that I can't imagine them wanting to keep reading.
Yes, it was my decision to make her an absolute mess. Scratch that. It was my decision to lean into her existing characterization as an absolute mess and heighten it up to 11. Because I need to make readers understand what would drive a person to do what she does, even if they hate her for it. I need to elevate her to tragic anti-heroine. I need to create a version of her that stays with people, whether they like her or not, and makes them wonder what they would do in her place. But I don't want people to read two paragraphs and go, "Damn. I'm tired of this bitch."
Yes, it was my decision to make her an absolute mess. Scratch that. It was my decision to lean into her existing characterization as an absolute mess and heighten it up to 11. Because I need to make readers understand what would drive a person to do what she does, even if they hate her for it. I need to elevate her to tragic anti-heroine. I need to create a version of her that stays with people, whether they like her or not, and makes them wonder what they would do in her place. But I don't want people to read two paragraphs and go, "Damn. I'm tired of this bitch."
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Date: 2021-12-29 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-29 08:48 pm (UTC)Exactly! I have written a lot of self-loathing characters before, but they always end up reaching a moment where they realize they have to make a decision about what their life is going to be and commit to it, for better or for worse. For her, that moment never comes. She repeatedly acknowledges that she needs to change, but she doesn't. And I try to make it clear that many of her reasons for struggling relate to her having PTSD and nobody around who is willing or able to check her impulses. Because it is very easy for people to spiral out of control when they don't have anybody to ground and support them. And that's the tragedy. It's not just about a woman self-destructing; it's about the devastating consequences of loneliness and alienation, and this theme is prominent in my interpretations of Hojo and Vincent as well.
The problem is that realism doesn't always make for good reading. Writing bastards who know they are bastards (like Hojo and several other characters I've enjoyed writing) is easy because you can play the push-and-pull game between enticing the reader and repulsing them. It never gets boring. Characters who are in bad places but move toward changing themselves for the better are compelling because the reader roots for them to do the right thing. But how many times can you get an audience rooting for a character to do the right thing and then have them not do it before nobody wants to read anymore. My version of Lucrecia isn't just depressed and self-loathing; she's stalled-out.
I also gave her a dry, sarcastic sense of humor because I think that's par for the course for people whose emotions are shot to shit. Something I really want to convey with her is the difference between who is she internally and how she presents externally. In her personal thoughts, she is sardonic and sometimes even mean-spirited in her observations, but on the outside, she is committed to an image of polite type-A perfection. Every word she says, every facial expression is calculated, and when something slips through by accident, she panics and spins out. So she's trying to maintain this brittle, tightly controlled exterior all while a chaotic storm is picking up speed and debris inside her and threatening to blow it all apart.
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Date: 2021-12-30 07:15 pm (UTC)I guess I wonder whether they need to root for her to do the right thing. I'm thinking out loud really; the default tragic framing with her is the idea that she's always very close to happiness and always swerves out of the way, which is frustrating to watch, and yeah, I think suits something shorter because it gets repetitive. So one option with a longer thing is to have fate play more of a role; she does make some good decisions but shit gets in the way (maybe stuff she set in motion earlier). Though it may feel like taking the easy option. Another option is to make the choices she makes actually be the best ones in the situation, which could be quite fun to construct though it's going to do some interesting things to Vincent's characterisation, or Hojo's, or the plot, or all three. And I think another option is to go 'we are here to watch a trainwreck'. Maybe it comes from a place of self-destruction and loneliness but we as the audience are here to see just how bad she can fuck up because whatever we're picturing, she's gonna find something worse. Bojack Horseman plays with that (and the character stuck in a loop, making resolutions and then failing because a setback always leads him to a moment of 'who cares, I'm irredeemablly shit' and he undoes all his progress but worse), though I guess they used a whole cast of characters and a lot of humour to break it up. Bojack with just Bojack might be a bit samey. But yeah, you *know* he's going to fuck it up. You hope he won't but it doesn't feel like you've been cheated or frustrated when he does. Though they also get round that by having the catastrophe in the penultimate episode of each season, and then the last episode tends to be more peaceful and uneasily hopeful. So maybe a fic trying for a similar tone would need a similar structure.
Back to the Jenova project, I think a trouble with it is that the source material is very earnest melodrama. I chose to lean into that this time but there's a tension between treating it as a tragedy and the potential for mockery it all has. You have to commit at the outset, stuff like 'we are going to do pathetic fallacy with full seriousness', you know? Deciding what you mock, what you don't mock, accepting things will be cheesy. And Lucrecia as a character mocks *everything* and has no patience for cheese. So if you're writing a tragedy, she is going to be fighting you and snarking at every step. You have a character who thinks she's above her own story. :D So I kind of want to say that something narrated *by* Lucrecia needs that mania, for the stakes to be higher, she thinks she's Frankenstein, she thinks she's Faustus. From the outside, we're seeing basically a girl being manipulated for petty reasons. And Vincent sees 'pretty girl'. But from Lucrecia's perspective, she's a genius the likes of which the world has never seen and she takes pride in being able to do things that others cannot (which is the lever by which she can be manipulated if others are able to detect it, but 'pretty girl' has remarkable blinding properties). She doesn't *just* hate herself, she also thinks she's above everyone, and there's a push-pull there. So what I'm meandering toward is that the perfectionism is different to my versions of her because for me she goes beyond that, she wants to be a god and Sephiroth perhaps gets it from her. And, she gets to make an attempt. And then all that annoying human stuff gets in the way.
So I wonder if something that might keep it engaging is what she's aiming *towards*, what she's picturing, her dreams. And we as the reader can see that this is not that, and maybe Vincent is trying to tell her that this is not that. Sadcrecia is nice in 3rd person or for shortfic, but Madcrecia may suit a longer project better.
> So she's trying to maintain this brittle, tightly controlled exterior all while a chaotic storm is picking up speed and debris inside her and threatening to blow it all apart.
Comedy analogue but my mind goes to Josie in Fresh Meat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoGhhbbt9Q8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejJHjfUB23s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUdf8GQmZPg
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Date: 2021-12-30 08:22 pm (UTC)It is! It's SUCH MELODRAMA. But the thing that sets melodrama apart from tragedy is depth. Like, the Grimoire thing, as presented in DoC, is absolutely peak melodrama. They just stuffed him in the fridge to give Lucrecia a reason to not want to be with Vincent. It just comes down to "she's guilty" and that's pretty lame as far as storytelling goes. And a lot of fanfic writers who explore Vincent and Lucrecia relationship tend to minimize or completely jettison that entire facet because it comes off as lazy and cheesy.
But I want to take a different approach. I want to explore the significance of Lucrecia's relationship with Grimoire and the impact his death had on her and give it more depth so it stops being a diabolus ex machina and instead becomes AN ACTUALLY REALLY FUCKING GOOD REASON WHY THEIR RELATIONSHIP IS A DOOMED CLUSTERFUCK. So I try to headcanon some flesh onto the bones of the Lucrecia-Grimoire melodrama to make it less cheesy and more real:
- Lucrecia and Grimoire knew each other for more than 10 years. They met when she was 18, and he was her teacher and academic advisor in undergrad. As an undergrad, I had some very strong mentor-student relationships with my professors, so I try to pull a little from those relationships to add realism. Having an amazing role model who believes in you is a HUGE DEAL for someone that age.
- Grimoire struggled with being a good husband and father because he was preoccupied with work and was never good at expressing himself (I have 13k of his unfinished POV back story on my drive, and the way I ended up writing him he's alexithymic and possibly on the autism spectrum, although I am absolutely not a psychologist and wish to avoid writing characters into specific diagnoses). He had no clue how to communicate with Vincent as a kid and did a lot of damage without really meaning to. His wife got fed up and left him and took Vincent with her, so he only saw Vincent during the summers for the next 10 years and most of the time had no idea what to do with him. Then Vincent's mother died (which also broke Grimoire's heart because he never ever got over her - like father, like son) and Vincent came to live with him again, was angry and rebellious, they had a horrible relationship, and then Vincent ran away and vanished off the face of the earth. Grimoire spends the next 13 years trying to find out what happened to him, while reflecting on all the ways he absolutely fucked up as a father.
- Meanwhile, he becomes very attached to Lucrecia, who is both a promising protege (see: like the kid he wanted to have) and in desperate need of a father figure. So he starts working through all his bad-dad guilt by trying to fill that role for her, completely oblivious to the fact that (she at least thinks) she is falling in love with him.
- Lucrecia is experiencing romantic/sexual feelings for him but AT THE SAME TIME, she wants him as a dad. You know, because daddy issues. She is aware of his guilt about Vincent, though she doesn't know all the details about what happened, and is resentful and jealous of Vincent for being Grimoire's son. While she is outwardly supportive of Grimoire trying to find Vincent, she is secretly afraid that they will reconnect and she will have to play second fiddle. It also pisses her off that she has worked her ass off to be perfect in every way, but Vincent, whom she understands to have been a "fuck-up," will always threaten to "steal" her position in Grimoire's life. This also ties back to Lucrecia's father not being in her life and her eventually finding out that he has another daughter that he actually raised.
- So when she finally meets Vincent, it's not just "guilt because she involuntary manslaughtered his father." It's a big sticky mess of guilt for Grimoire's death, resentment and anger toward Vincent, guilt for feeling resentment and anger toward him, intense grief over the loss she is constantly reminded of by Vincent's presence, affectionate and sexual feelings toward Vincent because of his resemblance to Grimoire, a desire to use Vincent as an instrument of self-punishment, guilt for using him as such, guilt because she can't bring herself to come clean to him about any of it, and then her sense that their relationship is vaguely incest-y.
>And Lucrecia as a character mocks *everything* and has no patience for cheese.
> So I kind of want to say that something narrated *by* Lucrecia needs that mania, for the stakes to be higher, she thinks she's Frankenstein, she thinks she's Faustus.
Yup. This is the part of her that is attracted to Hojo.
>She doesn't *just* hate herself, she also thinks she's above everyone, and there's a push-pull there.
Oh yes, that's something I enjoy playing with a lot. She simultaneously thinks that she's too good for Vincent and that he's too good for her.
>Sadcrecia is nice in 3rd person or for shortfic, but Madcrecia may suit a longer project better.
In my HC, Grimoire died because Lucrecia made a routine safety mistake due to lack of sleep and stimulant drug abuse. Instead of looking at it as a consequence of her ambition and overall irresponsibility, she sees it as the result of her perfectionism and conscientiousness. So she decides that's what needs to go. Hence the gravitation toward Hojo, whom she turns to to help her escape the "goody two shoes" cage she built for herself and transform into a damn-the-consequences type (this is basically what Hojo observes in "Possession" and he is correct). The problem is that she's not great at damning the consequences. But she does start tapping into her id quite a bit more, and the results are erratic and disturbing. And it's not clear which of them (if any) have to do with Jenova poisoning her mind, and which have to do with being an angry, traumatized pregnant woman in a noxious folie-a-deux marriage, coming apart at the seams.
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Date: 2021-12-31 12:14 am (UTC)This is a really cool idea; I love the headcanons and look forward to seeing how it turns out! There is a lot of fun in taking the more casual (or downright nonsensical) design choices Square made and trying to turn them into something that makes sense. It's like a logic puzzle. :P And yeah, I think a weird faux-sibling-rivalry is the perfect ingredient. Also bet you can then have a lot of fun writing AUs of your own fic where they meet at different times... (One of my fave pasttimes is coming up with families and extended families for established characters and making them all meet each other in awkward and dramatic situations, lol. Normally I assume it's no fun for anyone else to read so they tend to stay in my head. I think one of my grievances with DoC is that it took away some of the mystery of Vincent's family (or would if I accepted it :P) and I liked that it was open-ended. Anyway, I like that you're doing a version that stands to do the ideas justice; had I come across a fic that went 'Vincent's dad's a scientist and Lucrecia killed him by accident', I would have liked it better than when they put it in the official stuff since I don't hate the idea of it, just its status and the shitty execution.)
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Date: 2021-12-31 02:48 am (UTC)Yup! I love taking advantage of the unmined potential of things in canon. Also, when I'm dealing with things that are controversial in the fandom or where there is a lot of fanon, I go out of my way to play with that, too. There's a LOT of this when it comes to the Jenova project, so I'm having fun. For example:
- Hojo and Lucrecia doing drugs together was my "take that!" to the "Hojo drugged Lucrecia" take I see now and then, which always irritated me for reasons I can't fully articulate. Okay, fine. He *did* drug her, but it was completely consensual and doesn't detract from her agency in participating in the project. And then later on, he keeps her under sedation against her will, so now it's double-subverted.
- Everybody has a violent opinion about who Sephiroth's biological father is, but honestly I don't really care. I am much more interested in the implications of Vincent knowing there is a possibility that Sephiroth is his son and having to come to terms with the fact that he will probably never know, and of Hojo recognizing that Sephiroth might *not* be his son and convincing himself he doesn't care, and of Lucrecia not knowing for sure but changing her mind about which she *wants* to be the father of her child based on her present circumstances, than I am in actually answering the question. Questions are often much more interesting than answers.
- I never reveal Hojo's first name, although I have written about why he doesn't use it. Again, this is a case of the circumstances around the question being more interesting than the answer. Deliberately avoiding the name because of the character's visceral hatred of it just seemed like more fun than...making up a name.
>Also bet you can then have a lot of fun writing AUs of your own fic where they meet at different times...
You know, I've never really been one for AUs. I don't mind different interpretations of events or stories that play fast and loose with canon, but the whole "what if things were completely different" never interested me that much. Maybe it's my fatalistic tendencies. That said, I *do* love timeline fuckery and parallel universes in fiction (Dark and The OA are two of my favorite shows), although I've never felt the desire to extend that to fanfic for whatever reason. I'm probably missing out.
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Date: 2021-12-31 03:21 am (UTC)Mine would be that it's too easy an answer and kind of a boring design choice. It's a challenge to make that lead somewhere interesting. A fic with a plot that hinges on that is going to need something else to do the heavy lifting. Though:
> Also, when I'm dealing with things that are controversial in the fandom or where there is a lot of fanon, I go out of my way to play with that, too.
Same; I like to try taking fanon I dislike or find boring and twisting it into something I find more interesting, or treating it with a ridiculous degree of realism, or parodying or subverting. One silly little thing I noticed when browsing around Vincent fic was how much of it involves him cleaning his gun. Why is everyone so fucking obsessed with him cleaning his gun? Why does he never do anything else? So I put a few things in to mock that. Sometimes I feel like half my writing is just me snickering behind my hand with myself at jokes that aren't even recognisable as jokes and are definitely not funny.
> You know, I've never really been one for AUs.
Ah I guess I'm using the term broadly since I think of anything that diverges from canon as AU. I'm generally not too interested in them for established characters, but for some reason I like them for my original characters. I even daydream timetravel crossovers for my own fictional characters every so often. It's pure self-indulgent trash. Anyway at the point where I've fucked around with an established character so much they might as well be original, I do have fun with it. Just shit like 'a scene where Lucrecia introduces Vincent to her parents'. It's mostly about having conversations happen that couldn't happen otherwise so I can hoover up everyone's emotions like a weirdo.
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Date: 2021-12-31 07:17 am (UTC)I think it's fun that characters like Lucrecia and pre-hibernation Vincent don't actually have a ton of canon-bestowed characterization, so every writer has a radically different version of them, but none of it is ever OOC no matter how much it varies. I've seen so many different versions of them, and it's honestly fucking cool. I've seen Lucrecia as a naive idealist and as an absolute sociopath and plenty in between. I've seen her written as a blushing virgin and a femme fatale. I've seen Vincent written as a dashing ladies man and as a maladjusted loner. Even Hojo's characterization can vary a lot because there is so little information provided to us about the nature of their marriage - was it coldly professional or was there more to it than that? Is Hojo capable of romantic love, and how would that look coming from him? What the fuck even IS Hojo? What the hell happened there? (Obviously this is a question I greatly enjoyed answering - or not answering.) It seems like everyone who writes these characters puts a lot of work into crafting their own versions of them and becomes very attached to those versions. I like it because it reminds me of theater and how many different things can be done with the same script.
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Date: 2022-01-01 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
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