h. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mirrorwitches) wrote2024-12-17 03:52 pm
mirrorwitches) wrote2024-12-17 03:52 pm
Entry tags:
“the rapture of that cruelty which yet is love” fic influences
in response to a tumblr ask about intertexts - i would like to do a proper dvd commentary for this one one day; this is the raw material.
fic is here.
my main one to start was maybe claudia from interview with the vampire, both book and show (although more show). and working out feelings about her arc and about people's responses to it. claudia being turned at 14 and trapped eternally in her adolescent body without the opportunity to grow up is a horror and a tragedy, but to think it is only that is to agree with the coven that she is fundamentally broken without an undeath worth living. i kept coming back to that scene where she tells louis she was still breathing and by now she would have a husband and babies. and claudia is both right that her being denied this is heartwrenchingly sad...and also having a husband and babies is MY nightmare, and from the person we see claudia grow into, it doesn't seem like it would actually make her happy either.
dead she gets to read dickinson, and see paris, and find lesbian love, and see the flowers bloom from the dead. as jacob anderson says, claudia is a "wonderful vampire." more than any of them, she ends up figuring it out. and the tragedy in s2 becomes not that she was made in the first place but that the existence forced on her which she fought so hard to make meaning of and to make livable is then stolen for her. but it's still sad. she's still dead, she still didn't have a choice, and she still will never get to know what she made of her human existence, and this is always a loss. i wanted to grapple with this idea of being turned as both violation and liberation, trauma and gift. if i did my job right with the fic, that comes across with rhaenyra.
also, all the texts i discuss deal with girlhood. claudia is changed from 5 at turning to 14 in the show, which is compelling and provocative. eternal girlhood is fascinating to me. it's a time of life that is simultaneously filled with a sense of immense untapped possibility, and also constraint as one becomes aware that this possibility is exactly what a surveilling eye and resultant measures of control want to stamp out in the process of making girls into women. that process is in its most brutal stage, and yet also not yet completed. its also specifically temporal - it gains it's charge from the fact it will end, that girls are looking forward with different degrees of dread and excitement to the future and what adulthood will hold for them. being frozen within all that, to gain an eternal threshold of becoming and also be locked out of ever completing it, rendering it null, to be within both endless possibility and acute constraint, was part of what i was obsessing over.
like you note, jean rollin was the biggest intertextual influence. i watched 'la morte vivante' as a part of a vampire film syllabus i conducted for myself while writing this. it was seized on at random as the first rollin film (chosen because he has that obsession with eternal girlhood), but of course turned out to be incredibly relevant. one blonde from an ancient family line, one devoted brunette, friends since childhood. alicent wishes she could let rhaenyra eat her! and of course in the fic, she does. its influence is the air of a special, magical, profoundly erotic world between women as a result of the overwhelming power of a shared childhood, and the idea of the devotion blooming from that having only the one natural end in a melding via annihilation, because childhood and the childhood home can never be left, not even by death. i twist that idea a bit, but that ending scene is so haunting and powerful and was definitely with me.
but my biggest rollin influence was 'les deux orphelines vampires.' there is a similar thing of the erotic insular world of two between girls here, but it's elaborated on. its demonstrated through their shared reading of texts, where the thing that is important is not the words themselves but what they make of it, their co-created imaginative universe. they read about incan blood sacrifices, and imagine themselves as the priestessess of brutal rites with such adorable joy, gaining this beautiful sense of pleasure and power of it, and providing a unique, non-paternal or patriarchal origin for themselves. that was a huge influence on how rhaenyra interacts with old valyria, and the special bond created by incorporating alicent into it. i talked about the idea of even a very problematic (in this case appropriated) past providing an alternative empowering model for girls in the victorian era here. its really moving to me, and i loved its combination with vampirism here. and in general, the film's balance between that sense of power the girls get from their vampiric condition and the shattering loneliness was on my mind.
this next one didn't make it super into the final fic. i originally was going to write a modern AU - where rhaenyra went missing as a teenager, and daemon went missing at the same time (and alicent was aware that something was happening to rhaenyra, that daemon was involved, but failed to intervene), assumed murdered, and then shows up, not a day older, when alicent is in her 30s, married to viserys and a mother of 4. obviously that same basic structure makes its way to the victorian version, but the emphasis was going to be slightly different, and the greatest influence on that version was sharp objects. really compelled by camille's unsettling sexual fascination with amma's pubescence that stems from her own traumatic girlhood, and always find stories about failure by girls in regards to their victimization and sorrows really wrenching. its still present in attenuated form in the fic - the ways rhaenyra and alicent mutually fail each other in their respective situations with viserys and daemon is always something i find so sad in the show, and the victorians had their own erotic fascinations with girlhood that have a unique dimension for women who were girls themselves.
this was for a reverse bang, where an artist draws art for a story, and then a writer writes the story from it. so i just got the sketch of a vampire woman feeding on a human woman, and had great latitude to write any f/f hotd pairing from that. one story i considered was a canon set fic where the targaryens are vampires and alicent becomes rhaenyra's blood bag concubine. as it turns out, another great fic for the challenge by wakesirens @ ao3 "all my blood is cherry red" has that general concept so i'm glad i diversified. but basically i have wanted to write a hotd AU drawing from octavia butler's fledgling since i read it last year. that finds its way into this fic as well - my fascination with what it is like to give another person sustenance from your own body, to be food, to be fed upon. in the vampire chronicles, the pleasure of feeding is about extinguishing a life, and it was interesting to go in a different direction - where that symbiotic (or parasitic?) relation of feeder and fed is the one almost ecstatically alluring. and it's a series of questions i've not exhausted. it can both be a form of abuse, and a form of mutual relation, and can slip back and forth between them - and it does all in this fic. there's so many things it can stand in for: again sexual abuse, societal sexual use of girls and women, but also, as you noted, motherhood. giving one's body for the sustenance of another is also motherhood, especially patriarchal motherhood. alicent in canon is already a vampire's victim! and victorian womanhood is also a condition of vampiric victimhood, to me. i was playing around with that because...
carmilla ended up having the largest influence and the most diffuse. it's huge in terms of style - frame narrative (staged by a patriarchal man of medicine), epistolary, general language. but there's also the atmosphere of fervid feminine homoeroticism that really influenced my style. and i'm always obsessed with carmilla's mom and what is going on there when i reread (as i did in october) and thinking about alternative views of vampire generation than the patriarch vampire. being penetrated, filling someone with a bodily fluid that gives them life, obviously has those overtones. but feeding someone your own blood to birth them into a new existence is equally maternal, and those themes of sustenance between women, how it echoes other kind of feedings (of erotic and intellectual lives), is really alluring.
lastly, i reread most of dracula, and i didn't get as into it as i originally imagined due to time constraint, but mina's distress over lucy's sleepwalking and obvious danger for which she has no explanation were going to be a big influence on the section where daemon is feeding on rhaenyra and is getting observably ill, which was going be extended. and wuthering heights was an influence in the scenes from their childhood - rhaenyra half-savage and hardy and free, desperately longing to grow up and never wanting to leave the freedom of the inexhaustible world you can make of childhood with another. both of these have direct references in the text that i am curious if anyone caught!
fic is here.
my main one to start was maybe claudia from interview with the vampire, both book and show (although more show). and working out feelings about her arc and about people's responses to it. claudia being turned at 14 and trapped eternally in her adolescent body without the opportunity to grow up is a horror and a tragedy, but to think it is only that is to agree with the coven that she is fundamentally broken without an undeath worth living. i kept coming back to that scene where she tells louis she was still breathing and by now she would have a husband and babies. and claudia is both right that her being denied this is heartwrenchingly sad...and also having a husband and babies is MY nightmare, and from the person we see claudia grow into, it doesn't seem like it would actually make her happy either.
dead she gets to read dickinson, and see paris, and find lesbian love, and see the flowers bloom from the dead. as jacob anderson says, claudia is a "wonderful vampire." more than any of them, she ends up figuring it out. and the tragedy in s2 becomes not that she was made in the first place but that the existence forced on her which she fought so hard to make meaning of and to make livable is then stolen for her. but it's still sad. she's still dead, she still didn't have a choice, and she still will never get to know what she made of her human existence, and this is always a loss. i wanted to grapple with this idea of being turned as both violation and liberation, trauma and gift. if i did my job right with the fic, that comes across with rhaenyra.
also, all the texts i discuss deal with girlhood. claudia is changed from 5 at turning to 14 in the show, which is compelling and provocative. eternal girlhood is fascinating to me. it's a time of life that is simultaneously filled with a sense of immense untapped possibility, and also constraint as one becomes aware that this possibility is exactly what a surveilling eye and resultant measures of control want to stamp out in the process of making girls into women. that process is in its most brutal stage, and yet also not yet completed. its also specifically temporal - it gains it's charge from the fact it will end, that girls are looking forward with different degrees of dread and excitement to the future and what adulthood will hold for them. being frozen within all that, to gain an eternal threshold of becoming and also be locked out of ever completing it, rendering it null, to be within both endless possibility and acute constraint, was part of what i was obsessing over.
like you note, jean rollin was the biggest intertextual influence. i watched 'la morte vivante' as a part of a vampire film syllabus i conducted for myself while writing this. it was seized on at random as the first rollin film (chosen because he has that obsession with eternal girlhood), but of course turned out to be incredibly relevant. one blonde from an ancient family line, one devoted brunette, friends since childhood. alicent wishes she could let rhaenyra eat her! and of course in the fic, she does. its influence is the air of a special, magical, profoundly erotic world between women as a result of the overwhelming power of a shared childhood, and the idea of the devotion blooming from that having only the one natural end in a melding via annihilation, because childhood and the childhood home can never be left, not even by death. i twist that idea a bit, but that ending scene is so haunting and powerful and was definitely with me.
but my biggest rollin influence was 'les deux orphelines vampires.' there is a similar thing of the erotic insular world of two between girls here, but it's elaborated on. its demonstrated through their shared reading of texts, where the thing that is important is not the words themselves but what they make of it, their co-created imaginative universe. they read about incan blood sacrifices, and imagine themselves as the priestessess of brutal rites with such adorable joy, gaining this beautiful sense of pleasure and power of it, and providing a unique, non-paternal or patriarchal origin for themselves. that was a huge influence on how rhaenyra interacts with old valyria, and the special bond created by incorporating alicent into it. i talked about the idea of even a very problematic (in this case appropriated) past providing an alternative empowering model for girls in the victorian era here. its really moving to me, and i loved its combination with vampirism here. and in general, the film's balance between that sense of power the girls get from their vampiric condition and the shattering loneliness was on my mind.
this next one didn't make it super into the final fic. i originally was going to write a modern AU - where rhaenyra went missing as a teenager, and daemon went missing at the same time (and alicent was aware that something was happening to rhaenyra, that daemon was involved, but failed to intervene), assumed murdered, and then shows up, not a day older, when alicent is in her 30s, married to viserys and a mother of 4. obviously that same basic structure makes its way to the victorian version, but the emphasis was going to be slightly different, and the greatest influence on that version was sharp objects. really compelled by camille's unsettling sexual fascination with amma's pubescence that stems from her own traumatic girlhood, and always find stories about failure by girls in regards to their victimization and sorrows really wrenching. its still present in attenuated form in the fic - the ways rhaenyra and alicent mutually fail each other in their respective situations with viserys and daemon is always something i find so sad in the show, and the victorians had their own erotic fascinations with girlhood that have a unique dimension for women who were girls themselves.
this was for a reverse bang, where an artist draws art for a story, and then a writer writes the story from it. so i just got the sketch of a vampire woman feeding on a human woman, and had great latitude to write any f/f hotd pairing from that. one story i considered was a canon set fic where the targaryens are vampires and alicent becomes rhaenyra's blood bag concubine. as it turns out, another great fic for the challenge by wakesirens @ ao3 "all my blood is cherry red" has that general concept so i'm glad i diversified. but basically i have wanted to write a hotd AU drawing from octavia butler's fledgling since i read it last year. that finds its way into this fic as well - my fascination with what it is like to give another person sustenance from your own body, to be food, to be fed upon. in the vampire chronicles, the pleasure of feeding is about extinguishing a life, and it was interesting to go in a different direction - where that symbiotic (or parasitic?) relation of feeder and fed is the one almost ecstatically alluring. and it's a series of questions i've not exhausted. it can both be a form of abuse, and a form of mutual relation, and can slip back and forth between them - and it does all in this fic. there's so many things it can stand in for: again sexual abuse, societal sexual use of girls and women, but also, as you noted, motherhood. giving one's body for the sustenance of another is also motherhood, especially patriarchal motherhood. alicent in canon is already a vampire's victim! and victorian womanhood is also a condition of vampiric victimhood, to me. i was playing around with that because...
carmilla ended up having the largest influence and the most diffuse. it's huge in terms of style - frame narrative (staged by a patriarchal man of medicine), epistolary, general language. but there's also the atmosphere of fervid feminine homoeroticism that really influenced my style. and i'm always obsessed with carmilla's mom and what is going on there when i reread (as i did in october) and thinking about alternative views of vampire generation than the patriarch vampire. being penetrated, filling someone with a bodily fluid that gives them life, obviously has those overtones. but feeding someone your own blood to birth them into a new existence is equally maternal, and those themes of sustenance between women, how it echoes other kind of feedings (of erotic and intellectual lives), is really alluring.
lastly, i reread most of dracula, and i didn't get as into it as i originally imagined due to time constraint, but mina's distress over lucy's sleepwalking and obvious danger for which she has no explanation were going to be a big influence on the section where daemon is feeding on rhaenyra and is getting observably ill, which was going be extended. and wuthering heights was an influence in the scenes from their childhood - rhaenyra half-savage and hardy and free, desperately longing to grow up and never wanting to leave the freedom of the inexhaustible world you can make of childhood with another. both of these have direct references in the text that i am curious if anyone caught!