asherdashery (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
asherdashery) wrote2012-08-27 11:24 am
asherdashery) wrote2012-08-27 11:24 am
Entry tags:
DVD Commentary: John<3Vriska, the Great Wall of China
[This was the first fill I did for one of lantadyme's prompts, and one I jumped on for the location despite John<3Vriska not being one of my usual ships. It's a ship I really like when it's done well--especially from Vriska's perspective. And HSO bonus rounds were all about going beyond your ships, so.
The research I did for this fill basically amounted to opening Wikipedia and then doing an image search to make sure the colors I wanted to do were theoretically possible. I didn't actually LOOK that hard at the image search so I still don't know, but you don't get between a man and his color problem.]
and it’s thirteen thousand, one hundred and seventy-one miles long.
you can see it from the moon.
[Wikipedia's article on the Great Wall actually has a little section dedicated to the fact that it is not visible from the moon.]
Woooooooow, John, consider me tot8lly impressed. Not!
Your culture’s puny wiggler 8uilding escapades are totally l8me compared to stuff I threw together 8efore I could even talk.
haha, says you!
you are totally wrong.
[John blithely shutting his friends down is one of my favorite things about him.]
the great wall of china is a world wonder and everybody knows that. you are just jealous.
i did a report on it in fifth grade.
[Ah, pesterlogs, my wondrous safety net for voices I'm unsure of. Prospit kids are hard for me, and nobody understands.
This is actually my only fic without Derse people in it, and--I think--my only fic without a Strider in it. FAVORITISM MUCH, ASH? I am definitely a one-trick pony.]
It’s not too lame, you think, watching it snake away into a distance made of jagged, verdant hills and blue sky. Earth colors are so weird, all brilliant golds and greens and blues where there should be ochre and purple, burning colors and black. Sometimes it reminds you of the Land of Maps and Treasure, but there was little there of this bright, restful blue.
John’s wearing a puffy jacket that makes him look like a neon marshmallow, but you allow it. It brings something out in his eyes.
[Originally that read "candy rave marshmallow" because I was thinking about blacklights, but then I was like, "What does that even mean? Did I just inadvertently steal that from Lanta without actually knowing what that means in a fill for her own prompt?" So then I changed it.
God, I love colors.]
I guess it’s not 8ad to look at.
Even if it’d 8e a total cinch to 8reach with even the we8kest horde, hahahahahahahaha!
wow, i totally felt that burn.
i am totally insulted that you think you could overrun a wall built thousands of years ago by a country on the other side of the world from me.
a country that would totally wipe your barbarian horde out with their nuclear bombs.
They could try!!!!!!!!
What’s a nuclear 8om8, anyw8y?
shh!
look!
[The first half of that pesterlog is probably the most-edited piece of this fic.]
The sun seems to plunge suddenly over the horizon, and maybe it does, because the abrupt shift into sunset takes your breath away like a fall. Red, fuchsia, the flushed insides of a fruit John called a blood orange, and gold, real liquid gold at the edges, a blazing reminder of Prospit. [I think it was here that I realized that both of them were Prospit kids, and that was very affecting for me, for some reason.] The trees beneath you change color, take on the shadows of majesty, and you feel maybe a smidgen of respect for this ancient culture of John’s.
Carting a thousand tons of rock up the mountain range, building it for five hundred, six hundred, eight hundred sweeps--it should be a laughable exercise in futility and hubris. How could anyone expect to defend such a sprawling monster? How could it be anything but an eyesore on the land? How could anyone not want to scrap it and make it something leaner, something stronger, something 8etter?
[Because trolls build, and they build for war. And Vriska is the 8est troll there is. Except for when she's not. I think that slip into her quirk is almost a self-mocking note, because she knows she screwed up. I say "almost" because I think, even knowing she screwed up, she's not really that self-aware. She's thirteen, geez.]
But it’s not a monster, not an eyesore. There’s nothing to improve. It just is. And you watch the sun wash it in red and, with pain, you think: Terezi.
[For the red, and because Vriska is thinking about how she screwed up so badly Terezi had to kill her. Not because Terezi never made the same mistakes.]
John stirs beside you.
[And John's there to kick her out of the funk, because the dead have to let go of the problems of the living. The living help the living. The dead help the dead.]
hey, vriska.
What?
You think he might hold your hand, but instead he punches your shoulder and grins like light itself.
[Here's where I started really wanting to mix their imagery. Light is Vriska's aspect, but they can gift parts of their aspect to those they love.]
i’ll race you.
[Because it's childish and silly and competitive and fun, and that's what I love about love, that it can be fun. Especially in John pairings. Vriska, too. So even more in John<3Vriska.]
And he takes off, whooping into the wind as fast as his jet pack can take him, and you roll your white eyes and remember what it’s like not to have wings. [Switching from God Tier to Pshooooes, since she can, since they're dead.] Your sneakers regain that new shoe scent for a second before you can only smell jet fuel and exhilaration, because you are rocketing after John along the Great Wall of China.
You chase the dying light, chase the last threads of gold, and the wind takes you and you forget everything but flying. You forget the dream bubbles, you forget SGRUB, you forget death and justice and the sudden whiteness at the end of everything, and you hear John laugh and you bark a laugh back at him as he does a loop-de-loop. What a show-off.
[I'm really bad at coming out and saying things, but in my head this fic was actually set after Lord English nuked the dreambubble(s). So instead of being contained in a memory, in a time or place--instead of having some kind of delineated existence--they're completely vanished and free, like the ghost of two electrons. They're loose in time and space so of course they can be at the Great Wall even if neither of them has ever been there, because they are everywhere and everywhen. The suddenness of the sunset is actually because of this, too, because they can be when/whereever according to their whims.]
He’s a piece of sky held against the sun, and you love him.
[That's my favorite line in the whole thing. Possibly my favorite line of all I've written for HSO.]
You do hold hands now, your fingers tied together against a light that wipes out any difference in color between your skin. There’s no telling where he starts and you end, and his smile is bending your lips, or maybe that’s yours in his eyes. The wall never ends. It breaks in places and splits and turns, but it goes on forever like you never could.
[Can't write sappy shipping for people without tainting it with FAILURE AND REGRET, I guess.]
And that’s the thing about being dead eight times over between the two of you: you are nowhere, but you can be anywhere. You can be everywhere.
And if both of you are everywhere, then finally, there is no place the two of you are not together.
The Great Wall of China is not actually visible from the moon, but if you believe in something hard enough, that makes it slightly less fake.
[Because I couldn't just leave the fic as it was without noting that, and that brought Tavros back into it, too. She learned something from him after all.
This was probably my favorite BR5 fill to do, possibly edging out And I Will Sing a Lullaby and/or maybe the Dave+Karkat THG one. There are just so many colors in it, even if I'm weak with both John and Vriska and the Chinese landscape.
So thanks a lot for requesting the commentary for this one, and thanks to Lanta for prompting it!]
The research I did for this fill basically amounted to opening Wikipedia and then doing an image search to make sure the colors I wanted to do were theoretically possible. I didn't actually LOOK that hard at the image search so I still don't know, but you don't get between a man and his color problem.]
and it’s thirteen thousand, one hundred and seventy-one miles long.
you can see it from the moon.
[Wikipedia's article on the Great Wall actually has a little section dedicated to the fact that it is not visible from the moon.]
Woooooooow, John, consider me tot8lly impressed. Not!
Your culture’s puny wiggler 8uilding escapades are totally l8me compared to stuff I threw together 8efore I could even talk.
haha, says you!
you are totally wrong.
[John blithely shutting his friends down is one of my favorite things about him.]
the great wall of china is a world wonder and everybody knows that. you are just jealous.
i did a report on it in fifth grade.
[Ah, pesterlogs, my wondrous safety net for voices I'm unsure of. Prospit kids are hard for me, and nobody understands.
This is actually my only fic without Derse people in it, and--I think--my only fic without a Strider in it. FAVORITISM MUCH, ASH? I am definitely a one-trick pony.]
It’s not too lame, you think, watching it snake away into a distance made of jagged, verdant hills and blue sky. Earth colors are so weird, all brilliant golds and greens and blues where there should be ochre and purple, burning colors and black. Sometimes it reminds you of the Land of Maps and Treasure, but there was little there of this bright, restful blue.
John’s wearing a puffy jacket that makes him look like a neon marshmallow, but you allow it. It brings something out in his eyes.
[Originally that read "candy rave marshmallow" because I was thinking about blacklights, but then I was like, "What does that even mean? Did I just inadvertently steal that from Lanta without actually knowing what that means in a fill for her own prompt?" So then I changed it.
God, I love colors.]
I guess it’s not 8ad to look at.
Even if it’d 8e a total cinch to 8reach with even the we8kest horde, hahahahahahahaha!
wow, i totally felt that burn.
i am totally insulted that you think you could overrun a wall built thousands of years ago by a country on the other side of the world from me.
a country that would totally wipe your barbarian horde out with their nuclear bombs.
They could try!!!!!!!!
What’s a nuclear 8om8, anyw8y?
shh!
look!
[The first half of that pesterlog is probably the most-edited piece of this fic.]
The sun seems to plunge suddenly over the horizon, and maybe it does, because the abrupt shift into sunset takes your breath away like a fall. Red, fuchsia, the flushed insides of a fruit John called a blood orange, and gold, real liquid gold at the edges, a blazing reminder of Prospit. [I think it was here that I realized that both of them were Prospit kids, and that was very affecting for me, for some reason.] The trees beneath you change color, take on the shadows of majesty, and you feel maybe a smidgen of respect for this ancient culture of John’s.
Carting a thousand tons of rock up the mountain range, building it for five hundred, six hundred, eight hundred sweeps--it should be a laughable exercise in futility and hubris. How could anyone expect to defend such a sprawling monster? How could it be anything but an eyesore on the land? How could anyone not want to scrap it and make it something leaner, something stronger, something 8etter?
[Because trolls build, and they build for war. And Vriska is the 8est troll there is. Except for when she's not. I think that slip into her quirk is almost a self-mocking note, because she knows she screwed up. I say "almost" because I think, even knowing she screwed up, she's not really that self-aware. She's thirteen, geez.]
But it’s not a monster, not an eyesore. There’s nothing to improve. It just is. And you watch the sun wash it in red and, with pain, you think: Terezi.
[For the red, and because Vriska is thinking about how she screwed up so badly Terezi had to kill her. Not because Terezi never made the same mistakes.]
John stirs beside you.
[And John's there to kick her out of the funk, because the dead have to let go of the problems of the living. The living help the living. The dead help the dead.]
hey, vriska.
What?
You think he might hold your hand, but instead he punches your shoulder and grins like light itself.
[Here's where I started really wanting to mix their imagery. Light is Vriska's aspect, but they can gift parts of their aspect to those they love.]
i’ll race you.
[Because it's childish and silly and competitive and fun, and that's what I love about love, that it can be fun. Especially in John pairings. Vriska, too. So even more in John<3Vriska.]
And he takes off, whooping into the wind as fast as his jet pack can take him, and you roll your white eyes and remember what it’s like not to have wings. [Switching from God Tier to Pshooooes, since she can, since they're dead.] Your sneakers regain that new shoe scent for a second before you can only smell jet fuel and exhilaration, because you are rocketing after John along the Great Wall of China.
You chase the dying light, chase the last threads of gold, and the wind takes you and you forget everything but flying. You forget the dream bubbles, you forget SGRUB, you forget death and justice and the sudden whiteness at the end of everything, and you hear John laugh and you bark a laugh back at him as he does a loop-de-loop. What a show-off.
[I'm really bad at coming out and saying things, but in my head this fic was actually set after Lord English nuked the dreambubble(s). So instead of being contained in a memory, in a time or place--instead of having some kind of delineated existence--they're completely vanished and free, like the ghost of two electrons. They're loose in time and space so of course they can be at the Great Wall even if neither of them has ever been there, because they are everywhere and everywhen. The suddenness of the sunset is actually because of this, too, because they can be when/whereever according to their whims.]
He’s a piece of sky held against the sun, and you love him.
[That's my favorite line in the whole thing. Possibly my favorite line of all I've written for HSO.]
You do hold hands now, your fingers tied together against a light that wipes out any difference in color between your skin. There’s no telling where he starts and you end, and his smile is bending your lips, or maybe that’s yours in his eyes. The wall never ends. It breaks in places and splits and turns, but it goes on forever like you never could.
[Can't write sappy shipping for people without tainting it with FAILURE AND REGRET, I guess.]
And that’s the thing about being dead eight times over between the two of you: you are nowhere, but you can be anywhere. You can be everywhere.
And if both of you are everywhere, then finally, there is no place the two of you are not together.
The Great Wall of China is not actually visible from the moon, but if you believe in something hard enough, that makes it slightly less fake.
[Because I couldn't just leave the fic as it was without noting that, and that brought Tavros back into it, too. She learned something from him after all.
This was probably my favorite BR5 fill to do, possibly edging out And I Will Sing a Lullaby and/or maybe the Dave+Karkat THG one. There are just so many colors in it, even if I'm weak with both John and Vriska and the Chinese landscape.
So thanks a lot for requesting the commentary for this one, and thanks to Lanta for prompting it!]
no subject
no subject
ok so i'm less of a huge creep, i found your dvd commentaries by perusing your tumblr during work (i am very bored at work today) and then found this AND THEN READ IT LIKE FIVE TIMES?? god it's really great. you may say you have trouble writing prospits, but i love the way you've written both john and vriska in this. reading this felt like looking at shimmery liquid light IF THAT MAKES ANY SENSE which i doubt it does. anyway i loved it uvu
no subject
Also yes the shimmery liquid light thing makes perfect sense to me, but I clearly have kind of a boner for synesthesia. jfkdf ANYWAY I'M HAPPY YOU READ IT AND LIKE IT. I can link you to the clean, commentary-free version if you want.