asherdashery (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
asherdashery) wrote2012-08-23 05:42 pm
asherdashery) wrote2012-08-23 05:42 pm
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DVD Commentary: And I Will Sing a Lullaby
[So this was I think the third HSO BR5 prompt I did for Tumblr user lantadyme, who was sort of the first non-RP Homestuck writer friend I made. She wrote Hold Your Colour, which was one of the first Homestuck fanfics I read and was just really GREAT and gorgeous. I think then I went and stalked her Tumblr and sort of kept stumbling over that "friendly stranger" line until she got used to my presence. B )
Anyway, even though I'd already filled a couple prompts for her--one of which she'd made specifically for me--I saw this one and I was like NO MINE I HAVE TO DO THIS ONE. I know basically everything I've written for Homestuck has been shippy, but I feel like I'm just...a strongly gen-flavored shipper, for the most part. I want everybody to be bros and live in the same house and throw popcorn at one another during movies. I want them to watch lots of movies.
So yeah I saw this gen prompt for Dirk and the White Queen on Prospit and I was seized with an attack of the cutes. Especially since one of my favorites of Lanta's works was Golden Towers, which probably was a big influence on this piece.
And I Will Sing a Lullaby was originally untitled since it was a fairly short bonus round fill, so when I ran across the title box on AO3 I was like, "--oh. Crap. UH." My original thought was to title it "Golden Slumbers" after the Beatles song, but then I was like, "Wait, that sounds too much like Golden Towers." So then I settled for picking a lyric at random from the song. I think it's still a somehow misleading title, but I was in a rush to post it.
Wow, I am a ramblemonster.]
The first time you try for Prospit, you are seven years old and you make yourself an astronaut helmet first.
[I don't know when Dirk first became aware that he was awake, but it really seemed like forever ago. Jade was awake since she was at least four, right? I decided on seven because that's a good age: still really young and liable to do silly things, but also with a more solid set of rules.]
You’ve explored everything there is to see on Derse, sneaky like a ninja, sneaky like your bro must have been. There isn’t really much to see. Purple, purple, purple, and the girl in the other tower. But she never wakes up, no matter how much you talk and jump on her bed and smoosh her face into weird shapes.
[I like to imagine a really straight-faced kid Dirk doing this to Roxy while she smiles through it.]
Even when you think she has to be awake, she’s not. The newspaper explains it one time for you. Sleepwalking.
The newspaper also tells you about Prospit.
They’re heretics there, bad guys and hypocrites. You decide to go there, take down their whole system. The Dersites would like that. The moon will stop feeling like eyes in shadows, and you’ll come out and the people with their hard shells and skittering feet will see how cool you are, and you won’t be alone.
[I don't think any scared kid, no matter how lonely, would run out into the dark of Derse without assessing the situation first. Dirk only had Cal, and whenever he first woke up, he probably stayed in his tower first and sneaked around second until that just was how he operated there.]
--
Your first attempt fails when you hit the Veil. The rocks are flying everywhere, some the size of your head, some the size of Derse’s moon, and you panic and throw your arms over your face and think, noplacelikehome--
Back in your apartment, you curl around Cal and he wraps his noodley arm around you, reminds you how proud he is of you.
[Cal is not my homeboy, but he IS Dirk's, and I respect that.]
--
You try again in a week. There’s no one to tell you it’s okay to be scared but you. And you don’t. [That's probably my favorite line in this piece. Dirk raised himself.] You don’t wear the helmet, but you tuck it under your arm in case you need it.
Three. Two. One. Lifdoff.
[I actually wrote "Blast off" originally and then on my first edit (HSO-->Tumblr), I saw it and said to myself, "WOW, it's not like you to miss a chance to make a dumb obvious reference!
I make a lot of dumb obvious references. See the Wizard of Oz quote a few paragraphs above.]
You go faster this time. You pretend you’re a street-tough maverick with nothing to lose [Oh there's another one.], and if, even at this age, you’re not really sure what the deal with that movie is, it makes you feel better. [Even seven-year-olds can have taste in movies. [Actually, Con Air is pretty fun.]] You played with the bunny in the other girl’s room once. That made you feel better, too, even if you didn’t have your own.
You resolve to get one, someday. [Li'l Seb, on the other hand, is my homeboy.]
In the meantime you blast through space like a stealth missile, a silenced gun. You are small and the Medium is dark and even when the Veil rises before you again, you are exhilarated. You spin around the asteroids and realize that you are invincible and you are fast.
You come through the inside of the band of rocks and hesitate. There’s almost nothing out here. It’s a waiting empty, like a shell. [This is where the alpha kids' planets go, but they haven't been instantiated yet. I mean, I know each planet comes with its own history and stuff, but since they don't show up on the radar thing until the kids get there, who's to say the planets are there in the same sense that Prospit and Derse are?] But in the distance, if you lower your shades a little, you can see a blue glow.
You keep going.
Skaia is bright, and you’re glad you’re wearing your sunglasses because otherwise you would have missed the shining satellite below it. Prospit is brilliant in colors you’ve never really seen, a gold richer than the nine o’clock sun on the ocean. You float among the buildings, and even as a stranger, feel none of the dark watchfulness of Derse.
You keep out of the Prospitians’ sight anyway. They’re wary of your shadow. And you came here to scout them out for war.
[What a dork.]
--
You’re not sure when it occurs to you to see if they have towers on their moon, too, but the second you think it, you’re there. You move stealthily, a smudge against all this radiance.
[I really love how bright Prospit is in canon. It hurts my eyes to look at, but it makes me so happy. Color moods are really important to me, and gold has always been one of my favorites.]
The girl sleeps peacefully in her cozy palace. She’s dark-haired and rosy-cheeked: Snow White outside her book. Another human girl. One more than you’d thought existed.
[Dirk keeps thinking in references. That's all he has to connect him to humanity, with Roxy asleep on Derse and incommunicado on Earth--I imagine Pesterchum isn't really a thing for them at this age. So that's what he has: eBooks and movies and Wikipedia and YouTube.]
You think about kissing her, just to see if she’d wake up and talk to you.
[And of course he's the prince.]
Instead you poke her cheek. [I like the idea of little Dirk being really tactile because he doesn't know any better, and then as he gets older getting really self-conscious about BEING touched because he never has been.] She giggles and snuggles deeper into the covers.
She’s so happy. It weirds you out, and you suddenly feel awful, like a foreign antibody in the planet’s lifestream. You want out and Prospit does, too.
[That was an image I really wanted to convey. Prospit's great, but Dirk is alien and does not belong. I've felt like that, and it's stronger when you're little. There's no place like home.]
You flit out the room in a controlled panic, but then see the other tower.
Where there’s a princess, there’s a prince, right?
You don’t enter his tower, you just crouch on the windowsill. He looks like the girl, dark-haired and ruddy, so foreign [Oh dammit I used that word twice.] to your inverse blacklit moon. He smiles in his sleep and twitches his hands like a dog. Bow wow. Pow pow. You’re not sure what he’s doing. You lean in for a closer look.
[Both Jade and John seemed to be restless sleepers: Jade with her sleepwalking, and then John with his troubled grimaces. Stands to reason Jake might be, too. Especially with the dog motif.]
Someone clears her throat, demure and polite.
You jump but the queen just inclines her head, crinkles her eyes in a mouthless smile. She beckons to you before you can flee.
[HOW DO THEY EAT???]
She’s seen you and you still feel no threat from this place, just the unease of a surprise guest who doesn't know the right language.
You jump back to Earth, anyway, and only realize the next night that you left your helmet on Prospit’s moon.
[Because I'm really taken with how leaving things in the dream rooms influences the dreamers. And I'm self-indulgent and want people to be connected forever and ever and ever. Someone should have warned Dirk about helmets, bro.]
--
The next time you rocket straight to Prospit, only stopping to make sure your princess is tucked in safe and sound. You almost kiss her, remembering your thought about Snow White, but Cal says it’s a bad idea.
[I'm also really taken with the idea of a desperate bond between Dirk and Roxy. They're the only humans left alive, in their world. She would do anything for him. He would do anything for her, in a way he wouldn't for Jane and Jake, I feel. I mean, he'd do anything for any of them, but with Roxy, he knows she won't judge him, won't ever give him up.
I am so uncomfortable with the idea of Cal talking, even if maybe it's in a seven-year-old's head.]
You don’t bring Cal because you’re afraid of leaving him on Prospit and never getting him back. [But Dirk loves him, so I deal.] Then you’d really be alone. Better to face your battle by yourself. You’re a street-tough maverick with nothing to lose.
You bring your brother’s second-best sword instead.
[An off-hand nod to my favorite book in The Chronicles of Narnia, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.]
When you reach Prospit, though, it’s just as you left it; no standing armies, no sentries on the rooftops, no sign that an enemy spy had slipped their radar at all. Your disappointment tingles, jangles against your relief.
[Everyone knows that perverse feeling, while you're waiting for something terrible to happen, of excitement. Right?]
You make a beeline for the royal palace. You are going to find out just how HIGH the White Queen has to BE.
[Dirk. You dork.]
Not high at all, you find out. She’s down on hands and knees, skirts hiked up, still elegant somehow in the curve of her neck and shoulders as she weeds a hydroponic hanging garden.
[I like that phrase, too. "Hydroponic hanging garden." Weird EPCOT technology mixed with Nebuchadnezzar's storied Babylon. That's the kind of off-beat majesty I imagine on Derse and Prospit.]
A mother will do what is best for her children, she tells you, and smiles that crinkly-eyed smile again.
“I came here to kill you,” you say. You wonder how to put an edge in your voice. Real hard-boiled heroes can do it.
[I'm still not sure about the prose there, but someone else liked it, so I guess it's okay. I don't really know how I'd change it besides just cutting it.]
Instead she hands you a pumpkin and asks if you like books.
[Yeah, it's a hydroponic hanging pumpkin patch. Even this White Queen feels some echo of Jade.]
--
Prospit’s king keeps a magnificent library. You think you’ve seen the same arching hall on Derse, but it’s full of weapons, full of armor and spiked gates.
The White Queen drifts through her husband’s books like a curling wave, delicate foam and rhythm. She trails one hand along the shelves. She asks you if you like adventure stories.
[The wave makes me think of LOLAR, which is the first time we hear her "speak." The adventure stories thing is my way of trying to show how she does her best to learn about her prince and princess, even if they're asleep. She's a Mother.]
“I guess,” you say, shrugging. You haven’t sheathed your sword, but then you forgot to bring the scabbard.
She starts to slide a slim volume off the shelf, then changes her mind and takes a massive tome instead, almost as big as Part One of Complacency of the Learned. You accept it impassively--your eyes are only wide behind your shades, where no one can see--and bear up under its weight, even if it’s awkward to support with your sword hand.
[She's trying to show she respects him. I doubt Dirk can actually read CotL this young, but this book's not complicated, just fat. I guess I never said, but I think it's a book of fairy tales.]
The White Queen asks you to tell her if you like that one when you finish it. If you do, she says, and leans down to cup your cheek in a gesture that startles you--if you do, she’ll find another one like it.
[I still don't know if that was moving to physical touch too fast, but WQ is lonely, too. Her charges are sleep, her subjects are loving but probably put her on a pedestal, and her husband is away fighting a war he'll never win. Either he fights forever at an impasse, or he loses. She's awkward, too.]
You don’t know what to say. This is the most you’ve ever spoken to another person. [One who's spoken back, anyway.] Maybe you've run out of words. [I like that one, too.] “Why?” you finally ask.
Somehow she manages to make her smile wry only using her eyes. She couldn’t get your helmet back from the other prince, she confesses. He really seems to like it.
[If the way Jake's curled around it like a teddy bear she can't pry out of his hands is any indication, that is.]
“A pretend helmet’s not like a book,” you say.
[How do I explain the difference here? It makes a lot of sense to me, and I think it makes a lot of sense to a seven-year-old. Yeah, he likes that helmet, he made it himself, but it isn't real in the way that a book is real. Especially if, to Dirk, books mean ancestors, books mean adulthood.]
She knows. But if it’s a book, you’ll have to come back to return it, and then the two of you can talk about it over tea. Or hot chocolate?
[See? She's awkward. She's new to this, too, and learning. But she wants this, she really does.]
You realize that her prince and princess are sleeping, just like yours.
[And he gets it.]
“Okay,” you tell her, and she ruffles your hair, and you find you don’t even mind the golden brightness when your shades go a little askew.
[I've got a thing for people shaking Dirk's composure up, even if it shouldn't count with him so little and dorky. So yeah, have some cute. And have, in some way, I guess, a physical interpretation of him letting the light of Prospit into his lonely life.
DID I WROTE MORE COMMENTARY THAN THERE IS FIC TO COMMENT ON? Probably.]
Anyway, even though I'd already filled a couple prompts for her--one of which she'd made specifically for me--I saw this one and I was like NO MINE I HAVE TO DO THIS ONE. I know basically everything I've written for Homestuck has been shippy, but I feel like I'm just...a strongly gen-flavored shipper, for the most part. I want everybody to be bros and live in the same house and throw popcorn at one another during movies. I want them to watch lots of movies.
So yeah I saw this gen prompt for Dirk and the White Queen on Prospit and I was seized with an attack of the cutes. Especially since one of my favorites of Lanta's works was Golden Towers, which probably was a big influence on this piece.
And I Will Sing a Lullaby was originally untitled since it was a fairly short bonus round fill, so when I ran across the title box on AO3 I was like, "--oh. Crap. UH." My original thought was to title it "Golden Slumbers" after the Beatles song, but then I was like, "Wait, that sounds too much like Golden Towers." So then I settled for picking a lyric at random from the song. I think it's still a somehow misleading title, but I was in a rush to post it.
Wow, I am a ramblemonster.]
The first time you try for Prospit, you are seven years old and you make yourself an astronaut helmet first.
[I don't know when Dirk first became aware that he was awake, but it really seemed like forever ago. Jade was awake since she was at least four, right? I decided on seven because that's a good age: still really young and liable to do silly things, but also with a more solid set of rules.]
You’ve explored everything there is to see on Derse, sneaky like a ninja, sneaky like your bro must have been. There isn’t really much to see. Purple, purple, purple, and the girl in the other tower. But she never wakes up, no matter how much you talk and jump on her bed and smoosh her face into weird shapes.
[I like to imagine a really straight-faced kid Dirk doing this to Roxy while she smiles through it.]
Even when you think she has to be awake, she’s not. The newspaper explains it one time for you. Sleepwalking.
The newspaper also tells you about Prospit.
They’re heretics there, bad guys and hypocrites. You decide to go there, take down their whole system. The Dersites would like that. The moon will stop feeling like eyes in shadows, and you’ll come out and the people with their hard shells and skittering feet will see how cool you are, and you won’t be alone.
[I don't think any scared kid, no matter how lonely, would run out into the dark of Derse without assessing the situation first. Dirk only had Cal, and whenever he first woke up, he probably stayed in his tower first and sneaked around second until that just was how he operated there.]
--
Your first attempt fails when you hit the Veil. The rocks are flying everywhere, some the size of your head, some the size of Derse’s moon, and you panic and throw your arms over your face and think, noplacelikehome--
Back in your apartment, you curl around Cal and he wraps his noodley arm around you, reminds you how proud he is of you.
[Cal is not my homeboy, but he IS Dirk's, and I respect that.]
--
You try again in a week. There’s no one to tell you it’s okay to be scared but you. And you don’t. [That's probably my favorite line in this piece. Dirk raised himself.] You don’t wear the helmet, but you tuck it under your arm in case you need it.
Three. Two. One. Lifdoff.
[I actually wrote "Blast off" originally and then on my first edit (HSO-->Tumblr), I saw it and said to myself, "WOW, it's not like you to miss a chance to make a dumb obvious reference!
I make a lot of dumb obvious references. See the Wizard of Oz quote a few paragraphs above.]
You go faster this time. You pretend you’re a street-tough maverick with nothing to lose [Oh there's another one.], and if, even at this age, you’re not really sure what the deal with that movie is, it makes you feel better. [Even seven-year-olds can have taste in movies. [Actually, Con Air is pretty fun.]] You played with the bunny in the other girl’s room once. That made you feel better, too, even if you didn’t have your own.
You resolve to get one, someday. [Li'l Seb, on the other hand, is my homeboy.]
In the meantime you blast through space like a stealth missile, a silenced gun. You are small and the Medium is dark and even when the Veil rises before you again, you are exhilarated. You spin around the asteroids and realize that you are invincible and you are fast.
You come through the inside of the band of rocks and hesitate. There’s almost nothing out here. It’s a waiting empty, like a shell. [This is where the alpha kids' planets go, but they haven't been instantiated yet. I mean, I know each planet comes with its own history and stuff, but since they don't show up on the radar thing until the kids get there, who's to say the planets are there in the same sense that Prospit and Derse are?] But in the distance, if you lower your shades a little, you can see a blue glow.
You keep going.
Skaia is bright, and you’re glad you’re wearing your sunglasses because otherwise you would have missed the shining satellite below it. Prospit is brilliant in colors you’ve never really seen, a gold richer than the nine o’clock sun on the ocean. You float among the buildings, and even as a stranger, feel none of the dark watchfulness of Derse.
You keep out of the Prospitians’ sight anyway. They’re wary of your shadow. And you came here to scout them out for war.
[What a dork.]
--
You’re not sure when it occurs to you to see if they have towers on their moon, too, but the second you think it, you’re there. You move stealthily, a smudge against all this radiance.
[I really love how bright Prospit is in canon. It hurts my eyes to look at, but it makes me so happy. Color moods are really important to me, and gold has always been one of my favorites.]
The girl sleeps peacefully in her cozy palace. She’s dark-haired and rosy-cheeked: Snow White outside her book. Another human girl. One more than you’d thought existed.
[Dirk keeps thinking in references. That's all he has to connect him to humanity, with Roxy asleep on Derse and incommunicado on Earth--I imagine Pesterchum isn't really a thing for them at this age. So that's what he has: eBooks and movies and Wikipedia and YouTube.]
You think about kissing her, just to see if she’d wake up and talk to you.
[And of course he's the prince.]
Instead you poke her cheek. [I like the idea of little Dirk being really tactile because he doesn't know any better, and then as he gets older getting really self-conscious about BEING touched because he never has been.] She giggles and snuggles deeper into the covers.
She’s so happy. It weirds you out, and you suddenly feel awful, like a foreign antibody in the planet’s lifestream. You want out and Prospit does, too.
[That was an image I really wanted to convey. Prospit's great, but Dirk is alien and does not belong. I've felt like that, and it's stronger when you're little. There's no place like home.]
You flit out the room in a controlled panic, but then see the other tower.
Where there’s a princess, there’s a prince, right?
You don’t enter his tower, you just crouch on the windowsill. He looks like the girl, dark-haired and ruddy, so foreign [Oh dammit I used that word twice.] to your inverse blacklit moon. He smiles in his sleep and twitches his hands like a dog. Bow wow. Pow pow. You’re not sure what he’s doing. You lean in for a closer look.
[Both Jade and John seemed to be restless sleepers: Jade with her sleepwalking, and then John with his troubled grimaces. Stands to reason Jake might be, too. Especially with the dog motif.]
Someone clears her throat, demure and polite.
You jump but the queen just inclines her head, crinkles her eyes in a mouthless smile. She beckons to you before you can flee.
[HOW DO THEY EAT???]
She’s seen you and you still feel no threat from this place, just the unease of a surprise guest who doesn't know the right language.
You jump back to Earth, anyway, and only realize the next night that you left your helmet on Prospit’s moon.
[Because I'm really taken with how leaving things in the dream rooms influences the dreamers. And I'm self-indulgent and want people to be connected forever and ever and ever. Someone should have warned Dirk about helmets, bro.]
--
The next time you rocket straight to Prospit, only stopping to make sure your princess is tucked in safe and sound. You almost kiss her, remembering your thought about Snow White, but Cal says it’s a bad idea.
[I'm also really taken with the idea of a desperate bond between Dirk and Roxy. They're the only humans left alive, in their world. She would do anything for him. He would do anything for her, in a way he wouldn't for Jane and Jake, I feel. I mean, he'd do anything for any of them, but with Roxy, he knows she won't judge him, won't ever give him up.
I am so uncomfortable with the idea of Cal talking, even if maybe it's in a seven-year-old's head.]
You don’t bring Cal because you’re afraid of leaving him on Prospit and never getting him back. [But Dirk loves him, so I deal.] Then you’d really be alone. Better to face your battle by yourself. You’re a street-tough maverick with nothing to lose.
You bring your brother’s second-best sword instead.
[An off-hand nod to my favorite book in The Chronicles of Narnia, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.]
When you reach Prospit, though, it’s just as you left it; no standing armies, no sentries on the rooftops, no sign that an enemy spy had slipped their radar at all. Your disappointment tingles, jangles against your relief.
[Everyone knows that perverse feeling, while you're waiting for something terrible to happen, of excitement. Right?]
You make a beeline for the royal palace. You are going to find out just how HIGH the White Queen has to BE.
[Dirk. You dork.]
Not high at all, you find out. She’s down on hands and knees, skirts hiked up, still elegant somehow in the curve of her neck and shoulders as she weeds a hydroponic hanging garden.
[I like that phrase, too. "Hydroponic hanging garden." Weird EPCOT technology mixed with Nebuchadnezzar's storied Babylon. That's the kind of off-beat majesty I imagine on Derse and Prospit.]
A mother will do what is best for her children, she tells you, and smiles that crinkly-eyed smile again.
“I came here to kill you,” you say. You wonder how to put an edge in your voice. Real hard-boiled heroes can do it.
[I'm still not sure about the prose there, but someone else liked it, so I guess it's okay. I don't really know how I'd change it besides just cutting it.]
Instead she hands you a pumpkin and asks if you like books.
[Yeah, it's a hydroponic hanging pumpkin patch. Even this White Queen feels some echo of Jade.]
--
Prospit’s king keeps a magnificent library. You think you’ve seen the same arching hall on Derse, but it’s full of weapons, full of armor and spiked gates.
The White Queen drifts through her husband’s books like a curling wave, delicate foam and rhythm. She trails one hand along the shelves. She asks you if you like adventure stories.
[The wave makes me think of LOLAR, which is the first time we hear her "speak." The adventure stories thing is my way of trying to show how she does her best to learn about her prince and princess, even if they're asleep. She's a Mother.]
“I guess,” you say, shrugging. You haven’t sheathed your sword, but then you forgot to bring the scabbard.
She starts to slide a slim volume off the shelf, then changes her mind and takes a massive tome instead, almost as big as Part One of Complacency of the Learned. You accept it impassively--your eyes are only wide behind your shades, where no one can see--and bear up under its weight, even if it’s awkward to support with your sword hand.
[She's trying to show she respects him. I doubt Dirk can actually read CotL this young, but this book's not complicated, just fat. I guess I never said, but I think it's a book of fairy tales.]
The White Queen asks you to tell her if you like that one when you finish it. If you do, she says, and leans down to cup your cheek in a gesture that startles you--if you do, she’ll find another one like it.
[I still don't know if that was moving to physical touch too fast, but WQ is lonely, too. Her charges are sleep, her subjects are loving but probably put her on a pedestal, and her husband is away fighting a war he'll never win. Either he fights forever at an impasse, or he loses. She's awkward, too.]
You don’t know what to say. This is the most you’ve ever spoken to another person. [One who's spoken back, anyway.] Maybe you've run out of words. [I like that one, too.] “Why?” you finally ask.
Somehow she manages to make her smile wry only using her eyes. She couldn’t get your helmet back from the other prince, she confesses. He really seems to like it.
[If the way Jake's curled around it like a teddy bear she can't pry out of his hands is any indication, that is.]
“A pretend helmet’s not like a book,” you say.
[How do I explain the difference here? It makes a lot of sense to me, and I think it makes a lot of sense to a seven-year-old. Yeah, he likes that helmet, he made it himself, but it isn't real in the way that a book is real. Especially if, to Dirk, books mean ancestors, books mean adulthood.]
She knows. But if it’s a book, you’ll have to come back to return it, and then the two of you can talk about it over tea. Or hot chocolate?
[See? She's awkward. She's new to this, too, and learning. But she wants this, she really does.]
You realize that her prince and princess are sleeping, just like yours.
[And he gets it.]
“Okay,” you tell her, and she ruffles your hair, and you find you don’t even mind the golden brightness when your shades go a little askew.
[I've got a thing for people shaking Dirk's composure up, even if it shouldn't count with him so little and dorky. So yeah, have some cute. And have, in some way, I guess, a physical interpretation of him letting the light of Prospit into his lonely life.
DID I WROTE MORE COMMENTARY THAN THERE IS FIC TO COMMENT ON? Probably.]