We can guess from the novel that Christine was still a teenager when her father died: she and Raoul were no longer children but 'adolescent' when they met again at Perros, and her father was still alive at that point -- after the meeting with Raoul she throws herself into studying music, makes great progress, her father dies, she becomes depressed and eventually enters the Conservatoire. The latter probably doesn't happen before she is seventeen or eighteen (while musical instrument prodigies did enter the Conservatoire at a very young age, there would be no point accepting an immature voice for training in the adult singing repertoire: it's basically a three-year university-level course for musicians). So Christine's father probably died when she was sixteen or seventeen, and she can't have been much younger than fifteen when she fell in love with Raoul, since we know that Raoul was orphaned and went to live with his aunt in Brittany (where he met Christine) at the age of twelve...
Twenty seems *extremely* young to be in command of a pirate ship to me! (Why would all the older crew members pay any attention to anything she said? She'd have to be really spectacularly better than all the other possible candidates for the role... although if she's still trying to pass as a man, 'he' will probably resemble an adolescent rather than a grown adult :-p)
I don't see "the canonical love triangle is reduced to a subplot" as a problem at all; I'd say it's probably a bonus. The original novel isn't really the story of a love triangle in the first place -- it's a mystery/thriller with the love rivalry as a subplot motive to explain the characters' actions. Fan-fiction tends to concentrate entirely on either retlling the canon events over and over again or on pairing the characters off without actually having them *do* anything, so having a story which consists of the protagonists staying in character while actually going out and having adventures sounds like an excellent idea.
(Phantoms of the Past works by having a present-day plot moving forward in parallel to its retelling of canon, for example, while Fraternité has a thriller sequel plot that takes Christine chasing around the Mediterranean...)
You do know what "white slave" refers to, don't you? ;-p
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Date: 2017-05-15 02:09 am (UTC)So Christine's father probably died when she was sixteen or seventeen, and she can't have been much younger than fifteen when she fell in love with Raoul, since we know that Raoul was orphaned and went to live with his aunt in Brittany (where he met Christine) at the age of twelve...
Twenty seems *extremely* young to be in command of a pirate ship to me! (Why would all the older crew members pay any attention to anything she said? She'd have to be really spectacularly better than all the other possible candidates for the role... although if she's still trying to pass as a man, 'he' will probably resemble an adolescent rather than a grown adult :-p)
I don't see "the canonical love triangle is reduced to a subplot" as a problem at all; I'd say it's probably a bonus. The original novel isn't really the story of a love triangle in the first place -- it's a mystery/thriller with the love rivalry as a subplot motive to explain the characters' actions. Fan-fiction tends to concentrate entirely on either retlling the canon events over and over again or on pairing the characters off without actually having them *do* anything, so having a story which consists of the protagonists staying in character while actually going out and having adventures sounds like an excellent idea.
(Phantoms of the Past works by having a present-day plot moving forward in parallel to its retelling of canon, for example, while Fraternité has a thriller sequel plot that takes Christine chasing around the Mediterranean...)
You do know what "white slave" refers to, don't you? ;-p