PotO badfic plotbunny

[betweensunandmoon]

So there's this idea I've been kicking around in my head for a few weeks now, which I haven't actually done anything with due to the little voice in my head saying, "This is a very bad idea and you shouldn't do it. It's got nothing in common with canon except the names. If you actually write this and post it online, it will end up being sporked somewhere."

It's a pirate AU, because my brain runs on pepper-jack cheese logic.

Christine is a pirate captain.

Erik is her Angel of Sailing.

Raoul is a naval deserter.

Basically, after her father died (do we know how old Christine was when her father died? I don't think the novel ever mentions it), Christine dressed in boy's clothes and got a job as a cabin boy on a merchant ship. Erik, one of the crew members, figured out she was a girl, but instead of revealing her secret, he took a liking to her and taught her the finer points of sailing. After a while, the ship was attacked by pirates. Erik and Christine were among those who volunteered to join the crew.

Nowadays, Christine is the captain of her own pirate ship, the Angel. (I know 20 is a little young to be a captain, but I can age her and Raoul up a little. And I know the Angel doesn't sound very pirate-y, but hey, Edward Low named one of his ships the Rose Pink. Besides, I can always add "of Death" or something.) Erik is her quartermaster. They've recently picked up a new crew member: Raoul de Chagny, Christine's childhood friend who's traumatized by his days in the navy and the death of his brother.

Here's the part I'm worried about. I came up with this plotline involving the hunt for a lost treasure and a literal ghost ship, which is all very well, but it sounds more like Pirates of the Caribbean than Phantom of the Opera. The canonical love triangle is reduced to a subplot. I know that's bad, which is why I'm having doubts about this whole thing, but part of me still really wants to write this fic.

So, uh...talk me out of it? Encourage me to go ahead and do it? Offer suggestions for improvement?

(In case you're wondering how I came up with Pirate-captain!Christine in the first place...I was reading Phanwank's tags list and came across the tag "white slave!christine." I immediately thought, "And then Christine escaped her master, commandeered a ship with the help of her fellow runaway slaves and a tax dodger, and became the most feared pirate in the Caribbean."

Remember Custer!Raoul, igenlode? Now we have Blood!Christine.

Besides, "Captain Christine Daaé" has a nice ring to it, don't you think?)

Comments

[igenlode]

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

[betweensunandmoon]

I'm planning to have Christine be fourteen when she and Raoul last saw each other, sixteen when her father died, and around twenty-three or twenty-four in the present. Would that work?

Based on what I've read, the captain and the quartermaster pretty much shared day-to-day command, so Erik would help with that. :P

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.

Good!

That's one of my main problems with "Love Upon the Sea," actually. It has Erik and Meg as pirates, Christine as the governor's daughter, Raoul as an admiral, and Jack looking for a mysterious map. All of those elements could make for a very interesting story, but the author insists on sticking to the canon storyline, which doesn't work under these circumstances.

You do know what "white slave" refers to, don't you? ;-p

Unfortunately, I do. That was a horrible fic; I don't know what's wrong with some people. Though thinking of Captain Blood upon seeing that probably means someone needs to take the pirate-related media away from me...
(Seriously, I love that movie. May the badfic writers never learn it exists. Amen.)

[igenlode]

I'm no expert, but twenty-three or four sounds just about plausible-ish, assuming that the crew basically sees Erik as being in command and Christine as his charismatic figurehead puppet :-p
Does the plot absolutely require her to be the captain? It might make just as much sense for some OC to be the captain and Christine simply to be a trusted crew member, along the lines of Annamaria in PoTC. Basically, if she's going to be plausible in command she's got to have a really good reason for other people taking her orders -- like 'can beat any of you in a one-on-one duel' (Mary Sue territory), 'comes up with brilliant schemes for making lots of money', 'knows how to play crew politics in order to convince everybody to back her against more credible authority figures', 'has some kind of magical power supporting her' (again, Mary Sue territory), 'is really good at reading the wind and weather conditions' (what, better than men of forty years' experience?), 'is the blood relative/protegée of some other powerful figure who has to be propitiated' (again, Mary Sue...)
It's like Hollywood producing leading female scientist characters but having them as beautiful thirty-year-old blondes instead of no-nonsense women with no make-up, glasses and grey hair -- the reason why female captains in PoTC fiction are almost always Mary Sues is that it's really difficult to put a lovely young woman into a role normally occupied by unattractive men with lots of practical experience *without* giving her a whole load of overpowered backstory to justify why she has leapfrogged over the heads of everyone else :-(

Not sure how old Captain Blood was supposed to be; he'd completed his medical training (however long *that* took in the seventeenth century) and been in practice for a while before he ever ended up in the West Indies, so not all that youthful.

I like the film a good deal better than Sabatini's novel (which falls into his usual trap of gratuitous anti-intellectualism; brains without brawn equals villainous envy of the handsome, muscular hero), but it's not Flynn's best work -- he was very inexperienced and a bit self-conscious here, and it shows. (And he's completely incapable of pulling off the Irish accent written into the dialogue; they should just have let him play it straight!)

I enjoyed "The Black Swan", "The Crimson Pirate" and "The Pirates of Capri" as well...

[betweensunandmoon]

'comes up with brilliant schemes for making lots of money', 'knows how to play crew politics in order to convince everybody to back her against more credible authority figures'

That's kind of what I was thinking. I have a weakness for characters who maybe aren't the biggest or strongest people around, but make up for it by being clever and resourceful.

What do you think was his best work?

I enjoyed The Crimson Pirate, too; it was hilarious. The Black Swan...eh, not so much. It wasn't a bad movie, not by any means, but I have two main problems with it:

1. I could not like or sympathize with Margaret, no matter how hard I tried. It did not help that I found Jamie genuinely interesting and likable.

2. The plotline. I'm still not sure WTF was up with the ending.

[igenlode]

What I chiefly remember about "The Black Swan" was the Morgan bits (if I'm thinking about the right film!) I love an ambiguous protagonist who comes out on the right side...

Which Flynn film is the best is an almost impossible question ;-) Also, I have a soft spot for some of his work in films that were not, objectively, his best -- "Lilacs in the Spring", for example, which is basically a highlights compilation from Anna Neagle's earlier and more successful films. Flynn's role in the framing story is neither young, handsome nor dashing -- but he is both charismatic and possessed of a moving degree of emotional depth. (It's almost surreal to witness the charm detached from the physical good looks, but it's undoubtedly there; he compels the audience attention in a way that the two young men who are supposed to be the rival romantic leads don't manage.)

"The man can act. One forgets it, beneath the charm and the heroics and the famous sidelong grin."

I think that's the key to all his best performances: a delicacy of touch beneath the flamboyance. His great talent was that he could make the flamboyance look convincing (and by all accounts it wasn't that far off his own youthful bounce and swagger) -- he's a little self-conscious still in "Captain Blood", but by the time he got to "The Charge of the Light Brigade" he comes across as entirely confident. But in addition to being able to laugh and banter and swing a sword, in his best performances he can do the sort of still, infinitesimally shaded stuff that you'd associate with a very different type of actor. (Custer is a pretty good example, as I recall.)

[betweensunandmoon]

Really? Morgan wasn't even in it that much, from what I recall.

But in addition to being able to laugh and banter and swing a sword, in his best performances he can do the sort of still, infinitesimally shaded stuff that you'd associate with a very different type of actor. (Custer is a pretty good example, as I recall.)

*nods*

And since it would be rude to speak of Errol Flynn so long without mentioning a certain person, I'll tell you how he helped achieve something I previously thought was impossible.

I've been a Robin Hood fan since I was a kid. I never liked Marian or the Robin/Marian pairing. I'm not entirely sure why, but it probably stemmed from my main source of Robin Hood lore being Pyle's book, in which Marian is only mentioned twice and never appears. Didn't that prove Robin had no need of a love interest, and that Marian was essentially a useless character? My very jaded attitude toward romance in general didn't help, either. Nothing could make me like Marian or ship the Robin/Marian pairing. Or so I thought.

Fast-forward a few years.

After a chance encounter with The Mark of Zorro, I was poking around on the Internet looking for more swashbucklers, and came across The Adventures of Robin Hood. I'd never heard of anyone in it (save Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone), but as previously mentioned, I love Robin Hood, so I checked it out.

When Robin and Marian met, I remember sighing, mentally bracing myself, and thinking, "Oh, fuck, here it comes..."

"Why, you speak treason!"
"Fluently!"

I was so shocked, I almost fell off the couch. The rest, as they say, is history.

Does Marian still annoy me? Yes. But not out of hatred, out of being spoiled by Olivia de Havilland. I doubt any Marian will ever measure up to hers.

I'm glad they made eight films together. That kind of screen chemistry is not something you see every day.

[igenlode]

My review of Flynn's "Robin Hood" is quoted under the cast notes in the DVD release ;-D
http://www.forgottensouls.com/movies/Robin-Hood-(1938)%7B%7D_0.html

I think my first acquaintance with the story was the Carola Oman retelling, which I now know was based on the various ballads of Robin Hood, although she sets her Robin in the reign of Edward II, which makes more sense in the light of the book's depiction of a 'weak King' who needs the outlaws' help than using the chronology popularised in "Ivanhoe" (as seen in the Flynn film).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Robin-Hood-Aldine-Paperbacks-Carola/dp/046002177X

It starts off as what appears to be the story of a mediaeval knight who has nothing to do with Robin Hood at all -- which, when you're a child who has just plucked the book off the shelf and don't have any idea what to expect of this 'Robin', isn't in any way off-putting, but might puzzle an adult reader who is already well-versed in the legend! Of course, by the end of the first story the narrator has had an encounter with Robin and his merry men and the day has been saved -- not sure this is a story I've ever seen anywhere else (I assume it's a specific ballad), but I was quite taken aback to find that the next version of the legends I encountered started off on a quite different note :-p

Anyway, I'd recommend the book if you ever come across an old paperback reprint, though I don't know now if it's still as good as I remember...

Marian doesn't feature very much in that one either, though she turns up in a couple of the chapters (including the first). I suspect she was a later addition to the corpus of stories, like Lancelot in Arthurian legend. Most children don't have any taste for love-interests anyway.

I think you must be the first person I've ever heard of who recognised Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone as headline actors before encountering Errol Flynn :-P
They're both very well worth watching; both fall under the category of people whose name on a film is likely to arouse my interest for that alone.
But yes, that "You speak treason"/"Fluently" exchange is a classic of its kind; I just wish the period costumes in this production did Olivia de Havilland's beauty a few more favours!

[betweensunandmoon]

I loved your review!

Anyway, I'd recommend the book if you ever come across an old paperback reprint, though I don't know now if it's still as good as I remember...

If I see it, I'll read it.

I think you must be the first person I've ever heard of who recognised Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone as headline actors before encountering Errol Flynn :-P

I'd already seen Claude Rains in Casablanca and Basil Rathbone in the 1940 version of The Mark of Zorro (as I mentioned above), so yeah. :P

And hey, didn't Rains play Erik in the 1943 Phantom movie?

I just wish the period costumes in this production did Olivia de Havilland's beauty a few more favours!

So do I!

[igenlode]

Thanks -- I used to write a lot of very eloquent film reviews, before I went in for fan-fiction (I only have a certain quotient of creativity, I'm afraid, and it's getting channelled elsewhere at the moment). As a result I've been amused to see my comments on otherwise obscure films cropping up on DVD sleeves, in British Film Institute information sheets, and elsewhere on the Web :-D

I believe Claude Rains did play the Phantom, although I haven't seen the film; I thought you were more likely to have come across him in "The Invisible Man" ;-p It was actually his performances in "Notorious" and "The Passionate Friends" that I was thinking of, where he goes a fair way towards stealing the film in unpromising cuckolded husband roles: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041735/reviews-8 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038787/reviews-172

[betweensunandmoon]

Thanks -- I used to write a lot of very eloquent film reviews, before I went in for fan-fiction (I only have a certain quotient of creativity, I'm afraid, and it's getting channelled elsewhere at the moment). As a result I've been amused to see my comments on otherwise obscure films cropping up on DVD sleeves, in British Film Institute information sheets, and elsewhere on the Web :-D

That's awesome!

I haven't seen the 1943 Phantom either, or any of those other movies; like I said, I first saw him in Casablanca. He's a pretty good actor.