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