Re: FIC: Ascension's Shadow (1/?)

[Alan Rogers <masterofwords@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Whoa....thanks, Dan.  This is a lot more feedback than I'm used to
in one shot, so let me take a minute to answer each part.

At 12:05 AM 8/4/01 -0700, you wrote:
> Alan,
>
> Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.
>
> Didn't you just get through telling me offlist that you didn't have
> anything ready yet?  Even if this is all you have written, that's a
> heck
> of a start.
>
> And are you the same guy who said he couldn't write angst?  Lord,
> I'm
> having agita here, and I'm not even IN this universe.  Apparently,
> it'll
> be just Buffy and Willow against a ridiculous horde of villains
> (and
> I'll count the new Watcher, for the moment).  And this is supposed
> to be
> the lighter version, if that "you don't want to know" signifies
> a tonal
> difference between the two.

Thank you for that...but when I mentioned offlist to you I had nothing
ready, this story was by no means appropriate for this list.  The
story leaned a direction that I truly fear to put into words here,
considering the estimable Mad Hamlet's reaction.

As for angst...I really didn't see any of this as angst! That comes
later.

And for the most part, it's gonna be the Wicca and the Slayer doing
battle with most of the baddies...although Xander plays an important role
in this one...



> Some nicely written stuff here,
> about Xander and his mom and his worry
> she'd been vamped (glad she died, though;  I thought you were
> getting
> uncomfortably Oedipal) and Buffy's visit to Faith and blaming the
> whole
> thing on her failure to save Faith, and being all too familiar with
> the
> hospital, and making the calls when she got the bad news.  I like
> to
> think Buffy made the toughest call first, and I was thinking that's
> Cordelia, but given how badly Willow is hurt by the news, maybe
> that's
> the demon Buffy stares down first, her comfort zone with her friend
> being cancelled out by her pain at having to be the one to hurt
> Willow
> by telling her the news.

*lol* sorry...no Oepidus Rex here; just an emotional moment before
killing someone off.  I needed her for that one-shot scene, and then
she became like the red-shirts on Star Trek; cannon fodder.  (or is
that canon fodder?)

I would really hate to have Xander poke out his eyes, too....


> Now for the quibbles and
> nitpicks:
>
> Quibble #1:  You've got at least three separate divergence
> points
> working here:  Xander's dad shooting up the joint, Wilkins not
> dying,
> and the Council sending out the new guy and kidnapping G/We/C.  I
> was
> trained by years of Marvel Comics to pin my AUs on a single
> divergence,
> and so I'm really psychologically resistant to this.  Maybe it all
> ties
> together somehow in the past?
>
> BTW, I'm not as resistant to things that make no claim to have any
> connection to canon, like snoe's "Stop, Don't Go" over at
> Faithful.

You're right, I'm working off of three separate divergence points. 
Having never been a comic book fan, I don't suppose I've ever really been
trained on the way those work...

But that's always been the fun of AU for me; the rules all change the
moment it becomes AU.  And I'm pretty sure if I tracked it all back
and  plotted it all out on a timeline I could tie it to one
divergence, but where's the fun in that?



> Quibble #2:  Cordy's
> wearing only jeans, sneakers, and a raincoat?  No
> top, no undies?  Kind of sexy, but uncomfortable for the trip to
> the
> airport, much less Britain.  I'd think I'd have spared 3 seconds to
> grab
> a T-shirt.

*blinks*  I thought I had mentioned she had a t-shirt on
too....oops.  Thanks for pointing that out.  Although I have no
objections to a topless Codelia, I hadn't consciously meant to
write her that way...



> Quibble #3:  If Angel
> thought the mayor might still be alive, why did he
> let the good guys disperse?  Not the sort of situation to play a
> lone
> hand, as he's found out and should have known.

Angel is suffering frome some severe blood poisoning; I just barely
hinted at what the blood of a Slayer was doing to him.  You'll find
out later more about WHY he decided to play lone ranger, and it will make
more sense.  But thanks for catching that!



> Nitpick #1:  I don't think
> Xander was actually in the basement then.  In
> "The Freshman" he comes back from his cross-country tour that
> turned
> into a dishwashing job at the infamous "Ladies Night" club in
> Oxnard,
> and says he's living at home and everything's the same "except
> NOW
> [emphasis mine] I live in the basement and pay rent."  So it
> sounds like
> the bachelor basement didn't exist until them.

Hmm...that's what I had thought too, but a source of mine on another ML
told me 



> Nitpick #2:  Wilkins a
> warlock?  I never heard that, never saw him
> practice magic.  I understood that his immortality was because of
> his
> alliance with the demonic forces, of which his Ascension was to be
> the
> climax.

A warlock is a guy who's sold out to demonic forces and gotten powers in
return for it...and besides, the Ascension was successful, and Wilkins is
a Demon Lord trapped in a human's body.

(cultural note:  A warlock is not a male witch; a male witch is
still a witch)


> Nitpick #3, aka THE BIG
> ONE:  "Elizabeth Anne 'Buffy' Summers".  No.
> No.  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, a thousand times NO!  The
> gravestone in
> "The Gift" says "Buffy Anne Summers".  If it
> were Elizabeth Anne it
> might say "Elizabeth Anne" or it might say "Buffy",
> but it wouldn't say
> "Buffy Anne" because nobody is so informal as to use a
> diminuitive and
> simultaneously so formal as to include the middle name.   In
> the South
> people might use two diminuitives (Billy-Bob) but Buffy isn't
> Southern,
> and they're usually quite formal in the cemeteries anyway.  
> When I wrote about this a month ago, someone (whose name, forgive
> me,
> escapes me) wrote in to add that the Birth Certificate also says
> "Buffy", so that's that, although I don't know which episode he
> was
> citing.
>
> I know people do this so they can get cutesy and give Buffy another
> name, like Lizzie or Beth, but stop it, and I quote BuffyFaith in
> "Who
> Are You", "because it's wrong."
>
> You can call her Buffy, you can call her Anne, you can call her
> some
> entirely different name she's adopted for whatever reason you dream
> up,
> but you should not 
> act as if her given name, or its diminuitive, is any of the
> following:
>
> Elizabeth, Elisabeth, Ellie, Elsie, Elle, Ella, Elise, Elisa,
> Elissa,
> Eliza, Elspeth, Lizabeth, Lisabeth, Lisbet, Lise, Lisa, Liz, Liza,
> Lissa, Lizzie, Libby, Beth, Bethie, Betty, Betsy, or Bitsy
>
> Okay, I know I'm being didactic here, but it's annoying (the
> "Elizabeth"
> thing, not me, although maybe me, too).  And besides, 9/10 of the
> reason
> for this post was so I could write out that whole list.  Did I miss
> any?
>
> Well, maybe only 6/10 (I did like the fic, after
> all).

*lol* again, this is place where someone else corrected me, telling me
that during the series, Buffy's first name was referred to as Elizabeth,
and her middle name as Anne, and that Buffy was just a nickname from
somewhere in her past...*sighs* and your correction means that I have
some research to take care of...


> BTW, the HTML was nice with the
> usage of the boldface and Italics.
> There was one paragraph that accidentally repeated itself,
> though.

Thanks for that!  I should be good at the formatting and
presentation stuff; that's my job.

aagh!  which paragraph?


> Keep going, as if I could stop
> you, and I look fearfully forward,

be warned...there is actually quite a bit of this written (not yet
tweaked for the Willow/Buffy 'ship, though) and it goes some pretty
strange places.

~alan, the mad dragon