Chapter 10 of the Aphanes completed

[tocryabout]

Chapter 10, The Wide Unknown Country¹, is finished. Scott! Wittgenstein! Major plot turning point!

(Read from the beginning.)


¹ I always heard that line as "wild and old country", but the official version works even better.

Comments

[to-cry-about.livejournal.com]

Heh. I'm always worrying that Americans are just scratching their heads and wondering what the hell I'm on about. I'd like to avoid some situation where Xavier has to say, "But what exactly is the notwithstanding clause, Dr. Visineau?"

(Although now I'm imagining an X-Men version of Schoolhouse Rock, which might be lame enough that it would cross into awesome.)

Xavier stories often seem to ignore the fact that patients make themselves better, if they have the space for it. I think Charles knows that, but at the same time he wants to control the show and gets upset when people don't progress in the way he thinks they should.

[to-cry-about.livejournal.com]

(altho why they had to feminize her I d'know, perhaps to make the deceit Extra Special Helpless because she was a Gurl! &c).

You could read that in a lot of ways -- I guess I saw it as underscoring the fact that Jason Stryker doesn't really have an identity of his own, a sense of his own body, so he creates his own and steals from others and so on. Or it could be a cunning way of making Xavier put his guard down. I really liked that storyline just because there was so much left unsaid, and so many ways you could look at it.

Is Joel's extreme haircutting perhaps a little reference to the ancient Greek custom of mourning wossname?

Yeah, I was thinking about that when I wrote it. A lot of the ancients (at least in Southern Europe/Middle East/North Africa) had customs of mourning by shaving the head or cutting hair, the Greeks included. Here it's a Biblical reference, specifically to Job (which will come up in the next chapter).

moremoremoremoremoremoremoremore

Sweeeet. :D

[to-cry-about.livejournal.com]

I think I'd have been more surprised if he'd gotten out alive.

Yeah, I didn't believe that scenario either, although I had originally planned to let him live. :-P