Hi Crash, hi everyone else who might be reading this
I thought I'd go public with this bit of feedback, because it contains a few things I'd like to read other people's opinion on. Hopefully that's okay with you Crash
. Also, I guess it goes without saying that I very much enjoyed 'The Changeling' and 'The Chrysalis' . Capturing and intense, with enough substance and steam behind them to drag a usually NC-17 avoidant, drama and adventure preferring reader like me through the shippier and more erotically charged parts.
Actually, I was delighted when I discovered there was a sequel, since finishing 'Chrysalis' had left me with a strange feeling of 'Hey wait, that can't be all. There's got to be more to John's (literal as well as metaphorical) descent into darkness!'. Reading the respective wingnuts about how both stories came into being was fascinating. Thank you so much, Crash, for going public with all that behind-the-scenes stuff!
A lot of what you've said about writing 'Changeling' and 'Chrysalis' made me think about narrative patterns, themes and also something I can only vaguely describe as the 'problem of Genre lit'. (My brain feels a bit mushy at the moment, 'cause I'm sitting here with the headcold from hell.) Oh, and maybe I should clarify: by 'problem' I of course don't mean there's anything wrong. It's just that I felt the change from the very dark, in a way very grand-scale universal literary themes of 'Changeling's opening chapters, to the very microcosm of John/Aeryn in 'Chrysalis' very distincly.
To phrase it boldly, a lot of what John undergoes in 'Changeling' (the entire setting, being stripped of his humanity, the starvation , his fight against the faceless oh so very alien charrids) seems to touch upon stuff that's straight from Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'/Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now'. I even wondered whether John himself might realize this and eventually refer to it. Well, maybe not to Conrad, but at least to 'Apocalypse'...
John's recovery in 'Chrysalis' on the other hand struck me as something entirely different, rooted in the time-proven structures of Hurt/Homfort and NC-17 fanfic, pushing all the right buttons. (While NC-17 might not exactly be my cup of tea on most days, I'm a sucker for H/C and loving it to bits and pieces. And having these two very different things, the grand scale and the more 'fanficcy' one combined, the first one going over into the latter while keeping the darker undertones, was interesting.
I'd be glad to know what other people are thinking about this.
Oh, and a final observation going back to what you wrote in the wingnuts for 'Changeling':
Sleeper, Hunter, Explorer, and the Idiot. I was going to take that part out. I cannot
remember why I was going to do that. I think it had to do with the levity, which I felt might be
inappropriate, or because I thought it might be more devastating if he was defining himself in more
animalistic terms. In any case, PKLibrarian told me that it was better with those parts, and I
wound up putting them back in. She was right, of course. I especially enjoy the idea that John
would refer to himself as the Idiot. Aside from being in character, it illustrates that there is some
vestige of John Crichton still alive inside this vengeful, vicious feral being. I'd very much like to hug PKLibrarian for convincing you to keep that part in, because I loved Johns way of referring to himself that way. To me it made perfect sense on both the immediate story and also the meta level. Not only is John reducing himself to the very (and somewhat archaic) core elements of his personality. Replace 'Idiot' with 'Fool' and you are dealing with a nice quartet of literary archetypes.
Bimo
