Assorted ficness

Even though I've had the climax of my current fic ready for a while, it just hasn't felt right. Sunday morning I finally realized what was wrong and how to fix it. The climax went from being seriously ludicrous to seriously beautiful. I just adore it now! I did cringe a bit that I felt I couldn't split it up and had to post its 17-page self (eeek!) all in one gulp. Hopefully it will be so entertaining that people won't notice the length. I also decided that the next chapter, where they have to solve the other of the two mysteries, needed more stuff, which I'm putting into it now.

One thing I really want to do in the New Orleans fic is a scene based on this awesomely creepy scene in a Hardy Boys two-parter called Voodoo Doll. The boys end up at this voodoo ceremony and are tricked into believing that voodoo is killing them, gah. (They're really just being chloroformed.) They wake up laying in open coffins in a cemetery while a band plays When the Saints Go Marching In. The coffins even have their names on them! It's probably my favorite scene in the episode. I'm thinking something similar happens to some of the YGO characters, probably Joey, Tristan, and Bakura. And I must keep the creepy lady calling, "Where are the children?" at the ceremony. For the fic, I think I'll either leave it up in the air as to whether it's really voodoo or I'll say it is, rather than chloroform. But it's still just a knockout tactic meant to seriously scare them. Everyone else is panicking looking for them all night, including the Big Five. Events in the current fic seem to indicate that they will be considered part of the group by the end.

One thing I have to be sure of is to have good voodoo and bad voodoo people, and to emphasize that only corrupt people are going to use it for evil purposes. And I need to restudy the differences between vodun and hoodoo; I suppose most of what I want to do is more hoodoo. I haven't looked that up since I was writing for Mignon Germaine, so probably about seven years or so.

I've also been preparing with atmospheric media. I have a wonderful Nancy Drew game set in New Orleans that I've been enjoying. And I was given $5 in Kindle credit and got several books with it since I have the Kindle app on my Fire Tablet. One was a Nancy Drew parody set in New Orleans.

I am so frustrated with that book. It started out kind of adorable, with the characters really the Nancy Drew characters in everything but names, and even then, the main character is still Nancy (with a surname of Keane, ha ha). And Bess is still Elizabeth, but called Beth. George is called Hannah. I guess that was just a way to keep Hannah Gruen remembered, since she doesn't have a counterpart in the story. Otherwise, it would have made more sense to call George Georgia or something. So anyway, it starts out cute, and definitely is like a Nancy Drew book, just with Nancy's abilities being stretched more to slightly WTH levels. There was some nice New Orleans atmospheric goings-on. And I was slightly amused by turning some tropes on their heads, like instead of the girls meeting strange boys who are really nice, they meet some who aren't and have to flee.

But what I didn't like was that the more I got into the book, the more it seemed to emphasize the naughty side of the city and the characters and often seemed to have passages and adventures that were clearly there for no other reason than to be adult. What's more, even though the book is called The Ghost in the Plantation, they've barely visited the plantation or the ghost. A real Nancy Drew book totally would have that plantation as a main setting! There's really not much voodoo content even though it looked like there might be some, and I'm getting sick of Nancy and other characters taking the Lord's name in vain. Plus, it's mostly devolved into chasing down corporate creeps who are after oil and getting very technical and it feels like it could be set anywhere. It is so aggravating. I only got the thing for the New Orleans setting, and honestly, the only thing I can really take away from it to help my fic is for Lector to warn the kids not to go to Bourbon Street.

It says in the summary that it's written for Baby Boomers who fondly remember the Nancy Drew books. Honestly, if they love the Nancy Drew books so much, chances are that they would like to see a book that's like the Nancy Drew books instead of having all of this unnecessary adult junk thrown in. The great thing about Nancy Drew books is that they're clean!

By contrast, the real Nancy Drew in my game brings everything I wanted for the New Orleans atmosphere: a creepy house, a huge cemetery, a voodoo shop, weird stuff going on.... I am so in love with this game. And also stumped; I'll probably have to get out a walkthrough. I generally have to at some point with these games. I always go as far as I can on my own at first, which may or may not be far depending on the difficulty of the game. (And I'm playing at the easier level, oy.) I'm not very good at puzzle games, but I love them.

Then tonight I watched a really intense Mod Squad episode about a kidnapping and I decided I am still going to do that story about Gansley, but I will probably have it known as a kidnapping outright instead of Portman trying to make the others think Gansley is dead. They'll have to try to get the ransom together and be agonizing over whether the crooks will kill Gansley anyway. And I'll still keep Gansley giving his captors Hell, because of course you know he would. **snerk.** I love him. Although naturally I don't love him being so sadistic with Atem and Yugi in canon; that was disgusting. But it will help with characterization for this fic; he can put that sadistic streak to good use.

I started wondering what would happen if Gansley ever snapped. Considering he's the level-headed one and is almost always calm, it would probably be very bad. I wrote a blurb where he snaps and starts beating Yami Marik with his cane (and I swear it's darker than that description seems to make it sound, lol. I mean, a cane can be a dangerous weapon). Yami Marik is taunting him and brings up all the things the others have endured in these fics and says that maybe he'll hurt them some more. That's when Gansley snaps. Crump finally stops him, worried about him and not Yami Marik, and he and the others try to comfort him.

And I was also thinking, oddly enough, canon redeemed the Big Five years before I ever had the thought of trying. Okay, game canon, not anime canon, but still an official canon. Reshef of Destruction does feature them having apparently crawled back to Seto and he has them working as an acting troupe, putting on shows for kids as their Duel Monster Deckmaster characters. I had thought those people were just random actors, but considering that Crump is specifically identified in the script bothering Tea at one point, it's definitely them. (He's not named and he's still in costume, but from what he says, it's absolutely him. He wants to build Penguin Land and goes on about penguins and numbers.) Even though the animators were too lazy to give them proper human form sprites. It's kind of adorable at the end; Crystal showed me this scene where the kids are all scared about the worldwide danger and Roland is insisting that the Big Five help him calm them down and inspire them, and they get fired up and agree, lol. Aww. So apparently whoever made that game felt that they weren't beyond redemption. I had thought only Lector was really deserving of it, but I like the idea that they all are. One thing that is certainly true is that they haven't committed worse sins than some of the characters who did get redeemed, like Marik and Mai and the bikers and Dartz. I love how one of YGO's main themes is clearly redemption and another is forgiveness. It fits in perfectly with the kinds of stories I love to write.

Of course, one problem I ran into is that I made some of them do things arguably worse than in canon during Static Code Analysis, and had I known I was going to end up falling in love with them and wanting to redeem them, I might not have done some of those things, especially since they didn't go that far in canon. (One could technically argue that Gansley wasn't trying to kill Mokuba, since it was virtual reality and not real; he knew Mokuba would still exist. It was still horrible, though. And we don't know what Nesbitt was going to do with Mokuba in season 3. He definitely went after Seto with kendo, but what with virtual reality it's hard to say what he was going to do.) But Mokuba comments on Marik being able to find redemption even after the abominable things he was trying to do to innocent people, so I'm trying to work with that concept and figure that they, even Nesbitt, can still be redeemed in my verse.

Other interesting things of note: Pegasus came to the Big Five on his own in the original and made them feel like aligning with him was the only way to save KaibaCorp. They planned to dismiss Seto from his position, not to hurt or kill him. Of course, then we have the sticky problem of the game. In the original, they make it, and seemingly without anyone's knowledge, so they were planning it for some time and perhaps intended on trapping Seto in it before Duelist Kingdom happened. In the dub, Seto made it, and it is possible that they panicked and rewrote the ending only after Duelist Kingdom, once they knew Pegasus had lost to Yugi. Since I combine dub and sub and kind of like Seto making the game, I might go with the latter.

I was pondering the other day on who did what with the game in the original. Nesbitt animated it, no doubt. Maybe Crump did character designs. I wonder which one of them mocked Mokuba by making Adina look like him.

Can't recall if I mentioned it, but I think the plushie bases I have are going to be used for other purposes yet again, lol. Of course, I would end up feeling like I wanted Lector to have his friends. The smaller-framed plushie can be Nesbitt and the stockier one can be Gansley. I'll have to go back for more plushies to make Crump and Johnson. I'll need another material for Crump's hair too. Right now I have materials at home to make Gansley and Nesbitt, especially after picking up some fabric last week. Haven't had a chance to work on them yet. I'll probably make them concurrently, like I did with Ginger and Lou.

I did get a picture finished: http://meromeroyui.deviantart.com