#i will ship vernon roche with literally anyone | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bomberqueen17 · 2 years

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reply-replies on ch 7

snipertrifle replied to your post fic update: growing out ch 7

Re:punchlines - one of the things I really like in your fic is how “messy” and organic everything feels. It feels much more like moments in a world than events in a story

ha, yeah, that’s the asthetic I’m going for!! A lot of works of fiction have this very like..... ship in a bottle sort of feeling. I’m thinking like-- Norman Rockwell paintings, right? The ones with crowd scenes? Every single person in the image is reacting to the central event of the painting, everyone is raptly interested in whatever minor drama is unfolding, there is never anyone just passing by or anyone who hasn’t noticed what’s happening yet or anyone just incidental to the composition, every single person in the frame is raptly invested in whatever thing is going on. And I get it, that’s good visual storytelling, but it always annoyed the shit out of me because while his images were extremely realistic, that’s just not ever how the world works. In a crowd scene of 20 people witnessing a boy asking a girl out I can see like five of them being like “aw that’s cute”, sure, but like, most of them would either be like “ew that was such an awkward phase of my life I feel for these kids and it’s gonna be a disaster anyway” or, like, “if I cross the street rn am i gonna get hit by a car” or something. Having twenty people all staring raptly at the young couple in vaguely supportive ways is just sort of bizarre-looking actually.

And I just really like telling stories where not everyone is privy to the Main Protagonist’s Innermost Thoughts and so isn’t totally up on what’s going on and isn’t necessarily on the same page, because they’ve got their own shit. It’s not really possible to tell a story like that in any kind of detail, so it’s mostly just alluding to ongoing offscreen stuff, but I just-- that’s what I find satisfying. And it’s probably why I wind up telling 300k-word stories all the time, LOL.

msilverstar replied to your post fic update: growing out ch 7

Excellent chapter, both Ves being comforting and Roche being melodramatic, I just realized it's like the books he loves

oh gosh yes it IS like those books, sort of.

Well I mean-- think about poor Vernon’s life. He’s grown up kicking around various brothels etc., which is not going to give him much of a great outlook on the concept of romantic/sexual love. He gets as far as his teenage experimentation phase, never really having experienced attraction, and then falls into the orbit of the fucking King, who takes a shine to him and proceeds to have a very bizarre but very sincere love affair with him and sure he means well but there’s literally no ethical and healthy way for an emotionally-stunted ruler of a nation to have any kind of relationship with a teenaged subject of literally zero standing. I explore this a bit with Saskia, that Iorveth is literally worshipping her as a god and yet they’re also fucking; she’s clearly got to be careful about how it works, and also has gone to some lengths to make sure he has other supports in his life. Foltest never really managed that, or even knew he ought to. And the fucking king cheats on him, too, hammering home that Vernon could never really be enough on his own, could never be acknowledged-- how is that, as a huge basis for your relationship? gotta do a number on you-- and then the king fucking dies.

So Vernon has had like. Absolutely no normal romantic interactions in his entire life to date. Nothing he has done has been in any way normal. And he’s spent his whole life reading these lurid novels, and actually some of what he has experienced is probably closer to those novels than most people’s real life.

So i’m just saying, like-- if there’s anyone in the world who has no fucking clue how to behave, it’s Vernon fucking Roche. So I could see how, for him, climbing a castle wall to spy on a love interest is a perfectly reasonable and valid thing to do. I had originally come up with the idea of him climbing the wall just to be sort of cracky, but then I concepted it out a little bit and was like wait, he actually would do that though, and so we have this delightful little treat.

I invite you to contemplate whether anyone else might have also climbed this tower.

#my writing #replying to replies #peace-tied

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