Author notes for Intermission

[brigdh]

This is my original assignment for remix, aka the one everyone heard me complaining about while I was writing it. Not that I didn't have fun writing it, but it's just very long. I mean, it's 8,768 words long! That's a lot of words. I think it's the longest thing I've ever written; at least, it's the longest thing which is both finished and which I still have a copy of. And I did it in essentially a weekend, so go me. I ended up completing it about three hours past the dead; I just barely managed to read over it and edit it once, so it still feels to me like an unfinished second draft. There was some things I'd planned to put in that got cut in the interest of my not having time to write them; I was going to have one more Gaiden scene, for the purpose of showing Konzen and Goku being cute at each other and giving Goku more of a reason to decide to keep the memories, but it didn't make it. Also, it logically should have come after the scene where Izanami offers to take the memories away, and I wasn't sure if the fact that the Gaiden timeline was skipping around chronologically would confuse people. I'm not terribly happy with the last Gaiden scene, by the way. I'd planned to actually write Konzen, Tenpou and Kenren dying, but it was 2am I didn't have the mental abilities to do it and not have it be over-the-top. Instead, you get implications.

I was assigned xsmoonshine, which was pretty neat, since I'd expected the pool of animanga writers to be so small that I'd know my assignee. But since not, it was a great opportunity to read some stories that I hadn't before, though as soon as I started looking at them I realized that I did know them, or at least a few of them. Her phantom pain (YnM, Tsuzuki thinks about Muraki and Hisoka) is amazing, and I've thought so for a long time. Unfortunately, it's a character introspection piece, and I couldn't think of a way to remix it. This is what led to my post asking about what counts as a remix- how could I find the middle ground, for instance, between just repeating exactly what xsmoonshine had already said with different words (and since I like her take on it so much, I'm sure if I had attempted to remix that story, I'd have repeated a lot of the same ideas), or writing an entirely new story with the same basic premise? After all, I'm sure there's a million fics out there that could be described by that summary, but they're not remixes of each other. They're different stories. Of course, mine ended up going so far from her original premise that it's a pretty different story too, so I still haven't really found the balance.

In the comments to that post though, someone mentioned that they were taking what had been a serious story and remixing it as a comedy, which was where I finally got the idea that eventually turned into my story.

The original 'Intermission' is a cute, funny crack!fic about the Sanzo-ikkou spending the night at Baba Yaga's house. But hey, I thought, Baba Yaga is a witch, and the ikkou can be fairly dark themselves; obviously this is the perfect set up for a horror story. At this time, I was picturing it as something very scary, along the lines of The Ring or something, which it didn't turn out to be. Someday I'm going to get around to writing (and finishing) something scary.

I started doing research on Baba Yaga, as I didn't know anything more than the basic details: a house with chicken legs, flies with a mortar and pestle, etc. I turned up a lot of little details that were interesting and made it into the story: her steel teeth, the fence around the house made of children's bones, cannibalism. Her first line, "Are you seeking something, or running away from it?" comes directly from the fairy tale "The Apples of Youth and the Living", but it sounded so perfectly like something a Saiyuki villain would say that I had to use it. One of my favorite things (and which I'm sure no one picked up on, but hey, I amuse myself) is that she has three horsemen- white, red, and black- who embody dawn, the sun, and night respectively. So when everyone keeps mentioning Sanzo and the red horseman look alike? Yeah.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything that lent itself to a plot. The only stories I could find with Baba Yaga as a character were the same two or three plots repeated over and over, and they weren't really conducive to plugging in the ikkou. I did, however, keep turning up references to her as a goddess of death and the Underworld, particularly in regards to rebirth, to discovering new strength in yourself and in your past. Which, again, sounds completely like a Saiyuki villain. How many climactic battles have been sealed with Significant Flashbacks now?

Eventually I gave up on finding anything. I figured that since Journey to the West and Russian mythology were already being thrown together and deformed, why not try throwing in some Japanese death myths too? I stuck a couple of relevant keywords into google and- here's the creepy synchronicity part- wikipedia's page for Journey to the West was one of the first hits.

I didn't have time to read all of the novel, but I skimmed an online edition of it and came up with this passage:

Then the Venerable Immortal Ge, a heavenly teacher, reported, “Your Majesty, the King of Qinguang, one of the ministers of the Underworld, has come with a memorial from the Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha.” A jade girl messenger took the memorial, which the Jade Emperor read through. It ran:

The regions of darkness are the negative part of the Earth. Heaven contains gods while the Earth has devils; Positive and Negative are in a constant cycle. Birds and beasts are born and die; male and female alternate. Life is created and change takes place; male and female are conceived and born; this is the order of nature, and it cannot be changed. Now the evil spirit, the Heaven-born monkey of the Water Curtain Cave on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, is presently giving full rein to his wicked nature, committing murders, and refusing to submit to discipline. He killed the devil messengers of the Ninth Hell with his magic, and he terrified the Ten Benevolent Kings of the Underworld with his power. He made an uproar in the Senluo Palace and crossed some names out by force. He has made the race of monkeys completely uncontrollable, and given eternal life to the macaques. He has annulled the law of transmigration and brought them beyond birth and death. I, impoverished monk that I am, importune the might of Heaven by presenting this memorial. I prostrate myself to beg that Heavenly soldiers be despatched to subdue this fiend, bring the positive and Negative back into order, and give lasting security to the Underworld.

When the Jade Emperor had read this through he ordered, “Let the Lord of Darkness return to the Underworld. We shall send generals to arrest the demon.” The King of Qinguang then bowed till his head touched the floor and took his leave.

And then I had a plot. One which hopefully is not contradicted by any other part of Journey to the West, but someone who's actually read it will have to confirm that. I also had an excuse to make a post about good luck and weird coincidences, in case any of you remember that and wondered what it was about.

Unfortunately, I had a really long plot, and not much time to write it. I like this story, though; I've always wanted to write something that actually had action, and suspense, and action scenes, and multiple plotlines, and now I have! Though, uh, I might have liked more time in which to do it. Or someone to babble incoherently to while I was writing it, but trying to stay anonymous spared you all the worst of my whining. It was a lot of fun to do something different. I had a lot of fun writing the fight scenes, in particular, though I have no idea how well they turned out. I'll have to do that more often.

And it's gen! When do I write gen? However, if you'd like to believe that the ikkou head off to the nearest inn and spend the rest of the day in bed, I fully support any and all combinations you come up with for that. Me, I'm thinking they all get stuck in one room together.

Anyway, I also needed some central Underworld figure for Goku to talk to, which is where Izanami comes in. Her myth is Japanese, and corresponds almost exactly to the Greek Persephone myth, which then gave me the excuse to use other elements from the Greek, like the pomegranate she's eating, Cerberus (the two-headed dog Sanzo, Hakkai and Gojyo kill) and the "don't look back" thing at the end. So, basically this whole story is a big game of "spot what Brigdh stole!" Possibly I've forgotten some of them myself.

Given the length, the lack of pairings, and the many things which typically don't appear in stories of mine, I thought that no one would guess that I'd written it. It turns out that I'm a lot more recognizable than I'd thought, though.


Okay, and now I promise to stop spamming your flist. Maybe I'll post my other remix story tomorrow.