Starkiller: Fusion Breakdown
Apr. 11th, 2019 06:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ktulaIntro:
Well, here we are again. Back for another series of blog posts/director’s notes/however you’d like to phrase this, and also back in the Come As You Are au, which is the site of my very first longfic! It’s possible this is the first piece in the AU you’ve read, and if so, that’s totally cool—the pieces are meant to be stand-alone, so you can start wherever, and then read whatever you like. Come As You Are is my most self-indulgent kylux fic—it’s a dance/ballet/burlesque/BDSM/sex work fusion, that deals rather intensely with themes of mental illness, recovery arcs, overcoming trauma, and being an authentic person/pursuing acceptance and all that fun kind of stuff.
I’ve refined my tagging strategy since writing Foxtrot in the first place, so you’ll note a bunch of tags on the piece that are applicable to the piece as a whole, but specific chapter warnings will always be at the bottom of the chapter notes. As always, if you have concerns or questions or comments or anything, you can reach out to me here, on Twitter, on Curious Cat, or anything of the like, and I will give you more information, redact triggers if I can*, and all that type of thing.
*(I know that sounds bizarrely vague—but let me put it this way, I can give you a version of Foxtrot with the lead-up to some specific off-screen self-destructive behaviour that Ben is involved in redacted out, because that’s a specific event in the story. I cannot give you a version of Foxtrot in which Ben does not have mental health issues, because that is the story.)
I generally use these behind-the-scenes entries to both deconstruct the things that happened in the chapter that was just posted, as well as talk about themes for the work, why I made the choices I made, include Easter eggs that couldn’t make it into the text, talk about some trivia, all that kind of stuff. If you have any questions about any of this stuff, feel free to reach out, and I can elaborate on my thought process. For Dollars to Donuts, I broke the blog entries down into technical considerations, and story considerations—and I’m going to do that here too, because I like the format.
With all that wanking aside, on with the show!
Chapter Intro:
Technical Considerations:
Point of View: The entirely of Starkiller started out in Hux’s POV. I wrote about 50k of the story, and then I set it down for two years while I worked on other projects. When I came back to it, my conceptualization of Hux’s mindset had altered rather dramatically, and I was headcanoning a much messier Hux than the one I had originally written. A Hux so messy, in fact, that I didn’t particularly want to sit in his head for the first chunk of the story. And so, I started considering who else might want a POV chapter, and which stories we don’t really get to see otherwise. Finn was one of the first that I landed on—I think his backstory is really crucial to the story, but without being in his head, we don’t really have access to it. I knew I wanted to write about Finn joining up with the rest of the “dark side”, but I couldn’t quite figure out how I wanted him to do that.
And then, I realized that I hadn’t at all referenced FN-2187 in the verse, and the moment I started thinking about how the number 2187 might be represented, I knew the story that I wanted to tell. So I guess that’s how the technical details sometimes link right into the story details…sometimes you can’t really separate the two things out.
Story Arc: Finn’s story arc is the most stand-alone of the three Starkiller chapters. For that reason, I considered, briefly, separating it out—but since Finn’s arc is continued through chapters two and three, as long as you squint, I opted to leave them as a unit, and figured I would just quietly acknowledge that the Finn chapter could also stand alone. So here I am, quietly acknowledging it. I considered making the Phasma and Mitaka chapters stand alone a little more strongly than what they do now (ie, not at all)—but that’s not really where their character arcs are going, and Finn deserves to have his moment. So here he is, having his moment.
Titles: The piece, as a whole, has always had Starkiller in the title. There was a brief moment where it was called “The Rise and Fall of the Starkiller Project”, and then a briefer moment where it was called “The Life Cycle of a Star”, but that was a little long even for me, so I shortened it up. Usually I don’t have a pattern for my chapter names—usually, I just pick them based on whims for my longfics, and I frequently don’t name the chapters for my shorter fics at all, but this time, I went and sat with a Wikipedia article about how stars are formed and die, and then I based the chapter names on that. So, for various reasons, Finn’s chapter is named Fusion, which is one of the initial stages of the birth of a star. It’s important not just for its link into Starkiller, but because Starkiller the project, and Finn the dancer, are more or less coming into the public eye at the same time.
Dance Terminology: Although Finn and I share the same tendency of counting our physical labour/undesirable tasks off in counts of eight to avoid having to think about it for any longer than necessary (and to fill up space in our brains so that our brains don’t convince us that we can’t possibly bike up the hill), I absolutely cannot take credit for the dance terminology used in this chapter. That’s all Deadsy, who has tons of dance experience, and was able to fill in every single gap I left her with appropriate dance terminology. I’m really pleased with how the piece reads—and I’m also really pleased I didn’t have to do the research myself, because I would have produced something bad.
Story Considerations:
Cameos: That’s right, I jammed an un-tagged Han Solo cameo right in there. I try to minimize my use of original characters when I can—Darius being an exception—and when I was looking around for who might be selling Finn his new identification, I figured Han was a really great option to slot in there, especially because I—so far—hadn’t been specific about what, exactly, it was that Han Solo did. There was an earlier version of the story where Chewie was in here too—but it wasn’t working the way I wanted it to work, so I briefly separated Han and Chewie, and let Han fuck up this delivery all on his own. (I mean, we all know that Chewie never would have tolerated this kind of mess.) I’m particular fond of Han’s soft spot for dancers, here—especially considering that, at this point, Han is significantly estranged from his dancer son, but wants to bond with Finn over it anyway. Also, Han should fix the lettering on his truck—but, then, if that’s how late he’s gonna be for deliveries, maybe he should just become more and more anonymous.
The Audition: Fun fact! Deadsy pulled the dance sequence from A Chorus Line--specifically, it's this sequence right here. I headcanon that the auditions here are a little less populated than the auditions in that movie—or, at least, Black Sun ends up taking fewer dancers—but, yeah, it’s a legitimate danceable sequence, that you might be expected to demonstrate at an audition. Also, it’s implied, but I’ll make it explicit here, that Finn hasn’t had the benefit of regular dance lessons in a studio before, and is cruising on a background cobbled together from YouTube videos, books, and hopefully the occasional in-person workshop he’s been able to attend. So he’s very lucky that he has his own talent to rely on, and I think he has a lot of empathy once he sees that Slip doesn’t have that, and is trying to coast on the training he’s had, but is also quite clearly trying to punch above his weight. (I have no idea what happened in the interview room that Slip made it in—but, for all we know, Hux was just coasting on hubris and making unilateral decisions by that point. The end result is that I get to explore the canon dynamic between Slip and Finn in future chapters, which is what I wanted.)
Stage Manager: Stage manager is not an administrative position. Stage managers will make or break entire shows. I once had the pleasure of working with a stage manager so good that I wanted to hire them to stage manage my entire life, because I could instantly see how much better everything would be with them looking after the behind-the-scenes work. So, yeah—Slip should shape up his attitude there, and everyone would be correct to impress Mitaka, because Mitaka can make magic happen if he’s inclined to do so.
The Mythos of Armitage Hux: Ah, Hux was so fun to write in this. Is he manipulating the hell out of Darius? Yes. Is he doing a lot of cocaine? Also yes. Is he passing his cocaine off to Mitaka to hold and/or do himself later? Also yes. And yet, Finn is still like “I get to see Armitage Hux in person! Yay!”, so apparently those online videos of Hux are really something.
Isolation tactics: And, then, just as a final bit of analysis, I want to draw your attention to this bit here:
“Well, well, well,” Phasma says, leaning against the door and grinning at them wolfishly. “Fast friends already, hmm?”
“Ma’am,” Finn says automatically, straightening and putting his hands behind his back.
She grins at him, but there’s no humour or emotion in it.
This kind of behaviour is the equivalent of Finn rolling over and showing his stomach to a wolf. Just by virtue of immediately ceasing to joke around with the other dancers, and snapping to attention like he does, Finn demonstrates to Phasma that he’ll submit to authority, and that the bonds he is developing with the other dancers aren’t valued as much as he values approval by an authority figure. There’s a ton of different reasons why that could be—and since Finn’s backstory isn’t canonized any further than this at this point, any of those options might be true—but the takeaway is that Phasma is absolutely going to exploit this, given the opportunity, so watch for that in future updates.
So, that's about all for the first chapter here! The second chapter will be up next week, and, as always, I'm always happy to chat about the piece, or hear what you have to say about it.
