Fic: Duality Chapter 24 (Batman + Superman)

Title: Duality
Fandom: Nolanverse Batman, Superman Returns
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,291
Characters/Pairings: Bruce Wayne, Lex Luthor, Oswald Cobblepot
Previous Part: Chapter 23
Next Part: Chapter 25
Summary: Lex and Bruce have a few things in common.

( We’re men of vision, Bruce. The rules don’t apply to us. How could they? They’re meant for lesser men, yesterday’s men. But because we are ahead of our time, we have to wear masks. I’ve never distrusted a mask. It just means someone is smart enough to wear one. What I worry about is the man who trumpets how he doesn’t need a mask. )

Writing, yet again

Just putting this out there so I can get the meta out of my head, because this was bouncing around all through my walk when, according to my dog, I should've really been thinking "FUCK YEAH! WALK!"

The Love Rack

An old cliche of the screenwriting advice genre, this is the reason why lovers "can't get together, yet they must." The old example is of a gangster who's assigned to bodyguard the don's wife. He can't fall in love with her because she's the don's wife. Yet he must fall in love with her because he's spending so much time guarding her.

A simpler way to categorize that would be, if you're going to show a relationship that's going to take up a lot of your run-time, there should be a reason why the lovers want to get together and a reason why they can't. Neither should just be authorial fiat, there should be some reasons inherent in the characters and in their circumstances.

In my novel, I wanted to have a really good FoeYay relationship. The reason the lovers can't get together is that they're enemies, on opposite sides of a war (no, not like them, Romeo and Juliet's FAMILIES were at war, not them themselves. This is like if Romeo and Tybalt fell in love). And yet, by dint of being rivals, they spend all their time obsessing about each other, trying to figure out each others' plans, fixating on each other... to the point where they can't help being in love.

Most FoeYay relationships seem to fall into two categories. There's the m/m relationship, which mainly consists of friends who become enemies (Xavier/Magneto, Clark/Lex) and then there's the m/f relationship, usually with the female trying to tempt the male. I set out to do the exact opposite of that, with a woman who was just as capable at fighting, but actually somewhat inept at relationships. The only time there'd be a femme fatale offering of sex would be something she slipped into her "come to the Dark Side" speech about how they could be together if he would wise up and embrace her side's philosophy.

So, hopefully it'll end up being very distinctive, because it's set up like this Clark/Chloe, Rachel/Ivy sort of crack pairing, but then it supercedes the main pairing and you're left wondering how can they possibly make this work.

Violence

Obviously a big deal of this kind of pairing is that it's a relationship in which the lovers start out actively trying to kill each other, and end up this John and Aeryn team that can take on the world. There were two main problems there.

1. The villainy. I wanted our girl to be a real villain, because if she weren't that bad, her redemption arc wouldn't have any teeth. However, I also didn't want her to be too evil, because I can't stand it when a character is established as scum of the earth, monstrous, even-his-momma-can't-stand-him evil... then the second season rolls around and the actor is popular, so suddenly he's on the side of angels. So, basically I didn't want her to be Sylarette.

(We also would've accepted Spika and Chuckina Bass.)

It's something I'm still grappling with. In a classic case of plot influencing character influencing plot, she has a code of honor and she really does believe she's doing the right thing in her villainy. But it's wrecking havoc with the last act, which I might elaborate on tomorrow if I can't think of anything better to post.

2. The violence. Well, it's the urban fantasy genre, where Anita Blake can fuck a werewolf while he's a wolf and so on, so boy-girl violence shouldn't raise that many eyebrows, because they're portrayed as equal and they're both superhuman anyway, so there's an element of cartooniness there. It's just that I don't want to glamorize sexual violence. This being sort of an action movie deal, the violence runs the spectrum from stylized to slapstick, and never really goes near American Psycho descriptions of blood and gore.

I toyed with this a little in the third chapter of Before You Let It Go, although there Scott is only trying to get past Barda and she's only trying to restrain him, so it's not the "fight" that's important so much as what they're saying (screaming) to each other. Here, it's very explicit that they're trying to kill each other, yet there's this flirtatious, sexual vibe I'm trying to work in and they even come to look forward to these fights. I even ended one of their fight scenes with them smoking cigars. It makes sense in context, but on a reread it's totally obvious what i did thar.

There was some logistics in figuring it out. The main action sequences are gunfights and car chases and swordfights, with a downplayed emphasis on fistfighting. And that's both because of the connotations and because I wanted to hold something in reserve for a kind of "punch, punch, kiss" later on that would be really emotionally intense and cathartic (which, again, you can see in the build-up and kink of that third chapter. See, I'm not crazy, that's what I'm talking about).

I decided very early on that I didn't want either of the lovers to be sadistic or cruel in their fighting. They would enjoy the sport of fighting and the banter and so forth (think the Master and the Doctor), but they wouldn't rejoice in each others' pain. I scripted one brief bit where the villain is downed, the hero goes in for a kick... and at the last moment he whirls away to help himself to some wine. It's a very lighthearted, adventurous attitude, which runs into some problems of its own, but I'll bore you with that later.

I know that in most cases, saying a villain has a code of honor is basically saying "they're stupid when the plot demands it," but here it's a very pragmatic code of honor that's really more like a line they won't cross. And part of the conflict is actually shying away from that line and being more honorable, more sentimental than it demands.

Hey crackas!

I have been putting this off forever, but to all the Spider-Man fans on my f-list (and lurkers, too!), how do you feel about a live viewing of Spectacular Spider-Man? For those not in the know, it's an unbelievably cool new TAS about Spider-Man from the mind that brought you Gargoyles. It blends comic canon, Ultimate, movies, and tops it off with Number Six from BSG. It is, in short, spider-gasm.

We'd get together at a set time (to be determined), start a group chat on AIM, and watch the first DVD release, Attack of the Lizard. It's about seventy minutes, so you won't have to clear that much time out of your schedule, and it's 100% seriousfic-guaranteed for satisfaction.

So, are you interested, and what time's good for you?