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I wrote four fics for Remix Redux/Remix Madness this year:
Noble Little Boxes (The Doomed Italian Remix) (classic Doctor Who), remix of “Sarah/Giuliano” by ParanoidAngel. The original fic’s about Giuliano thinking Sarah has to be noble and wanting to dance with her; my remix Sarah, pondering her travels and Giuliano’s attempts to categorize her.

Dance Like You Mean It (The Flighty Thief Remix) (Highlander: The Raven), remix of “After Nick’s Flight” by keerawa. The original is from Amanda’s watcher’s POV about how she’s coping after certain series events; mine was a simple, quick remix to Amanda’s POV.

Good People Keep You Young (The Sweet Librarian Remix) (RH Plus), remix of “RH Plus Drabble” by Daegaer. The original is about Kiyoi, pondering baking a cake for a local librarian’s retirement; I wrote a “five times” fic out of it, focusing on the relationship between the two over the years.

The One Whose Head Fits On Your Shoulder (The Dental Caries Remix) (Kamen Rider Kabuto), Remix of “Happy Summer Wedding” by lazulisong. In the original, Kagami tries to deal with Tendou wanting to marry him. My remix focuses on the events of one scene and its aftermath for a pair of originally nameless characters.

On a short note, I loved Madness! (And Remix in general.) Remix gives you permission to play around in another fic writer’s sandbox (with some small limitations), just like you do with the original source series. For example, this year’s fic I got to play with two different peoples’ OCs and give them my own backgrounds and stories, which I consider fun.

ETA: I also wanted to once more promote Lazulisong’s wonderful remix of my “Chosen One’s Choice” (Kamen Rider Kabuto). I’d pretty much guessed it was her early on, and was absolutely delighted that she’d drawn me.

Further ETA: defeatedbyabridge kindly did the beta on “Noble Little Boxes”; the other three had no beta.

Notes under the cut.

This year for Remix Redux, I matched on Doctor Who (1963), aka Doctor Who classic (with the possibility that they also/only wrote new series). Now, as most people will quickly realize, I do not write Doctor Who very often; I just figured, hey, I’d probably get Power Rangers, but it wouldn’t kill me to stretch my writing muscles. I grew up on the classic Doctors (one through eight), and I was certainly familiar enough with most of them that I could write fic, so it, Power Rangers, and Kamen Rider Kabuto (an optional fandom) were the ones I volunteered to remix in. As it happened, I got to stretch my writing muscles a bit this year, writing a pair of characters I’d long adored. So, I thought I’d write a little about my remix.

For this year’s fic, I chose a drabble about Sarah and Giuliano from the Doctor Who episode “The Masque of Mandragora”. I had several choices on what to remix; my top other choices were a Sarah Jane Adventures story featuring Ace and a Time Trax fic, but I looked at this fic and said, “You know what? This fic was made for me to remix.” (I’d had a much harder time the previous year; Angel Negra writes much differently than I do, and we focus on different seasons and different pairings, and nothing screamed “remix me!” until I was rereading “Q & A” and said, “You know, this would make a great Cam story.”) This story was literally a drabble, which didn’t leave me a whole lot to go on, but I’d always liked Giuliano, and it was something I could work with. I got my hands on a copy of “Masque of Mandragora” to try to make sure I got my details correct, and started writing. There admittedly wasn’t a whole lot to retain from the original other than the original POV character’s attitude, so I tried to echo it in his dialogue and actions in my story. His desire to dance with Sarah, his view of her intelligence and his (mistaken) assumption that she’s noble come out again in his dialogue, and also a bit where he’s dancing with her before they get captured.

My first start on this fic unfortunately was after the bad guy had been defeated, which made it after the original fic, a sequel, which was a no-no. So I had to go back to the fic, figure out where I wanted to start it, and started it instead as Sarah is getting ready for the dance. The original fic takes place after the masque starts but before he gets a dance in with Sarah, so I neatly (I think) incorporated it into the story. I think it came out the stronger for it, because it fit so well together. My fic is about the boxes we put strangers in as we attempt to fit them into our worldview, which kind of is what got me interested in the original drabble in the first place. Giuliano thinks that Sarah has to be noble because of the traits she displays; he doesn’t have the frame of reference to realize what Sarah and the Doctor are. (As the Discontinuity Guide points out, nobody thinks that the Doctor and Sarah are anything weird.) He wants to dance with her, he wants to court her, because she is who he wants to be with. Sarah is busy trying not to be too awkward, keeping an eye on the people at the Masque, and of course she doesn’t notice that Giuliano is trying to talk to her about her availability because she has other things on her mind. In fact, she doesn’t realize what he is thinking until he finally asks about her married state, at which point she goes “…”. Her only relief is that she’ll soon be gone.

Last year’s remix title was meant to be reminiscent of Cam’s expressed feelings about the others being chosen instead of him, and the subtitle basically says that this is a POV remix about Cam (who is kind of a grumpy genius). This year’s, “Noble Little Boxes (The Doomed Italian Remix)”, came to me before the story was done. It was originally “Pretty Little Boxes”, because of the whole “boxes” theme, but what Giuliano wants to do is place Sarah in a little box that says “noble”, I felt that “Noble Little Boxes” fit better. The subtitle reflects back to the original drabble (where my first remix reflected back to the new POV character) in more than one way; one, because Giuliano felt very much doomed in the original fic, and two, his romance of Sarah isn’t going anywhere. (I always thought that Giuliano/Sarah was a bit one-sided, though I think Sarah certainly liked Giuliano as a person well enough.) I’m hoping nobody sees this as a pairing or ending change, because not only is it canon for her to leave shortly after, but she does accept Giuliano’s invitation to dance, because she does like him.

I didn’t notice this until after I wrote the fic, but if you count the Big Finish audios, Sarah did spend quite a bit of time with Giuliano before she and the Doctor left.

(On a sadder note, between the time I posted the fic and when the archive opened on AO3, Elisabeth Sladen died. Mingled in with the “oh gads, Elisabeth Sladen is dead” was “Did I get her right? Did I do a good job in capturing the character that meant a lot to me growing up?” Because of course, I discovered Doctor Who in my teen years on PBS, which ran classic Who consistently; Sarah Jane was my first companion (well, Sarah and Harry), and Tom Baker was my first Doctor. (I wish I could say “Masque” was my first serial, but that was “Genesis of The Daleks”, if I remember correctly.)

I also wrote three fics for Remix Madness, which is kind of an opt-in free-for-all kind of like Yuletide Madness, except you’re finding stories, not prompts, and you’re writing for yourself, not the original author. This time, I found drabbles by two different authors in two different fandoms, and a longer fic that I remixed a scene out of at the last minute.

The first one, “Dance Like You Mean It (The Flighty Thief Remix)” is a really short piece about Amanda in the aftermath of the Highlander: The Raven episode “Dead on Arrival”. (There’s a very small amount of Highlander: The Raven fans out there, so I was delighted to find fic at all to remix.) I tried to snag this author as a pinch hit, but came in a tad too late, but I think the fic was better for it. It’s a tiny little fic that shares the whole idea of the original fic (which is written from the POV of Amanda’s anonymous Watcher), but it’s Amanda’s grief over losing Nick over what happened in the episode. I chose present tense to emphasize how in the moment Amanda is emotionally, living one day at a time until she recovers from everything that’s happened. She’s guilty about what happened, she wants Nick to come back, and she copes in her own way. Thus the title, which has to do with the fact that Amanda’s dancing to get through things, with the subtitle reflecting the POV change.

The second is “Good People Keep You Young (The Sweet Librarian Remix)”. This was from RH Plus, which has a Yuletide-size fandom. I’m familiar with the TV version, so when I wrote it, I had TV-Kiyoi in my mind. The original was Kiyoi’s musing about his local library and local librarian. My brain immediately turned this into a “five times” fic, specifically the five times the librarian (Kato-san) gave him a book, and the one time he gave one back, except he gave a bunch of books back. Kiyoi seems to me a very nice guy, unless you mess with his boys, and of course he tends to be really sweet to the people he likes and loves. I gave Kato-san a first name (Reiko), a bit of a background, and a lifetime love of learning that I’d think Kiyoi would very much encourage. The second element that came to me was the Esperanto; that particular section of dialogue was written beforehand, and I think I managed to fit it in smoothly. (I also used the old “h-convention” – that is, using “h” after most of the accented letters except for the accented u, because that kept me better in the character’s mindset, even though AO3 handles the unicode letters perfectly well.) The choice of books was fairly random, and I had to keep remembering that Japanese libraries likely stock books in Japanese, and would not likely have large amounts of foreign-language titles. Thus, the translated philosophy book, the novel in French and Japanese, the book on Korean folklore, and (presumably) the French cookbook from the original. The odd one out was the book on the Scottish Battle of Culloden (the book mentioned is a real book), which I didn’t think would be translated, but might end up as a gift item in a library near an American base. (This is one of the books that Kiyoi gives her in the last part, incidentally.) The title comes from something that Kiyoi says; the subtitle signals that the POV character is Kato-san.

The third was “The One Whose Head Fits On Your Shoulder (The Dental Caries Remix)”, for Kamen Rider Kabuto fandom, otherwise known as the remix I totally didn’t expect to write. As I explained in the post I wrote, I ended up with a very persistent plot bunny on the way in to work, and had about 45 minutes to do it between break and lunch. This is one of those times where I’m glad I invested in a smartphone, because I managed to produce and post this despite being at work. (I finished it at lunch and uploaded it to AO3 with very little problem.) I really wanted to name it the “WTF are you doing brain” remix, but the title I gave it fits better. It’s in the POV of the Worm in one scene (minor OCs for the win!), and why he was so protective of his companion, which required giving the two of them backgrounds and personalities. About 45-55 hits later, I realized that the fic was missing a sentence or two, so I added them in. I intended these boys to parallel Tendou and Kagami in ways, especially Toru, who has elements of both Tendou and Kagami in him, and what effect the meeting with Kagami has on their lives/love lives. Kagami is capable of making people realize things, even if he’s oblivious to things himself like with Makoto, and I thought he’d have kind of the same effect with Toru, who will be asking Yoshihiro on a date any time now. Really. Both the title and subtitle in this fic reflect love, with the first part reflecting the two boys in the original fic, and the second part reflecting the fact that this is the kind of fic that can help create cavities.

Crossposted from Ramblings Yet Once More here.