Subject: Re: mission
Author:
Posted on: 2014-10-16 08:07:00 UTC
As I said when I commented on the first half, you continue to do an excellent job juggling the sheer bulk of canons and characters that had to appear on-screen in this mission. You show the reader the sheer amount of complication that's intertwined, but still keep the actual mission's story plowing forward through it all. There's one spot where this causes a problem: letting replacement!Ludlow die without being charged, which is stated in the original series to let the killed character's legacy to continue influencing canon. However, I don't see this particular instance to be too much of a problem. Replacement!Ludlow had the least effect on the story compared to the other three Suvians, his characterization was so "generic villain" that he barely resembled the canon Ludlow, and you described a very thorough neuralyzation and disentangling job at the end, which would have wiped any remaining influence from replacement!Ludlow out of the story. Next time, though, be sure to charge OCs that get offed, and preferably do the offing yourself; I know this story got complicated, but that is part of the agents' Duty.
Getting back to that epilogue, you did a good job of communicating the sheer time the agents had to put in to disentangling everything without turning it into a rote list of, "and then they did blah and then they did bleh and then they did bluh." I like that you involved Mr. Dicker in the cover-up process; since that's his canon job, it's reasonable to think he would go along with the neuralyzation process to a certain extent. One more major scene that I feel did warrant inclusion here would have been the healed Violet being reunited with the rest of the Parrs. Actually, bringing up Violet reminds me: I don't understand why she had a missing leg in the first place. If there was a source for that occurring in the badfic, you should include it, because otherwise, it feels rather random, and an out-of-place thing to happen to an Incredibles canon. (Unless I'm just forgetting something that happened in the first half of the mission?)
The way you imitate the original fic's script format is especially creative. Each time you had Falchion get stuck in it, it made sense, whether separated from Rashida and the RA, or when Rashida was knocked out. I did find it rather obnoxious to read, since the way I read is to read every word on the page. However, in this case, that annoyance is actually a plus, as it better showed me Falchion's own feelings when having to deal with it.
I see now that I was too hasty in one comment I made last time. I made the assumption that Rashida, as the more experienced agent, was correct in her mockery of Falchion, but I see now that you were setting her up to overreact in Medical, and then get her comeuppance. I like this; it's a nice change from the cliché of the veteran agent always being the more level-headed and wise one. So sorry for jumping the gun last time.
As I see it, this mission does suffer one major flaw. In your ending author note, you mention that the final chapters were basically a violent gore-fest, and that that's one of the major issues you wanted to address. Unfortunately, your way of addressing it was to show some of the worst such scenes (but I'm primarily talking about replacement!Ludlow's death here) in blocks of full quotes from the fic. At the simplest level, this does show the reader how bad the gore was, but personally, I feel that it also aggrandizes that gore, and puts it on display. I think it would have been far more effective to give just one or two lines, something like, "Another display of gore showered the ground. In the end, the mostly still-recognizable head of not!Ludlow slid down a nearby wall." I somewhat understand why you wanted to show that whole display, since it leads to Rashida's break. However, a short description like the lines above still get across how unrealistic and over-the-top the violence was without making the reader have to read it directly. And quite frankly, I don't feel that I needed to read that, either from a narrative perspective, or from matters of simple taste and comfort. This is especially true of replacement!Ludlow, who was already established as a character replacement, and was pretty much acting like a bad, generic villain; his death simply didn't deserve that level of detail and drama within the mission, because he was ultimately such a non-factor. To further fall from the point you wanted to make about the awfulness of the violence, you wind up partaking in some more all on your own, without the badfic helping at all. I'm talking about UltraViolet's assassination scene. We hardly needed to read about a Tyrannosaurus rex's worth of innards hitting the ground. Certainly describe the explosion being cross-shaped, since that was a clever little brick joke from the earliest portion of the fic. But the reader didn't need to "see" that body. A simple, "and then it blew up," would have sufficed; we're all familiar with explosions. (Well, through media, anyway.) But giving UltraViolet an eerily similar death scene to replacement!Ludlow's only reinforces and vindicates the unnecessary violence from the badfic. (Also, I think it would have made the T. rex head popping out of the bag of holding later a heck of a lot more surprising and funny/less morbid.) The one benefit you did derive from displaying all that gore was that it made the scene in the epilogue, when the Galeforce family had their little reunion, all the more sweet. It gave me the sense that The Incredibles canon had been returned to its family and Disney-oriented roots. It was so sappy, that it felt right at home there. Nonetheless, I still think the mission would be better with less gore, both quoted from the badfic and as part of the mission's actual narration.