![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cofax7 posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
the_comfy_chairI expect everyone in the Atlantis fandom has read ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
auburnnothenna's Legion the Things I Would Give to Oblivion by now (Legion for short). If you haven't, I encourage you to do so: it's a tour de force of storytelling. Although I should warn you: it's not a happy story.
There are a lot of things to talk about in this story: plot, characterization, style, and so forth. I'm going to skip those and focus on the story structure: in particular, the order in which the plot unwinds, and what effect that has on the reader's experience of this particular story.
If you haven't read Legion recently, you may have forgotten that Auburn tells the story in the following order: 10 -- 1 -- 9 -- 2 -- 8 -- 3 -- 7 -- 4 -- 6 -- 5, where 10 is the scene with John and Rodney at Jeannie's barbecue and 5 is the final, climactic scene in the Atlantis gateroom. (I'm simplifying for purposes of discussion, as there are actually far more than 10 scenes in the story, but you get the idea.) It's a complex structure, both lines of narrative spiraling in from opposite directions to end at the moment which is, chronologically, in the center of the story.
Lots of people use flashbacks in narrative, and a lot of stories are told in interesting order, but I don't recall that I've ever seen a story structured in quite this way: one narrative line running forward and the other running backward, and both headed to the same place. (The closest parallel I can think of is Mary Doria Russell's novel The Sparrow. I think the familiarity to The Sparrow is enlightening, but sadly, I don't have time to talk about it in the context of this post.) I've certainly never seen a piece of fanfiction pull off a structure like this quite so successfully.
There are two interwoven elements of storytelling here: suspense (or, the reveal of the actual plot) and the emotional tone, and how they work together. I'll talk about those, and then discuss how they operate to make the story a success.
The Structure of Suspense
If you look at the plot purely chronologically, it's a bit lopsided: all the action happens before John and Rodney return to Earth, and everything after that is just reaction. If Auburn had told this story chronologically, and included all the aftermath, the tension would have dissipated at the halfway mark, as soon as the reader knew John and Rodney survived. (Of course, at that point the reader might decide not to read any further, because they're too traumatized to continue!)
With this structure, after the first four scenes, the reader knows, if unconsciously, that the climax of the story is the dividing point between the Earth-present and the Atlantis-past. The explanation of what happened is not given until the very end, and the question of who survived and how is not answered until the end. This set up simultaneously manipulates the information available to the reader, and keeps them engaged despite their frustration.
Hiding what happened until the very end of the story is a technique that some might find manipulative, because we are in John's head in the Earth scenes, and yet we don't know what he knows. However it works so well here because the story is still moving forward, drawing the reader along, and promising a satisfying reveal, while simultaneously providing enough hints that the savvy reader can guess some of it before it's actual described. The alternating scenes, flipping back and forth between the disintegrating situation on Atlantis and the back-step to Cheyenne Mountain, keeps the reader engaged. The pacing moves smoothly from action to reaction and back again, giving the reader time to breathe and reinforcing that at least someone survived, before getting back into the thick of things in Atlantis.
From a purely technical standpoint, this is masterful storytelling.
The Emotional Narrative
The emotional throughline of the story, in comparison to the chronology, is very direct: the tone of the story starts ominous in the Earth scenes and suspenseful-but-hopeful in the Atlantis scenes, and heads unrelentingly downward to horror. In neither narrative line does the situation ever improve: it simply gets worse. The final scene in the Atlantis gateroom, where they forget the IDC and John is forced to shoot Teyla, in fact negates any hope or cheer found in the Earth-based scenes.
The images of John and Rodney driving down the Pacific coast in a Mustang, wind in their hair, are now retroactively colored with Teyla's blood; the soundtrack of that drive includes the thump of Beckett and Weir's bodies hitting the iris in Cheyenne Mountain. Despite the fact that the final point, chronologically, of the story is the barbecue in the LA sun, the fact is that there is no happy ending.
Not to put too fine a point on it, this story is kind of a downer.
Putting it Together
So, why did the story work?
It's likely that this outcome: the complete disaster of the Atlantis expedition, and the way in which everyone died, would not have made for a successful story unless it was structured in the way that this one was. The two things that I see making this story so successful are the structure, as described above, and the fact that the story is fanfiction.
Going in, the reader knows these characters, and cares about them. Without that investment, I suspect that the content of the story would turn them away. There isn't enough in the story to make me care about John, Rodney, Elizabeth, Teyla, and Zelenka in the story if that's my only experience of them. Most of them are just names. It's my understanding of who they are and what they mean , both independently and to each other, that makes the scenes in the city so powerful. This is not a flaw in the story, to my mind: it's an element inherent in fanfiction that allows the author to reach for emotional resonance that would otherwise take a lot more time and effort to achieve.
To expand on that point: the reader starts the story knowing John and Rodney survived. That is key to the reader's involvement -- the reader doesn't know what else happened, but they know John and Rodney survived. This is built-in reassurance from the author: See, things aren't so bad -- look at John and Rodney at a barbecue! Look at them squabble about sharing food! Sure, there are ominous undertones to the scene, but the reader starts the story from a place of comfort. (Particularly if the reader is a slash fan: her OTP is safe, yay!) They're alive and together. It's only as the story progresses that the reader slowly begins to realize that holy cow, John and Rodney are the only ones who survived! And by that point the reader is too sucked in by the plot to pull away.
Also, and possibly more importantly, because this is fanfiction, the reader can invest themselves fully in a story that is so incredibly harrowing and painful, and then go on. This is fanfiction, and therefore the reader knows that Elizabeth, Zelenka, and Teyla aren't dead. That Atlantis survives, that John and Rodney didn't go through all that, that O'Neill didn't witness the horror of those thumps against the iris.
The reader can close the story and find another one, a happy fluffy story about penguins or Aliens-Made-Us-Have-Sex. Whereas if this were original fiction, or the canon, and this were the outcome, it would require both more upfront work to engage the reader in the characters, but the bleak and horrifying outcome would be less emotionally fulfilling to the potential readership. It would, in fact, alienate the audience, or many of them. That's one of the freeing things about fanfiction.
But to bring it back around to the major point of this essay. I'm structure's bitch, and I'm enthralled by the way that Legion works on several levels to suck the reader into a story that she doesn't want to see happen. We don't want to see them forget the IDC, and starve to death in the chair room, and destroy the Daedalus. But the story is so well designed that we can't help staying with it until the very end, jaws hanging open, as the pieces fall into place and we see the inevitable disaster. In less skilled hands, this story might not have worked: it's too dark, too grim. It wouldn't have had a broad appeal, because the narrative would have been lopsided and the emotional content is so difficult to read. But structured this way, it works fabulously.
***
Note: Yes, I told Auburn I was writing this essay. And yes, I've shared it with her. And no, she had no input into the content.
auburnnothenna's Legion the Things I Would Give to Oblivion by now (Legion for short). If you haven't, I encourage you to do so: it's a tour de force of storytelling. Although I should warn you: it's not a happy story.There are a lot of things to talk about in this story: plot, characterization, style, and so forth. I'm going to skip those and focus on the story structure: in particular, the order in which the plot unwinds, and what effect that has on the reader's experience of this particular story.
If you haven't read Legion recently, you may have forgotten that Auburn tells the story in the following order: 10 -- 1 -- 9 -- 2 -- 8 -- 3 -- 7 -- 4 -- 6 -- 5, where 10 is the scene with John and Rodney at Jeannie's barbecue and 5 is the final, climactic scene in the Atlantis gateroom. (I'm simplifying for purposes of discussion, as there are actually far more than 10 scenes in the story, but you get the idea.) It's a complex structure, both lines of narrative spiraling in from opposite directions to end at the moment which is, chronologically, in the center of the story.
Lots of people use flashbacks in narrative, and a lot of stories are told in interesting order, but I don't recall that I've ever seen a story structured in quite this way: one narrative line running forward and the other running backward, and both headed to the same place. (The closest parallel I can think of is Mary Doria Russell's novel The Sparrow. I think the familiarity to The Sparrow is enlightening, but sadly, I don't have time to talk about it in the context of this post.) I've certainly never seen a piece of fanfiction pull off a structure like this quite so successfully.
There are two interwoven elements of storytelling here: suspense (or, the reveal of the actual plot) and the emotional tone, and how they work together. I'll talk about those, and then discuss how they operate to make the story a success.
The Structure of Suspense
If you look at the plot purely chronologically, it's a bit lopsided: all the action happens before John and Rodney return to Earth, and everything after that is just reaction. If Auburn had told this story chronologically, and included all the aftermath, the tension would have dissipated at the halfway mark, as soon as the reader knew John and Rodney survived. (Of course, at that point the reader might decide not to read any further, because they're too traumatized to continue!)
With this structure, after the first four scenes, the reader knows, if unconsciously, that the climax of the story is the dividing point between the Earth-present and the Atlantis-past. The explanation of what happened is not given until the very end, and the question of who survived and how is not answered until the end. This set up simultaneously manipulates the information available to the reader, and keeps them engaged despite their frustration.
Hiding what happened until the very end of the story is a technique that some might find manipulative, because we are in John's head in the Earth scenes, and yet we don't know what he knows. However it works so well here because the story is still moving forward, drawing the reader along, and promising a satisfying reveal, while simultaneously providing enough hints that the savvy reader can guess some of it before it's actual described. The alternating scenes, flipping back and forth between the disintegrating situation on Atlantis and the back-step to Cheyenne Mountain, keeps the reader engaged. The pacing moves smoothly from action to reaction and back again, giving the reader time to breathe and reinforcing that at least someone survived, before getting back into the thick of things in Atlantis.
From a purely technical standpoint, this is masterful storytelling.
The Emotional Narrative
The emotional throughline of the story, in comparison to the chronology, is very direct: the tone of the story starts ominous in the Earth scenes and suspenseful-but-hopeful in the Atlantis scenes, and heads unrelentingly downward to horror. In neither narrative line does the situation ever improve: it simply gets worse. The final scene in the Atlantis gateroom, where they forget the IDC and John is forced to shoot Teyla, in fact negates any hope or cheer found in the Earth-based scenes.
The images of John and Rodney driving down the Pacific coast in a Mustang, wind in their hair, are now retroactively colored with Teyla's blood; the soundtrack of that drive includes the thump of Beckett and Weir's bodies hitting the iris in Cheyenne Mountain. Despite the fact that the final point, chronologically, of the story is the barbecue in the LA sun, the fact is that there is no happy ending.
Not to put too fine a point on it, this story is kind of a downer.
Putting it Together
So, why did the story work?
It's likely that this outcome: the complete disaster of the Atlantis expedition, and the way in which everyone died, would not have made for a successful story unless it was structured in the way that this one was. The two things that I see making this story so successful are the structure, as described above, and the fact that the story is fanfiction.
Going in, the reader knows these characters, and cares about them. Without that investment, I suspect that the content of the story would turn them away. There isn't enough in the story to make me care about John, Rodney, Elizabeth, Teyla, and Zelenka in the story if that's my only experience of them. Most of them are just names. It's my understanding of who they are and what they mean , both independently and to each other, that makes the scenes in the city so powerful. This is not a flaw in the story, to my mind: it's an element inherent in fanfiction that allows the author to reach for emotional resonance that would otherwise take a lot more time and effort to achieve.
To expand on that point: the reader starts the story knowing John and Rodney survived. That is key to the reader's involvement -- the reader doesn't know what else happened, but they know John and Rodney survived. This is built-in reassurance from the author: See, things aren't so bad -- look at John and Rodney at a barbecue! Look at them squabble about sharing food! Sure, there are ominous undertones to the scene, but the reader starts the story from a place of comfort. (Particularly if the reader is a slash fan: her OTP is safe, yay!) They're alive and together. It's only as the story progresses that the reader slowly begins to realize that holy cow, John and Rodney are the only ones who survived! And by that point the reader is too sucked in by the plot to pull away.
Also, and possibly more importantly, because this is fanfiction, the reader can invest themselves fully in a story that is so incredibly harrowing and painful, and then go on. This is fanfiction, and therefore the reader knows that Elizabeth, Zelenka, and Teyla aren't dead. That Atlantis survives, that John and Rodney didn't go through all that, that O'Neill didn't witness the horror of those thumps against the iris.
The reader can close the story and find another one, a happy fluffy story about penguins or Aliens-Made-Us-Have-Sex. Whereas if this were original fiction, or the canon, and this were the outcome, it would require both more upfront work to engage the reader in the characters, but the bleak and horrifying outcome would be less emotionally fulfilling to the potential readership. It would, in fact, alienate the audience, or many of them. That's one of the freeing things about fanfiction.
But to bring it back around to the major point of this essay. I'm structure's bitch, and I'm enthralled by the way that Legion works on several levels to suck the reader into a story that she doesn't want to see happen. We don't want to see them forget the IDC, and starve to death in the chair room, and destroy the Daedalus. But the story is so well designed that we can't help staying with it until the very end, jaws hanging open, as the pieces fall into place and we see the inevitable disaster. In less skilled hands, this story might not have worked: it's too dark, too grim. It wouldn't have had a broad appeal, because the narrative would have been lopsided and the emotional content is so difficult to read. But structured this way, it works fabulously.
***
Note: Yes, I told Auburn I was writing this essay. And yes, I've shared it with her. And no, she had no input into the content.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-10-03 02:35 am (UTC)Apart from that, I really enjoyed Legion. It was horrifying, but very engaging and I adored the structure, which impressively did not become confusing. It also served to add a greater sense of movement to the story - because there was the constant jump from time period to time period it was more interesting to read, not just from an action point of view but also from a detective point of view, so to speak, as you try to assemble clues and work out how the two halves of the story are related.
The point you made about the strength of fanfic - the ability to have previously developed characters so that you have the freedom to write a more streamlined and focused story - was really interesting. I had a moment of 'Oh, yeah, of course'. And, as you mentioned, knowing you can go and read a story where is is all better is one of the aspects that makes this so satisfying. It's somewhat like riding a rollercoaster - exhilarating and scary, yet you know you'll be safe afterwards and can go and ride on the Ferris Wheel. (Of course, this also allows for a much greater flexibility in fanfic - in essence, a global 'Five things' type fic for the show, only it's more like '5000 things'. Yay fandom.)
no subject
Date: 2005-10-03 04:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-03 03:33 pm (UTC)Legion is one of my favorite Atlantis stories, and the structure definitely added to the effect. I told Auburn, when I first read it, that I felt like the ending was inexorable, like gravity pulling me in faster and faster. I was racing to finish the story, to find out what happened, and everything that happened in the last sequences fell into place like it was fate. Very, very effective storytelling, which also added to my understanding of John and Rodney.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-03 03:19 am (UTC)Check out Happily Ever After by Merry. It's a Once a Thief story with a similar structure. It's I, A, II, B, III, C, etc., so not quite the same, but similar, and I think Merry pulls it off very well.
Interestingly, Legion is probably Auburn's least effective SGA story for me. Because of the structure—and, from that, the knowledge from the outset that John and Rodney were okay—I wasn't nearly as invested in it as I was in The Taste of Apples, for instance.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-03 06:32 am (UTC)And The Taste of Apples was fantastic. I loved the sci-fi plot that she included.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-03 04:14 am (UTC)I've used this device in a story (mine was more 5-1-6-2-7-3-8-4-9-10 in structure) to heighten tension, and I liked how it worked. Stories that use this device often strike me the way dzurlady mentioned it felt to her--like a detective story, where the crime has already happened and now we're drawn into wanting to know who and how and why, searching for clues as we go. It's very engaging, when done well, but can be confusing when it isn't, when the author tries to weave in more than two timelines or jumps seemingly pointlessly around in a way that makes things too hard to follow. If I don't know that's what I'm reading, it might take me a section or two to catch on, even when it's done well; if it's too ridiculously twisty, I'll probably give up on it. This one was faboo.
It is a manipulative device, yes, in the best sense, in that it presents the story in a way that increases my appreciation of it, in the elements of mystery it creates, in the rollercoaster feel, those "take a breath" moments interspersed with the horror, the way it pulls me in with evidence that John and Rodney are okay and then whomps me thoroughly with how untrue that is. This is a kind of manipulation I can get behind, unlike the kill-the-puppy-and-play-sad-music manipulations of some movies (argh, I hate that.) This is crafty. It's terrific storytelling.
I like your observations about the nature of fanfic making the dark and grim and horrific more palatable. I think I'd have thought that wasn't true, that our strong attachment to the characters, going in, would work to make the horrific even more so (which is cool but also hard on people), but, yes, the idea that one can pull back and say, "It's only a story, it's not real, like the show is," *g* or find a palate cleanser afterwards is interesting. And we all appreciate the reduced need for world-building, the ability to jump right into the meat of the story with characters and situations we already know, but maybe that does work especially well when the story is as intense as this one is. Hmmm.
I'd really like to see you compare and contrast the use of alternate structure in this story and in Kaneko's Intersections, another, very different kind of story that also successfully manipulates structure in interesting ways, to different ends. Maybe in another couple of months? *g*
no subject
Date: 2005-10-04 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-04 05:53 pm (UTC)Icarus
no subject
Date: 2007-08-04 06:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-04 09:11 pm (UTC)