Part 1 - intriguing.
Part 2 - wow.
[SNIP]
Terry, your comment made more than my day; it brought tears (of joy) to my eyes. Coming from an author whose stellar writing and 3D characters have enraptured some of my reading hours for many years, it means quite a lot.
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I agree with you: at this point, Lois won’t be shaken enough for her to renege on her marriage with Lex, but the seed of doubt is planted… and we all know how it turned out. But she couldn’t escape being haunted by Clark’s ghost... even in Paris! Her subconscious must be trying to tell her something!
“Butterfly” sprang up from several elements:
- Apart from a creepy sociopath, I see Lex as a snob who wanted to show off his power and his money, so his opera outing with Lois had to be in Europe… I also remembered the Bob Wilson staging at the Opéra Bastille very well. So, this was perfect for my plot, because it was so different from Lois’s expectation for opera! (Personally, I adore Bob Wilson’s staging.)
- Lex’s interest for this particular Puccini opera struck me as an interesting psychological insight (after all, Madama Butterfly is a victim of a guiltless and selfish lover, a cruel plot point that would perfectly resonate for Lex). Besides, Lex’s refusal to yield to the Police in “The House of Luthor” was a parallel of the myth of “Don Juan”, as many literary commenters understand it’s a form of suicide caused by hubris. So, the opera thread was obvious for me as a sub-theme. Add to this that the theme of honor-bound suicide (for Butterfly) or metaphorical suicide (the ending of Don Juan) is one that would strongly appeal to Lex. I tried to make that obvious and creepy in their operatic debate, without being too didactic for a reader who isn’t an opera buff. This is meant to plant some seed of disquiet in Lois’s mind.
- Don Juan’s ending (the police is trying to arrest the murderer) also fits “The House of Luthor”: if Lex is a Don Juan-lookalike, Clark is a sort of Don Ottavio, the law abiding and tender fiancé, so despised by Lex in this fic.
- The architecture of the
Opéra Bastille (which I dislike very much) was also a metaphor for the sterility of Lex’s world.
- Setting the story in Paris allowed me to bring Sandrine and her soon-to-be-fiancé into the mix. He became an opera singer because I wanted to introduce Lois to them in this peculiar way in order to introduce the Don Juan theme. (As a matter of fact, the whole fic developed from this scene. I always wanted to have Lois and Sandrine meet.)
- Sandrine’s investigations allowed me to display the international ramifications of LexCorps. Maybe her information will be of importance in Clark’s, Perry’s, Jimmy’s and Jack’s enquiries into Lex’s business. And I had some fun with Sandrine-meets-Clark-as-Superman.
RE: Sandrine.The best a writer can hope is that an original character feels and sounds as alive to the readers as s/he did when s/he developed on the page. Clearly, Sandrine achieved it, and I’m so very grateful.
Although Sandrine isn’t a Mary-Sue (as the only thing I share with her is a love of old movies and of Lewin’s
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman—a terrific movie if you haven’t watched it yet), she really grew on me as she really took a life of her own. I don’t know any documentarian personally, but I’ve read enough interviews and stuff to know that many of them share this trait: they are passionate about their work and they try to act for the common good.
Sandrine’s experiences with friendship during “April Comes He Will” are some that many people can relate with, I’m afraid. She now has a deep-friendship-with-previous-undertones-of-a-huge-crush with Clark and this experience made her mature and grow into her own, as I intended: she now is adult enough to love Stéphane as he is and for whom he is. Love comes in many shapes.
From the start, I wanted Sandrine to have some of the qualities Clark enjoys in Lois; IMHO, he is drawn to strong women, which is one of the side effects of being raised by a Martha Kent! It’s also a testimony of Clark’s goodness and intelligence that he has such a deep impact on the people he meets. Superman isn’t merely “super” because of his powers.
Regarding Sandrine’s “reading” of American body language; don’t forget that she meets a lot of different people in her professional capacity and that her sensitivity as a filmmaker and documentarian has to use that as a tool. One is also supposed to understand between the lines that Clark has told her about Lois, and that Sandrine is astute enough to understand what he doesn’t say. (And she also watched them kiss on TV during Nightfall, along with an audience of several millions people, as she mischievously told Lois!) As for her opinion of Lex, Sandrine doesn’t much like LexArts, and she would not care much about anyone praising poor Madama Butterfly’s suicide and belittling her Stéphane. Add to it that Clark lately wrote to her, even if she didn’t yet wrote back... His letter might have been interesting, to say the least!
I
do plan to write another story including Sandrine, but it’s still in a nebulous shape. Maybe in 2020?
Thanks again for your wonderfully detailed comments.
