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Fic Rec: "The Substitute" and "Brown Bottles" by Antennapedia
I realize these stories have been out there for a while, but as is so often the case is the huge wilderness of BtVS fan fic, I just found them. I realize that I am a very small blip on the established Giles fic radar, so I don't know who will read this, but I do know that I must write it because there are some aspects of these stories that deserve close and admiring attention. And Antenna deserves to know how much I admire and appreciate the talent apparent in these stories. Not raw talent, but cultivated, exercised, cranky, disciplined, fit, and courageous talent. It takes real work to write like this. It takes real work to write at all -- but to stick with it for as long as it takes to learn to draft, revise, refine, heighten, aim, and launch a fine bit of fiction: well, that's a scarce and wonderful thing.
"The Substitute" is an excellent piece of short fiction in and of itself, independently of it being a stunning piece of fan fiction. This is so very rare in the realm of fan fic that I have to carry on about it a bit. While it also fulfills the very best qualities of fan fic by enriching our understanding of these known characters and a familiar situation (more on that in a moment), it does so while also being a splendidly constructed short story, independently of the known characters and context.
Here is what I mean. A short story must contain a character who experiences a change. Any kind of change. And we must have a definite, deep grasp of that event or process in the very limited space allotted for the author to narrate it. One of the things that makes "The Substitute" so effective is the clarity of the protagonist's voice and his point of view. We can feel him working through these events -- a very tricky thing when they are not in the story themselves -- and we can ease into the particular rhythm of this person's thought and reasoning processes. Antenna has given us unusually intimate access to her protagonist's heart and mind, and the resulting empathy is profound. Some of this she does with crisp, perfectly selected details, such as the contents of Giles' shelves or the ways Xander finds to hold himself that will invite Giles to accept assistance without compromising his privacy or dignity. This continues in "Brown Bottles" with the narrative of the labels, the dates, and the number of pills of each kind that have been taken, a lovely, subtle way to characterize aspects of Giles's personality that are difficult to view directly, rather like faint stars that will reveal themselves better to our peripheral vision than to our direct regard. These are exactly the kinds of things that Xander would notice; this is truly the way that this person navigates through his life.
The cadence of Xander's thoughts gives us an indirect, highly effective characterization of him -- what catches his attention about Giles, the shortcomings he's aware of in himself (and his conscious attempt to address them with whatever information he has at hand), his distinctive brand of close observation, his confusion and anger at the paradoxes of what should be and what actually happened. We know from the allusions to his own upbringing that he's done what many children of alcoholics do: he has learned defensive observation. Know the territory; know the players; know their condition; know your escape route; know when you are more or less likely to be in danger because you are never, ever safe. What is so astonishing about Xander, and one of the most endearing qualities of his character which Nick Brendon captured very well, is that he has nevertheless managed to emerge from his besieged childhood as a loving person. Willow gets a great deal of credit for that in these two stories, and in Antenna's hands, the relationship between the two of them definitely lays the groundwork for what Xander can do for Giles. And the change at the core of her story is one of his astonishing, occasionally clumsy, wonderfully brave growth spurts toward becoming a loving man. In the shorthand of fan fic this is considered an "angst" story, but I have only rarely found any story that actually contains so much hope and courage.
Antenna also deftly conveys Xander's ambivalence and confusion about Buffy's role in the events. We know from the narrative that so much has happened very quickly, yet Xander can only absorb what he actually knows. Also, he can only process the avalanche at a certain rate, and that's very hard to do that when you must also offer succor to other victims. I like the fact that he has Willow there with him, that in sharing what they have each experienced they can grieve and then collect themselves enough to help the third, most significantly wounded, of their party of refugees. And they are refugees. They are infantry in a company whose captain has vanished, leaving them only one another and the sudden silence after battle. Their center of gravity is missing, and Xander is not a person who believes in his own ability to balance without someone to anchor him. It has been Willow, then Buffy, then Giles, then the team. Antenna manages to show us that Xander is not yet mature enough to understand that sometimes the ones who anchor you are themselves torn loose and absorbed by the storm. As a boy, he felt she was invincible and blames her. As the man he is becoming, he realizes that, in Buffy's absence, he can be the one to help Giles, he can continue to function as part of the team. Those are such frightening responsibilities, and Antenna's portrayal of Xander makes his self-doubt abundantly clear. He does not want this job. It is not his job. She should be doing it: dammit where is she? I have never found another story that has made so clear the reasons for the pain that we see in Xander when Buffy returns in the autumn ["Dead Man's Party"]. Antenna's story makes that otherwise annoying episode more logical and appropriate for all the characters, something Joss & Co. quite failed to do.
Another thing that I admire about this story is specific to the difficulties in writing fan fiction where your audience knows The Canon and it is too easy to rely on their memories to make up for gaps in narrative, description, characterization, or dialog. In an odd way, it makes fan fic far more difficult than more conventional fiction, because it is so much harder to spot your omissions, assumptions, or errors. And your audience will forgive you since they just gloss over the hitches and gaps using their own information. It is too easy to fall back onto stereotypies that we associate with each character instead of identifying and applying telling, detailed, narratively rich specifics. In both of these stories, Antenna has managed to stay completely within the boundaries of what Xander himself knows, right then, at that moment. She manages to allude to what happened but which we do not actually know [i.e. that Angel raped Giles] without making it seem fabricated, and she succeeds in the very tricky maneuver of capturing the aftermath without burying us in redundant reports of earlier events. No rehashing: only the new reality in which the world is a different shape because those things happened. In fact, it is by describing this new shape of the world that we learn some of the events that transpired off screen. Using the counselor's pamphlets to inform Xander is so spare and elegant a way to inform us of Giles's anguish. Just as a whisper can convey so much more than a shout, a delicate narrative touch can carry greater emotional weight than more graphic description, and it takes maturity and skill on the part of the author to use that as well as Antenna does in these two stories.
I have no idea how to go about this, but I would like to see these two stories, or "The Substitute" at least, archived at "I'd Like To Test That Theory" [www.wickedsky.com/gileszone] as part of the permanent reference collection for Giles and BtVS writers. I want others learning to use characterization to drive narrative to have such a sterling example. I want others to read this supple, vivid kind of point-of-view. I want others to read what may be the finest canon portrayal of Xander I have ever read.
"The Substitute" is an excellent piece of short fiction in and of itself, independently of it being a stunning piece of fan fiction. This is so very rare in the realm of fan fic that I have to carry on about it a bit. While it also fulfills the very best qualities of fan fic by enriching our understanding of these known characters and a familiar situation (more on that in a moment), it does so while also being a splendidly constructed short story, independently of the known characters and context.
Here is what I mean. A short story must contain a character who experiences a change. Any kind of change. And we must have a definite, deep grasp of that event or process in the very limited space allotted for the author to narrate it. One of the things that makes "The Substitute" so effective is the clarity of the protagonist's voice and his point of view. We can feel him working through these events -- a very tricky thing when they are not in the story themselves -- and we can ease into the particular rhythm of this person's thought and reasoning processes. Antenna has given us unusually intimate access to her protagonist's heart and mind, and the resulting empathy is profound. Some of this she does with crisp, perfectly selected details, such as the contents of Giles' shelves or the ways Xander finds to hold himself that will invite Giles to accept assistance without compromising his privacy or dignity. This continues in "Brown Bottles" with the narrative of the labels, the dates, and the number of pills of each kind that have been taken, a lovely, subtle way to characterize aspects of Giles's personality that are difficult to view directly, rather like faint stars that will reveal themselves better to our peripheral vision than to our direct regard. These are exactly the kinds of things that Xander would notice; this is truly the way that this person navigates through his life.
The cadence of Xander's thoughts gives us an indirect, highly effective characterization of him -- what catches his attention about Giles, the shortcomings he's aware of in himself (and his conscious attempt to address them with whatever information he has at hand), his distinctive brand of close observation, his confusion and anger at the paradoxes of what should be and what actually happened. We know from the allusions to his own upbringing that he's done what many children of alcoholics do: he has learned defensive observation. Know the territory; know the players; know their condition; know your escape route; know when you are more or less likely to be in danger because you are never, ever safe. What is so astonishing about Xander, and one of the most endearing qualities of his character which Nick Brendon captured very well, is that he has nevertheless managed to emerge from his besieged childhood as a loving person. Willow gets a great deal of credit for that in these two stories, and in Antenna's hands, the relationship between the two of them definitely lays the groundwork for what Xander can do for Giles. And the change at the core of her story is one of his astonishing, occasionally clumsy, wonderfully brave growth spurts toward becoming a loving man. In the shorthand of fan fic this is considered an "angst" story, but I have only rarely found any story that actually contains so much hope and courage.
Antenna also deftly conveys Xander's ambivalence and confusion about Buffy's role in the events. We know from the narrative that so much has happened very quickly, yet Xander can only absorb what he actually knows. Also, he can only process the avalanche at a certain rate, and that's very hard to do that when you must also offer succor to other victims. I like the fact that he has Willow there with him, that in sharing what they have each experienced they can grieve and then collect themselves enough to help the third, most significantly wounded, of their party of refugees. And they are refugees. They are infantry in a company whose captain has vanished, leaving them only one another and the sudden silence after battle. Their center of gravity is missing, and Xander is not a person who believes in his own ability to balance without someone to anchor him. It has been Willow, then Buffy, then Giles, then the team. Antenna manages to show us that Xander is not yet mature enough to understand that sometimes the ones who anchor you are themselves torn loose and absorbed by the storm. As a boy, he felt she was invincible and blames her. As the man he is becoming, he realizes that, in Buffy's absence, he can be the one to help Giles, he can continue to function as part of the team. Those are such frightening responsibilities, and Antenna's portrayal of Xander makes his self-doubt abundantly clear. He does not want this job. It is not his job. She should be doing it: dammit where is she? I have never found another story that has made so clear the reasons for the pain that we see in Xander when Buffy returns in the autumn ["Dead Man's Party"]. Antenna's story makes that otherwise annoying episode more logical and appropriate for all the characters, something Joss & Co. quite failed to do.
Another thing that I admire about this story is specific to the difficulties in writing fan fiction where your audience knows The Canon and it is too easy to rely on their memories to make up for gaps in narrative, description, characterization, or dialog. In an odd way, it makes fan fic far more difficult than more conventional fiction, because it is so much harder to spot your omissions, assumptions, or errors. And your audience will forgive you since they just gloss over the hitches and gaps using their own information. It is too easy to fall back onto stereotypies that we associate with each character instead of identifying and applying telling, detailed, narratively rich specifics. In both of these stories, Antenna has managed to stay completely within the boundaries of what Xander himself knows, right then, at that moment. She manages to allude to what happened but which we do not actually know [i.e. that Angel raped Giles] without making it seem fabricated, and she succeeds in the very tricky maneuver of capturing the aftermath without burying us in redundant reports of earlier events. No rehashing: only the new reality in which the world is a different shape because those things happened. In fact, it is by describing this new shape of the world that we learn some of the events that transpired off screen. Using the counselor's pamphlets to inform Xander is so spare and elegant a way to inform us of Giles's anguish. Just as a whisper can convey so much more than a shout, a delicate narrative touch can carry greater emotional weight than more graphic description, and it takes maturity and skill on the part of the author to use that as well as Antenna does in these two stories.
I have no idea how to go about this, but I would like to see these two stories, or "The Substitute" at least, archived at "I'd Like To Test That Theory" [www.wickedsky.com/gileszone] as part of the permanent reference collection for Giles and BtVS writers. I want others learning to use characterization to drive narrative to have such a sterling example. I want others to read this supple, vivid kind of point-of-view. I want others to read what may be the finest canon portrayal of Xander I have ever read.
