Thank you, I’m very pleased to see that my efforts have pleased you.
If you’ve ever read any of my other stories, you might notice a tendency for me to let a situation explain itself, or at least hold off on offering the explanation till what I believe to be the right moment. (Not all the stories, probably not even most, but it’s definitely been done.) Thus my choosing to show the growing changes in the relationship between Cordelia and Giles, and only then reveal what kicked off the whole shebang. I didn’t even really make a conscious decision to go this route, it was just the one that came naturally to me.
Some of the delay in Cordelia’s character development in canon … whether or not we agree with it, we can’t accuse the showwriters of obliviousness, because they made a choice there, letting her stake her very first vampire only in the closing minutes of her final Buffy episode, and then start up on Angel with the same shallow, unformed personality so she could grow from there. (Similarly, knowing that he also would be moving over to Angel, they asked Alexis Denisof how he wanted Wesley to perform in the graduation battle, to fight respectably or to wimp out; he was the one who chose for Wesley to try and fight, only to be sidelined — clotheslined — within moments.) Obviously, my own veering-away from canon meant Cordelia wouldn’t be relocating to L.A., and canonically Giles had shown enough impatience with her that a quick romp in the sheets with Ripper wouldn’t be enough to spark an actual relationship, story!Cordelia would need to show more, sooner.
Making an unconventional pairing is easy enough, the effort (and fun) comes in showing how it could have come about. It doesn’t even have to work — a dysfunctional, unsuccessful relationship has its own points of interest — just as long as we can see that, yes, these people could have done this given these circumstances.
Thanks again. I enjoy hearing that I’ve done a decent job.
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Date: 2018-07-22 09:01 pm (UTC)If you’ve ever read any of my other stories, you might notice a tendency for me to let a situation explain itself, or at least hold off on offering the explanation till what I believe to be the right moment. (Not all the stories, probably not even most, but it’s definitely been done.) Thus my choosing to show the growing changes in the relationship between Cordelia and Giles, and only then reveal what kicked off the whole shebang. I didn’t even really make a conscious decision to go this route, it was just the one that came naturally to me.
Some of the delay in Cordelia’s character development in canon … whether or not we agree with it, we can’t accuse the showwriters of obliviousness, because they made a choice there, letting her stake her very first vampire only in the closing minutes of her final Buffy episode, and then start up on Angel with the same shallow, unformed personality so she could grow from there. (Similarly, knowing that he also would be moving over to Angel, they asked Alexis Denisof how he wanted Wesley to perform in the graduation battle, to fight respectably or to wimp out; he was the one who chose for Wesley to try and fight, only to be sidelined — clotheslined — within moments.) Obviously, my own veering-away from canon meant Cordelia wouldn’t be relocating to L.A., and canonically Giles had shown enough impatience with her that a quick romp in the sheets with Ripper wouldn’t be enough to spark an actual relationship, story!Cordelia would need to show more, sooner.
Making an unconventional pairing is easy enough, the effort (and fun) comes in showing how it could have come about. It doesn’t even have to work — a dysfunctional, unsuccessful relationship has its own points of interest — just as long as we can see that, yes, these people could have done this given these circumstances.
Thanks again. I enjoy hearing that I’ve done a decent job.