#breaking up edmund and mary without ruining maria in the process

[whenthegoldrays]

Okay. Further thoughts about the Not-Henry-Crawford story.

Our protagonist is simultaneously in love with Fanny and wants to keep the novel on track, so he wants to get Fanny to her original happy ending while minimizing the damage. There are a few ways to do this, but I’m compelled by the idea of him just trying to Darcy his way through the story, being cold to Fanny on the surface but secretly doing nice things for her, like getting William’s promotion, and maybe later visiting her in Portsmouth. Although if he Darcies too hard, he might actually win Fanny over, and that’s not really what we’re going for.

For a more comedic tone, perhaps he’s only read up to the part where Henry has decided to propose to Fanny, and then he falls into the Austenverse thinking that Henry Crawford is the male lead of Mansfield Park. So he does the nicest things he can think of for Fanny, but none of it is working, and he’s mortified that he’s screwed up the whole story.