#yeah originally the Forgotten Vows verse was the AU of another idea

[victorluvsalice]

Helo yes, I just want to say that I found your Forgotten Vows verse again, and also your Secundus verse, because of @thesatiricaldemon 's "Beneath A Broken Sky" and all I have to say is:

... how dare you both, now I have two AU fic ideas that sprouted from them because of inspiration! [Positive] (Actually three, but that one is just an afterthought)

*snrrrk* How very dare we XD But hey, I'm glad that both my fics and SatiricalDemon's have been inspiring to you! Love to know more about what percolating in your head! (And hey, don't dismiss that "afterthought" idea -- my ORIGINAL idea for an Alice: Madness Returns / Corpse Bride crossover after the release of the former was for them to meet after Alice killed Dr. Bumby and Victor had gone through both the "corpse bride" incident and its aftermath, but while I was sorting out that, I had a stray thought of "but what if Victor's parents hadn't believed him and instead sent him to Dr. Bumby to force him to forget the whole thing...and we see where THAT ended up. XD)

[victorluvsalice]

Valice Calendar: Happy "Started Thinking Of Fanfic" Anniversary!

Hi everyone! We're back to acknowledging the final few important dates on the Valice( r) Calendar, and today could be seen as a real doozy -- it's the first date I could find in my old LiveJournal entries where I mentioned wanting to write Victor/Alice fanfic! Again, the entry itself is probably fairly incomprehensible if you weren't already familiar with me and my quirks back then (like talking to myself about my day in the guise of chatting with my fifteen million AU versions of Doc Brown -- yes, the whole "how many fucking AUs do you have" thing was well-established even then), but the gist of it was that I'd just completed NaNoWriMo, and was looking for a new writing project! And because I was already considering how to add versions of Victor and Alice to this LJ RP game I was part of at the time ("Beyond The Rift," where people from other worlds were falling into an alternate Chicago full of magic-users and demons and angels via "rifts" that gave them weird superpowers -- it was a bizarre, if fun, game), I found myself thinking a lot of how I might get them to meet in a way that didn't involve chucking them both into another universe. This was BEFORE Alice: Madness Returns was a thing, remember, so I didn't have "Victor getting chucked off to Dr. Bumby" as a crutch! I ended up just skirting the issue for my first few fanfics (such as the very first one, "Suffocating"), and then came up with "maybe Victor and Alice met as kids once" (leading to "By The Riverside"), and then started doing stuff with Alice having an uncle, Charles, who was a solicitor and thus might be involved with the Van Dorts (this is the origin of the Uncle Charles and Aunt Susan who show up in the Secundus Verse, which itself was prompted by me getting into steampunk and having what I thought was a cool mega-crossover idea for NaNoWriMo one year), and then A:MR came out, and I came up with the "hey, what if Victor got sent to Dr. Bumby because his parents didn't believe him about Emily?" idea (leading to the Forgotten Vows Verse) and then --

Um. Well. We can see how far I've come, can't we? ^^; (Though admittedly, the "fanfic" tag on this tumblr also includes non-Valice fanfics from me (generally gift fics for friends), and fanfics from other people, Valice-related (like "Beneath A Broken Sky") and non-Valice-related.) But yeah -- I think I've gotten over whatever mental hurdles I had before regarding finding a way to get them together for fanfic purposes. XD

[victorluvsalice]

Forgotten Vows Friday: Favorite Moments, Part II

So, today on my favorite moments -- oh, uh, look at that. We have another Friday the 13th today.

Anyone mind if I use the occasion to admit that there's a lot I like about "Triskaidekaphobia?"

Yeah, I know, I know. This is one is easily my darkest story in the verse, given that it’s an account of a few key moments in Victor’s time as Thirteen. But darn it, I think it’s very well-written darkness! I feel like I did a good job with fleshing out Charlie, Jack Splatter, Dr. Bumby, and even Thirteen!Victor in the story. Charlie in particular felt satisfying -- the kid is the only canonically named orphan, he deserves a bit better than just one line about why he’s in Houndsditch. The whole paragraph about Charlie’s relationship with his parents, and how Victor’s stories of the Land of the Dead gives him comfort when thinking about his father’s death. . .it’s sweet, in a sad way. And I liked having someone else trying to help Victor in that house -- even if he doesn’t fully understand what’s happened.

The next two chapters with Splatter and Bumby were also good writing exercises -- I don’t generally get that deep into the heads of my villains, so this was good practice on making sure they seemed real, and to expand upon some of their motivations and quirks. Jack Splatter in particular was interesting, mostly because I originally wrote the story expecting him to just be annoyed by the fact Thirteen!Victor couldn’t respond properly to his threats. Him being so severely creeped out, first by Victor, then by Bumby’s possessiveness, was a surprise, although a bit obvious in retrospect. I mean, wouldn’t you get the willies? So that was fun, for a given value of such.

And, er, as you might expect, I quite like the last chapter. ^^; Seriously, I feel it’s a great look into what kind of person the hollowed-out version of Victor is, and it sets up his briefly coming back to himself upon seeing Alice nicely. Not to mention the whole dream sequence has quite a lot of AU potential in itself, regarding what might have happened if Victor had stayed asleep instead of waking up mid-dream. (I’ve got a pretty thorough fix-it AU idea that I believe I’ve mentioned before, where the dream Alice essentially rehypnotizes him to recognize her as his Mistress, leading to some very weird moments for the real Alice when they reunite. . .)

I suppose while we’re talking about favorite dark moments, I should also mention that I'm sickly proud of Chapter 22 of "Forgetting You" -- aka, the chapter that gave the story its name. (And sort of the whole verse too. . .) I think I really captured just how bad it was for Victor to be broken down by Bumby like that. You know you did a good job when it honest and truly hurt a little to write. Poor Victor, he seriously needed all of the hugs after that. . . The asylum sequence in Chapter 20 of the same story is also a winner by that metric for Alice. That section of the game creeped me out, and I think I did a good job of capturing just how disturbing it is in text form. Playing around with bold and italics to show Alice’s fractured state of mind was fun too. . .and I love her reaction to seeing Victor being dragged in, and how she’s ready to throw down to protect him. It may be angsty, but it’s oh so good.