DVD Commentary Meme

[mark_asphodel]

Stolen from Ammie on tumblr.

Pick any passage of 500 words or less from any fanfic I’ve written, and stick that selection in a comment. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what’s going on in the character’s heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

And I do mean "any," so feel free to poke at Archanea-fic, Magvel-fic, and crackfic in addition to the Jugdral-centric stuff.  Obviously I ought to remember the more recent scribbles with more clarity and depth but if you go after "Starchild" or "Another Piece of Blue" or whatever I should have something to say.

Comments

[samuraiter]

This might look familiar:

* * * *

Michalis invited her to have dinner in the King's Apartments that night; Melissa knew it was very, very special to get to have dinner in the King's Apartments and she asked the servants to dress her up in her very finest gown. Her clothes wouldn't surprise Michalis, as he'd bought them all for her, but he'd never seen her in them, either, so it would be a little bit of a surprise. She had on a pale-blue gown edged in silver, and her hair was done up like a fine lady's, and she even wore the pendant that was a gift from Grandmother. The pendant was old but it was quite a nice piece and Melissa thought it looked good enough with her new clothes.

The King's Dining Room was all red and gold; even the dishes were gold, or at least silvergilt, and there was a great golden fish spouting wine in the middle of the table. There wasn't anybody else at the table but her and Michalis, King of Macedon, and Melissa had never felt so special in all of her life. Well, almost never, anyway.

Melissa smiled the way Grandmother taught her and showed off her very best manners while the servants walked silently around them and laid course after course of wonderful things before her- little dishes of olives and vegetable fritters, rich soup and colorful salads, squash blossoms stuffed with meat and rice and spices, skewers of roasted fish, venison stew in wine, and on and on and on. Michalis did almost all of the talking and Melissa just nodded her head; one mustn't ever interrupt a king or speak to him without being spoken to, after all. He talked about politics, both inside Macedon and on the mainland of Archanea, and Melissa understood quite a lot of it- probably more than Michalis thought she did, really. But the whole effect was to show what a fine and important man Michalis, King of Macedon, really was, and how the continent was cradled in his hand even if the mainlanders didn't see it yet, and didn't Melissa agree? Wasn't Michalis absolutely instrumental in the victory at the Dragon's Altar? Wouldn't Lord Marth's army have been thwarted by dark powers had Michalis not been there to lend them aid?

Yes, yes, yes. Melissa nodded her agreement to every word, right up to the moment when she was served a dish of rice pudding sprinkled with gold dust and rose petals. She'd figured out her part in the game before they'd even got to the venison stew; just like young Lord Edwin, King Michalis wanted something from her. Only Michalis understood the right way to go about it, and Melissa hoped he would understand why she wasn't going to give him anything more than a smile until he gave her something more substantial than gold dust.

She was, after all, a young lady of breeding and virtue, and as her grandmother's granddaughter, Melissa wouldn't settle for anything less.