Meme, stolen from recessional (again)

[terajk]

Pick any passage of 500 words or less from any fic I’ve written, and comment to this post with that selection. 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.

Comments

[nenena]

This entire fic: http://terajk.dreamwidth.org/83752.html

[terajk]

This story gave me a major case of: "Dear God, why am I writing these two right now?!" I was really worried about breaking them both, as being Stein's weapon has scared Spirit pretty badly on the one hand, but on the other they're pretty good friends. I'm really fond of them both, now.

Oh crap oh crap oh crap.

He and Stein were walking back from lunch when he ran into that pretty little yari Kyoko (seriously, she was really hot) and he asked if he could carry her books and then he got her number and then Stein was just gone.

"Dear God, why am I writing these two right now?!" makes for a good tone. XD

So he runs through the school--oh god, oh god, oh god--checking all the boys' bathrooms

This image--of Spirit running through the school looking for Stein--was the first part of this story that popped into my head.

and praying to all that's good and holy not to find him in a stall carving up his arm with a switchblade. Again.

I love how Soul Eater treats disability as just something that happens. While Spirit is definitely panicking and desperate to keep Stein from hurting himself, seeing him cut himself up is a pretty monotonous horror…

("Holy fuck! What are you doing?!"

"Algebra, senpai.")

…which that Stein takes all the way to "just a thing that happens." I'd thought he was actually writing mathematical equations into his arm, but writing them on the walls/floor in his own blood makes more sense. Either way, algebra is not something to get all yelly and blasphemous over.

"Stein!" he calls now (oh, god, he is the worst weapon ever oh god, oh god, oh god), "I know you're in here! Stein!" He opens up all the stalls,

Spirit, how are you opening locked doors? (D’oh!) I should've just had you bang on them.

and people are shouting, "Pervert!" but he doesn't care, he doesn't care, because Stein could be in here doing things with Sid, a lighter and a corkscrew for all he knew and all he'd have to say for himself is--

"Senpai?"

Stein calling Spirit "senpai" somehow adds a whole extra layer to their relationship for me (I don't know what this layer means, exactly; I'm inclined to think part of it when they're adults is for Stein's own amusement), and I am disappointed beyond all logic that the English dub didn't leave it in. (The same for Crona thinking of Maka as "Usagi-chan.")

He spins around, looks his meister over--no blood, all his fingers look…there--and says, "Stein...Franken...Stein. Where the hell were you?!"

"Walking Marie to class," he says.

And here's where I was really afraid of breaking Stein forever. But as an adult he is protective of Marie in not a creepy Knight in Shining Armor way (i.e. in a way where they're mostly on equal footing and also, she protects him, too).

On the other hand, Ohkubo has this pattern of dude meisters with disabilities being assisted by their weapons, but not a lot of disabled ladies being assisted by dudes. (Happily, he breaks this a bit with Liz and her fear of ghosts/monsters, but it's usually Patti rather than Kid who provides the assistance, even if it's along the lines of: "You'd let our friends die just because you're afraid of monsters? You suck, sis.")

So I wanted to…complicate that a bit more! (Also, I am a huge fan of PWD being all interdependent together.) And while walking Marie to class is a Nice Thing to do, it's a very concrete and practical Nice Thing to do (unlike, say, cheering someone up who is sad) and would also appeal to Stein's love of dissection the human body. ("Wow! Your brain is weird!")

Also, I guess I read Stein as caring about specific people he knows (in his way) instead of humanity in the abstract. And Marie seems to have liked him even when they were in school and has no qualms about asking to stay in his lab, so they were probably friendly as students, even when he was beating up random people, etc.

OH GOD. He grabs Stein by the shoulders and shakes. "What did you do?"

"I walked. Marie. To. Class. We'd have waited for you, but you disappeared. Should we go, then?"

He blinks. "Ah!...Ah!"

As they walk through the halls, Stein says, "Did you know, senpai, that if you didn't have any bacteria in your stomach, it would explode? Cool, huh?"

Stein feeds Spirit a mixture of true science facts and bullshit for his own amusement, because damn did I get this "fact" wrong on, like, four levels of failure.

1) I got it from The Andromeda Strain-- you know, that medical thriller from the '70s? 2) when I tried to look up its accuracy I got nothing at all, but trusted Michael Cricthon because he was an actualfax medical doctor in ways he wasn't an actualfax paleontologist. 3) Fact-checking led me nowhere partly because I misremembered that plot point. The "wonder drug" in question kills not only every bacterium known to man (not just the ones in your stomach), but every virus, fungi, parasite and cancer. And when people stop taking this drug, they die of superinfections no one's seen before (which may or may not include exploding stomachs), as their body's immune systems just stop working. 4) The Andromeda Strain is, like, 40 years old. Even if this fact were true at the time, real life tends to Joss 40-year-old medical facts.

But Stein is smarter than I am; he knows this is nonsense.

"Cool," he says miserably.

Spirit doesn't care if it's nonsense. He's probably not even paying attention.

[nenena]

oh man this is awesome. thank you!!

I agree completely wrt Stein calling Spirit "senpai" just because it amuses him. (Probably because he knows that Spirit hates it.)

Also agree completely with how awesome it is that Stein feels protective of Marie but in a way that he still respects her as his equal in badassery.