Trick or Treat!

[maplemood]

Author reveals are out for trickortreatex  and even though I didn't sign up, I did end up writing a treat in the new fandom of my heart:

Witchwork (Penny Dreadful): “Soft.” The old woman spits it out like a bitter taste. “That soft skin and those soft hands, girl, they’ll not serve you here.” [Missing scenes from Vanessa's apprenticeship with the Cut-Wife of Ballentree Moor.]

Not that I don't love all the Penny Dreadful characters equally, but I imprinted on the Cut-Wife--hard--pretty much from the moment she first showed up, and her relationship with Vanessa is still one of my favorite parts of the entire series. But (who knows why) she's not the most popular character in the fandom, and when I saw a request specifically for her I knew I had to write something. So I did. :) There's also an absolutely huge amount of awesome-sounding fic in the collection that I haven't had the time to read yet, but once this week is over and all my bigger assignments are turned in I'll try to get around to that, and also hopefully write up a rec post. 

Comments

[notasupervillain]

That is achingly beautiful.

[maplemood]

Thank you!!

[notasupervillain]

I often imprint on hard women, or soft women who pretend they're hard, sometimes enough they fool themselves. I am invariably in the minority of the fandom.

I don't know Penny Dreadful, I don't even know if it's a show or a book, but your story makes me think maybe I should know it.

[maplemood]

Yes! I love hard-yet-soft female characters, and Penny Dreadful actually has a couple of them (both of the seems-hard-but-is-really-soft and seems-soft-but-is-really-hard varieties). It's a TV show that ran for three seasons on Showtime, and it's basically a mashup of a bunch of popular Gothic Victorian novels (like Dracula and Frankenstein) mixed with its own original mythology and some really, really wonderful found family dynamics. I just love it to pieces and if my fic convinced you to give it a try I'd be ridiculously happy. :)

[notasupervillain]

It does sound lovely. I am so behind on watching TV but I will definitely add it to the list. Your fic was brilliant.

Also, you've just helped me un-riddle my newest character. I've had trouble diffentiating her voice from the character who would fit into your metric as hard, or hard-but-soft. But Skyler needs to be soft-but-hard to survive. I don't know what she sounds like yet, but at least I have words for the difference.

[maplemood]

Hey, I'm glad I could help! But yeah, it's sometimes a kind of subtle difference, but it's helped me make sense of characters before, because there is a difference.

[notasupervillain]

Weaponized femininity. I'd thought a lot about how women can weaponize sexuality, but I hadn't properly considered how they'd weaponize frills and nude lipstick.

My other problem is it's easy to imaging how a woman like that interacts with men, and with other women she's competing with, which is almost all women. But when she interacts with my hard woman, Aisha is securely occupying a male role, and I don't know how a woman like Skyler reacts to that.

(Hard or hard-but-soft, depending on which Reader you ask. I don't get a vote.)