⭐ i would love to hear about your meme selection for alectopause the ninth (and if any got left on the cutting room floor)!
HIIIII EM i love this ask!!!! here's a quick and dirty tour:
this is VERY SPECIFICALLY structured after a line from an early episode of sword art online abridged. i could put the reference here but it is so minuscule of a joke that it really wouldn't scan. it was done for no one but myself. sao my beloathed but saoa my beloved
harrow's "let me explain - no, there is too much. let me sum up" is a line taken directly from the princess bride, both because it's a funny joke and because william goldman was a genius and it's a nifty little writing gag. gestures broadly to the audience. we don't have time to cover everything you've already seen. shit's happened. you understand. we're moving on
a paraphrase of this iconic and perennial classic:
kiriona calling the river "the ghost superhighway" is meant to evoke the early internet being termed "the information superhighway" (is the river just the ghost internet? vote now on your phones)
"parasite in chief in his idiot sacristy" is a reference to that chrisecc post about the queen, which i've been itching to use in reference to silas forever and ever (there's a version of it in my tlt fashion au too that i wrote like three years ago and which may never see the light of day)
i'm counting literary references as memes because they are, ultimately, memetic: pulling in a wrinkle in time felt obvious due to the canon nature of river travel reflecting the eponymous wrinkle. i read awit when i was like 12 and it changed me. i wanted to be a theoretical physicist for so long BECAUSE of that book (and hitchhiker's guide LOL)
i think i've put at least one shakespeare reference in every tlt fic i've written, but in my defense tamsyn has done the same with the books. 'hell is empty and all the devils are here' is so deliciously apt for colum that i couldn't not include it (it was almost the title of no exit before i decided on the sartre reference)
ianthe calling pal "that smug motherfucker" is after john turturro's delivery in severance. because i am hashtag #severed
ianthe quipping that she should survive "at least until chapter 26" is an in-joke for the aptn writers and organizers: the outline for the event mentioned ianthe specifically in the chapter 26 prompt, and one of the rules for the event warned against killing off major characters if they were supposed to show up later. @carys-the-ninth gave the specific example "no killing ianthe before chapter 26." if anyone was going to get meta with it, it was always going to be the character who called the people she doesn't give a shit about extras IN THE CANON TEXT. she's awful <3
those are most of the major ones! i don't think there were any left on the cutting room floor - most of the edits to this chapter were additive, since i worked on the outline for it very slowly over the course of a month and then sat down one saturday and wrote the whole thing in like an eight-hour session the day before the deadline lol. there just wasn't much to cut!
if this has intrigued you, you can read my chapter of alectopause the ninth here!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
it does work as a standalone piece, but it is also the second part of a full novel-length fan-written exquisite-corpse-style fic, which you can read all of here
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
(ask me for 'director's commentary' about my fics!)
