From "A Kindness," for the director's commentary ask:
Deputy Commissioner Vaganov came back from Paris without all of himself, the girls decide, but they need him, because the only thing worse than being an informant is being a former informant so they must fix him. Paulina nearly manages it. She's simple but not completely stupid and she knows men, so perhaps she can fix their poor wounded Deputy Commissioner. After all, she nursed that lost kitten back to health only last year; she is the most qualified to heal wounded creatures. (The kitten had barely lasted a month out of her care. Dunya hadn’t had the heart to tell her of the cruelty of Leningrad and ruin her optimism.)
Frankly I want your director's commentary on this whole fic; it's one of my favorites of yours. <3
Right off the bat: I had actually forgotten I wrote this. I saw "A Kindness" and squinted at it. (Fic, if you've also forgotten.) This was a fic that sort of sprang into the world almost fully formed, directly into DMs with the intent of hurting the recipient. That was the main motivation, aside from fleshing out the world and characters of Leningrad in a way that Anastasia refuses to do.
Paulina (in canon) is one of the women who auditions for the part of Anastasia. Marfa is the one with the hilariously over the top reading, Dunya is the one who snaps at Dmitry the strongest. Paulina is a sort of a wild card, so I put her in the space of being a little sweet and simple compared to her friends, while being most emotionally astute and honest.
Metatextually, Paulina is usually played by the actress cast as teen!Anastasia (who's also the understudy Anya). What this means to me is that she looks the most like Anastasia of all of them. In fact, she literally looks more like Anastasia than Anya does.
So all of that brings us to this: a situation where the officer they're being paid by has come back from the events in Paris completely shattered, and all three girls go, oh shit. These women are prostitutes, they are willing to do whatever they need to do to get by, and if they need to DIY therapy, they will. Except they dont know what's wrong with him or the fact they, specifically Paulina, cannot help.
In this part, I was underscoring that Paulina is coming from a good place. She means well, she'd never hurt him intentionally, and that sets up the contrast of the fact it does hurt him and he lashes out in turn. (And since this is Aftermath verse, it's obviously tinged by the fact Gleb isn't even sad or cruel consciously. He's simply surviving, as so many do.)
The kitten detail is just to drive home all of this characterization. Paulina means well, she will take in wounded creatures and expend energy and emotions to be kind to them. The gut punch is the foreshadowing: she wants to fix Gleb like she fixed the kitten, but all her efforts with the kitten ultimately got swallowed by the wide, awful world and the kitten died.
She doesn't do much better in trying to fix Gleb.
Pick any passage ~500 words or less from a fanfic I’ve written and I will give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet.
