FANFICTION WEEK #5: Kill off other people's characters


As quickly as he had started to feel the heat of her body beside him, she was gone. He spun around and stared at empty air. Already knowing, already feeling the lurch of despair deep in his gut, he looked down. There, where Jane Eyre had been standing, there was just a small pile of ash. The smell of ozone and burning filled his head. He felt dizzy.
‘No,’ he said, quietly. ‘No.’ Then, louder. ‘No!’ He stood, arms outstretched, screaming at the sky. Electric bombs were raining all around him, but he didn’t even see them. It had happened so quickly. One moment she was there, the next she was gone. He had never really understood before now what it meant to lose a life. He felt hollowed out. As the invaders dropped another row – just above head-height now – he closed his eyes and wondered what happened next. Could he really carry on without her? Was there work still to be done?
‘Continue?’ he muttered to himself. ‘Y/N...’

14 comments:

  1. I laughed when i saw Jane Eyre!

    And again when I saw "electric bombs" :D

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  2. Do you really use span as the past tense of spin, or is that just part of writing badly, well or otherwise? The OED2 reports only Carlyle (1865) and Ouida (1882) using span for spun in plain prose; the OED3 hasn't reached spin yet.

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  3. How interesting – that must be a quirk of my own usage. As the only backup I have on that is from the nineteenth century, I think it's fair to say that I'm on the wrong side of history on this one. "Spun around" doesn't quite sit right with me for some reason. On the other hand, I would say that the wheels spun and that the cloth-maker spun, so it stands to reason that a person should have spun as well.

    (I also have a compulsive need to write "thankyou" as one word, but I tend to suppress that quirk during editing.)

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  4. I've corrected it. Sorry, Carlyle; sorry, Ouida. I've betrayed the brotherhood of "span."

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  5. So authors write badly when they *don't* kill characters off (rescue them against impossible odds) and when they *do*?? My only beef is when the death is so inevitable, the character is screaming "Red shirt over here!"

    That said, "Continue Y/N" was brilliant.

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  6. now bring her back to life!
    the soapie writers do that all the time to their characters.... and im pretty sure u dont get worse than that....

    jane.
    (doe)

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  7. She's not dead, she's Ascended. Or in another dimension. Or about to be resurrected by a spell which will unbalance all of reality. Or she's an enchantress and actually has nine lives.

    We all know she's not dead, because she goes on to many more adventures and eventually lives happily ever after - well, as happy as a Bronte character gets. Unless, of course, that's the badly part: kill off characters in completely non-canon ways.

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  8. The Antipodean had a revelation andSunday, August 08, 2010

    Ooh, ooh, or she's a Time Lord.

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  9. I should probably have called it "Kill off other people's characters" – as Derrill points out, there's nothing wrong with killing off characters per se; it's killing off Jane Eyre specifically that's the problem. You know what? I'm going to change it. Thanks, internet, for allowing me a second chance.

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  10. hmmm....no wonder your jane eyre seems so familiar. she reminds me of terry pratchett's susan sto helit character.
    (both stern teacher types in unlikely combat scenarios....)

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  11. Not to pound the issue into the ground or anything, but span has seen plenty of use in verse, where an extra rhyme is very handy. "When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman?" was a 14th century slogan (slightly modernized) about human equality, for example.

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  12. No, no, Joel, thank you for writing badly well.

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  13. The Antipodean, a stubborn creature and never a big believer in authorial intention,Wednesday, August 11, 2010

    I still think she's just gone to The Next Level.

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