OMG. I love you so much. Which, of course, you already knew.
I read Doyle's "The Older Woman" and was all, "I hate you, for now I have to redo my character grid to rec this," but now I have two Joyce fics I must rec -- so you two can share the hate :)
You reference Ulysses, which I've yet to read (though a classmate's creative thesis drew heavily on Joyce -- and okay I only just now got the pun -- so "yes" made me think of the hella important endword in her book and I felt like I sorta *got* the reference even though not) but I was all "Ooh, smartfic." And I have S6Willow issues (as everyone knows well by now) so the allusions to the coming badness made me happy.
> Buffy will be home soon, for loud, terrible sex with Riley. Joyce doesn't like to allow it but sometimes doesn't have a choice.
*weeps for Joyce*
And the sweet vague sex. Which nicely keeps the reader from thinking too much about just how bizarre and impossible this all is :)
> It takes nine months and a single hour to stop being young forever.
SUCH a good line. And rich with implication for Joyce's history.
And poly and multi-tasking and "The key, Joyce knows, is to allow some things to take care of themselves." and Joyce taking a moment to keep track of the time.
> If Joyce stopped worrying about any of them, even for only a day, something terrible would happen. It is this knowledge that keeps Joyce fighting.
*shivers* ('cause "IWMTLY"/"The Body")
And then you mention Joyce's line about giving up on men and I wonder how they could possibly forget that night, how repressing it totally doesn't lead to the scene being played as it was, and the WHAM: Dawn. Which makes so much sense. You have so much less freedom when you have a kid to be responsible for -- which is a theme already alluded to in the fic -- and I think the biggest meta-problem with making Dawn all queer and kinky like I wanna is that dude, monks; they're gonna create wholesome normalcy; so it makes sense that dirtybadwrong would be retroactively whitewashed. And damn, it makes the whole life!rewrite even creepier than it already is.
> There is never any hint that something is missing, until Joyce dies, and her absence is a hole too big for Tara to understand. Slightly too large, slightly off, something not quite right. > But that is all grief, not just theirs
Mmmm. I really like the idea of sort of submliminally remembering, and you don't even take the easy way out; you insist that all grief feels like too much for what it is.
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Date: 2005-09-07 10:45 pm (UTC)I read Doyle's "The Older Woman" and was all, "I hate you, for now I have to redo my character grid to rec this," but now I have two Joyce fics I must rec -- so you two can share the hate :)
You reference Ulysses, which I've yet to read (though a classmate's creative thesis drew heavily on Joyce -- and okay I only just now got the pun -- so "yes" made me think of the hella important endword in her book and I felt like I sorta *got* the reference even though not) but I was all "Ooh, smartfic." And I have S6Willow issues (as everyone knows well by now) so the allusions to the coming badness made me happy.
> Buffy will be home soon, for loud, terrible sex with Riley. Joyce doesn't like to allow it but sometimes doesn't have a choice.
*weeps for Joyce*
And the sweet vague sex. Which nicely keeps the reader from thinking too much about just how bizarre and impossible this all is :)
> It takes nine months and a single hour to stop being young forever.
SUCH a good line. And rich with implication for Joyce's history.
And poly and multi-tasking and "The key, Joyce knows, is to allow some things to take care of themselves." and Joyce taking a moment to keep track of the time.
> If Joyce stopped worrying about any of them, even for only a day, something terrible would happen. It is this knowledge that keeps Joyce fighting.
*shivers* ('cause "IWMTLY"/"The Body")
And then you mention Joyce's line about giving up on men and I wonder how they could possibly forget that night, how repressing it totally doesn't lead to the scene being played as it was, and the WHAM: Dawn. Which makes so much sense. You have so much less freedom when you have a kid to be responsible for -- which is a theme already alluded to in the fic -- and I think the biggest meta-problem with making Dawn all queer and kinky like I wanna is that dude, monks; they're gonna create wholesome normalcy; so it makes sense that dirtybadwrong would be retroactively whitewashed. And damn, it makes the whole life!rewrite even creepier than it already is.
> There is never any hint that something is missing, until Joyce dies, and her absence is a hole too big for Tara to understand. Slightly too large, slightly off, something not quite right.
> But that is all grief, not just theirs
Mmmm. I really like the idea of sort of submliminally remembering, and you don't even take the easy way out; you insist that all grief feels like too much for what it is.