Fic Wittering and Ethan Rayne Meta - Request for Comments

[hobgoblinn]

Um, so. Yeah. I kinda agreed to be a pinch hitter for antennapedia's Antique Roman (Ethan Rayne) ficathon. I now have 2-3 weeks to write something readable, and do it for one of my goddesses, the great penwiper26. No pressure or anything.

Though thinking on it now I'm wondering why, exactly, I chose last night to completely take leave of my senses, at the time it seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do. A couple of you may remember I did NaNoWriMo for the first time last year, and I posted sections of the tale as a WIP for the brave (masochistic) 2 or 3 souls who clicked on the cut every night. Well, the place at which the tale got bogged down pretty much reflected the prompt, right down to the not having been written part.

So, I need to get my head out of Harry Potter space (though I have a couple of WIPs started there) and back into the Buffyverse. So, forgive me while I ramble a bit, and feel free to chime in with ideas.


One of the things I see, looking at last year's novel as a whole, is I had a really good idea where Giles and Willow were, and what I wanted to explore with their estrangement, their friendship, and the terrible space in which Giles finds himself (very like Graveside, the snippet I wrote for summer_of_giles). The original idea in this case was exploring how a father would deal with sending his child to her death for the greater good, and if that was even something this man could do, vows or no. And it came from remembering this Wilfred Owen poem: The parable of the Old Man and the Young. The last lines are a chilling twist on a familiar tale, a betrayal of innocence. And thinking ahead to possible futures, it seemed to me that this man, as a general, would feel this responsibility terribly.

Willow I chose initially as a narrative voice because I had never been happy with how I wrote her, and I thought she and Giles would have some common ground in their tremendous power and responsibility. She's a good angle to explore from, with her own unique perspective.

The mother and child introduced are fairly shallow, but I was getting better with them, I thought, and their perspectives didn't interest me as much, plus I wanted to stay as far as possible from Mary Sue-dom.

And Ethan-- was a very fun plot device. Which is why, I think, things ground to a halt right where they did. I didn't have a lot invested in Ethan, certainly not enough to carry things forward when I got out of the habit of writing Every Day and forcing myself past the really awful awfulness of a first draft.

So, that's what I need to remedy now. What is this Ethan like? How do I see him? How does he react when his meddling costs Giles in a very personal way?


Here's my take on this Ethan:

He's like Loki, mischievous, amoral, delighting in chaos but not deliberately setting out to hurt anyone. He sets forces in motion, but he usually sets contrary forces in motion at the same time. Tattooing Buffy, he knows she's the Slayer. Tying her up gives him time to get away, but he must know she's capable of freeing herself and taking on the demon. In Halloween, he sets things in motion again, but it's Giles' attention he wants, and gets. He's irresponsible, but he's also twisting reality to make the people wearing his costumes face their inner fantasies. He may not care who gets hurt, but that's a different thing from intending their harm.

In "Band Candy", he performs a job,plain and simple. He may suspect harm will come as a by product of his actions, but he doesn't know-- and I think it's telling that he hasn't tried hard to find out specifics. He hasn't sought Giles out before Giles and Buffy come bursting in to confront him, but I think he probably would have; getting Giles' attention, affecting him in some way, is a secondary motive for him in coming back to Sunnydale at all.

Finally, in "A New Man" Ethan is all about shaking Giles out of his midlife doldrums, but he doesn't poison Giles as he joked, and he is again very well aware Buffy's superpowers are more than a match for the situation he's set in motion. I think chaos magic probably can't effect permanent change anyway, by its very nature. So if he had skipped town, I doubt Giles would have been permanently demonized, as it were. It might have gotten Giles an uncomfortable firsthand look at 314 and Ethan might have been able to get at that info later. But the Ethan of the series was never much of a planner, really.

Lots of fics have speculated about Ethan's time as a "guest" of the US military. Bound and bitter, forced to endure experimentation and the carefully regimented, controlled life that is antithetical to everything Ethan stands for-- what kind of mark would that leave on the Ethan in my story now?

I see him, these 5 years or so later as having built up his resources by doing his odd jobs and contract magic as before, but I see him being much more careful, much more of a planner, much less open to letting others control him. That would be a reasonable response-- to keep himself free for his deity, he has to be able to slip out of any noose.

He's avoided Giles up to now-- at first because he had to build up his strength again after his confinement, later because he's probably heard of the destruction of the Council and saw no reason to kick a man when he was down. Two years post "Chosen", though, he'd be drawn to the new organization, so full of possibilities for unleashing chaos on the world, and to the Giles who is even more cut off from the old mystic who had once been his lover, his friend, his partner in crime. He'd want to shake Giles up, and this job, seemingly a simple abduction of a person the Council is interested in, would certainly accomplish his aim.

And now we get to the crux of the matter. How deep do Ethan's feelings really run? How human is he? He seems so Puckish-- delighting in chaos like a child, unable to fathom why he should care about consequences beyond his own amusement. Giles' feelings run deep-- Ethan's one of the few people who can cause him to completely lose the careful dignity and compassion and wisdom of the Watcher. But do Ethan's? Or is he more a moth drawn to the flame?

If he does really care for Giles, what's he willing to do when he realizes what he's set in motion has completely upset the balance of the on and off again game Ethan's been playing with Giles for years? (Sudden idea-- Ethan has to have crossed Giles' path before Sunnydale-- he hasn't just been gone for 20 years to resurface just because Joss needed a script that week, even if he did....) Will he sincerely want to tip the scales back to help his friend? Will it be more a matter of wanting to avert an apocalypse ("Here to help. Wanna live.")? Will it just be a desire to keep Giles and Willow from killing him personally? Will he see an opportunity to make a new contact in Willow, to tap into her power and convert her to his agenda? Will he just decide as a matter of both self preservation and wreaking maximum chaos that now would be a good time to switch sides again?

I'm seeing just asking these questions that some of my assumptions don't really hold water. But some of the ideas I had about What would happen can fit into the new why's I'm seeing now.

This is terribly long-- sorry. I'll stop and hope a couple of people can give me some thoughtful takes on Ethan Rayne. Thanks, all.

Hob

Comments

[beccaelizabeth]

*nods a bunch*

(but somewhat lacks thoughts this morning)

[hobgoblinn.livejournal.com]

maybe this afternoon?

thanks for the nods. I have always liked your Ethan-- it's good to know some of this is on the right track.

[ex-shitsu-to509.livejournal.com]

I think Ethan is plenty human and must on some level be seeking more than chaos in his life especially as he gets older, doesn't everyone want someone and somewhere to be? You said that loads of fics have explored Ethan's time as a guest of the U.S military and most I've read have Ethan being a long-term and much tortured and scarred inmate. Personally I'd like to read a story in which Ethan escapes immediately from the soldiers and when he meets Giles again in the future has changed for other reasons. Good luck with the story, you've obviously got some great ideas and thoughtful things to say about the characters. I look forward to reading it :-)

[hobgoblinn.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the encouragement. I'm still sorting through what makes sense for this Ethan -- what the stakes and payoffs are for his actions. Or how much baggage/ emotional scarring his time with the Initiative has given him. But I agree, a fic that has Ethan out of the Initiative's hands almost immediately would be a new twist. But in that case, why would he have stayed gone through seasons 5-7?

[kambee.livejournal.com]

Hi!

Replying to your question about why I friended you: I do the Wednesday and Friday Giles Watchers posts, and often find myself wandering from the task at hand to read lj's that catch my eye. Yours was one of those, so I friended you to read more. I hope that's okay!

[hobgoblinn.livejournal.com]

Oh absolutely-- happy to have you. I haven't been posting much lately-- been doing a lot of reading of my own, and now, some writing again.

Welcome.

[rainkatt.livejournal.com]

I always felt Ethan had deeper feelings than he admitted to, possibly even to himself. If he didn't, why keep bouncing back to Giles? Why care about Giles's doldrums or his Slayer, or anything to do with him? He could go on to cause chaos anywhere, and probably risk less, if he stayed away from Giles.

I can't think beyond that--I should be asleep, especially since I've not made it through a full day without a nap in four days, and I really must work tomorrow.