Writers in the POTO fandom

[igenlode]

AO3 has been running a meta-essay compilation by writers in the "Phantom of the Opera" fandom where they are given the chance to 'expound' on writing POTO fan-fiction. Some of the questions... reveal quite a lot about the assumptions being made :-D

I sent in a submission last week, but as I haven't received any acknowledgement and the compilation hasn't been updated since the 29th of October, it looks as if it either wasn't deemed suitable or wasn't received -- I rather suspect that this work is based around a Tumblr-centric group expecting submissions via that route, and that the alternative email contact given simply isn't being monitored.

Anyway, I spent several days writing it and then editing it down (and toning down some of my views for Erik-fans' benefit), so here it is my essay, for what it's worth.

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Can you say a bit about your first experience of POTO - was it love at first sight or more of a slow burn?

My first acquaintance with the Phantom of the Opera came courtesy of an Andrew Lloyd Webber Greatest Hits disc someone gave my younger brother for Christmas, which featured a few of the Phantom songs; I enjoyed them and later acquired a cassette tape of highlights from the show. I played it occasionally, but was no more a fan of Lloyd Webber's "Phantom" than of his "Joseph" or "Evita". At some point I came across a copy of Leroux in the local library, read it, and dismissed it as a boring 19th-century 'classic'; this would of course have been the de Mattos translation, the only one that was available at the time, but I don't think I was even aware that the original story had in fact been written in French, still less that what I had been reading was a heavily abridged version!

Eventually along came the Joel Schumacher film, and I went to see it out of passing interest. It didn't make much of an impression; my chief memory of the experience was that the Prologue and constant references back to the graveyard scenes gave the entire story an aura of impending tragedy which left me convinced that Christine was destined to die in the final scene and leave Raoul to grieve her lifelong, and I was pleasurably taken aback on finding out that in fact she survives. As a non-fan I don't recall that it occurred to me in the slightest to mourn for the Phantom...

I saw the Lon Chaney film version as a late-night broadcast one Hallowe'en on Channel 4 and was unimpressed; it's better with a live accompaniment, but I'm afraid that, with the exception of Chaney's iconic performance as the Phantom, it simply isn't that good. I've seen a lot of great silents, and this is strictly B-movie stuff.

At some point much later on I happened to pick up the Leroux novel again from the library, this time in a shiny new paperback copy; I flicked through it and found to my surprise that it had somehow become very much more interesting in the interim! My prior experience with "Les Misérables" (which I had found in the library in a 19th-century edition, after falling in love with the musical, but found so boring in that form that I ended up reading it in French for preference) should possibly have warned me that a different translator could make the world of difference, but certainly I had no idea at this point that the earlier edition had simply chosen to leave out vast chunks of characterization for just about everyone save Erik.

Carlotta and Raoul in particular seem to suffer the most... and since the latter is the viewpoint character and the main protagonist for most of the novel, it's entirely unsurprising that the constant removal of material that makes him more three-dimensional results in a pretty boring book. I can only assume that de Mattos was (a) in a hurry (this was a pretty obscure French novel and he had a lot of translations on his plate) and (b) felt that a book entitled "The Phantom of the Opera" ought to be more focused on the titular character for the benefit of English readers...

I still wasn't in any sense a fan, though I felt a lot more kindly about the story. So you could only say it was a very, very slow burn!

What really got me writing POTO fic was when I eventually stumbled across "Love Never Dies". I came to "Phantom" more or less backwards from LND; in fact, for a long time I had written far more LND stories and knew the source material in far more detail than Lloyd Webber's "Phantom", which I still knew only from one "Highlights" tape and some very confused memories about a movie graveyard.

What was it about the source material that really caught your attention?

So far as I remember, it was the image of Christine caught between the two men who love her, one of whom she cannot help but pity, the other whom she cannot help but love -- and knowing that whatever she does, she is inevitably going to hurt somebody. In terms of the novel, I think this is basically the rooftop scene rather than the 'scorpion and the grasshopper' (by which point Erik has gone too far for her to be influenced by any concern for his feelings); in terms of the musical, it is of course the 'Final Lair'.

What prompted you to start looking for fic about POTO?  Was this something you did straightaway after experiencing the source material?

I didn't encounter POTO fic at all until after I'd already written one. It was... shall we say, a shock.

Because, as I'd mentioned, I was not a fan -- I'd never been part of 'the fandom', or privy to the shared 'fanon' universe, or aware in the least of what fans discussed among themselves. I'd just written a story based directly off the original source material, because I'd listened to my old "Highlights from 'The Phantom of the Opera'" tape again for the first time in ten or fifteen years, and had an unexpected fanfic idea.

So I published that one short Raoul-based fanfic on my existing fanfiction.net account, and had every intention of moving on without writing any more in that fandom. What actually happened next was... I stumbled onto "Love Never Dies". And that is an even longer story.

Why did you start writing fic?  How soon after discovering fic did you start to write it?  Is creative writing something you've done before starting to write poto fic?

I started writing original fiction almost before I was physically able to write -- I have a couple of my oldest stories which consist of a few struggling, staggering lines of text, followed by the remainder of the page evidently dictated to my mother in frustration. I didn't discover the concept of fan-fiction until I was an adult many years later, and in those days it was all physical zines with strict editors and proofreading; I was very flattered to get published!

I was already a pretty seasoned fanfic writer before I had anything to do with POTO -- and a lot older than most of the fandom, which made it even harder to fit in. At this point I've been writing since before some of the contributors here were even born, which is a somewhat unsettling thought...

We all write different versions of Erik.  Which aspect of the source material are you most influenced by when you write him?  Why do you think he is the way he is when you write him? What is it that you like (in the broadest sense!) about the Erik that you write about?

Well, one of the reasons I didn't fit in is because -- in a fandom united around love of the titular Phantom -- I don't instinctively write Erik! It's not that I hate the character as such, but just that, for whatever reason, he doesn't appear to constitute a source of active plot ideas so far as my subconscious is concerned.

My imagination apparently regards the Phantom as a background threat rather than an active protagonist, and I think I almost certainly hold the record for the largest number of 'Phantom' stories on fanfiction.net in which Erik is not listed as a character! I don't bash him, and I try to treat him sympathetically and keep him absolutely in character where he does appear, but unfortunately for me my subconscious is simply not interested in him as such -- only on the effect his activities have on other people, from Christine and Raoul down to Piangi and Buquet.

I did quite consciously set myself to write a story from Leroux-Erik's viewpoint once, as a challenge to prove that I could in fact do it; unfortunately the character started fantasising about killing Christine to get rid of those incomprehensibly disturbing feelings she was arousing in him, which wasn't quite what I'd expected, although it fitted his extremely damaged mindset... Weirdly enough I think my single most popular fic was the one that featured Piangi's revenge, in which the tenor triumphantly produces a tied-up Phantom, gagged and furious, with a flourish of the bed-curtains at the end of "Point of No Return" ;-D

(I've always had a soft spot for the story in which Piangi and Christine rehearse PONR together, myself-- because all those sexy moves had to be blocked out in the rehearsal room, and she must have sung that number far more often with poor unromantic Piangi trying to do his best Don Juan than she ever did with the song's intended recipient. But it just demonstrates that my subconscious is more interested in humanising Piangi into a genuine character instead of a caricature than in the Phantom's woes.)

If you write about Christine in your fics, tell me about her - what do you think of Christine and the way you like to portray her?

I try to portray her -- and everyone else -- in a way that is consistent with what we see in canon. In the case of Leroux-Christine, that's the girl who repeatedly argues with Raoul and always wins, who spends two desperate weeks as Erik's captive with only her own wits to give her any hope of ever regaining the surface, and who lies to him with all her ability again and again until he finally believes her enough to let her go -- on a short leash, admittedly -- the girl who is capable both of genuinely believing in angels and korrigans, and of standing upon her dignity and rebuffing both her ardent suitors. She successfully deceives Raoul for weeks as to her true feelings because she is terrified of what Erik out of jealousy may do to him; in fact she spends a lot of the novel trying to keep the young man safe, despite his best endeavours, going so far as to physically drag him away from the risk of the trapdoors. Likewise she manages to successfully manipulate Erik and retain her freedom during the nightmare weeks after she learns who and what he really is.

She doesn't necessarily particularly enjoy singing; she certainly shows no sign of aspiring towards a glorious opera career in her own right, though she earns her living at it, and she shrinks from the success that Erik conjures up for her. We are told that she sings to win a prize to please her foster-mother, and then in order to please the Voice, and, on one occasion, she tells Raoul that her performance that night was for him. But she doesn't enjoy the applause and attention, and we're told that she actually appears to fear the unearthly new voice that Erik has conjured out of her: "I no longer know myself when I sing," she writes to Raoul.

Christine is stubborn -- too stubborn for her own safety, as it turns out -- and self-reliant. There is no-one she can ask for help, and she tries desperately to sort everything out herself, as well as protecting those she loves. And she is neither a 'celebrity' whom Raoul can show off to boost his social status -- opera performers were in general regarded as little better than prostitutes, offering their charms for sale to the highest bidder, and Christine's obstinate virtue is seen as an oddity that is too good to be true -- nor a poor peasant who is embarrassed by the existence of servants and nauseated by displays of wealth. Leroux-Christine is the adopted daughter of a respected Professor, which puts her well into the middle classes, has studied at the Paris Conservatoire, which is the equivalent of a three-year university degree, earns enough at her profession to wear furs, and employs at least one servant herself, probably two (the maid who leaves her mistress' dressing-room at the opera is unlikely to be the same as the pert serving-girl who giggles at Raoul's gaucherie when the young man calls at Madame Valerius's apartment, unless Christine is taking their sole servant to the opera with her all evening and abandoning her bedbound foster-mother with no-one to answer her call).

Musical-Christine is as frightened as Leroux-Christine, and in fact she spends most of the show terrified of what the Phantom will do (he will "kill, and kill again" if he does not get his way; "all I want is freedom"; "what horrors wait for me?"). But she is not lacking in courage -- she snaps back at Carlotta when the accusations become too much, and refuses to sing in the Phantom's opera when the demand is made of her -- or in compassion. Her main weakness is the same as in Leroux's canon: she is afraid she will be unable to resist the hypnotic power of the Phantom's voice, and indeed we see her fall victim to it twice, in "Music of the Night" when he draws her through the mirror, and then again at her father's grave, even though by this point she is forewarned of what he can do. Yet when it comes to it, she finds the resolution to oppose his desires; she first defies him by unmasking him in public at the climax of "Don Juan", then spits scorn and hate at him when she finds herself once again a hopeless captive.

And it is Christine who, unlike her Leroux counterpart, finds a way to actively subvert the ultimatum the Phantom tries to impose. Say yes or no, he insists, but Musical-Christine, resourceful, refuses to do either. She says oh, you poor thing, have a kiss, and shocks him out of his strung-up homicidal hysteria and back into realisation of his own humanity instead.

If you include any of the other main characters in your fics, how do you feel about the way they turn up in your fics?

Raoul tends to turn up a lot! I ended up dubbing my POTO fics the 'Rescue Raoul' tendency, since at that point there was a lot of loud and proud Raoul-bashing going on; I don't necessarily write him happy endings, but I do treat him as an ordinary decent human being with feelings and concerns of his own.

The version who really got me interested in the character was, ironically, the desperately unhappy and self-hating Raoul of Love Never Dies, who is busy lashing out at everyone around him -- I suspect I reacted to him in much the same way that the rest of the fandom did to their first glimpse of poor hard-done-by Erik. And the Raoul/Christine relationship in LND, even from the tantalising glimpses we get of it (and what exactly did happen to Raoul that drove him to this, and why do they have no children of their own?) felt far more adult and interesting than the one-note demands of Mr. Y.

That bled backwards into an increased interest in Raoul's experience of the POTO events, and in Leroux-Raoul's relationship with his brother. Philippe has a tendency to show up in Phantom fic as the villain, simply because -- like the unfortunate Meg in Love Never Dies -- he is an available spare character whom nobody particularly cares about one way or the other. But in canon he is actually far more of a father-figure to Raoul than anything else; just about everything he does (including trying to put in a good word for Christine with the managers, and attempting to discuss the state of Raoul's health with her post-Perros; she refuses to grant him an interview) is motivated by concern for his little brother's happiness and future. He doesn't have much time for Christine, but from his point of view that is entirely understandable; he does love Raoul, and is certain he knows what is best for him.

Leroux-Raoul is tricky to write, since he is basically in a state of constant emotional switchback, swamped by very adolescent ecstasies and despairs. Musical-Raoul is effectively a completely different character who happens to share the same name, and to be frank it's hard to get a handle on him as he is not particularly distinctive, which is why -- until my latest story -- I have only ever used him in one-shots. But I'm currently engaged in trying to produce a novel-length fic based on the stage version with a recognisably non-Leroux Raoul, so it is a juggling act trying to keep him reasonably in character.

If you include original characters in your fics, tell me about them! What do you enjoy about OCs in your fics?

I've always loved creating characters -- I did start off writing original fiction, after all. Incidental OCs in the background of my scenes have a habit of developing snippets of backstory and characterisation at the drop of a hat (which can sometimes be awkward, if they end up taking a significant role in a story where they didn't originally exist at the planning stage; at least twice I've had to work out how to plausibly write out of the plot an extra character who can't be part of the finale!)

In addition, I've done three POTO stories with OC narrators -- I particularly enjoyed the case of the grizzled New York PI who sees the whole set of the canon characters as a pack of incomprehensible flighty foreigners, but gradually gets drawn in (and, as ever, rapidly ended up developing a backstory of his own that influences the way he relates to Christine and Raoul in particular). Hertha, my current narrator, is, come to think of it, cut from a not dissimilar cloth in that she is a sturdily practical character coping with high drama all around her, but who has hidden vulnerabilities; her family represent yet another case of characters who literally didn't exist in my original concept of the story but who were invented on the spot as I was writing it, and who subsequently blossomed out into fully-rounded individuals with an active influence on the plot.

Do you identify with any of the main characters in particular?

I immediately identified with LND-Raoul; also, most of the Raoul/Christine material I've written has been based on my very limited personal experience, which means it eventually becomes hard to distinguish between your own private memories and your memory of the characters in the scenes in question. So I tend to find myself quite strongly on Raoul's side, which is rarely a comfortable position to be in when it comes to Phantom fic! (I've been known to skim through chapter upon chapter of E/C material just looking for the one scene where the author complained that Raoul 'stole the show'...)

But whenever I write a story from a particular character's viewpoint, I tend to find myself much more engaged with that character as a result; I wrote what was intended as a crackfic chapter from the point of view of Count Philippe, and could never see him as quite such a background figure again. And writing from the point of view of Madame Valerius made me very much conscious that she, too, was not always a silly senile old woman, but had a youth and dreams and an identity of her own. (Writing from the point of view of LND-Meg made me more conscious than ever before, I'm afraid, of just how much Lloyd Webber had to wrench continuity between the two shows in order to insert his desired plot.)

Do you write about different versions of the characters in each of your fics, or do you feel that you are writing about the same version Erik or Christine in all of your fics? Are you intending to do anything like that? Do you link your fics thematically or in terms of character?

I made an active choice very early on that all my various fanfics would be independent of each other; I don't write series involving the same versions of the characters or referring back to previous events. Every single story effectively takes place in a different 'branch' of the POTO universe, where the characters had a different childhood, met in a different way, experienced different events and have no knowledge of any of their other selves, but they all branch off from the same canon facts. So Raoul always has an 'aunt in Lannion', for example, but in one story she is called Tante Emilie and lives in Lannion, and in another story she is Marguerite de Marsèmy, lives in Brest, and only goes to Lannion for summer holidays.

And I keep my Leroux-based stories quite distinct from my musical-verse ones, as well; no Daroga popping up in the Opera Populaire, no Meg as daughter of the ballet mistress in the Palais Garnier, and musical-Raoul has normal parents rather than an elder brother, and is a lot more emotionally mature than his book counterpart... and in my world, 'Nadir Khan' is not canon for anything other than fanfic of Susan Kay's actual novel!

Do you think that your fics have any particular themes?

Well, the one thing I've noticed is that an awful lot of them seem to acquire a suicide reference of some kind, whether that is the young Englishman who loses his entire fortune and then shoots himself, or the Raoul who resolves to taunts the Phantom into killing him in as gruesome a way as possible to serve as a distraction so that Christine can escape... It's a fairly common trope in the sort of novel I grew up with, but I have wondered occasionally quite what it says about the state of my subconscious, and what readers, if they notice, make of it.

A lot of my fanfic tends to have an Angst and/or Tragedy categorisation. I've made a conscious effort to do some fluff, and angst along the way doesn't necessarily preclude a happier ending, but even in a vignette like "A Family Man", which is almost entirely plot-free, the story suddenly produced a still birth and a old family tragedy almost between one paragraph and the next; I don't think I'll ever be writing cinnamon rolls and spoopy Erik. To be fair, when you're writing fiction based off Gothic melodrama littered with murder and jealousy, things do inherently tend to be a bit fraught...

What do you most like to write about? And why?

I like to set the stories in an actual historical background -- not in the sense that the characters are referencing contemporary news events all the time, but by depicting a credible nineteenth (or early twentieth, in the case of LND chronology!) century mindset, rather than having them adopt contemporary attitudes in period clothing, and by dropping in the appropriate 'props'; spirit gum and greasepaint for opera costumes, cans of hot water for shaving, bootlaces for paddling on the beach, and the whole view of the contemporary world as one of inexorable Progress rather than something quaint with corsets and carriages.

In terms of fanfic, I'm generally inspired to write either by a piece of character analysis (e.g. what did Raoul mean by 'there is no Phantom of the Opera', given that he had already received a personal letter signed by just such an entity, and heard him issuing threats only a few minutes earlier? How did Raoul come to scratch his initials into the wall of his cell, given that Erik returns to fetch his prisoner back to Christine almost immediately?) or by an AU what-if: what if the Raoul who rescued Christine's scarf wasn't the Vicomte de Chagny, but only one of the local Breton fisher-boys? What if the Raoul who recognised Christine at the gala was already, fatally, married to someone else? Otherwise it's mainly canon in-fill; scenes that fit in around what we actually see in the original, whether seen from the point of view of another character, or simply 'behind the scenes'.