Another thing I love about ITB is the writing style (though I could say that about virtually every fic I love). I love that it’s spare, but at the same time deliberately rough. I think the style of the writing does a brilliant job of conveying the harsh, ramshackle nature of the existence these people are living. Teanna’s writing has both eloquence and a lack of concern for “proper” grammatical and syntactical structure.
And finally, I love that as bleak as the fic is, I don’t feel like the narrative is one static note of despair. The emotions in ITB shift beneath the weight of despair, enough to keep me closely engaged throughout. There’s not much hope in this fic, and there’s even less by the end, and usually I wouldn’t approve of a hopeless ending, but in this case it works for me. I think it works because in staying with the dying girl, and in staying together, they’re making a choice and they’re choosing tenderness. In the face of defeat, it's- not a triumph, but it's something, the very smallest bit of something.
As to what others have said about the people of Land’s End leaving the corpse of Lance Aldrin on the side of the road, I really do not understand how that could possibly seem out of place in the bigger picture. It’s the END of the WORLD. No one is in their right mind, Doggett is enforcing that it be kept there, historically it’s not uncommon for towns to show off slain corpses as deterrents, and corpse rot isn’t much of a concern when they’re already dropping like flies because of an alien virus. I’m not sure how fast corpses decay, and maybe there should have been more of a mention about the corpse rotting away, but again, it’s not a difficult presumption to make that the condition of the corpse is deteriorating.
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winterfish
no subject
Date: 2012-08-23 11:12 pm (UTC)Another thing I love about ITB is the writing style (though I could say that about virtually every fic I love). I love that it’s spare, but at the same time deliberately rough. I think the style of the writing does a brilliant job of conveying the harsh, ramshackle nature of the existence these people are living. Teanna’s writing has both eloquence and a lack of concern for “proper” grammatical and syntactical structure.
And finally, I love that as bleak as the fic is, I don’t feel like the narrative is one static note of despair. The emotions in ITB shift beneath the weight of despair, enough to keep me closely engaged throughout. There’s not much hope in this fic, and there’s even less by the end, and usually I wouldn’t approve of a hopeless ending, but in this case it works for me. I think it works because in staying with the dying girl, and in staying together, they’re making a choice and they’re choosing tenderness. In the face of defeat, it's- not a triumph, but it's something, the very smallest bit of something.
As to what others have said about the people of Land’s End leaving the corpse of Lance Aldrin on the side of the road, I really do not understand how that could possibly seem out of place in the bigger picture. It’s the END of the WORLD. No one is in their right mind, Doggett is enforcing that it be kept there, historically it’s not uncommon for towns to show off slain corpses as deterrents, and corpse rot isn’t much of a concern when they’re already dropping like flies because of an alien virus. I’m not sure how fast corpses decay, and maybe there should have been more of a mention about the corpse rotting away, but again, it’s not a difficult presumption to make that the condition of the corpse is deteriorating.