DVD Commentary Meme

[kethni]

Stolen! From approximately half my flist :D

Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 500 words) from any fanfic I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

Probably not the puns, I'm not a very pun person.

Comments

[kethni.livejournal.com]

Sublime is a sequel to Toy and was my answer to a question nobody asked, why would anyone be the original of a clone?

This section is right at the very end of the story and it's the counterpoint to the journey of the Matt clone in Toy.

I was very interested in the extremes of experience that the clones could have and what effects those would have on them. In a way Matt in Toy is the ideal of what would happen; he grows and develops, learning to reason, and developing his own sense of self and of right and wrong. He chooses not to kill because he comes to the considered decision that it's wrong. He doesn’t ‘need’ Mohinder to provide him with sense of self or worth as he’s grown to find those inside himself.

Mohinder in Sublime is the other extreme, the dark flip-side. Unlike Toy!Matt, Mohinder has baggage, his life as a clone has poisoned his perceptions and beliefs. His sense of self has been crippled by the dehumanisation, abuse, and violence he’s suffered, leaving him completely dependent on Matt for validation and purpose. He's too crushed to be capable of developing an independent moral compass and, as he was never meant to think independently, the company didn’t bother inculcating one in him either. Since his world is so small, his attachments, to Daniella, to Matt, are intense and obsessive. He literally has no sense of the wider world and no awareness of why Matt is so horrified by his actions.

Throughout the story, I tried to put in little suggestions that Mohinder was not going to be untouched by the experiences he’d had. In the same way that he carries the physical scars, he also carries mental and emotional ones. There were signs but Matt chose not to look too closely, ignoring Bennet’s warning, not thinking about the ‘steel’ in Mohinder’s nature, and not considering deeply the effects Mohinder’s previous life had on him. For Matt I think the worse thing is probably not that Mohinder killed his ex-Master so much, but that he’s completely calm about it. Mohinder doesn’t understand that he did something terrible, simply because he has no conception of human life as having innate worth. I tried to show in the passage how utterly shocked Matt is by what’s happened, he knows but he doesn’t want to believe it. He can’t square the image he has of Mohinder, the image that Mohinder is still showing him, of a caring affectionate man, with the cool brutality needed to dispatch someone that way.

Mohinder isn’t mad but he is terribly, perhaps hopelessly, damaged and there’s no easy happy ever after to be had.