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Good at the Dance (DD4, Chapter Three, Pages 6-10)
🕑 Added 2023-06-08 17:41:00 +0000 UTCLast week, Katerina was questioning Alexandra's noble motivations. This week, dance lessons continue, though Katerina might be in over her head.
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Fun fact! That whole business with the French minuet was, in fact, a real practice. It sounds awful — having to dance to put on a show — but I guess everyone just learned how to do it and got on with their lives?
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Spoilery deep-dive inside-baseball details: Katerina's dialogue here is how I originally wrote it, but there's a note on my desk saying "revise K's dialogue re: dancing. It's not that Alexandra CAN'T dance but that she just refuses or won't try."
"Dancing" as a theme will return later on, and (again, spoiler) it will turn out that Alexandra can dance, in her own way. So I thought, "maybe Katerina shouldn't put it in the reader's head that Alexandra can not dance," because then when Alexandra does sort-of dance, I don't want the reader saying "hey, you said she couldn't dance."
But then I remembered that this is a comic book, not a legal document composed of carefully-worded mousetrap statements, and it's perfectly fine for a character to assert something that only seems true. In fact, it's better that way, and many iconic stories are built on the idea that characters can and do say things that represent solely their own point of view. So I left it as-is.
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Thank you, as ever, to you, Dear Reader, for helping to make this whole entire endeavour possible. You're all wonderful.
Until next week,
I remain,
as always,
making things up,
TC
Comments
Tony Cliff
Thanks! Which page part is that - the “this is nonsense, did you make this up?” part?
Abrian Curington
I agree with her just saying she can't dance! Not only is that how it would probably go in reality, but logically, all Katernia has seen is Alexandra decidedly Not being able to dance! The composition of that half of the page was a little confusing for me, but the moment and dialogue rang true.
Tealin
I completely agree on "you can't dance." It sounds like a perfectly natural thing for someone to say, regardless of the cosmic implications of it for the narrative. In the storytelling community, I find there is too much emphasis put on the perfect clockwork origami story and not enough on characters feeling like real people; I think you came down on the right side of the divide here. (FWIW.)
