So, a short while back I wrote a... well, call it an opinion piece on the work of one Chalcedony Cross.

This wasn't one of my more popular pieces of meta and the responses (well, response) I got suggested that a lot of my opinions weren't that popular either, or at least not with the one person who responded to me. That's kind of what I expected to happen, given the nature of the post and the popularity of the story I was complaining about, and ordinarily I'd have left it at that. The only thing is, I can't quite get this post, or the fic that it's about, out of my head. Hence the reason why I'm posting about it again.

The original post, which can of course be found here, was a rather lengthy explanation of why I thought Cross's fanfic Graumsame Maskerade didn't work anywhere near as well as it could have done, and one of the major reasons that it didn't work as well as it could have done was what I saw as the over-emphasis on how very different and wonderful Aya was when compared to, well, everyone else in the fanfic. For those of you as don't want to wade through the entire TL;DR screed just to work out what I'm going on about now, here's an excerpt:

Cross isn't a bad writer: I just wish she had stepped back from Aya slightly more often, and at least tried to look at him without the fangirl goggles on for a moment. When she forgets to go on about how amazing she thinks Aya is to the detriment of every other character in the story, her work is actually rather good. [...] I still don't think Maskerade is a bad fic: I'm just no longer blind to its flaws or what it is has caused them, and how much better it might have been if Cross hadn't run away with the idea that Aya was wonderful.

The point being that Maskerade is a good fanfic which, at present, feels rather exclusive. It's fun for those readers who buy into the idea that Aya just will attract the degree of attention that Chalcedony Cross and her ilk suggest he comes in for simply by virtue of being Aya and There; it's not so much so, however, for those of us who prefer to take a slightly more balanced view on the whole thing that treats Weiss as more like a functional team and less like Aya and his backing singers, because the focus is placed so narrowly on Aya and how immediately wonderful half the cast seem to find him that there's no real time for anything else.

Rather a shame as Chalcedony Cross is, as I mentioned, a very competent writer and Maskerade a well-executed mission fic. There are moments which work extremely well and just left me wishing there'd been more made of Weiss working as a team.

To that end, I ask myself, how would I have approached writing this fic if I had, say, been handed a basic outline of Cross' plot, informed that I could only change the details and told to write the story myself? Have the whole public torture and almost-rape thing happen to Ken? Actually, no. Chances are I wouldn't even have switched the characters' roles around much. Even I'll admit that it makes a Hell of a lot more sense for a group of targets who are into publicly torturing and killing attractive young men and women to go after Aya or Omi than it would for them to go after Ken, who is not only rather plain but comes complete with some rather unpleasant scar tissue. Even without the scarring Ken is average to a fault; he ain't never getting picked out of a crowd by virtue of his distinctly ordinary looks.

Anyway, strip a lot of the specifics from Cross's plot and the outline reads rather like this:

The mission takes place in a theme park. Weiss are ordered to take down a group of targets who have been abducting teenagers and young adults and publicly torturing them to death. While scoping out the park, one of the team attracts the attention of the villains' henchmen and is abducted. Weiss only find this out after infiltrating the evening's show' and witnessing their teammate's torture. The big boss comes out of hiding during the show and decides to personally hunt their teammate. Alone, unarmed and injured, the kidnapped Weiss member then has to stay alive long enough for his team to finish the mission and find him.

Considering myself constrained by this central premise, I would not be able to change a lot about the plot as it stood. If I had to work to a set scene outline, so every scene in my version found a strict parallel in Cross's, I would be able to change even less. For the purposes of this rant, I will presume that I am unable to change anything about the plotline, the scenes that need to be included, or the way the story ultimately plays out. All I am allowed to do is change the details. To that end, I would do the following:

• I would, if it were possible, make the villains' intended victim Omi rather than Aya. Omi is Weiss's leader and their strategist, and having to run a mission that wasn't going to plan without Omi would make for a rather tenser, more high-stakes story than running it without Aya, who can't always be trusted not to totally ignore a mission plan even when things are going well.
  
  
• I would make whichever victim Maskerade took conform far more closely to the standard profile of the victims they usually go after. If it was Omi, I would stick to the victim profile as Cross's version has it - young women and adolescents of both genders. If I was to have the villains abduct Aya, I would make it obvious that Maskerade also targeted handsome young men. This would avoid a lot of '... yeah, but this one's special, okay?' hand-waving about why the group were tossing the manual out the window, and stop Harlequin looking like a total idiot who has no idea what his own boss, a man he worked under for years, might find appealing in a victim.
  
  
• I would give Harlequin a reason to object to Aya that wasn't simply 'he's too old and we don't feature men' which, as noted, makes Aya into a special exception and Harlequin look like a moron who doesn't understand his boss's tastes. He could, for example, object to him because something about Aya suggested he wasn't just an attractive guy visiting a theme park and they didn't want to have to deal with the fallout if he turned out to be, say, an undercover policeman or working for an investigative reporter.
  
  
• I wouldn't bother with the Special Black Mask of Specialness: being the featured prey is enough. As a plot angle the special mask doesn't go anywhere, or add anything to the story save yet another conspicuous way to point out How Very Awesomely Different Aya Is.
  
  
• I also wouldn't bother with the random out-of-nowhere rich-kid bidder. I'd go for a rather more standard auction which didn't rely on a totally left-field Deus Ex Machina stumping up five million dollars for no reason other than to foil Youji's plans to save his teammate.
  
  
• I would make the Big Bad less disinterested. Though he didn't always come out to claim a victim and certainly didn't often chase them around with a katana, I would not suggest that he hadn't bid on the game in months or called a hunt in years and that Aya was the finest prey he had seen for at least half a decade. Making it an occasion when he shows up is one thing, but having him portrayed as having been entirely uninterested in the whole process for years and then he saw Aya is quite another.

I would not remove the idea that whichever Weiss member was abducted became the featured prey: that's just good storytelling. I would not remove the idea that the Big Bad decided to hunt them likewise, as even if that wasn't mandated by Cross's plotline anything else would make for a disappointing finale. I just wouldn't want it to be the first time in many years that anything of the sort had happened, because there's quite enough of a distinction implied by the fact that it's happening at all: there doesn't need to be a massive and almost literal song and dance about how this hasn't happened for years, dammit, but Random Weiss Member is so hot and awesome that of course it'd happen for him. Besides, none of Weiss are all that outstanding or remarkable. They wouldn't be very good assassins if they were.

A lot of these ideas would not actually change the story in any meaningful way: they certainly wouldn't somehow spoil it. They'd just get rid of the prevailing attitude that Aya was a special exception to all the villains' usual rules and mores. All I'm asking for is a little proportion.