no man is an island

I put the latest thing I've posted to the AO3, “Anything That Does Not Harm Others” (1789: Les Amants de la Bastille, as adapted and performed by the Takarazuka Revue’s Moon Troupe in 2015), through enough major changes that it might interest some people to see the revision history, as it were.

The original draft was written on an airplane last October (I find ficlets a great way to occupy my brain and distract from flight anxiety); the first rewrite, during that vacation; and while I made a couple of friends read it and provide feedback I couldn’t do much of a canon check. I’d seen the musical exactly once at that point, a month or two prior, and had neither reliable internet access nor a device larger than my phone with me. I got back, rewatched as part of a final edit before posting, and almost scrapped the entire fic because it turned out I’d completely forgotten a major plot point.

It wasn’t until much later I realized that this could, instead, with some edits, enhance the canonical sequence of events, in the way that gives me—as someone who entered fandom on bad late 00s/early 10s genre TV—tremendous nostalgic satisfaction.

Content notes for the drafts: aftermath of torture (taken only about as seriously as the musical does, which isn’t very); kink discovery that results in a sexual situation nobody participating in it has consented to; painplay. Content notes for the edit notes: also, internalized kinkshaming and emotional infidelity.

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