Bulletproof Fic - Klint/Barok vampire AU
Time to ramble about my latest fanfic!
Prompt: Incest - it’s not sexual we just need to be as physically close as possible (it’s totally sexual)
This fic is just my sneaky attempt to make more people listen to harpsichord music. I always liked it, and it’s so prominent in Barok’s theme I ended up getting really into it and have even managed to hear a harpsichord recital live.
However, the music that I listened to most while thinking about this fic was probably Elgar’s violin sonata, and that’s because I listened to these violin sonata recordings while reading slowquotesquill’s amazing Barok fanfics, which were very much my inspiration for the entire thing and for my TGAA fic in general (not that I’ve posted my other one). Their stuff is thoughtful and beautiful. No vampire incest to be found, though actually they have written vampire AU stuff since I last checked.
Where did this come from?
The backstory for this fic is that I love the horror novel Mexican Gothic SO much, and at the time also watched about half of Crimson Peak, both of which are about women going to live with creepy possibly incestuous families. I was into TGAA back then and I outlined the plot of a “Van Zieks bros are incestuous vampires” AU horror retelling of precanon from the POV of Lady Baskerville as the ingenue. I thought it would also be fun to explore her POV (like, imagine being Klint’s wife? Who are you), have her solve the mystery of the Professor, and put in references to the actual Hound of the Baskervilles Sherlock Holmes story.
I was racking my brains for what to write for my Bulletproof recipient, saw all the incest prompts and suddenly got reminded of that old outline. In the original plan, the Klint/Barok would only be a few sentences of implications and things half seen when Flora peeks into a dark room (because i LOVE when ships are told through only implications) but in order to fulfil their prompts I switched it to Barok POV.
The writing experience?
Writing three characters with only the vaguest canon characterisations is hard. Klint was the easiest - since he is Kazuma’s counterpart I just referenced Kazuma. Although I still made him a bit softer than Kazuma. Barok… I was clueless, failed to include much of his 33-year-old self at all, and focused on making him a quiet and cute character who could be called ‘little darling’ as he was in canon. Flora was the hardest because of course I wanted to base her on Iris, but it’s hard to apply anything about a quirky genius child raised by Herlock Sholmes to a normal Victorian lady. At least I made her also an inventor. (A side note is that when thinking of a plausible way she could’ve gotten into mechanical tinkering I landed on watches. So I wonder if this Flora has a big connection to Stronghart…?)
Flora bothers me because in the original she was the protagonist, and she was meant to be sneaky and inquisitive and solve the mysteries, and also her relationship with Klint was supposed to be very romantic. But in this fic she got relegated to merely existing in order to make the plot happen. I needed to avoid wasting time developing her (I even cut some sections out) and it felt bad because really the entire point of the original was to take the fridged mother, develop her character, and retell the manpain angsty precanon events from her POV.
BUT I don’t care in the end because I got to write vampire incest!!! A trope combination I have been obsessed with for years. Also, when writing, setting a rule of ‘no actual sex’ makes me 250% excited to make non-sexual things as horny as possible. I just love thinking creatively about this.
The best thing of all is that I finally wrote a fic for an old fandom, which I had thought was impossible before. It’s not my best work this time but I still feel like I leveled up a bit. Thank you Bulletproof.