The FanFic Critic: Masque

1 thought on “The FanFic Critic: Masque”

1. I’ve never seen Love Never Dies, but everything I’ve heard about it makes it sound like bad fanfiction that somehow got turned into a musical. Phantom of the Opera was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s last hit – after that, he never had anything even remotely as successful. And he pretty much hit a new low with Love Never Dies.
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   Even ignoring the fact that sequels are rare in musical theatre, and the rare sequels that DO happen flop and generally become obscure and the subject of trivia questions, the basic summary of Love Never Dies sounds like it has a whole bunch of bad fanfic tropes in it.
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   As for THIS fic … it makes no sense for the Phantom to still be around near the Opera house. If this is meant to be a sequel to the musical, Phantom, it ended with many of the people from the opera house (after the Phantom kidnaps Christine and murders the opera house’s tenor, Piangi) hunting down the Phantom. It’s surprising that he’d return to the Opera House after the ‘heat was off’ and everyone had moved on, though I suppose it COULD work if the writer bothered to give a decent enough explanation.
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   If I recall correctly, the Phantom’s real first name being Erik was a part of the original book, though I don’t recall it being mentioned in the musical.
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   It’s been a while, but I don’t recall Raoul being as big a jerk in the musical as he is portrayed in this fic.
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   And yes, the fic seems to be abandoning realism by having Amy be able to resume her dancing even after not having danced for ten years. That’s way too much of a stretch.
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   I think you got the terminology confused. Second person is when the main character is called ‘You’, as in Choose Your Own Adventure books and text-based adventure games (often called Interactive Fiction). The Game of Thrones books narrative you’re referring to is still third person, but it’s a variant of third person that concentrates the viewpoint on one character in each chapter. This is different from the usual third person omniscient narrator who knows all and constantly gets into the thoughts and feelings of multiple characters within the same scene, let alone the same chapter.
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   But yes, it’s not surprising that Christine/Phantom shippers tone down the Phantom’s character and make Raoul more of a jerk than he was in the source material. We see things like that all the time in bad fanfiction.

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