I-have-finished-a-fic-go-me. Not dragons. Seven Samurai. Kyuuzou (that's the swordsman)/ Katsushirou (that's the kid.) And to spare you all I've used English spelling for the names which are otherwise u-heavy.

I could natter at length about how I tend to be too explicit and how I can't manage to leave things to the imagination and how this exercise is no exception though it might have been if I'd left the first draft as it was and not rewritten it the way that sounded best to me. But I won't. I could natter about how I doubt what I've said was up with Kyuuzou really was up with Kyuuzou, but I won't do that either. I *will* mention some Japanese girl's remark about Kyuuzou, 'I want to fall in love with a man like that but even if I could tell him how I felt I think he'd be cold and unkind and then I'd be even *more* in love with him.' What makes Kyuuzou irresistible is his non-attachment; but non-attachment has to be the real thing if it's going to be irresistible; once he shows attachment... well, he becomes resistible.

Somehow this is going to segue into considerations of the Count of Monte Cristo and how the figure of Dumas' Count is actually undercut for me by his being Edmond Dantes, the nice young man we know in the earlier part of the novel. Yes, Dumas' novel is all about what happens to that nice young man and what a revenger's tragedy it all turns into. But lookasee, Gankutsu-ou starts you mid-novel with Albert's pov, and without any backstory the Count turns into a very satisfying magician/ supernatural power/ God figure indeed. I should hate to lose that by having Gankutsu-ou turn into Edmond Dantes. And I'll point out that Dumas had something of the same idea: in what I feel is the weakest part of the novel- the closing chapters- he presents that quondam nice young man turned revenger playing God, and failing to make the impression his author wants him to because... well, he's not God; he's Edmond Dantes. Dumas should have stuck with one or the other, but as it is... things feel very unsatisfying by the end of the book. Everything tidied away and Edmond given Haydee and Albert and his mother nobly and stiffly vanishing from sight. Mhh. Obviously from a quasi-Japanese and totally yaoi pov it's Albert who has to make amends to the Count for his parents' derelictions and betrayals, preferably with his body; but that, dear readers, will be the subject of my next fic.