mf

ok so I'm going to go with Oz, which, to be fair, is a fandom for which I have plotted fic, but the truth is, I've been sure for years now that I'll never get around to actually writing anything

En Pointe is an Oz ballet AU, set in an arts centre called Domaine Forget, which is in the middle of nowhere (it's a real place! I've been there.) Also it is a gender AU in which both Beecher and Keller are women. Basically they've both been dancing ever since they were little kids, but they're coming at it from radically different places - Tabitha Beecher is from a whole ballet *dynasty* while Christina Keller is the product of an arts-for-underprivileged-kids program - and now they're at this summer arts program wayyyyy up north. Like we're talking a solid five hour drive from Montreal. And they both have intense love-hate relationships with ballet, and they both feel like leaving the program is absolutely not an option. Tabitha is limited by a variety of factors, and Christina thinks she can’t - she thinks she’s good for nothing else. So with the distance and the sensation of captivity, the summer program feels a little bit like prison. They're roommates, obviously.

Like I said I did spend some time plotting Oz fic, so here's some characterization for you:

Christina is attracted to Tabitha because she feels that Tabitha is better than her. Tabitha knows things and she reads books Keller has never heard of, let alone understands. Tabitha writes essays at the drop of a hat; she makes cultural references Keller wouldn’t know where to begin to pick up, like she knows all the plots to all of the operas the dance instructors keep mentioning, and the names of all the original choreographers to classical ballets and she’s even read some of the sources and she even knows some French and Italian, like she says "shouldn't this section be in 3/4 time?" in rehearsal and Christina is like “where the hell are you getting that from” and Tabitha says, all, “it says pas de valse” and Christina nods like she knew that all along but really she’s like, boner alert.

Tabitha's feelings towards Keller are more like... it's just that Tabitha has never, ever been the subject of so much attention, not to mention sexual prowess, in her life. No it's more than that - she never knew this kind of attention and sexual gratification was even an option. But the thing that really makes Christina a genuinely (in the end) positive element in her life is that Christina genuinely thinks Tabitha is a wonderful person, a good person, just as she is. Christina’s love of Tabitha is utterly unrelated to Tabitha's skill at ballet; Christina looks at Tabitha just the same even when Tabitha has just given a bad performance. Tabitha does not have that in her family - her parents always passive-aggressively punished her when she danced badly or even if they just heard indifferent comments about her performances. They would spend all of dinnertime talking about some other ballet student’s qualities onstage, her mother would prepare Tabitha’s favourite foods only when Tabitha did well, etc etc etc.

Uh, I actually had some casting in mind for both characters - in my head Tabitha looks like Gilmore Girls-era Liza Weil, and Christina looks like Caroline Dhavernas.

As for my favourite or least favourite part of this story... Well, in my head, I wanted to retell their relationship arc and fix the ending. Which, yay, fixing the ending! But that would still involve an entire section where Christina genuinely betrays Tabitha which would be an awful, awful thing to write, not to mention an awful thing to subject readers to. So that would be my least favourite.