Reading all of these at once has made me realize something pretty important about what you're doing.
There's a surface wit and polish about all these stories that is very like the masks that Jack and John present to the world (and to some extent, to each other). But you slip in these touches, these moments that suggest a kind of rawness or emptiness beneath it all, something that goes a long way to explain their connection and need. It seems to go deeper with John, who is perhaps the more damaged of the two (at least at this stage) and whose surface is correspondingly more glassy (like the disc here).
I notice this especially here, with the recycling image and the vanity wall, and think back to "Hypnos" and ahead to "Mission of Mercy," which I see as a moment of synthesis where the various threads of all the stories come together. It's subtle and easy to miss, because the wit and sparkle satisfy so well in their own right -- but it does sneak up on you. You sly fox, you.
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Date: 2009-05-05 09:09 pm (UTC)There's a surface wit and polish about all these stories that is very like the masks that Jack and John present to the world (and to some extent, to each other). But you slip in these touches, these moments that suggest a kind of rawness or emptiness beneath it all, something that goes a long way to explain their connection and need. It seems to go deeper with John, who is perhaps the more damaged of the two (at least at this stage) and whose surface is correspondingly more glassy (like the disc here).
I notice this especially here, with the recycling image and the vanity wall, and think back to "Hypnos" and ahead to "Mission of Mercy," which I see as a moment of synthesis where the various threads of all the stories come together. It's subtle and easy to miss, because the wit and sparkle satisfy so well in their own right -- but it does sneak up on you. You sly fox, you.