Penny Dreadful fic: "Fate and Metaphysical Aid"

[chthonic_cassandra]

Title: Fate and Metaphysical Aid
Fandom: Penny Dreadful
Rating/Warnings: PG-13/T; some vampiric violence; deals with internalized homophobia.
Character/Pairing: Vanessa, Dracula, Mina, Vanessa/Mina, Vanessa/Dracula
Summary: Dracula offers another temptation to Vanessa. Slight AU of 3.07.

Also diving into another TV fandom, this one less intimidating to me. I have a lot of things I want to write for Penny Dreadful; this one felt easiest to start with, as a very slight, contained, single-scene canon rewrite.

What was trickiest about writing this was trying to shift to Penny Dreadful's characterization of Dracula characters after fic for the Stoker for novel for something like fifteen years now. I have strongly developed Dracula and Mina voices, and they aren't the characters from the show (also, let's be real, Penny Dreadful's Mina is obviously Lucy). Further complicating it, the dynamic in this particular fic is adjacent (but not identical) to one I've played with previous Dracula stories.

Twisting my head around changing it for these particular characters was lightly fun, even if I don't think I've totally succeeded - there a couple of lines here in particular where I think Alexander Sweet!Dracula sounds incontrovertibly like my novel!Dracula, but I'm going to let it stand.

Comments

[starshipfox]

I love this fandom, and I'm delighted you wrote fic for it. Vanessa is one of my favourite characters ever. I also love that you set it in the museum -- the museum the show used as the set is my local natural history museum here in Dublin, and it's one of my favourite places, and it's always very moving to me when it's connected with Vanessa and the emotions both she and that place evoke for me.

I'm not usually one to self-rec, but I wondered if my Vanessa fic would be of any interest to you? https://archiveofourown.org/works/15651576

[chthonic_cassandra]

Thank you so much! I hope to write a lot more Penny Dreadful fic in the future and lavish endless adoration on Vanessa. It's so cool that the set was your own natural history museum! That must have been such a surreal experience to watch; I know I feel strange whenever shows and movies use NYC locations that I'm familiar with.

Thanks so much for the link! I was really glad to read your story; I've been combing through the AO3 offerings for the fandom, and way too much of it is for pairings I just have no interest in (I don't get the appeal of Ethan/Victor at all!), so self-recs are more than welcome. I enjoyed your story very much.

[starshipfox]

I often find that fandoms I like are full of pairings I don't care about -- I do enjoy m/m slash some of the time, but usually even the m/m ships I do like aren't popular with fandom. So it's always a joy to find good stories about characters I love -- I'm thrilled you plan to write more about Vanessa, and would be delighted to read it.

It's pretty rare for things to be filmed in Dublin, but over the last few years Dublin has been standing in for London in various TV / movies, and I'm not at all used to it yet! I expect if you are from NYC or London or somewhere that appears in a lot of films, you get more blase about it.