![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cog_nomenCastle on the Sand
1920’s era FF7 AU. Various pairings, mostly ShinRa oriented.
Rating: M
Part 1
Part 2
Author’s notes:
1. The title of this piece is a reference, of course to The Edna St. Vincent Millay poem, Second Fig:
‘Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!’
Of course this poem itself is a reference to the 20’s on the whole, as is this fic.
2. There is a lot of history geekage in this fic, and for that I apologize. As I apparently did not learn my lesson about AU’s with The Many Adventures of Walking Man, I came back for a second beating (absolutely free). I do love history, and I think about the only period I could have gone on at longer length about would have been the Napoleonic Era. As no one will ever ask for an AU fic set during that period (and this is not a challenge, trust me the fic would be of an obscene length), I suppose I shall have to be satisfied with this.
3. I know that removing the bullet from a wound is a film-ism, in regards to current-day medical technology. Since a bullet gets hot enough to self-sterilize, and modern antibiotics are what they are, it is no longer as vital to dig a bullet out of a wound. However, antibiotics were not widely used until Prontosil in 1932 – and this fic is set mostly in mid 1929. It was still medical practice to remove a bullet from a wound as quickly as possible at that point, and especially worrisome if the slug carried in other foreign objects such as cloth from one’s shirt or pieces of anything else it passed through before entering the body. With no available treatment for infection, often an untreated wound would result in amputation if it became infected. Amputation of course being preferable to death.
4. There are large amounts of 20’s era slang. Hopefully everything is easy to figure out in the context it’s presented in, but if there are any questions I’ll gladly clarify. Period slang is a particular weakness of mine.
5. Reno’s anecdote about the umbrellas is an unabashed reference to The Untouchables. If you haven’t seen this film and enjoy the 20’s and 30’s era I highly recommend it.
6. The Cocoanuts did indeed come out in 1929, on May 3rd. It was the first Marx Brothers stage show to be transferred to film, once the technology of sound recording came to exist. It made an astronomical amount of money for the day, close to 2 million dollars and was hugely popular. It doesn’t hurt that I love the movie (and the Marx Brothers) in general, and so I felt I had to include it.
7. Entirely out of order. Reno’s family disaster is the Boston Molasses Disaster, a real historical event that happened on January 15th, 1919.
8. The popularization of wristwatches is in fact largely due to WW1, though they were worn by women as early as 1850 when advances in clockwork made accuracy possible in something smaller than a pocket watch.
9. October 28th-29th, ‘Black Monday’ and ‘Black Tuesday’, the dates of the most felt effects of the 1929 stock market crash, and I felt they were pretty much this AU’s version of Meteor.
10. This is more of a personal pet peeve, but I can hardly ever understand why everyone seems to think that Tseng is so deeply tied to being wutaiian when he gives zero evidence of even being interested in Wutai or any of its culture in the game. Instead I feel that he’s not a nationality but instead much more loyal to his job. I apologize for working out some of my frustrations with a back story that isn’t so flowery and complicated as most give him, but I liked ‘I’m from San Francisco.’ I probably couldn’t have lived with myself if he was Chinese mafia come over from the mainland after some horrible scandal and spoke seven languages and knew kung-fu. He’s a guy with long hair and an asian name.
TL;DR: Oh god I am so sorry. This fic is actually shorter than I originally intended because I refused to let it get past 20k.
1920’s era FF7 AU. Various pairings, mostly ShinRa oriented.
Rating: M
Part 1
Part 2
Author’s notes:
1. The title of this piece is a reference, of course to The Edna St. Vincent Millay poem, Second Fig:
‘Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!’
Of course this poem itself is a reference to the 20’s on the whole, as is this fic.
2. There is a lot of history geekage in this fic, and for that I apologize. As I apparently did not learn my lesson about AU’s with The Many Adventures of Walking Man, I came back for a second beating (absolutely free). I do love history, and I think about the only period I could have gone on at longer length about would have been the Napoleonic Era. As no one will ever ask for an AU fic set during that period (and this is not a challenge, trust me the fic would be of an obscene length), I suppose I shall have to be satisfied with this.
3. I know that removing the bullet from a wound is a film-ism, in regards to current-day medical technology. Since a bullet gets hot enough to self-sterilize, and modern antibiotics are what they are, it is no longer as vital to dig a bullet out of a wound. However, antibiotics were not widely used until Prontosil in 1932 – and this fic is set mostly in mid 1929. It was still medical practice to remove a bullet from a wound as quickly as possible at that point, and especially worrisome if the slug carried in other foreign objects such as cloth from one’s shirt or pieces of anything else it passed through before entering the body. With no available treatment for infection, often an untreated wound would result in amputation if it became infected. Amputation of course being preferable to death.
4. There are large amounts of 20’s era slang. Hopefully everything is easy to figure out in the context it’s presented in, but if there are any questions I’ll gladly clarify. Period slang is a particular weakness of mine.
5. Reno’s anecdote about the umbrellas is an unabashed reference to The Untouchables. If you haven’t seen this film and enjoy the 20’s and 30’s era I highly recommend it.
6. The Cocoanuts did indeed come out in 1929, on May 3rd. It was the first Marx Brothers stage show to be transferred to film, once the technology of sound recording came to exist. It made an astronomical amount of money for the day, close to 2 million dollars and was hugely popular. It doesn’t hurt that I love the movie (and the Marx Brothers) in general, and so I felt I had to include it.
7. Entirely out of order. Reno’s family disaster is the Boston Molasses Disaster, a real historical event that happened on January 15th, 1919.
8. The popularization of wristwatches is in fact largely due to WW1, though they were worn by women as early as 1850 when advances in clockwork made accuracy possible in something smaller than a pocket watch.
9. October 28th-29th, ‘Black Monday’ and ‘Black Tuesday’, the dates of the most felt effects of the 1929 stock market crash, and I felt they were pretty much this AU’s version of Meteor.
10. This is more of a personal pet peeve, but I can hardly ever understand why everyone seems to think that Tseng is so deeply tied to being wutaiian when he gives zero evidence of even being interested in Wutai or any of its culture in the game. Instead I feel that he’s not a nationality but instead much more loyal to his job. I apologize for working out some of my frustrations with a back story that isn’t so flowery and complicated as most give him, but I liked ‘I’m from San Francisco.’ I probably couldn’t have lived with myself if he was Chinese mafia come over from the mainland after some horrible scandal and spoke seven languages and knew kung-fu. He’s a guy with long hair and an asian name.
TL;DR: Oh god I am so sorry. This fic is actually shorter than I originally intended because I refused to let it get past 20k.