neveralarch (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
neveralarch) wrote2011-11-19 04:32 pm
neveralarch) wrote2011-11-19 04:32 pm
Entry tags:
Fic commentary: The Genuine Moral Incentive
This is a commentary for The Genuine Moral Incentive (non-explicit Doctor/Master). It was requested approximately forever ago by tweedymcgee. I live up to my commitments! Very slowly. If you want to read the commentary, I suggest reading the original fic first. Also about three hundred years worth of moral philosophy. Sorry.
If, for some reason, you have always wanted to hear my thoughts on my fic, I'm always taking requests. You may have to wait a few months, though.
Comments in bold, fic in... non-bold.
OKAY, THIS THING. This was- I’m still not sure what I was trying to do here. I suspect it’s a lot of the same stuff I tried to do with Wager, about a month later, except with a way more extreme case. (Wager is my Dresden Files AU, where every second page has an argument about some toy problem in moral philosophy, for some reason. I don’t know.) Anyway, fun times!
I wrote this sometime in August of last year, at the end of my summer job. I sort of just spilled it all out onto the page, mostly dialogue without any tags or description. I’d been reading Schopenhauer, as I mention on the fic proper. On the Basis of Morality discusses two basic foundations for morality. The first is fear of punishment/desire for reward, which makes moral behavior essentially a selfish act. You can do good things and still be a bad person, as Schopenhauer argues. The second foundation is sympathy/compassion, which Schopenhauer sees as ultimately divorced from the self and thus admirable. Buddhism showing through there, Schopenhauer.
The point is, this seemed like an obvious dichotomy to explore with Doctor/Master. The problem of morality is always in the ship, and it’s something most people ignore (including me!). I wouldn’t want every fic to go on and on about this kind of stuff, but it seemed important and interesting enough for this fic.
There was a room. In the room were a bed, and a chair, and two renegade Time Lords. The Doctor sat and stared at the Master.
"Where are we?" The Master looked around the room, up and down, searching in vain for a door or a TARDIS.
"Nowhere," said the Doctor. He crossed his legs and tried to project calm. "I have a question for you."
"Hmm?" The Master prowled around the room, his hands mapping the walls.
"How many people have you murdered?" SO MANY, oh man. I think of Delgado!Master as the least violent Master, and yet there he is, running dudes over and shrinking scientists and leaving their dead bodies in lunch pails. And Ainley!Master is much worse. The Doctor didn't turn as the Master left his field of vision. Instead he tipped his head back and crossed his arms as well.
"I really have no idea, Doctor. Do you think I keep a running total?" The Master, apparently satisfied that there was no means of escape for either of them, brought himself to stand just behind the Doctor, leaning down so his breath crept along the Doctor's nape.
"I don't know what I thought." The Doctor stood up, turning to look down at the Master.
"Why are we here? Is it actually for the sole purpose of asking me bizarre questions that you have removed yourself from your TARDIS, your companions, your safety nets?" Ainley voice, agh. I haven’t seen many of his serials, and it shows. The Master leered, smugly, already confident in the answer.
"Indulge me, Master." The Master's confidence hardened the Doctor's resolve, and he leant in until their noses were practically brushing. The chair kept them separated, briefly, and then was gone. "How many people have you killed, at a guess?"
"Only one who mattered."
The Doctor wasn't sure which one of them started the kiss. But it was him that steered them to the bed and him who pulled the Master down. Originally this whole scene was only dialogue. This is basically the only stage direction that was in the original draft. The rest all got written in later, when I was tinkering with it, and then almost completely rewritten right before posting, when I had figured out what the third scene would be.
---
Originally the gap was there because I felt like the sex was important, but didn’t want to distract from the argument. Once it was finished, the gap became important because it shows where the Doctor’s attention is – basically he’s reasoning the same way as I am, and so his consciousness just skips over the sex and into the next bit of the argument.
Afterwards the Master seemed to be dozing off, but the Doctor had no intention of letting him do so.
"Do you feel badly when you kill someone?"
The Master sighed, but didn't move his head off of the pillow he was sharing with the Doctor.
"Answer the question. Do you?" Lack of dialogue tags – stylistic, or a relic of the original dialogue-only draft? I don’t know, they just felt wrong. But I get confused if I leave exchanges of dialogue without anchors, which is why the Master’s dialogue almost always has tags here.
"No." The Master rolled his eyes, and the Doctor was momentarily distracted by the flash of grey-blue.
"Did you ever?"
"I can't remember properly." The Master hesitated, and then continued to speak, slowly. "I know the first time I killed I was sick for days. But I think I was just afraid of being found out."
"You don't feel any moral compunction? None at all?" The Doctor tried to keep his voice steady, but it came out as flat, dead.
"I'm sorry." The Master's eyes flickered and his expression hardened. The Doctor hadn't even realized he had been more open than usual before.
"Why are you sorry?" The Doctor's tone wavered, and he stopped in the act of saying something else.
"Because I'm making you upset." The Master frowned.
"No! You're supposed to be sorry for killing people." aaaaand there’s the Schopenhauer. This is the distinction that the Master can’t get. I mean, honestly, it’s a fine distinction, and one that I don’t always follow. I shouldn’t litter. Is it to keep the earth clean, or because I’ll get fined? Why does it matter if I’m standing in a parking lot and will only get asphalt dirty? What if I just don’t get caught? Which is Schopenhauer’s point, obviously – if your morality is based on reward/punishment, then there’s always the niggling feeling of ‘but what if there aren’t any consequences?’ The Doctor's control broke completely, and he was pulling at the Master's shoulders, shaking him. "Why can't you understand this?"
"I understand, Doctor." The Master shoved away the Doctor's hands, pushing them apart. They struggled briefly, foolishly, until they were lying on opposite sides of the bed, only just facing each other.
"I understand intellectually that you think I should react to death in a certain way," said the Master, at last. "But I can't make myself feel it. And why should I? Because you say it's right to feel guilt where I only see triumph?" Moral relativism, I just can’t quit you. Switching away from Schopenhauer, here.
"This lack of conscience makes you a monster," said the Doctor. He got up, searching out his scattered clothes.
"Hardly. It makes you a monster, Doctor." The Master raised an eyebrow at the Doctor's attempts to put on his trousers backwards. "I do not think what I do is wrong - I want to rule, to dominate, and I do so. What else could be expected of me? But you, Doctor," the Master's voice grew more heated, and he gestured furiously, "you know what you do is wrong. You speak of right conduct and morals, and then you turn to me." This is starting to get hard on the Doctor. I think some people took it as ‘oh Doctor, why can’t you just love the Master for who he is’ but, hm. No. Death of the author – you can think whatever you want about the fic. But when I was writing it, my thoughts were much more ‘Doctor. Doctor. Stop having sex with a MASS-MURDERER. This is not healthy for ANYONE.’
"I'm trying to save you," said the Doctor. He snapped his braces on.
"I don't even recognize your salvation as a reality. And you enable my behavior every time you fall into my arms."
"I'm not responsible for you." The Doctor turned his back.
"Aren't you? Your precious morals might say different, if you weren't capable of ignoring them every time they bother you." The Master's voice grew bitter, but he didn't move from the bed. "What separates you from me isn't that you're guided by your morals, but that they make you feel guilty afterwards." This is something that comes up in my fics from time to time – that the Master isn’t hurt by the Doctor hating him, but that he’s hurt by the Doctor hating himself for liking the Master. It’s made the most clear in Operator, Operator, I think. There’s two fics that are totally different in tone.
"Stop it." The Doctor picked up his coat from the floor.
"You'll be upset about this encounter for weeks now, won't you? And I'll only be pleased that it occurred and sorry that it had to end." The Doctor looked over his shoulder despite himself and caught the Master grinning, smugly, as if to illustrate his point.
"If everyone was like you," said the Doctor, "we'd all be dead."
"If everyone was like me," said the Master, "there'd be far less unhappiness in the universe. I'm a realist, Doctor."
"I don't think anyone's ever accused you of that." The Doctor laughed shortly, humorlessly.
"Oh, but I am," said the Master, ignoring the mockery. "I recognize the limits of my reason. I don't try to instill artificial motivations in myself. My actions stem naturally from my wants and needs." This is Crowley, now. I should read the Book of Lies again.
"Now who's trying to convert who?" The Doctor opened a door that hadn't been there until then.
"Yes, that's right, run, now that the balance of power has shifted." An odd note of vindication crept in to mix with the bitterness in the Master's voice. "What are you afraid of, that I might be right? That you might be happier without all that metaphysical baggage weighing you down?"
"I don't know if I'd be happier." The Doctor paused, half out of the door. "But I know that I would be broken inside. Try to get yourself fixed, Master."
The Doctor shut the door on the Master's chuckle. This is where the fic ended originally. And it stuck like that for four months. It’s mentioned in my WIP meme as done, but obviously I wasn’t happy with it. And then in December I was thinking about Deadly Assassin – possibly I was working on Honeymooners? I’m not sure. But anyway, all of a sudden I had it figured out, and I wrote the next scene and then went back and rewrote the tags and description to make it hang together, and I had a story. I think I posted it almost immediately (usually I wait a few days on non-anon fic) because I was afraid I’d change my mind.
---
Engin carefully lifted the Matrix headset off of the Doctor. The Doctor's expression gradually cleared, and when he opened his eyes his jaw was set and there were no lines creasing his brow. The forced calm was in stark contrast to the varied emotions Engin had seen while the Doctor was under. He had wanted to look away from the Doctor's raw, open face, but he couldn't adequately monitor the Doctor's condition by staring at his feet. Now there was no need to watch the Doctor, and Engin was glad of it. Engin is the guy in Deadly Assassin who’s in charge of the Matrix records. He’s awesome. I bet no one remembered who he was. He’s a Coordinator! He was probably only pretending to be doddering and harmless.
"Did you get what you wanted?" asked Engin, carefully.
"What I wanted?" The Doctor shook his head minutely as he stood up, swaying a little from the return to the physical world. "Tell me, Engin, how much of that was real? How much was simply projections from my mind?"
"Hard to say," said Engin. He busied himself with the Matrix controls, clearing the settings and doing other tasks that were hardly necessary.
"Try." The Doctor leant over the console, hands in his pockets.
"Well, the Master's records are hardly in ideal conditions," began Engin. He let himself natter on about the technical details until something in the Doctor's eyes stopped him. "I don't know," he said, at last.
"How useless," murmured the Doctor, and Engin raised his eyebrows. The Doctor shrugged. "Talking to myself." Double-meaning! I felt so clever.
"I'm sorry I can't be of more help." Me too, Doctor. No solutions for you here.
The Doctor nodded, and turned away. Engin focused on the controls again, and when he looked up only the fading outline of the Doctor's TARDIS was visible.
bagheera_san mentioned that Five seemed like a kind of unlikely Doctor for this confrontation, going out of his way to see the Master and argue with him. I think part of it is that my Five is audio!Five, whose characterization is often very different from proper!Five. But I definitely was forcing it a bit, for the sake of the dichotomy. Seven and Ainley!Master or even Six and Ainley!Master would have been more realistic, but it would have been such a different conversation. Less Schopenhauer and more Jonathan Dancy, different shades of relativism. I considered it, and then wrote Wager and now I am done with writing about morality, lest I become That Guy.
Or, I don’t know, maybe I’m That Guy already.
If, for some reason, you have always wanted to hear my thoughts on my fic, I'm always taking requests. You may have to wait a few months, though.
Comments in bold, fic in... non-bold.
OKAY, THIS THING. This was- I’m still not sure what I was trying to do here. I suspect it’s a lot of the same stuff I tried to do with Wager, about a month later, except with a way more extreme case. (Wager is my Dresden Files AU, where every second page has an argument about some toy problem in moral philosophy, for some reason. I don’t know.) Anyway, fun times!
I wrote this sometime in August of last year, at the end of my summer job. I sort of just spilled it all out onto the page, mostly dialogue without any tags or description. I’d been reading Schopenhauer, as I mention on the fic proper. On the Basis of Morality discusses two basic foundations for morality. The first is fear of punishment/desire for reward, which makes moral behavior essentially a selfish act. You can do good things and still be a bad person, as Schopenhauer argues. The second foundation is sympathy/compassion, which Schopenhauer sees as ultimately divorced from the self and thus admirable. Buddhism showing through there, Schopenhauer.
The point is, this seemed like an obvious dichotomy to explore with Doctor/Master. The problem of morality is always in the ship, and it’s something most people ignore (including me!). I wouldn’t want every fic to go on and on about this kind of stuff, but it seemed important and interesting enough for this fic.
There was a room. In the room were a bed, and a chair, and two renegade Time Lords. The Doctor sat and stared at the Master.
"Where are we?" The Master looked around the room, up and down, searching in vain for a door or a TARDIS.
"Nowhere," said the Doctor. He crossed his legs and tried to project calm. "I have a question for you."
"Hmm?" The Master prowled around the room, his hands mapping the walls.
"How many people have you murdered?" SO MANY, oh man. I think of Delgado!Master as the least violent Master, and yet there he is, running dudes over and shrinking scientists and leaving their dead bodies in lunch pails. And Ainley!Master is much worse. The Doctor didn't turn as the Master left his field of vision. Instead he tipped his head back and crossed his arms as well.
"I really have no idea, Doctor. Do you think I keep a running total?" The Master, apparently satisfied that there was no means of escape for either of them, brought himself to stand just behind the Doctor, leaning down so his breath crept along the Doctor's nape.
"I don't know what I thought." The Doctor stood up, turning to look down at the Master.
"Why are we here? Is it actually for the sole purpose of asking me bizarre questions that you have removed yourself from your TARDIS, your companions, your safety nets?" Ainley voice, agh. I haven’t seen many of his serials, and it shows. The Master leered, smugly, already confident in the answer.
"Indulge me, Master." The Master's confidence hardened the Doctor's resolve, and he leant in until their noses were practically brushing. The chair kept them separated, briefly, and then was gone. "How many people have you killed, at a guess?"
"Only one who mattered."
The Doctor wasn't sure which one of them started the kiss. But it was him that steered them to the bed and him who pulled the Master down. Originally this whole scene was only dialogue. This is basically the only stage direction that was in the original draft. The rest all got written in later, when I was tinkering with it, and then almost completely rewritten right before posting, when I had figured out what the third scene would be.
---
Originally the gap was there because I felt like the sex was important, but didn’t want to distract from the argument. Once it was finished, the gap became important because it shows where the Doctor’s attention is – basically he’s reasoning the same way as I am, and so his consciousness just skips over the sex and into the next bit of the argument.
Afterwards the Master seemed to be dozing off, but the Doctor had no intention of letting him do so.
"Do you feel badly when you kill someone?"
The Master sighed, but didn't move his head off of the pillow he was sharing with the Doctor.
"Answer the question. Do you?" Lack of dialogue tags – stylistic, or a relic of the original dialogue-only draft? I don’t know, they just felt wrong. But I get confused if I leave exchanges of dialogue without anchors, which is why the Master’s dialogue almost always has tags here.
"No." The Master rolled his eyes, and the Doctor was momentarily distracted by the flash of grey-blue.
"Did you ever?"
"I can't remember properly." The Master hesitated, and then continued to speak, slowly. "I know the first time I killed I was sick for days. But I think I was just afraid of being found out."
"You don't feel any moral compunction? None at all?" The Doctor tried to keep his voice steady, but it came out as flat, dead.
"I'm sorry." The Master's eyes flickered and his expression hardened. The Doctor hadn't even realized he had been more open than usual before.
"Why are you sorry?" The Doctor's tone wavered, and he stopped in the act of saying something else.
"Because I'm making you upset." The Master frowned.
"No! You're supposed to be sorry for killing people." aaaaand there’s the Schopenhauer. This is the distinction that the Master can’t get. I mean, honestly, it’s a fine distinction, and one that I don’t always follow. I shouldn’t litter. Is it to keep the earth clean, or because I’ll get fined? Why does it matter if I’m standing in a parking lot and will only get asphalt dirty? What if I just don’t get caught? Which is Schopenhauer’s point, obviously – if your morality is based on reward/punishment, then there’s always the niggling feeling of ‘but what if there aren’t any consequences?’ The Doctor's control broke completely, and he was pulling at the Master's shoulders, shaking him. "Why can't you understand this?"
"I understand, Doctor." The Master shoved away the Doctor's hands, pushing them apart. They struggled briefly, foolishly, until they were lying on opposite sides of the bed, only just facing each other.
"I understand intellectually that you think I should react to death in a certain way," said the Master, at last. "But I can't make myself feel it. And why should I? Because you say it's right to feel guilt where I only see triumph?" Moral relativism, I just can’t quit you. Switching away from Schopenhauer, here.
"This lack of conscience makes you a monster," said the Doctor. He got up, searching out his scattered clothes.
"Hardly. It makes you a monster, Doctor." The Master raised an eyebrow at the Doctor's attempts to put on his trousers backwards. "I do not think what I do is wrong - I want to rule, to dominate, and I do so. What else could be expected of me? But you, Doctor," the Master's voice grew more heated, and he gestured furiously, "you know what you do is wrong. You speak of right conduct and morals, and then you turn to me." This is starting to get hard on the Doctor. I think some people took it as ‘oh Doctor, why can’t you just love the Master for who he is’ but, hm. No. Death of the author – you can think whatever you want about the fic. But when I was writing it, my thoughts were much more ‘Doctor. Doctor. Stop having sex with a MASS-MURDERER. This is not healthy for ANYONE.’
"I'm trying to save you," said the Doctor. He snapped his braces on.
"I don't even recognize your salvation as a reality. And you enable my behavior every time you fall into my arms."
"I'm not responsible for you." The Doctor turned his back.
"Aren't you? Your precious morals might say different, if you weren't capable of ignoring them every time they bother you." The Master's voice grew bitter, but he didn't move from the bed. "What separates you from me isn't that you're guided by your morals, but that they make you feel guilty afterwards." This is something that comes up in my fics from time to time – that the Master isn’t hurt by the Doctor hating him, but that he’s hurt by the Doctor hating himself for liking the Master. It’s made the most clear in Operator, Operator, I think. There’s two fics that are totally different in tone.
"Stop it." The Doctor picked up his coat from the floor.
"You'll be upset about this encounter for weeks now, won't you? And I'll only be pleased that it occurred and sorry that it had to end." The Doctor looked over his shoulder despite himself and caught the Master grinning, smugly, as if to illustrate his point.
"If everyone was like you," said the Doctor, "we'd all be dead."
"If everyone was like me," said the Master, "there'd be far less unhappiness in the universe. I'm a realist, Doctor."
"I don't think anyone's ever accused you of that." The Doctor laughed shortly, humorlessly.
"Oh, but I am," said the Master, ignoring the mockery. "I recognize the limits of my reason. I don't try to instill artificial motivations in myself. My actions stem naturally from my wants and needs." This is Crowley, now. I should read the Book of Lies again.
"Now who's trying to convert who?" The Doctor opened a door that hadn't been there until then.
"Yes, that's right, run, now that the balance of power has shifted." An odd note of vindication crept in to mix with the bitterness in the Master's voice. "What are you afraid of, that I might be right? That you might be happier without all that metaphysical baggage weighing you down?"
"I don't know if I'd be happier." The Doctor paused, half out of the door. "But I know that I would be broken inside. Try to get yourself fixed, Master."
The Doctor shut the door on the Master's chuckle. This is where the fic ended originally. And it stuck like that for four months. It’s mentioned in my WIP meme as done, but obviously I wasn’t happy with it. And then in December I was thinking about Deadly Assassin – possibly I was working on Honeymooners? I’m not sure. But anyway, all of a sudden I had it figured out, and I wrote the next scene and then went back and rewrote the tags and description to make it hang together, and I had a story. I think I posted it almost immediately (usually I wait a few days on non-anon fic) because I was afraid I’d change my mind.
---
Engin carefully lifted the Matrix headset off of the Doctor. The Doctor's expression gradually cleared, and when he opened his eyes his jaw was set and there were no lines creasing his brow. The forced calm was in stark contrast to the varied emotions Engin had seen while the Doctor was under. He had wanted to look away from the Doctor's raw, open face, but he couldn't adequately monitor the Doctor's condition by staring at his feet. Now there was no need to watch the Doctor, and Engin was glad of it. Engin is the guy in Deadly Assassin who’s in charge of the Matrix records. He’s awesome. I bet no one remembered who he was. He’s a Coordinator! He was probably only pretending to be doddering and harmless.
"Did you get what you wanted?" asked Engin, carefully.
"What I wanted?" The Doctor shook his head minutely as he stood up, swaying a little from the return to the physical world. "Tell me, Engin, how much of that was real? How much was simply projections from my mind?"
"Hard to say," said Engin. He busied himself with the Matrix controls, clearing the settings and doing other tasks that were hardly necessary.
"Try." The Doctor leant over the console, hands in his pockets.
"Well, the Master's records are hardly in ideal conditions," began Engin. He let himself natter on about the technical details until something in the Doctor's eyes stopped him. "I don't know," he said, at last.
"How useless," murmured the Doctor, and Engin raised his eyebrows. The Doctor shrugged. "Talking to myself." Double-meaning! I felt so clever.
"I'm sorry I can't be of more help." Me too, Doctor. No solutions for you here.
The Doctor nodded, and turned away. Engin focused on the controls again, and when he looked up only the fading outline of the Doctor's TARDIS was visible.
bagheera_san mentioned that Five seemed like a kind of unlikely Doctor for this confrontation, going out of his way to see the Master and argue with him. I think part of it is that my Five is audio!Five, whose characterization is often very different from proper!Five. But I definitely was forcing it a bit, for the sake of the dichotomy. Seven and Ainley!Master or even Six and Ainley!Master would have been more realistic, but it would have been such a different conversation. Less Schopenhauer and more Jonathan Dancy, different shades of relativism. I considered it, and then wrote Wager and now I am done with writing about morality, lest I become That Guy.
Or, I don’t know, maybe I’m That Guy already.