"Fading" Surprise Fic Reading · 3:52pm Mar 3rd, 2018
So I logged in last night only to be greeted by a couple dozen notifications, most of them regarding a rather forgotten sadfic I wrote for a contest in 2014. Turns out, Scribbler and friends did a full cast reading of Fading.
This is awesome, and also got me thinking about the story again.
Don't get excited about a sequel or anything — I was going to expand it at one point (as a contest entry, it was done under pretty tight time/length constraints), but eventually decided that all I could really do with it was a series of vignettes showing shapshots of Marcus's friendship with Celestia, and that's not much of a story. I can, however, do some author notes and share some of the things I was thinking of doing with it at the time, and a few thoughts I've had since.
Just consider things below this line to have a few spoilers.
First, hearing it spoken out loud highlights that Marcus has a fairly formal and dramatic manner of speaking. Part of that is just from his nature and background, but I think the larger culprit is spending a year almost exclusively in the company of the royal sisters, and learning the language from them. He's picked up on their speaking habits, too.
On the background, Marcus was a college student who either never declared a major, or majored in a very "soft" area, like Philosophy or Literature. He wasn't really trying to complete a degree course, but instead just took whatever classes caught his interest. It gave him a lot of material for his conversations with Celestia, but wouldn't have done much for a career.
Most readers probably picked up on it from his references to "remission", a "miraculous recovery", and "living on borrowed time already", but Marcus was a cancer patient. He was a severe case, and entered treatment sometime around his first two years of college. That was the reason for his very scattered education — he wasn't trying to graduate because he didn't expect to live long enough to make any use of it, so he was just entertaining himself. Plus, constantly missing classes for treatments made graduation a challenging prospect, anyway. This is the source of his nihilistic attitude, as well.
A later thought, but I'm not sure that the idea that magic is inherently toxic to humans is actually correct. Were I writing this now, I think I'd specify that his failing health is due to an effect magic is having on cancer cells remaining in his body, and causing a rapid recurrence. It's possible a perfectly healthy human who crossed over would have been fine.
If there were any other things people were wondering about this story, comment and I can try to answer them here.
Also, if you're interested, I keep a YT playlist of all the readings of my stories that I'm aware of. If there are others out there that I'm missing, let me know.
I'm glad that's gotten you some more attention. :) This is why reading and reviewing old fics is important!