Title: The Disappointment
Words: 3,301
Quote: "So she wasn't a Gotham Prep prodigy who got caught up in the city's underworld of crime, drugs and murder?" — Bruce Wayne to Alfred Pennyworth about Valencia Carter
Song:
The Birth of a Chapter
Sometimes chapters are too short, and sometimes chapters are too long. Mine tend toward the latter.
I mentioned in the previous commentary that Linda Page was added as filler, but the reason why Chapter 2 was coming up short in the first place was that I decided to turn the explanation of Valencia's past into a chapter by itself. The earliest draft had the telling of her story as a joint venture between Alfred and Lucius Fox, after hours in Wayne Tower. (Alfred conveniently decided to make the trip up to the 40th floor after waiting to drive Bruce home.) I much prefer what I decided to go with in the end, with Fox ceding the responsibility over to Alfred. Plot cliffhanger endings — as opposed to the dramatic action variety — are always quite fun.
The Timeline
The bright side of chapter splitting is that the second chapter gets written a lot more easily and quickly, and it helped that I knew exactly what needed to be said. Before I even started writing out Chapter 1, I had mapped out all of Valencia's history so that it would work with the timeline of Bruce's life, based on the events of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. A little Googling research on my part revealed to me that The Dark Knight takes place only about six months after the events of Batman Begins. In retrospect, that makes a lot of sense because of the lead-in to the Joker at the of Batman Begins — obviously, Batman wouldn't have put off looking into the Joker issue for two to three years — but I had been under the impression that TDK took place some time after BB. Fortunately, my misunderstanding ended up helping my story, as it shorted by two to three years the sizable age difference between Bruce and Valencia.
Here's a simple timeline of events leading up to the start of Gotham's Cinerella. I'll be posting a more detailed version right after this, complete with detailed explanations of my reasoning/guesswork, and I will try to update it as the chapters progress.
- February 19, 1975: Bruce Wayne born
- December 1983: Thomas and Martha Wayne murdered
- January 30, 1984: Valencia Carter born
- 1984-1994: Bruce attends boarding school
- 1994-1997: Bruce attends college
- 1997: Joe Chill's trial, Bruce disappears
- 1997-2004: Bruce roams the world
- 1997-2000: Valencia attends Gotham Prep
- 2000: Valencia leaves Gotham
- fall 2004: Bruce trains with the League of Shadows
- February 19, 2005: Bruce defeats the League of Shadows (end of Batman Begins), Wayne Manor burns down
- August-September 2005: The Dark Knight, Rachel Dawes dies
- January 30, 2006: Valencia turns 22
- February 19, 2006: Bruce turns 31
- April 2006: The Return, The Interview, The Disappointment (Ch. 1-3 of GC)
So, long story short, that puts us about seven months after the end of The Dark Knight and about 14 months after Wayne Manor burns down at the end of Batman Begins. (That's probably not enough time to rebuild an entire mansion, but hey, what else is fanfiction for?)
Storytime with Alfred
In the original version of the chapter, Alfred pretty much spoke uninterrupted, but it didn't sound at all natural and even I couldn't get through it without getting bored. To try to fix this, I broke up the narrative by adding in Bruce's asking questions, making it play out as more of a dialogue between the two of them. Only once in the final version do two paragraphs of Alfred talking appear without some sort of a break. Though at first I wasn't in love with it, I think it helps show that Bruce is truly curious about Valencia, not just because she intrigued him during their interview, but also (perhaps more?) because of her relationship with Alfred. I will be posting the original monologue version shortly.
A Debutante Comes Out
My original plan for Valencia was that she went to school with the rich kids but remained pretty much an outsider. That would have been what brought her and her boyfriend together, both of their being scholarship kids and from less affluent backgrounds, working hard while their classmates were attending debutante balls and such. As I continued planning out her story, however, it soon became apparent that she would require more experience in the upper-class world for everything to work out and not be too far-fetched.
So the Wayne Scholarship evolved into something equally social and scholarly. As Alfred explains, it became a way for Wayne Enterprises and the Wayne Foundation to improve its image, especially right after Bruce disappeared from Gotham. The Wayne Scholars became mini Gotham celebrities, something that grew exponentially and was exploited in Valencia's case because of the scandal of what happened with her boyfriend's father. Though Valencia was never completely accepted by all of the elite, as will become apparent in later chapters, the divide between her and her classmates was much smaller than I had anticipated.
Only the Young
I am a huge fan of The Killers, and their music will certainly be showing up in future chapters. Lead singer Brandon Flowers' "Only the Young" felt like a perfect fit for this unexpected chapter. There's a kind of moonlight quality to it that is in accord with the late-night setting, the early morning hours during which Alfred and Bruce are talking, before the sun has risen. It's not a happy song, but there's a wistful hopefulness to it that I think reflects how Alfred views Valencia's story. He wants to hope everything will work out well for her, but so much tragedy has happened in her life that even wishing that is hard to do.
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