ernest | Entries tagged with the player

Title: Pulling the Strings
Fandom: Hamlet
Characters: Guildenstern, the Player
Summary: Predestination or manipulation, it hardly matters, except when it does.
Word Count: 200

The Player pulls the strings, but even he has been written to do so. Sometimes Guildenstern finds it a comfort to think that he’s not writing them into a corner so much as he’s read an act ahead and just knows how these things go. Sometimes that’s worse.

If someone had asked him back in his Wittenberg days he would have said without hesitation that of course manipulation is a worse fate than predestination. Now he’s tasted both — at least he’s fervently believed at various points that he was experiencing one of the other, and isn’t belief a central aspect of one’s personal reality? More and more he thinks he’d rather have someone push his actions to their own ends. He’d have a choice then, wouldn’t he? Even if the puppetmaster in question has studied him thoroughly enough to say with reasonable certainty that he’d respond one way, it doesn’t mean they know. It is a terrifying prospect, to be known, and he’s not sure that his closest friends who understand him best really know him. This impenetrability could feel absolutely isolating if he were a different man, but the distance between souls is as natural as that between electrons.

Title: Script Doctoring
Fandom: Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Verse: The Good Place
Characters: The Player, Alfred
Summary: The Player can of course fill any role admirably, but he’s never quite gotten used to that of a director.
Word Count: 572

( Read more... )

They should, thinks Guildenstern, be the best equipped to understand what’s going on at this school in all its layers of complexity. Didn’t the Player say they only exist at all as vehicles to offer commentary on the main plot? And yet, he’s never been given a script — not for the wild workings of the wider world, and not for his own scenes, even. He and Rosencrantz only get their sides, with a few trailing words for their cues, divorced from any meaningful context. And sometimes they even get a props list, oh happy day!

At least, he thinks both of them are kept in the same dark, the better for their shadow selves to be thrown into the screen with sharper clarity. It’s hard to tell with Rosencrantz, though. He travels through his days with an unconcerned ease that Guildenstern alternately envies and finds humanly impossible. Surely the only reasonable explanation is that he’s discovered some deep-down secret of the universe that makes it all bearable. Or, that’s just how he is, and how Guildenstern will never be.

All of the problems with which Rosencrantz concerns himself can be solved by their own components without the endless cross-referencing to which Guildenstern has become accustomed. Thus, he finds himself perfectly at home on stage with its self-contained skits, and has a particular talent for improvisation. The ability to bring a story to a fitting conclusion without waiting for it to be delivered by someone else is a potentially life-saving one.

In today’s scene they are dealing with… love? Or else… fish, perhaps. It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes. Regardless, they will be set on a boat, which is funny because — no, because nothing. A boat signifies nothing at all, which is to say it does not signify anything. Meanwhile, Nothingness is… not in this sketch. Well, no more than it is in any of their other performances. It might be different if the wind was southerly, but that’s not true either.

“Ah – um – Alfred?” Rosencrantz’s arm jerks up and down as if he’s jostling for a word in edgewise in the middle of a crowd, even though he’s alone.

Alfred chimes into the space with the music made by two coins together, wearing only the gauziest suggestion of a dress: “How can I help?”

“Yes – ah – now when the Player said ‘private viewing’ at the orientation, does that mean… that is to say… look, do you want to get married?”

( Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Theories )

( The Player, Laertes, and Bad Alfred )

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Queen of Infinite Space

and no bad dreams in sight

Entries tagged with the player

Pulling the Strings

Script Doctoring

kashira kashira gozonji kashira, a Hamlet in Ohtori fic

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are in the Good Place

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December 2019

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