Late reply, sorry, but thank you for these notes! And thank you for reading this one because this fic (and also Pinocchio in general) is quite dear to my heart and I love when people read it and offer their thoughts/reactions on it. Reading through your notes/questions was really interesting for me because for half of them I'm like "Oh yeah, I guess I didn't think about it" and for the other half I'm like "Oh yeah, there's a story behind that," and it's interesting to see what stayed in my head only. Here are some of my author's notes if you're curious:
Moving Lampwick out of the mines: This is mainly because I wanted to write something about Pleasure Island boys being sent to the salt mines as that was always a fascinating part of the movie for me. But then I read the book and discovered that Lampwick worked on a farm as a donkey so I was like "oh yeah, I've gotta work that in too." The strings are showing a bit here!
Lampwick's difficulty finding work: My thinking was that it was more that there's no one hiring/not many opportunities. Here, I was mainly drawing on my own experiences with job-hunting in a tight market.
Lampwick's motor skills: My headcanon is that Lampwick's motor skills returned fairly quickly after an initial adjustment period. He's more or less normal but maybe a bit clumsy because his dexterity stopped developing when he was a kid. His comment about his hands being hooves is more his self-deprecating dark sense of humor. But you're definitely right that I didn't expand on this at all! There's definitely room for filling in these details.
Lack of resolution on the job front: The story behind this is that the original Pinocchio book has some slightly creepy elements where working is inherently virtuous (and conversely, to not work is vice). I wanted work to have some role in Lampwick's return to society, but I wanted to steer clear of the direction of the book and avoid implying that Lampwick's worth/happy ending is dependent on whether he's working or not. Lampwick feels guilt about not pulling his weight, but that guilt is self-imposed; Pinocchio's support for him is unconditional. But I definitely could have actually integrated that realization into the story rather than leaving it awkwardly hanging!
The rest I didn't put enough thought into to have an answer. Thinking about all of these aspects is very interesting and definitely things I could expand on further in the fic. Thank you for this concrit!
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2021-05-09 02:13 pm (UTC)Moving Lampwick out of the mines: This is mainly because I wanted to write something about Pleasure Island boys being sent to the salt mines as that was always a fascinating part of the movie for me. But then I read the book and discovered that Lampwick worked on a farm as a donkey so I was like "oh yeah, I've gotta work that in too." The strings are showing a bit here!
Lampwick's difficulty finding work: My thinking was that it was more that there's no one hiring/not many opportunities. Here, I was mainly drawing on my own experiences with job-hunting in a tight market.
Lampwick's motor skills: My headcanon is that Lampwick's motor skills returned fairly quickly after an initial adjustment period. He's more or less normal but maybe a bit clumsy because his dexterity stopped developing when he was a kid. His comment about his hands being hooves is more his self-deprecating dark sense of humor. But you're definitely right that I didn't expand on this at all! There's definitely room for filling in these details.
Lack of resolution on the job front: The story behind this is that the original Pinocchio book has some slightly creepy elements where working is inherently virtuous (and conversely, to not work is vice). I wanted work to have some role in Lampwick's return to society, but I wanted to steer clear of the direction of the book and avoid implying that Lampwick's worth/happy ending is dependent on whether he's working or not. Lampwick feels guilt about not pulling his weight, but that guilt is self-imposed; Pinocchio's support for him is unconditional. But I definitely could have actually integrated that realization into the story rather than leaving it awkwardly hanging!
The rest I didn't put enough thought into to have an answer. Thinking about all of these aspects is very interesting and definitely things I could expand on further in the fic. Thank you for this concrit!