Remix Reveals (the unusual amount of time spent musing on Stannis Baratheon 'mix)

Earlier this year I tried to game my sign up in an exchange, failed badly, and found myself writing a fic about the Baratheon brothers at The Wall, focused on Renly, who by a very small margin I find the least boring of the three. (Brother, It's Cold Outside.)

prodigy remixed it into the Stannis centric Black Horns, White Snow which I liked a lot; Stannis' bitterness at Ned was darkly hilarious, and it fixed some issues with Stannis' characterisation that I felt my original had.

My remixee was The_Plaid_Slytherin who writes a lot of fic about Stannis, all of it good, and all of it skated right over my eyeballs because even after all my years in ASOIAF fandom my feelings about Stannis are still mostly: Who? What? Huh?

Writing fic about characters you don't like doesn't necessarily have to be hard (there's a difference between having a different take and bashing, obviously, and you should try to stay on the right side of that) but what is hard is fic about characters whose existence you struggle to remember.

I do understand why people get irked when it seems obvious that your remixee has scrolled through your works looking for one of these things which is not like the others (I've had it happen to me) but sometimes with remixes it's unavoidable, because sometimes the answer to the question how would I write this fic? is simply I wouldn't.'

I ended up remixing a short fic about Loras and Margaery bonding (For The Best) into a Margaery character study. For the Best (My Church Offers No Absolutes Remix).

As a remix it's less than ideal, but on the plus side I was writing it just as the show pulled Rhaegar and Elia's annulment out of its ass, and I managed to channel my annoyance into the line: Many men came to care little for their wives, that was why the laws of gods and men made it all but impossible for a husband, king or commoner, to set his lawful wife aside.