What If | Idina Menzel & Kristen Bell fanfic

Afterword

The story is finally finished!!!

I started crafting the story in last year's February. One of the major reasons for me to want to write a bellzel fanfic is that there were so few of them and none satisfied my vision of this ship lol. This is because most fics at that time were one-shots and I wanted to read a longer one.

I tried to write something about romance and the trials and errors people go through in order to truly realize what love is (or how I understand what love is at present). 

I also tried to include events that I feel are important but seldom directly represented in fan fictions, one of them being the Oscars. Some of my friends jokingly blame me for the intensity of the "Falling Angels" chapters and ... I'm really sorry for that! I wanted to write this because first, I think it'll perhaps make people empathize with others. Being in a fandom, we are prone to be result-oriented and treat the celebrities we look up to as "cultural products", and we do so quite unconsciously. Therefore, I can fully understand why people say mean things when someone makes a mistake and so on, because that's a natural tendency -- celebrity culture is meant to fulfill our dreams and fantasies to be glamorous, beloved, and perfect. However, it's equally important to see celebrities as people who err, accept them as so, raise sensible discussions instead of mean comments that dismiss people as such and such. The second reason is that I had similar experience and struggled with it. Looking back, I want to have some reflection upon and conversation with my former self.

Of course, no matter how much I claim to "treat celebrities as people", the nature of writing and of real-person stories makes it almost impossible to achieve. What I can write is only my impressions of the characters -- impressions that are frozen, like a picture from 2014, a video clip from 2017, and so on. Besides, everything written here is almost entirely literary imagination which fulfills my literary ideal. For example, I sometimes unconsciously apply Virginia Woolf's style to writing bellzel, and sometimes you'll hear them speaking lines from Heathcliff or Jane Eyre. Even though an "author" started out with an aspiration of humanization, the act of writing itself may intrinsically be an abuse to the real people behind the story because it requires a certain degree of generalization and turning real people into characters, metaphors, symbols, and muses. However, if you're an adamant Oscar Wilde believer like me, you understand that if writers stick strictly to these moral concerns, they can hardly write any good works.

Anyways. Whole-hearted thanks for everyone who reads the story! It took so long to finish and I truly wondered whether it will be finished. A good thing is, through writing this, I got to test if majoring in English literature is worth it, and I did see some growth and how my writing style changes according to what I have learned.

At last, for a nerd's pleasure, here are some literary analysis I did for my story (I'll post them irregularly):

Q1: Why do you change your narrative perspectives throughout the story?

A1: I started out writing respectively in Idina's and Kristen's point of view, but from the "Monument" chapter, I use three perspectives: Idina's, Kristen's, and the third-person narrators. At first, the multiple perspectives were used impulsively because I felt that certain things are hard to write from the first-person point of view. Later, I theorized it and decided to use the changing perspectives to express certain subtleties. The first-person perspectives are essentially one-sided thus sometimes show biased views of each character. The narrator observes and (not) understand the other person through her personal view. Therefore, the first-person parts can suggest a state that is prone to split and separation, anticipating a fall-out. At the same time, unbiased first-person narration shows true understanding and empathy for the other person. It feels like they have truly become one. On the other hand, the third-person narration suggests an effort to be less biased and more emphatic; it is not secluded in one character's isolated thoughts, which reminds us the opposite of isolation – communication. Communication, interaction, mutual openness and mutual trust – they are exactly what a healthy relationship requires.