"Evil Queen Bitch Valentine" A fanfic
"Evil Queen Bitch Valentine"
(a shameless rip-off of Wuthering Heights, The Hand of the Dead, Gankutsuou and The Lord of the World, with bits of Star Wars, Les Miserables and She)
This satirical fanfic was created because I was contacted by someone who
wanted to write a Monte Cristo sequel. The pitch was that the Count should have suffered consequences from the mess
he'd caused. He should not have gotten a "get out of jail, feee" card. Maybe
Valentine could get angry, and go after the Count, but loses herself in an
unending spiral of rage and retribution, sinking the Max + Val ship and
eventually hurting innocents.
Since I had read several badly-done
sequels already, here's some SequelTrope
traps:
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1-SequelTrope: Benedetto returns to wreak havoc? |
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2-SequelTrope: Eugenie straightwashed? |
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3-SequelTrope: Haydee dies young? |
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4-SequelTrope: The Count's son killed? |
There's several works
that I don't even like:
Wuthering Heights, The Hand of the Dead and Gankutsuou.
Then it occurred to me that all of these could be mashed together, with a bone
tossed to the people who always had been uncomfortable with the Count + Haydee
ship.
I could even write this myself and not have to wait! So in a one hour session,
I wrote this outline, And later, a one hour cleanup.
Sourced ripped-off are color coded:
Wuthering Heights (by Emily Bronte)
The Hand of the Dead (by Alfredo Hogan)
Gankutsuou (by Mahiro Maeda
The Lord of the World (by Adolf Mutzelberg)
Les Miserables (by Victor Hugo)
She
(by H. Rider Haggard)
Prologue: Valentine's Innocence Shattered: After the events of TCoMC,
Max and Val marry. Val finds out what happened to her father and sees him at
the mental asylum(*). His mind is gone, but she gets a few tidbits of
information. ...Benedetto, my son... Edouard, I'll find him if I have to dig
forever. She talks to Dr. D'Avringy and gets the full story about Heloise's
suicide, the note and Edouard's death by poison. Something snaps in her, and
she starts believing that the Count was responsible for Edouard's death. She
completely ignores the fact that there was never any love between her and her
baby half-bro, and her mind makes up some ridiculous notion that they were
loving siblings. She gets MAD and starts hulking out. Beloved Edouard must be
avenged.
Act I: The Descent Into Madness: Next step is to see Benedetto before his execution. Seems that Bertuccio arranged for a bunch of Corsicans to bring the case of Assunta's death to the attention of the authorities. This, added to Benny's murder of theCad gets him a death sentence. Benny, with nothing to lose, tells Val everything he knows. Benny is executed the next day. Val begins her descent into madness and obsession.
She has an argument with Max. Max insists that the Count was their Angel. But she keeps thinking about Edouard and Benny. She "gently" convinces him to donate the windfall on Monte Cristo to charity, telling him that only his salary as an officer in the Spahis is legitimate. The fortune the Count left was tainted, she says. But she secretly holds back a portion for her own nefarious purposes.
She gets meaner and increasingly worse, taking to locking herself in the basement and turning it into a lab. She read up on poisons(**). Max no longer recognizes her as his wife when he realizes that all the dead cats in the neighborhood are related to her basement activities. "Who are you? I don't know you anymore!" he cries. Her behavior becomes terrifying. He hastily leaves her and runs off to the provinces.
Act 2: The Transformation by the Demon of the Moors: Val, now unshackled from Max and no longer needing to maintain the facade of "being nice and respectable", now has a free hand. She uses the Monte Cristo money she kept back to find Danglars in a little village in Italy and pumps him for information. Danglars mysteriously dies the next week. Next, she takes a vacation out to the Moors in England after hearing some intriguing rumors. She rents a house there, and the locals fearfully whisper about "The Demon of the Moors". On a dark, stormy night that just happens to be Friday, the 13th, she heads out, looking for the Demon. She finds it.
The Demon scans her and recognizes a kindred soul. It makes her an offer: her soul, in exchange for limitless power. It can boost her physical and mental acumen, make her immortal and share the Wisdom of the Ages. Being half-mad already, she accepts. The Demon of the Moors possesses her, and she becomes EvilQBVal. Taking an inspiration from videogames, the Dark Side of the Force/the Sith and the then-popular pseudoscience of "physiognomy", her outward appearance alters, making her practically unrecognizable, unless she works really hard mentally to restore her original appearance for short periods (***).
She buys the land in the moors, and proceeds to have a Fortress built. She hires a bunch of goons to be her henchmen. They are all beholden to her til death because of the power of the Demon in her.
Act 3: Interlude: FFwd 9 years later. She is now an expert at Poisons, her knowledge overshadowing the Count's. She's still camped out in her Fortress, and now she's ready to find the Count, and MAKE HIM PAY. For her father, her "beloved" little half-bro, and her not-so-beloved stepmother and other half-brother, but now she'd convinced herself that Heloise and Benny were OK after all and more "innocent victims" of the Count.
In that time, Max could not bring himself to divorce Val, so he takes on a mistress. That couple is genuinely fond of each other, and they have a son.
Also on the Domestic Bliss front, things get rocky for the Count + Haydee ship. Haydee had gotten over her teenaged infatuation and realizes that she conflated "grateful to him for saving her" with "love". The Count notices the change, and asks what's wrong. Haydee admits her feelings. The Count, who truly does love her, knows he has to cop a Sting, and "If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free"(+). She asks to return to her people in Janina, and the Count obliges, sponsoring her return in style. She becomes, by popular acclaim "The Empress of Janina". Several of the Count's longtime servants stay with her.
The Count finds a new love, a lovely woman of Spanish-Moorish descent, named Esperanza. They start a new family.
Act 4: Evil Queen Val Triumphant: But EvilQBVal is ready. She kidnaps Max's son, and takes him to her Fortress in the Moors, and warps him into a mini-me version of herself. When she gets word that the Count, his wife Esperanza and their daughter are in Rome for the Carnival, she follows them. In disguise, she stalks them, whispering threats about their child. The Count becomes uneasy. His wife convinces him to see a Gypsy, who can tell them that all of that is nonsense. EvilQBVal, as the Gypsy, tells them that they are cursed, and the only way to lift the curse is to attend the Carnival, and to give away money to the poor, and to have their child walk to the [fountain? plaza?] alone at midnight and put in a coin kissed by the Count. The child is kidnapped (of course) by EvilQBVal's henchmen and spirited away to the Fortress in the Moors.
For several years, the girl is abused by EvilQBVal and her henchmen. She is reduced to being a scullery maid, forced to eat under the table with the dogs, and the henchmen hit her often. She has no friends. She is raised to believe that she cannot leave the Fortress. EvilQBVal decides that her "foster son", MiniMaxMe will marry the Count's daughter. The more involuntary, the better. The (illegal) marriage happens and it is, as expected, abusive and unhappy.
EvilQBVal arranges a meeting with the Count on... the island of Monte Cristo. She has the caverns burned by her henchmen. In the climactic moment, EvilQBVal presents the Count's daughter, now pregnant by MiniMaxMe. She demands that he hand over everything he owns. The Count sadly signs all of the papers. He asks, "Who are you? Why are you doing this?"Gankutsuou, errr, EvilQBVal lets her wicked guise drop, and
shows herself as Valentine de Villefort. "Why?" he pleads. Then she rips
into him and tells him about her resentment over Edouard, her father,
Heloise and Benedetto. And he must PAY. There must be CONSEQUENCES for his
actions years ago. He can't just talk to God and happily sail away with his
gf, leaving others to pick up the pieces. It's NOT FAIR.
Then she pushes the Count's daughter into the burning chasm, killing the girl and her unborn baby. EvilQBVal gloats, and then tells the Count that he can go, and he has exactly 3 days to see the people he loves and his old friends: Esperanza, Empress Haydee, Maximilian and his mistress, Julie and Emmanuel, Mercedes and Albert, Jacopo, Franz D'Epinay, Luigi Vampa, Hermine Danglars, as they will all die of a slow-acting poison that even he cannot cure. And she spared Eugenie and Louise, "just to show you that I CAN! Muh hah hah hah hah!"
She returns to the Fortress, and as a "F- you" to Max, she has MiniMaxMe killed, very painfully.
Act 5: Valentine's Turn to Pay: And what about EvilQBVal? With all this self-righteous posturing about making people PAY, and her own unending cycle of harm and vengeance, when does she pay the piper and get what's coming?
The Demon of the Moors, having the best chuckle of its existence, abandons her. It allows her a moment of clarity: to realize what she'd done and how she'd damned her own soul forever. It heads back to the moors, waiting for its next source of amusement in a foolish, revenge-hungry human. Val crumples to the ground, bereft of her former power. Her face and body had aged and withered- the price of all the power she once wielded. Her henchmen, with MiniMaxMe's blood on their hands, abandon the fortress in fear after looting it.
Epilogue: The Cycle of Revenge Ends: A thin, hunched-over shadow falls over Val's corpse lying on the floor of her now-rotting Fortress. It's Edmond Dantes, once the Count of Monte Cristo. He kneels down, and looks at her ravaged face. He softly says, "Valentine. Once dear as a daughter to me. It is over. The cycle must stop. No more hate, no more retribution. I once had the the world in my hands (++). And you took it, but gained nothing from it. My own time will come soon. I came into this world with nothing, and with nothing I will leave it. It is the final hand that Providence has dealt me and I'll go in peace (+++). Your salvation is beyond me... that is between you and your Maker. There is only one thing I can offer: I forgive you."
The Demon of the Moors, expecting more fun and games, hovers in the doorway. It looks disappointed and vanishes into the mist.
Act I: The Descent Into Madness: Next step is to see Benedetto before his execution. Seems that Bertuccio arranged for a bunch of Corsicans to bring the case of Assunta's death to the attention of the authorities. This, added to Benny's murder of theCad gets him a death sentence. Benny, with nothing to lose, tells Val everything he knows. Benny is executed the next day. Val begins her descent into madness and obsession.
She has an argument with Max. Max insists that the Count was their Angel. But she keeps thinking about Edouard and Benny. She "gently" convinces him to donate the windfall on Monte Cristo to charity, telling him that only his salary as an officer in the Spahis is legitimate. The fortune the Count left was tainted, she says. But she secretly holds back a portion for her own nefarious purposes.
She gets meaner and increasingly worse, taking to locking herself in the basement and turning it into a lab. She read up on poisons(**). Max no longer recognizes her as his wife when he realizes that all the dead cats in the neighborhood are related to her basement activities. "Who are you? I don't know you anymore!" he cries. Her behavior becomes terrifying. He hastily leaves her and runs off to the provinces.
Act 2: The Transformation by the Demon of the Moors: Val, now unshackled from Max and no longer needing to maintain the facade of "being nice and respectable", now has a free hand. She uses the Monte Cristo money she kept back to find Danglars in a little village in Italy and pumps him for information. Danglars mysteriously dies the next week. Next, she takes a vacation out to the Moors in England after hearing some intriguing rumors. She rents a house there, and the locals fearfully whisper about "The Demon of the Moors". On a dark, stormy night that just happens to be Friday, the 13th, she heads out, looking for the Demon. She finds it.
The Demon scans her and recognizes a kindred soul. It makes her an offer: her soul, in exchange for limitless power. It can boost her physical and mental acumen, make her immortal and share the Wisdom of the Ages. Being half-mad already, she accepts. The Demon of the Moors possesses her, and she becomes EvilQBVal. Taking an inspiration from videogames, the Dark Side of the Force/the Sith and the then-popular pseudoscience of "physiognomy", her outward appearance alters, making her practically unrecognizable, unless she works really hard mentally to restore her original appearance for short periods (***).
She buys the land in the moors, and proceeds to have a Fortress built. She hires a bunch of goons to be her henchmen. They are all beholden to her til death because of the power of the Demon in her.
Act 3: Interlude: FFwd 9 years later. She is now an expert at Poisons, her knowledge overshadowing the Count's. She's still camped out in her Fortress, and now she's ready to find the Count, and MAKE HIM PAY. For her father, her "beloved" little half-bro, and her not-so-beloved stepmother and other half-brother, but now she'd convinced herself that Heloise and Benny were OK after all and more "innocent victims" of the Count.
In that time, Max could not bring himself to divorce Val, so he takes on a mistress. That couple is genuinely fond of each other, and they have a son.
Also on the Domestic Bliss front, things get rocky for the Count + Haydee ship. Haydee had gotten over her teenaged infatuation and realizes that she conflated "grateful to him for saving her" with "love". The Count notices the change, and asks what's wrong. Haydee admits her feelings. The Count, who truly does love her, knows he has to cop a Sting, and "If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free"(+). She asks to return to her people in Janina, and the Count obliges, sponsoring her return in style. She becomes, by popular acclaim "The Empress of Janina". Several of the Count's longtime servants stay with her.
The Count finds a new love, a lovely woman of Spanish-Moorish descent, named Esperanza. They start a new family.
Act 4: Evil Queen Val Triumphant: But EvilQBVal is ready. She kidnaps Max's son, and takes him to her Fortress in the Moors, and warps him into a mini-me version of herself. When she gets word that the Count, his wife Esperanza and their daughter are in Rome for the Carnival, she follows them. In disguise, she stalks them, whispering threats about their child. The Count becomes uneasy. His wife convinces him to see a Gypsy, who can tell them that all of that is nonsense. EvilQBVal, as the Gypsy, tells them that they are cursed, and the only way to lift the curse is to attend the Carnival, and to give away money to the poor, and to have their child walk to the [fountain? plaza?] alone at midnight and put in a coin kissed by the Count. The child is kidnapped (of course) by EvilQBVal's henchmen and spirited away to the Fortress in the Moors.
For several years, the girl is abused by EvilQBVal and her henchmen. She is reduced to being a scullery maid, forced to eat under the table with the dogs, and the henchmen hit her often. She has no friends. She is raised to believe that she cannot leave the Fortress. EvilQBVal decides that her "foster son", MiniMaxMe will marry the Count's daughter. The more involuntary, the better. The (illegal) marriage happens and it is, as expected, abusive and unhappy.
EvilQBVal arranges a meeting with the Count on... the island of Monte Cristo. She has the caverns burned by her henchmen. In the climactic moment, EvilQBVal presents the Count's daughter, now pregnant by MiniMaxMe. She demands that he hand over everything he owns. The Count sadly signs all of the papers. He asks, "Who are you? Why are you doing this?"
Then she pushes the Count's daughter into the burning chasm, killing the girl and her unborn baby. EvilQBVal gloats, and then tells the Count that he can go, and he has exactly 3 days to see the people he loves and his old friends: Esperanza, Empress Haydee, Maximilian and his mistress, Julie and Emmanuel, Mercedes and Albert, Jacopo, Franz D'Epinay, Luigi Vampa, Hermine Danglars, as they will all die of a slow-acting poison that even he cannot cure. And she spared Eugenie and Louise, "just to show you that I CAN! Muh hah hah hah hah!"
She returns to the Fortress, and as a "F- you" to Max, she has MiniMaxMe killed, very painfully.
Act 5: Valentine's Turn to Pay: And what about EvilQBVal? With all this self-righteous posturing about making people PAY, and her own unending cycle of harm and vengeance, when does she pay the piper and get what's coming?
The Demon of the Moors, having the best chuckle of its existence, abandons her. It allows her a moment of clarity: to realize what she'd done and how she'd damned her own soul forever. It heads back to the moors, waiting for its next source of amusement in a foolish, revenge-hungry human. Val crumples to the ground, bereft of her former power. Her face and body had aged and withered- the price of all the power she once wielded. Her henchmen, with MiniMaxMe's blood on their hands, abandon the fortress in fear after looting it.
Epilogue: The Cycle of Revenge Ends: A thin, hunched-over shadow falls over Val's corpse lying on the floor of her now-rotting Fortress. It's Edmond Dantes, once the Count of Monte Cristo. He kneels down, and looks at her ravaged face. He softly says, "Valentine. Once dear as a daughter to me. It is over. The cycle must stop. No more hate, no more retribution. I once had the the world in my hands (++). And you took it, but gained nothing from it. My own time will come soon. I came into this world with nothing, and with nothing I will leave it. It is the final hand that Providence has dealt me and I'll go in peace (+++). Your salvation is beyond me... that is between you and your Maker. There is only one thing I can offer: I forgive you."
The Demon of the Moors, expecting more fun and games, hovers in the doorway. It looks disappointed and vanishes into the mist.
Minor Sources:
(*) The Son of Monte Cristo by Jules Lermina
(**) ChatGPT's hilarious and unintentional rewrite of The Count of Monte Cristo
(***) Star Wars Episode 3: The Revenge of the Sith
(+) Song by Sting, "If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free", 1985
(++) Song by Foreigner, "That Was Yesterday", 1985.
(+++) Job 1:21
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