[commentary] negotiate
Apr. 7th, 2026 03:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhodochrositenegotiate
jade/alexandra (arthur/jade, charles/alexandra) | f1 | e | 3.3k
dvd commentary under cut!
first of all everything in this fic is completely made up and slanderous and doesn’t represent my actual views. i was genuinely just intriguemaxxing. anything that is interesting or compelling characterisation-wise or concept-wise comes from mich’s mind of a mastermind, i take my job as mich’s f1 fic vending machine very seriously. all the canon review i did was scrolling jade and alex’s instagram feeds and cautiously wading through a few wagsnark posts to figure out dating timelines (i don’t like spending too much time on wagsnark they’re too mean about my alex) (comment from guy who said they were pretty sure arthur and jade had broken up because they saw arthur talking to girls at a monaco nightclub made me laugh though).
but this was so much fun to write, i love popular girls being horrible to each other i love toxic het yuri it’s all about both sides being so male centric that it cancels out. the thing is that arthur and charles are just symbols really or permits that enable jade and alexandra to interface in a socially conforming way even as they are transgressing beyond the boundaries of their respective heterosexual relationships. jade literally does not have the relational framework to engage with alexandra because she doesn’t understand anything other than heterosexuality so she has to either imagine a male voyeur for whose benefit she is performing or project arthur on herself and herself on alexandra / charles on herself in order to make it work within the confines of a male-female dynamic.
the sex that jadelex have is entirely about power: jade feels powerless and out of control in her relationship with arthur and tries to regain it by subjugating alex in turn and proving that alex is as base and human and powerless as jade is regardless of how watertight alex’s external construction of self appears. it’s important that jade fantasises vividly about inflicting violence on alex but alex is the one who actually does physically hurt jade in the end, though she stops short of making jade bleed. this goes back to jade’s assessment of alex as capable only of imitation/reflection and not the real thing, but really alex held back on purpose and it’s not that she’s incapable of Realness but that it’s more advantageous for her to play a role.
this is of course all a miserable process for jade because she’s on the rocks with arthur and she hates alexandra for simultaneously settling for an unideal romantisexual situation and also rising above her “station”; i didn’t have time to really get into it but i believe there’s a slight class difference between jade and alex as well so jade perceives alex as more of a social climber. jade also had an established audience as a fashion/lifestyle influencer before dating arthur whereas i think alexandra was quite private and gained most of her following after dating charles. jade disdains alexandra as a cheap imitation or construction of what others want from her and alexandra thinks jade is imitating her now that alexandra has the upper hand in social status. just a bit of petty competitiveness.
that being said jade is being extremely hypocritical and throwing rocks from a glass house. everything she criticises alexandra for (self-panopticoning influencer disease, cheating on her partner / her partner cheating on her, leveraging her relationship for social currency, playing the role of seen and not heard accessory, sticking with a guy who just kind of sucks sometimes) is something jade also does. occasionally she brushes up against self awareness but it’s just too humiliating for her to dwell on, so she doesn’t. like she is gorgeous and successful and shouldn’t be taking this kind of shit from “ferrari development driver” arthur leclerc the nepobaby second stringer but unfortunately the curse of heterosexuality. many such cases. but also you have to cut her some slack, she’s having to reinvent attraction to women from first principles. she isn’t aware it’s something that could happen to her!
and jade is barely even cognisant of just how much misery the prison of heterosexuality causes her. she tells herself she wants arthur and wants to be married to him but the only way she can envision marriage (filtered through alexandra) is as being trapped and killed. she does notttt want that damn ring lol but she thinks she does because it’s what girls are supposed to want. jade recoils from the vision of her “dream” future that alex embodies but she’s also envious that alex has obtained it and with a higher status partner than jade too (plus being ingroup/outgroup frozen out by alex and charlotte (tolotta-leclerc) didn't help i’m sure) and all of that is sublimated into dislike. still, i think alexandra dislikes jade more than jade dislikes alexandra. they’re insecure about different things but alex i think feels it more strongly than jade.
so being violent and cruel and awful to alexandra is jade’s only real outlet and it’s the same for alexandra—she has to be so perfect for charles and the cameras but all that repressed frustration and negative feeling has to go somewhere, so might as well go into sniping at jade. they are each other’s only means of achieving catharsis because they’ve trapped themselves in images that prevent them from showing anyone else, even their friends, the worst parts of themselves. and that’s kind of so romantic…
obviously the way that anyone feels about anyone in this fic is highly complicated and ambiguous and intrinsically tied to transaction because of how image conscious all of them are. jade is emotionally dissatisfied with arthur and alex is physically dissatisfied with charles. jade thinks she loves arthur because otherwise she’s let him humiliate her for no reason and she doesn’t even have the ring to show for it. when alex repeats if that’s all you know to jade that’s what she means: charles may cheat on alex but at least she has secured her position in the family and she knows charles will come back to her. arthur will cheat on jade too anyway but jade won’t have that same security. for alexandra the lack of sexual fulfilment is a small price to pay for the massive benefit that marrying charles will give her. also she loves him but this is unimportant to jade. [a/n: I THINK CHARLES AND ALEX LOVE EACH OTHER VERY MUCH IRL].
i did also feel pretty bad because i genuinely love all of jade and alex and charles and arthur like charles is my favourite driver and alex is my favourite wag and chalex is my favourite driver/wag couple and i wish them a very happy and fulfilling marriage and i think jade is such a sweet girl BUT i think it’s so funny and compelling how blatantly jade and alex do not fw each other especially considering how imagepilled our pr princess first lady of ferrari alexandra otherwise is. laughed at them icing each other out in the ferrari garage laughed at the silly passagg tiktok vagueing. i love you house leclerc relationship drama. the thought of charles being bad at het sex is also really funny to me, it’s because he’s such an elite uke so all his sex stats are concentrated in bottoming for other men. i also do laugh at charles’ habit of losing alexandra / walking too far in front of her and i think he deserves to be whacked for that. people are in fact going to take her away from you if you don’t hold onto her bro!!
as you may know cheating has been my longtime #1 landmine and it still is but lately i’ve been feeling like it’s kind of compelling in sports rpf sometimes idk… i still don’t love the idea of drivers cheating but i’ve seen it executed interestingly enough times to cautiously open my heart and i do think it’s righteous for wags to cheat (average rebealex truther who wishes that it didn’t have to come interlocked with 5516 like just the normal cheating without the partnerswap is fine…). thought that while i was shopping for landmines at the landmine store i should take the opportunity to explore the concept of fisting as well (another landmine because it’s scary to me) so i microdosed it with my favourite technique of Not Writing Porn by having the narrator imagine sex they could be but are not having but then i got too scared so it’s only there for like one line. not to look like i can excuse infidelity but i draw the line at fisting.
also took some careful editing to get to 3316 words exactly so that the ghost of lestappen is ambiently backgrounded because it’s myyyy fic. i wanted jade to accuse charles of being gay and or cheating on alex with men as well as women but i thought maybe that was too much for one fic. also didn’t have time to get into the leclerc brocon of it all, that will have to be in my next illegal and unethical dw locked fic. also couldn't get into the pascale’s jade favouritism aspect of house leclerc dynamix either but i believe mich will have that covered [homer_huge_staring_at_bart.png].
title from negotiate - kilo kish (when i feel so small / how do i make it? / how do i change this? // if i refuse to love this / how do i negotiate?) (the answer: you can’t lol)
some specific lines i wanted to point out:
It’s easier to breathe, outside the walls of the villa.
that ostentatious diamond, swallowing up the bright moonlight and spitting out an insipid, fragmented iteration of it onto her hands.
repeated association of alex with water which flows to fit the shape of its vessel but can also freeze lethally eg the fabric ripples down her body like liquid / gleaming waterfall of straightened hair / skirt pools at her hips / ice blue satin.
Jade thinks of a glass vase, a silver mirror. Jade thinks of how little force it takes to shatter a trinket like that.
Her shadow slashes a diagonal from Alexandra’s shoulder to hip. // Four muted red crescents slash a bloodless line across Jade’s palm.
Wide-eyed and panting Alexandra looks like a deer or a swan, some dumb, beautiful animal shot down and bleeding dumbly and beautifully out.
I will walk away, Jade thinks. Something awful and trembling in her chest; her heart, maybe. I will leave all of this behind. She is afraid to pull the arrow out of her, she is afraid to bleed out. And still if Arthur came to her now.
If Jade touched Alexandra’s hand the refraction would cut like Alexandra’s nails didn’t. She wonders if it hurts Alexandra, if Alexandra can be hurt at all. Jade stops looking.
jade/alexandra (arthur/jade, charles/alexandra) | f1 | e | 3.3k
dvd commentary under cut!
first of all everything in this fic is completely made up and slanderous and doesn’t represent my actual views. i was genuinely just intriguemaxxing. anything that is interesting or compelling characterisation-wise or concept-wise comes from mich’s mind of a mastermind, i take my job as mich’s f1 fic vending machine very seriously. all the canon review i did was scrolling jade and alex’s instagram feeds and cautiously wading through a few wagsnark posts to figure out dating timelines (i don’t like spending too much time on wagsnark they’re too mean about my alex) (comment from guy who said they were pretty sure arthur and jade had broken up because they saw arthur talking to girls at a monaco nightclub made me laugh though).
but this was so much fun to write, i love popular girls being horrible to each other i love toxic het yuri it’s all about both sides being so male centric that it cancels out. the thing is that arthur and charles are just symbols really or permits that enable jade and alexandra to interface in a socially conforming way even as they are transgressing beyond the boundaries of their respective heterosexual relationships. jade literally does not have the relational framework to engage with alexandra because she doesn’t understand anything other than heterosexuality so she has to either imagine a male voyeur for whose benefit she is performing or project arthur on herself and herself on alexandra / charles on herself in order to make it work within the confines of a male-female dynamic.
the sex that jadelex have is entirely about power: jade feels powerless and out of control in her relationship with arthur and tries to regain it by subjugating alex in turn and proving that alex is as base and human and powerless as jade is regardless of how watertight alex’s external construction of self appears. it’s important that jade fantasises vividly about inflicting violence on alex but alex is the one who actually does physically hurt jade in the end, though she stops short of making jade bleed. this goes back to jade’s assessment of alex as capable only of imitation/reflection and not the real thing, but really alex held back on purpose and it’s not that she’s incapable of Realness but that it’s more advantageous for her to play a role.
this is of course all a miserable process for jade because she’s on the rocks with arthur and she hates alexandra for simultaneously settling for an unideal romantisexual situation and also rising above her “station”; i didn’t have time to really get into it but i believe there’s a slight class difference between jade and alex as well so jade perceives alex as more of a social climber. jade also had an established audience as a fashion/lifestyle influencer before dating arthur whereas i think alexandra was quite private and gained most of her following after dating charles. jade disdains alexandra as a cheap imitation or construction of what others want from her and alexandra thinks jade is imitating her now that alexandra has the upper hand in social status. just a bit of petty competitiveness.
that being said jade is being extremely hypocritical and throwing rocks from a glass house. everything she criticises alexandra for (self-panopticoning influencer disease, cheating on her partner / her partner cheating on her, leveraging her relationship for social currency, playing the role of seen and not heard accessory, sticking with a guy who just kind of sucks sometimes) is something jade also does. occasionally she brushes up against self awareness but it’s just too humiliating for her to dwell on, so she doesn’t. like she is gorgeous and successful and shouldn’t be taking this kind of shit from “ferrari development driver” arthur leclerc the nepobaby second stringer but unfortunately the curse of heterosexuality. many such cases. but also you have to cut her some slack, she’s having to reinvent attraction to women from first principles. she isn’t aware it’s something that could happen to her!
and jade is barely even cognisant of just how much misery the prison of heterosexuality causes her. she tells herself she wants arthur and wants to be married to him but the only way she can envision marriage (filtered through alexandra) is as being trapped and killed. she does notttt want that damn ring lol but she thinks she does because it’s what girls are supposed to want. jade recoils from the vision of her “dream” future that alex embodies but she’s also envious that alex has obtained it and with a higher status partner than jade too (plus being ingroup/outgroup frozen out by alex and charlotte (tolotta-leclerc) didn't help i’m sure) and all of that is sublimated into dislike. still, i think alexandra dislikes jade more than jade dislikes alexandra. they’re insecure about different things but alex i think feels it more strongly than jade.
so being violent and cruel and awful to alexandra is jade’s only real outlet and it’s the same for alexandra—she has to be so perfect for charles and the cameras but all that repressed frustration and negative feeling has to go somewhere, so might as well go into sniping at jade. they are each other’s only means of achieving catharsis because they’ve trapped themselves in images that prevent them from showing anyone else, even their friends, the worst parts of themselves. and that’s kind of so romantic…
obviously the way that anyone feels about anyone in this fic is highly complicated and ambiguous and intrinsically tied to transaction because of how image conscious all of them are. jade is emotionally dissatisfied with arthur and alex is physically dissatisfied with charles. jade thinks she loves arthur because otherwise she’s let him humiliate her for no reason and she doesn’t even have the ring to show for it. when alex repeats if that’s all you know to jade that’s what she means: charles may cheat on alex but at least she has secured her position in the family and she knows charles will come back to her. arthur will cheat on jade too anyway but jade won’t have that same security. for alexandra the lack of sexual fulfilment is a small price to pay for the massive benefit that marrying charles will give her. also she loves him but this is unimportant to jade. [a/n: I THINK CHARLES AND ALEX LOVE EACH OTHER VERY MUCH IRL].
i did also feel pretty bad because i genuinely love all of jade and alex and charles and arthur like charles is my favourite driver and alex is my favourite wag and chalex is my favourite driver/wag couple and i wish them a very happy and fulfilling marriage and i think jade is such a sweet girl BUT i think it’s so funny and compelling how blatantly jade and alex do not fw each other especially considering how imagepilled our pr princess first lady of ferrari alexandra otherwise is. laughed at them icing each other out in the ferrari garage laughed at the silly passagg tiktok vagueing. i love you house leclerc relationship drama. the thought of charles being bad at het sex is also really funny to me, it’s because he’s such an elite uke so all his sex stats are concentrated in bottoming for other men. i also do laugh at charles’ habit of losing alexandra / walking too far in front of her and i think he deserves to be whacked for that. people are in fact going to take her away from you if you don’t hold onto her bro!!
as you may know cheating has been my longtime #1 landmine and it still is but lately i’ve been feeling like it’s kind of compelling in sports rpf sometimes idk… i still don’t love the idea of drivers cheating but i’ve seen it executed interestingly enough times to cautiously open my heart and i do think it’s righteous for wags to cheat (average rebealex truther who wishes that it didn’t have to come interlocked with 5516 like just the normal cheating without the partnerswap is fine…). thought that while i was shopping for landmines at the landmine store i should take the opportunity to explore the concept of fisting as well (another landmine because it’s scary to me) so i microdosed it with my favourite technique of Not Writing Porn by having the narrator imagine sex they could be but are not having but then i got too scared so it’s only there for like one line. not to look like i can excuse infidelity but i draw the line at fisting.
also took some careful editing to get to 3316 words exactly so that the ghost of lestappen is ambiently backgrounded because it’s myyyy fic. i wanted jade to accuse charles of being gay and or cheating on alex with men as well as women but i thought maybe that was too much for one fic. also didn’t have time to get into the leclerc brocon of it all, that will have to be in my next illegal and unethical dw locked fic. also couldn't get into the pascale’s jade favouritism aspect of house leclerc dynamix either but i believe mich will have that covered [homer_huge_staring_at_bart.png].
title from negotiate - kilo kish (when i feel so small / how do i make it? / how do i change this? // if i refuse to love this / how do i negotiate?) (the answer: you can’t lol)
some specific lines i wanted to point out:
It’s easier to breathe, outside the walls of the villa.
- it’s a snake habitat girl get out of there!
that ostentatious diamond, swallowing up the bright moonlight and spitting out an insipid, fragmented iteration of it onto her hands.
- the engagement ring as metonymy for alex herself as jade perceives her: a weak copy of the real thing (jade), something with no light or identity of its own. also purposeful reduction of alex to the thing that ties her most visibly to a man.
- similarly jade associates alex heavily with vases/flowers: inanimate, ornamental, fragile, but also the thing she wants to use to hurt arthur.
repeated association of alex with water which flows to fit the shape of its vessel but can also freeze lethally eg the fabric ripples down her body like liquid / gleaming waterfall of straightened hair / skirt pools at her hips / ice blue satin.
Jade thinks of a glass vase, a silver mirror. Jade thinks of how little force it takes to shatter a trinket like that.
- actually quite a lot of force tbh, jade is minimising alex to comfort herself.
Her shadow slashes a diagonal from Alexandra’s shoulder to hip. // Four muted red crescents slash a bloodless line across Jade’s palm.
- they both leave insubstantial and meaningless marks on each other despite the imitation of violence.
Wide-eyed and panting Alexandra looks like a deer or a swan, some dumb, beautiful animal shot down and bleeding dumbly and beautifully out.
- i like this line, deer is the animal emoji i have kpop idol style assigned to alex :)
I will walk away, Jade thinks. Something awful and trembling in her chest; her heart, maybe. I will leave all of this behind. She is afraid to pull the arrow out of her, she is afraid to bleed out. And still if Arthur came to her now.
- my personal favourite lines… oh jade my poor sunk cost fallacy susceptible meow meow. note that arthur repeatedly does not come to her.
If Jade touched Alexandra’s hand the refraction would cut like Alexandra’s nails didn’t. She wonders if it hurts Alexandra, if Alexandra can be hurt at all. Jade stops looking.
- jade is SO close to empathy with alex here but cuts herself off on purpose because she doesn’t want to understand alex’s position since that would mean letting go of her own asserted advantage over alex. also more evil and intimidating engagement ring imagery… girl i’m so serious it’s a snake habitat you don’t want it!
no subject
Date: 2026-04-07 08:52 pm (UTC)also re: the concept of male-centered yuri, i think the self-awareness about the male-centeredness and heterosexuality actually made it come off less male-centered than not. like everyone is kinda scaremongering about this male-centered lesbian boogeyman but it litr is good to acknowledge Living In A Society... whoa kind of another place sports rpf has led you that you wouldn't have gone with a gun before too now that i think about it.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-08 07:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-10 09:15 pm (UTC)"charles may cheat on alex but at least she has secured her position in the family and she knows charles will come back to her." one of the things i'm always curious about is how charles' partners feel about his relationship history and i love that this fic explores one view of it ... the coping!!
love the incisive dialogue and the narration too, it really tells your story effectively!! glad you chose to write about them *___*