#I'm trying to be braver in terms of talking about this project

[emilykaldwen]

Asking about writing - do you have a current favourite writing project right now? What is it about?

Oh! Thank you so much for this! I was popping in to look up something I saved and saw this!!!

So I really just have the one main project I'm working on right now and that's The Maiden and the Drowning Boy, which is a canon divergent AU for House of the Dragon/Fire and Blood.

Basically, I aged down one of Lyonel Strong's daughters to be the same age as the kids, and it's Arranged Marriage, Childhood Friends/Sorta Sweethearts to Lovers to Oh shit we have a war to get through because cycles of generational trauma and terrible coping skills and do we keep going down the paths our parents set for us or do we make a better world.

Abrogail Strong and Aegon Targaryen own me body, heart, and soul and I wouldn't give them up for anything in the world. It's been a really exciting challenge of creating a character that can exist in the world on their own - I don't want Abby's existence to simply be because she's in a romance, you know? I want her to exist as her own being.

Additionally, I'm really using this as an opportunity to work on my own perfectionism issues, practice the craft of writing, and challenge myself (god, am I fucking challenging myself) in terms of themes, through plot, and basically just... IDK. I'm writing this for me, but I want people who read it and stick with it to experience pay off in the little things I put in that come full circle. It's romance, yes, but I also like a ton of plot in my romance, and so I want to try see how I can give a lil bit of everything in terms of 'here's a story, and here's some yummy romance' and balance those out.

I've been working on this since last October! But then I had bariatric surgery, scrapped the initial 35k, and now I'm on four chapters in caught up with that previous word count. I'm HOPING to start posting soon, I'm just slow AF and I sorta want a consistent posting schedule while I'm also trying to pack my house up and move. So.

[sylvies-kablooie]

tbh, i think the whole thought process behind how sylvie is written is that she is not attached to loki and her happiness doesn't at all depend on him in any way.

was their connection deep? did he impact her? "shatter" her world even? yes. this is why she is so angry at him. bc in her mind, he had betrayed her.

but he doesn't take up much more space in her mind. she goes on to live her life just fine without him at the end of both seasons.

loki is a different story, he is obsessed with her to the point of doing something completely "out of character" and being ready to sacrifice everything for her.

i personally love how "unequal" their relationship is in this way, but i understand that it's not the majority of shippers' cup of tea kind of dynamic.

this is an interesting interpretation! i enjoy getting to hear people's differing takes on their dynamic, so this was a fun read. and hey if unrequited is your trope then all the more power to you. you're braver than me, that's for sure.

i haven't rewatched s2 (and tbh idk if i ever will- it just didn't do it for me the way i wanted it to) but the consensus that "loki fell first and harder" def seems supported by s1 and enhanced by s2. which i think made it all the more shocking when she kisses him first. i love that little detail.

i have a different take, which is informed by episode 5- particularly the bar scene contrasted with the record shop scene. she tells him to go and live his life and move on, then immediately goes to a record shop, tells the man at the counter she had a bad day, and then cries to the velvet underground (it looked like crying, also possible she was just laying there and basking it all in, which is just as compelling in my opinion).

to me that read as someone who is trying so hard to place their feelings in a convenient little box and ignore them and then running away when it doesn't work.

sylvie doesn't strike me as someone who can sit still, especially not after living through a million apocalypses and trying to ensure her survival. and while getting a job in oklahoma might not be the same frantic pace she's used to, i do think she threw herself into it (employee of the month placard i'm looking at you!) so she has a new life, a new job, time to do things like go to the bar and get a haircut and listen to music and do everything possible to just. not. process. the annoying feelings that the citadel situation brings up. just keep moving! just don't think about it! and so when loki rolls up at her work, she tries to push him away, tell him he's the last thing she wants to deal with, get him to leave. the tone in the bar scene felt like that to me as well. like she's saying just leave me so i can stop thinking about this.

of course, loki does not want to leave her- it's just that for some reason he is physically incapable of talking about anything but the TVA, who ruined her life and she justifiably wants nothing to do with hearing about how great they actually are. he is pretty skilled at killing the mood. (i take great pleasure in rewrite fics that make a show of addressing this)

am i blinded by shipping goggles and my own projection onto her? it's possible! but to me it read as someone in denial. when we hear sylvie talk about her love life on the train in s1 (a scene i LOVE because it seems so out of left field for her) we get a very clear sense she has no idea what she is doing when it comes to romance (and then flat out says so during the blanket scene). her experience with romance hasn't been anything real, to the point where i hesitate to even use the term "romance"- just centuries of numbing herself by staying busy with a fling. she is like a shark that will just collapse if she stops moving. which we get to see her do in the record store!

that's just how i read it though! your read on it is just as valid and i like hearing all of the different takes. i am by no means trying to persuade you to join my pining sylvie agenda, just using this blog as a means of idea exchange. which i love doing. seriously it's so fun.

[fiona-fififi]

⭐️ for… I got nothing to believe (unless you're choosing me)

Thank you!! 💜

Okay, so this one is one of my favorites, actually, mostly because it has a much deeper meaning for me than it maybe should because of just how much I was projecting onto it.

I started writing this one just after 7x04, if I remember correctly, and I was absolutely riding a high of canon bi!buck, and that brought forward a lot of very personal, complicated feelings for someone that I was both desperate to reveal and terrified to actually admit. So while the story, obviously, is not ours, several of the lines were all about how I felt for her, and all about how afraid I was of saying something so big to someone I cared for so much, even while the desire to do so made me feel like I couldn't breathe. (I got lucky. She's braver than me, and I had nothing to be afraid of. 💚)

But all those feelings felt like they mapped well onto buddie—so this was my attempt at catharsis via writing.

So in this story, I kind of poured myself into both of them, and I think that was, in a lot of ways, accurate to their characters—Eddie the embodiment of all that fear, and Buck the embodiment of some misguided self-sacrifice, trying to cling to something good, even knowing it could never truly be enough.

So, while I was in the middle of this crisis, all I could think about was the image of Eddie, drunk and sad, sitting curled in on himself beside Buck's door. My first plan was that he showed up while Buck was with Tommy, and that Tommy would find him there. But then, I didn't like that, because I needed Tommy gone for Buck and Eddie to hash it out (well, kind of), and I didn't see him just up and leaving in that situation. So then, I thought, oh! Tommy misses him in the hall, but spots his truck and calls Buck all confused, and Buck finds him. But then, my brain was like "no, that implies he drove drunk, and Eddie would never do that." And that was when I finally landed on Eddie and Tommy out, and Eddie getting a little too drunk and accidentally revealing his feelings for Buck to Tommy. (Shoutout to @messyhairdiaz for letting me talk at her until I figured this one out, because it took me a minute. And several back-to-back messages. 😂)

In the end, I think I'm very happy with where that landed. It allowed me to essentially end Buck and Tommy’s relationship without extraneous drama to open the door for Buck accepting his feelings for Eddie. So, while it is implied, rather than explicit, I intended for the moment Tommy leaves to be read as Tommy ending their relationship, so that Buck can be with Eddie, but in a gentle way, even if there was some hurt there. Largely, I wanted to make sure that no one was the bad guy. I wanted the implication to be that what Buck had with Tommy, no matter how brief, was meaningful and important to him, but that in the end, it was always going to be Eddie, because so many parts of him already belonged to Eddie.

In terms of the writing, the empty space metaphor is one of my favorites I've ever done (even though I absolutely dropped the ball on it in the end by not bring it back around). But the lines "I have all this empty space inside me that belongs to you, but you gave away all the space that was mine" hit me very early in the process, and obviously, those lines evolved a bit, but I'm quite proud of that metaphor and the emotional impact of it in this instance, and I think it hit all the right notes for what I was trying to convey about just how much they mean to one another.

And the ending was my hope. Buck's, too, obviously. But that was me saying maybe I'd have the courage tomorrow. (I didn't. But, again, I'm lucky and she's braver than me.)

So, I'm not sure if this was exactly what you were looking for, but that's the story of this little fic that holds such a very special place in my heart for so very many reasons.

Fanfic Writers: Director's Cut