#i havent posted any art for a while cos of these bitches

[honkowo]

behold. featherless biped.

So for the past month-ish I've been absolutely OBSESSED with xenobiology and have been working an alien race I've nicknamed angels (no official species name yet idk how language creation works). they're a skyfaring species that due to a (currently unknown) extinction event drove them off-planet and out into the galaxy. i dont have heaps of cultural/societal/technological stuff on them yet which I'll definitely post about as I work on it. what I DO have however, is the biology stuff >:) which I'll make a separate post for. u guys can wait for that for now :)

[dontcallmecarrie]

Are you planing on ever making By Dawns Early Light into a full blown story? ... And is Thanos an issue in this AU? I think you havent mentioned him in it so well, I wondered?

UMM. *looks over what I’ve got in that tag, and winces*

geez this thing’s longer than some of my actual fics, when did that happen?

Here’s the thing, though: this AU’s meant to be a writer’s-block-buster. Which, if the current evidence is anything to go by, has been a resounding success. 

However. 

As of right now it’s just that, a thought-and-snippet-writing exercise, because there’s a lot of things that’d need tweaking before I’d even consider posting it on AO3 [aka my inner perfectionist strikes again]. 

Again, this is mostly just me messing around with a fluffy tumblr-exclusive [for now, anyway] AU because this feels smaller stakes than if I were to round this up and make it into a full-out fic.

Also, in regards to the second part of your ask: not exactly. By Dawn’s Early Light is, at its core, a fairly fluffy self-indulgent AU, which for me is also code for ‘nobody dies if I can help it’ and ‘if the MCU can have a Gary Stu villain then I can do what I want, Deus Ex Machina-levels of fixits included’.

How? Simple. By nerfing the heck out of him, while also unfridging as many other moms as I can, with a side of I-have-yet-to-forgive-the-writers-for-pulling-this-bs-seriously-what-kind-of-writing-was-that. 

Here’s how the entire Thanos situation would go down, in By Dawn’s Early Light (spoilers for a fic I have yet to write):

First, let’s take a step back, shall we? This is, among other things, a timeline-crunch AU. There’s a lot going down in a very compressed time frame [originally just because I wanted Howard to still be around just for Tony to be able to punch him, but now I’m invested in this so time go the full nine yards, buckle up everyone].

So. The entire situation around Maria Stark and Tony and Bucky’s been covered fairly well, but to sum up: when Howard turns out to be an abusive asshole of a husband, his wife smiles at him and promptly turns around and burns both SHIELD and Stark Industries, revealing HYDRA and Obadiah Stane’s double-dealing ahead of schedule [unintentional fixits ftw]. In the chaos, Bucky manages to escape and joins up with Maria and Tony as they go in hiding. 

Ripple effect that didn’t get mentioned: Hank Pym sees this shit going down, realizes that the most famous missing child in the country is about the same age as his daughter, and decides to not aim to be Absentee Father of the Year. He ends up being a tad overprotective, sure, but is way more involved in his kid’s life and Hope Van Dyne grows up with at least one (1) parental figure in her life, so…there’s that. 

Things happen, and the timeline for bringing Janet back gets moved up somehow, right around when the Avengers assemble.

Note to self: adjust part of Scott Lang’s origin story in this? Compare whistleblower laws of that time era, alt. entrance for him could be him somehow helping Tony hide because BDEL!Howard’s the type of petty and vindictive asshole who’d pull some strings if he found out this rando interfered with his search somehow. 

Bonus for giving Scott and Hank something to commiserate about, later on, and would also have Tony and Co. feeling indebted to him [which would result in a lot of shiny prototypes and records being expunged, later on, probably]

…though that might be a bit much. Hmm.

Reason to bring Janet back: I do what I want also I think the MCU fridged moms because otherwise they’d be too powerful 

Ripple effect that didn’t get mentioned, the second: since this is also the AU where moms get unfridged, Frigga’s going to be derailing the plot from her corner of the galaxy.

Also, since I finally watched Ragnarok but was a mythology nerd as a kid and have a passing knowledge of the comics, time to revamp how Hela fits into this universe.

Okay, she’s still murderous and powerful and ruthless. 

Only, turns out there’s a very good reason for it: she was one of Loki’s students [iirc she’s his daughter in the myths, that’s the best I can come up with atm] before Odin saddled her with the thankless duty of being the watchkeeper of Asgard’s enemies and prisoners. As in, Odin just straight-up went ‘hey you look pretty talented, here, I now hold you responsible for this entire goddamn realm of assholes and creeps, if any get out we’re all screwed’. 

Which is something Hela absolutely did not sign up for, but she’s now just about the only thing standing between said realm of undesirables and her home so she stays put […also maybe Odin sealed the only way back? Maybe? Idk].

It didn’t help that in the early days, these ruffians thought they could overpower her and escape to wreak havoc. So she had to kick everyone’s ass six ways to Sunday, until they finally accepted her as the head honcho of this dump and as someone Not To Be Fucked With.

Thus, why Hela’s known as the goddess of death and ruler of Helheim.  

…and it’s also why she accidentally came to Thanos’ attention.

(Because why the hell not, as if her day wasn’t bad enough Odin you owe her big time—)

Thanos, of course, is in love with her carnage and seems to be the kind of guy who doesn’t take no for an answer. Hela just wants to be left the alone but can’t tell him to fuck off because if she did, she’d risk leaving her home open to attack from enemy agents, which is how we get the story behind why Thanos is known as the madman who courted death. 

[Hela: fuck you and the horse you rode in on shoo you bastard and take your stupid flowers with you—]

Thanos was on one of his especially annoying ‘let me woo you with the ashes of this one civilization!’ kicks [Hela: ashes. How romantic. Not. Leave me alone already.] when some of the Dark Elves snuck out and killed Odin. 

Hela…is only pissed she couldn’t have done it with her own two hands. Also slightly embarrassed that the Dark Elves escaped in the first place, and relieved that it was only Odin who’d kicked it because his wife had seemed pretty nice, the one time Hela’d seen the lady before she’d been drop-kicked to this hellhole. 

Also— apparently she now can leave this place? Sayonara, bitches. 

.

Thanos is very displeased when he doesn’t find her standing guard over Helheim when he returns.

Displeased enough to get creative, as far as courting gifts go, and think that if she didn’t like rings or jewelry, well, maybe this Lady Death would appreciate a shiny, fully-assembled Infinity Gauntlet instead.

well…let’s be honest, if it weren’t for his ‘don’t take no for an answer’ thing, you’d have to give the guy props for trying. Nothing says ‘I love you’ more than ‘here have this item of absolute cosmic power’, amirite? [just kidding]

.

Hela now has mixed feelings about Asgard. Before she was crowned Queen of This Dump, she’d been a student of magic, had been used to certain things. There’s quite an element of culture shock to be had, now that she’s back. It’s the first time she’s seen sunlight in thousands of years, and also there’s a lot of systemic changes going on now that some of Odin’s dirty secrets are coming out at last. Turns out she’s not the only one who’d been pressed into duty: some of Loki’s other students[/children in the myths] came back with stories of the same. Fenrir was apparently voluntold to be the guardian of the Reality Stone, Jormungandr had apparently been busy on Midgard […which now had a school of Mystic Arts? Pfft. Overachiever], and the more Hela thought about it the angrier she got.

Especially when it turns out that her teacher had been mocked for suffering a breakdown and was also tortured by the creep who’d been flirting with her for millennia [Everyone: wait what Hela: I am going to KILL THAT BASTARD NEXT TIME I SEE HIM]. 

However, thanks to Frigga being Frigga and having a crazy-high charisma stat, Hela is still mostly willing to play ball with everyone else on Asgard. Despite her not being happy with how ungrateful the general populace acted [oh, magic’s just ‘tricks’? Here, have a fireball TO THE FACE I FOUGHT MONSTERS WITH THESE TRICKS FOR MILLENNIA]. 

So when Thanos shows up again, he gets one-shotted by Hela, who’s very very pissy about her vacation being interrupted.

Because this planet has sunlight and hot chocolate and punk rock and she’s got centuries’ worth of time off and she is damn well going to enjoy it.

.

…aka why Thanos is a bit of a non-entity in this one. Again, fixits are the name of the game for this AU.