#love the idea of both Charlie being president and Donna

[thebreakfastgenie]

I don't even go here (westwing) but I would love to hear your analysis of how they screwed up each character in the later seasons :O

Okay so the thing is I haven't rewatched the later seasons in full in a long time, so I'm working from here! If I ever make myself watch them (which I probably will because I have a friend who's watching the whole show for the first time) I can make additions/corrections.

First I want to say that an underlying issue with a lot of this is they kept adding to the cast, which left less and less time for any real growth or development for the original cast. I like the new characters like Kate and Annabeth and of course Santos and Vinick, and I even like the recurring characters on the Santos campaign, but I think adding that many characters was a mistake.

Will is kind of a gimme. He's just a completely different character. He's less idealistic and more ambitious and honestly kind of a jerk. Because he was only in about half a season before Sorkin left, this Will ends up being the majority of who Will is, which is a shame.

Bartlet is probably the least screwed. He does feel a little different to me, which I think inevitable with the writer change, but he's fine. He actually gets a pretty good storyline, with the MS. I dislike how his marriage is handled in season 5, but that's more to do with how they screwed up Abbey. He does suffer a little from being out of focus in the last couple seasons, but I think that was to a large extent unavoidable. Bartlet kind of checking out from the presidency after Zoey's kidnapping also makes sense, although I think Leo should have tried to snap him out of it a lot sooner. And firing Leo didn't seem right.

Charlie is a mess because they had no idea what to do with him, but to be entirely fair, neither did Aaron Sorkin. Dulé Hill was criminally underused all seven seasons. Keeping Charlie in the White House well after he'd outgrown the personal aide role was a challenge, I get that, but in season 6 Josh, Donna, and Will were all allowed to leave the White House. Why not let Charlie leave as well? He could even have joined one of the campaigns. Charlie and Zoey rekindling was nice and I consider them endgame but like most of the relationships in the last season, they had so little screen time to develop that it felt a little out of left field.

CJ being chief of staff is a fun girl power moment but I've come to like it less and less. Before the Bartlet campaign, CJ had only worked for statewide campaigns. Become White House Press Secretary was a big deal for her. The reason I used to like her promotion is that she spends so much of the early seasons proving to the boys' club that she knows what she's talking about. But the fact is that CJ's skillset is not the chief of staff skillset. She has different, vital skills that deserve more respect and appreciation and I would like to see her continue to use those skills. I also think CJ being chief of staff was as much about the surprise twist as elevating a female character and honestly those are both bad reasons to do it (but the latter is understandable). They had to spend a whole episode making Josh and Toby act more incompetent than usual to justify giving it to CJ and it still didn't work for me. So many of CJ's interesting stories came from her working with the press. CJ taking on the communications director role could have been interesting, but not chief of staff. I think she just loses a lot of dimension. That being said, CJ is one of the least screwed up characters in the later seasons.

Abbey is complicated. Her reaction to Zoey's kidnapping is believable, but disappointing. The kidnapping storyline was a lot more interesting to me before she started blaming Jed. Also, while like I said it's believable that her emotions from that situation would affect her view, the Abbey we knew would not be angry with Jed for making a top secret foreign policy decision without consulting her. This is also a bit wrapped up in how annoying I am that they ended up tying the kidnapping to Sharif. I blame Sorkin for this as much as anyone because he had an ending in mind and didn't tell anyone. After that, Abbey's return to the White House and eventual reconciliation with Jed is just kind of glossed over. If they were going to put them at odds like that they at least needed to deliver a more satisfying conclusion. And Abbey working at a clinic and dodging questions about her suspended medical license just feels clumsy. Again, I love seeing her return to medicine and the storyline of the possibility press issues that can cause is great, and I would believe her feelings about her medical license changed, but it's never explored so it just feels thrown together.

Donna is probably controversial but I hate what they did to her. She's a completely different character and she lacks all the things that made her unique and fun. She becomes a generic political operative. Maybe she's a badass, but she's not Donna. She's missing Donna's idealism and also her quirks. It's also not actually character development. If it were character development, we would see a journey of growth. Donna is handed a very high ranking job on the Russell campaign, which is ridiculous. It was probably only done to keep her near Will, but it's bad writing. Donna having a high ranking job on a fledgling campaign like Santos might be believable, but Russell is the frontrunner. Donna has a lot of experience, but most of it is unofficial. Her entire resume is being an assistant and she doesn't have a college degree. Which is also why I dislike the statement that she outgrew her job three years ago. She didn't. She is maybe starting to outgrow it, but it also wasn't Josh's job to find a promotion for her. Donna's role in the show was always complicated, but showing how much vital work assistants do and how smart they are was a great element that's completely lost by basically saying that job is beneath someone like Donna. I would have liked to see Donna actually take control of her own destiny and work her way up. Let her confront that she gave up her education for a man, and then got a new start and built a life for herself but maybe allowed herself to stagnate a little for another man. You can still have the conflict between Josh and Donna without Donna unfairly resenting Josh, and it would actually make his feeling betrayed more personal.

Josh is another one who's handled relatively well, but I still think they missed some of the complexities of the character. Testosterone poisoned Josh test-driving a hummer and destroying a prius is funny, but it's a bit too much. Josh isn't that kind of a buffoon. He just falls down a lot. Josh being the one to say the president invoking the 25th was a mistake makes sense in some ways, but I think it's the first example of Josh being written as a little too cold and calculating. He's just... not very nice sometimes. He always had moments where he was a jerk, but it's more than that, somehow. To this end, the Dotty Baker storyline at the convention makes me furious. I honestly believe Josh would suggest leaking Dotty's mental health history in that moment, because he's desperate to win, but he would feel like shit about it later. There's a really interesting story there, but they don't tell it! They just forgot that he has PTSD. Which is funny, because a lot of what's off about him in those seasons could be explained by him ditching therapy when he starts the Santos campaign and his mental health subsequently deteriorating. He's also written as more of a screw-up. Not making him chief of staff makes sense if Leo wanted him to be free to go get the next guy (which would be in-character for Leo!) but it's not really explained and again, follows an episode of him and Toby acting like idiots for no reason, contributing to a larger pattern of Josh's competence being downplayed. He does have moments of competence too, though, so this might just be my memory failing me here. I don't like how he's written vis-a-vis Donna when they finally get together because whether he's ready to commit or not seems to change based on the scene. His loyalty to and love for the other characters gets lost a lot when he spends less time with them which is an issue because that's central to his personality.

Leo is just... mean. He is mean to Josh and basically everybody else in season 5. I get the idea is he's stressed because Bartlet is checked out but it really just doesn't feel like Leo. And then his fight with Bartlet. Again it seems like they understood one aspect of Leo, that he's intimidating and takes his role seriously, and just... missed his fun-loving human side and a lot of his complexities. I mean, bringing in Angela to do secret polling numbers... what even was that? I also think the cast shakeup in season 6 was a mistake. There wasn't much to do with Leo once he left the White House. Making him Santos's running mate doesn't make a lot of sense, except on an emotional level for Josh. Santos agreeing to that is... strange. Leo has never held elected office. He was Secretary of Labor, but aside from that his entire career has been as a staffer or in the private sector. He has recent scandals related to both his history of addiction (and he was using drugs while in the cabinet, so it's not just a personal thing) and Bartlet's MS, which you'd think the Democratic Party would want to distance themselves from as much as possible. He's recently had a serious heart attack and left his position a chief of staff as a result. Leo gets some fun stories as a candidate and he's much better than he was in season 5, but it's kind of a mess.

Toby... oh, Toby. Obviously the main thing is the leak storyline that never happened, but there's also everything else. Toby being an absent father does not fit with season 4 at all. I'm constantly baffled by that decision. Toby's desire to play more of a policy role in season 5 before Will jumps ship is interesting mostly because Toby was already doing that. Obviously his focus is communications but he was always part of policy meetings and advised the president directly on issues. Maybe the writers were basing his role more on what communications directors really did in the administrations they had experience with, I don't know, but they needed to stay consistent with Toby's job in the world of the show. And like everyone else he just... gets mean. He has these doom-and-gloom lines that make no sense (like his reaction to Vinick's announcement). He becomes so dark and angry. His anger at Josh makes no sense because all he'd done was belittle Santos as a candidate and insist he had no chance of winning, and then he got angry that Josh didn't invite him along? Also, before Bartlet, Toby had literally never won an election, because he picked candidates based on principles and refused to compromise. So Toby reacting that way to Santos is... odd. I'm not saying he needed to be onboard right away, but he should be the last person making the electability argument, or at the very least he should bring up his experience and discuss whether Democrats can afford to lose. The key to Toby, which they seemed to miss, is that his prickliness comes from a deep-seated belief that the world can be better than it is. Everyone and everything is constantly letting Toby down. The writers just didn't seem that interested in the character by season 7.

And what really, really gets me, is the actors definitely knew the characters better than this. I don't think they were given enough input. When I watch the episodes Bradley Whitford wrote, characterization-wise it feels like the old days. It's like they're back all of a sudden.

[unfortunate-arrow]

Could you please talk about your Seaborn-Moss headcannons! Love the idea!

The Seaborn-Moss campaign takes place in late 2021 and most of 2022, as the West Wing’s presidential campaigns are our midterm years. Santos had two terms, which were followed by two different Republican administrations. 

By that time Huck and Molly Ziegler are 18 and just starting college. Neither are majoring in political science, but they both decided to take it on as a minor.

So, Sam announces his campaign in December of 2021, at his home in California with his family and a lot of the former Bartlet staffers. (CJ, Danny, Toby, Andy, Josh, Donna, Charlie, Zoey)

Sam asked Donna if she’d be willing to be his VP before even announcing his bid. He knows it’s premature, but he thinks that Donna’s going to be one of the best people for the job. 

Josh is Sam’s campaign manager with Charlie being an assistant campaign manager. Toby helps a lot, but he’s still more of a speechwriter. Sam and Toby argue a lot over the speeches. Donna, CJ, and Danny deal with the press. Zoey and Andy are tasked with helping Sam’s wife, Natalie.

They recruit a lot of staff from the Santos campaigns as well, and of course, a bunch of college students.

So, all of the West Wing guys have kids by this point and CJ & Danny’s adopted daughter is the oldest at 15. The youngest is Charlie & Zoey’s daughter, who’s six. The group ends up deciding to try out online schooling, at least while they’re in New Hampshire.

Speaking of New Hampshire, apparently Manchester is quite close to where the Bartlet farm is, so Jed & Abbey watch the kids while the adults campaign. Sam asks Jed for a lot of advice.

There’s definitely a small, pointless scandal about the fact that CJ and Danny adopted two children, Abby and her brother, Dominic.

A different scandal includes a tabloid getting their hands on the kids’ grades and publish them. It’s madness trying to figure out what should be said, especially as a lot of the focus is on Sam’s kids along with Josh and Donna’s kids. They have to talk Josh out of doing multiple interviews. He’s ready to blow a gasket because “goddamn it there’s not the focus of this campaign!”

There’s multiple remarks about how it’s a good thing that Josh doesn’t really understand how to use social media. Actually, part of the campaign’s social media ends up being run by Sam’s daughter, Josh & Donna’s son, and the Cregg-Concannon siblings. They’re the teenagers after all.

Election night is an interesting, chaotic thing. Josh, Donna, CJ, and Danny find themselves drinking with some of the younger campaign staff and a conversation about “coming on board” breaks out. This leads the four to reminiscing about the first Bartlet for America campaign.

Election Day itself is just a ball of stress for all of them. There’s a lot of kicking each other out the room to go check on the kids. There’s also a lot of “Is Josh’s head going to explode?” conversations.

Of course, Sam manages to win the presidency and serves one term before deciding not to run again. 

[smallblueandloud]

hi essbie!! you seem super awesome❤️❤️ if you would like to talk to me about the west wing i would love that! i’m watching for the first time now and i’m in LOVE with it- tell me all your thoughts! otps, favorite episodes, arcs, characters... anything!

oh my god, this is my FAVORITE ASK THAT I HAVE EVER RECEIVED EVER. i’m so happy to talk about the west wing because the fandom that’s still alive today seems to be TINY (although high-spirited!!). thank you for asking!! i will endeavor to talk a lot.... which isn’t hard for me, lol.

(psst, before we begin, can i recommend you check out @donnajosh, who posts gorgeous new gifsets of tww pretty regularly [and also has gifs tagged by episode so you can find the right post to reblog when you’re liveblogging, shh], @etraytin, who’s written some AMAZING multichaps that have gotten me through this very stressful week, and @cassiesinsanity, who’s just plain genuinely amazing?? okay. now that that’s out of the way.)

i tried to figure out from your blog where you are in the show, but i can’t find anything more detailed than “probably has finished in the shadow of two gunmen”, so i’m just gonna keep things anti-spoilers. there are some really, really cool plot developments in tww, and i don’t recommend you spoil yourself for things on purpose! but also like. i DEFINITELY spoil things for myself all the time. so what the hell, don’t listen to me lol.

(i tried to put this under a cut, but tumblr glitched. sorry, peeps who don’t care about the west wing. also, WATCH THE WEST WING.)

my ALL TIME, dearest headcanon is adhd josh. i just. i love my boy so much. i love my impulsive, ridiculously-sensitive-to-perceived-rejection, loud, hyperfixated boy so much. i don’t know everything about adhd, but from what i know josh is TEXTBOOK. or at least he’s a lot like me! and i’m reasonably sure i have adhd. so. i’m REALLY, REALLY into that headcanon and everything about it. (i actually wrote a fic in which i wrote him the way i see his adhd presenting, because i love him so much. hmm, i should write a fic about josh being adhd. what kind of stims would josh like??)

i love and adore josh/donna, like many many other people. i like zoey/charlie, just because i think they make each other happy and both of them deserve that. i... like cj/danny? sorta? i think they’re adorable, and they have some REALLY good moments (no spoilers but. oh my god. danny really out here chugging his respect women juice and i love him for it). but also i am EXTREMELY ATTACHED to cj/toby and more specifically cj/toby/andy.

HEAR ME OUT. cj has EXTREME wlw energy and cj and toby have A LOT of married energy but then toby and andy... love each other so much, it’s so clear, in literally everything they do, i don’t know if you’ve gotten to the end of s5 yet but i cry. so like?? obviously, because i am who i am, polyamory is the answer! basically the rundown is: andy and toby are a typical couple except that they fight a lot. cj is kinda in the middle. if gay marriage had been legal / socially acceptable in the 80s (because god knows this ot3 has been thinking about optics since they graduated college), cj and andy would’ve gotten married and toby would’ve come and gone depending on who he’d pissed off recently, and everything would’ve been perfect. instead, andy and toby got married and it didn’t work because they really just couldn’t function as a unit, especially since their getting married meant that cj isolated herself a bit more. definitely cj and toby have a couple of SCREAMING arguments about the whole relationship. idk.

but just like. imagine with me, if you will, cj and toby... not dating, while working in the white house, but being exes. friendly exes. friendly exes who are still in love with each other and know it. please imagine that and then think about “i love you desperately / i know” and “you wanna make out with me right now, don’t you? / well, when don’t i?” and “we had it good there for a while / yeah, we did” and then join me in the pit of sadness.

(sidenote i have a sense8 au for the west wing and the second story is just me being emotional about their cluster for 5k. i have another story vaguely planned that i’ll probably never write about the development of the ot3 and about their cluster and how it functions. but don’t read that story until you finish... the first half of s7? or thereabouts? actually probably you should finish the show before you read the sense8 au in general if you’re avoiding spoilers.)

(when i say “i’ll probably never write”, i mean “until the next time i get obsessed with the west wing”. which will probably be years from now. oh, well, we can all hope the muse actually does something efficient for once.)

so yeah. those are my ships. i know a lot of people shipped josh/sam, but i don’t really see it? sam always seemed Way Too Straight for that to work lol, although i DO like the idea of sam pining tragically for josh for years just like donna does. (can you tell i read such a winter’s day a few days ago? it’s amazing. i haven’t left a review yet because i have not been a human being recently, but go read it!! it’s awesome!!)

also, i love the idea of bartlet/abbey/leo, although i can’t really visualize it lol. but there’s some amazing fic for them out there. maybe one day my stupid brain will realize the angst potential and actually let me write something for them, hopefully within the sense8 au. (sam also has a cluster! and i would love to write about them! .....but my brain doesn’t do what i tell it to. ever.)

my favorite arc.... i don’t know. i really loved the early seasons, which were a little more episodic, but ALSO i actually really liked the tone after aaron sorkin left after s4? it takes some getting used to, but it’s WAY more emotional, and i am ALL HERE FOR THAT. i definitely have a least favoite arc, or at least a least-favorite way-that-they-handled-a-storyline (spoiler alert: i hated how they handled the end of bartlet’s presidency in the white house. like. SHE’S ALL ALONE IN THERE- anyways. trying not to give detailed spoilers!)

favorite episodes: hmm. i love the thanksgiving episodes. i loved any episode with the ainsley-and-sam dynamic. noel is a phenomenal episode. 26 could make anyone weep. the flashbacks are the best. the fucking- the fucking what’s next motif.

honestly, probably i’d have to say my favorite episode is either 4x20 (evidence of things not seen, for “stupidly noble cluster” reasons and cj/toby reasons and bartlet & charlie reasons. also i feel like there’s some good josh/donna there too but i can’t remember exactly?) or 7x21 (institutional memory, because i’m pretty sure the writers reached into my id and pulled out EXACTLY what i needed from them to be okay with the show ending. jesus CHRIST i have never felt so satisfied after an episode. literally everything i ever could have wanted happened in that episode. i’m STILL reeling. it’s a perfect episode.)

my favorite characters are... literally everyone? i know that’s cheating but i love them all SO MUCH (except mandy and amy, of course). josh is my favorite, always and forever, but i love cj more than words and sometimes i can’t breathe for love of toby. leo and bartlet and charlie and sam and donna- here i was thinking i was gonna resent will forever but i LOVE will. ainsley is an amazing woman. abbey is such a good character, god, talk about a flawed woman who’s allowed to be a good person.

AND THEN THEY MADE ME ROOT FOR A REPUBLICAN. again, i doubt you’ve gotten to s7, but the republican nominee in the last election... jesus christ. i love that man so much. arguably, i’m very biased, but also how D A R E they expect me to root against him. how DARE.

(i swear this will make more sense once you meet him. i just love the actor a lot, okay?)

anyways. this got ridiculously long. i would LOVE to talk about the west wing with you, feel free to reblog this with your own thoughts or tag me in your own post or message me or something. i would love to hear your reactions!! it’s such a good show, and such a smart show, and every character is so mcfreaking good at what they do and i adore it. enjoy the ride because there’s nothing as perfect and as quality as the west wing. if you’ll please excuse me, i’m going to go cry about 7x21 again.

[etraytin]

Directors cut for “Ourselves and Immortality” (I sobbed, btw, the whole way through it. SOBBED. Especially when Donna has to ID people. But I loved it.)

Ourselves and Immortality is by far the most depressing fic I have ever written, but thinking about it makes me happy because I FINALLY got it finished, woo-hoo! It started out as a one-shot (just like Such A Winter’s Day, in fact), at the beginning of my 100-Day-Fic-A-Day back in 2016. I was in a very creative mood back then and taking pretty much any prompt anybody threw at me. My husband, who is only a very casual TWW fan but gives good prompts, tossed me “Roger Tribbey’s first hour as President.” 

“Wow,” I mused, “Everybody’s going to hate that.” 

But the idea was too tantalizing to pass up; it was so completely unlike anything I had written so far. Even just doing the one-shot involved a fair amount of research, figuring out where Secretary of Agriculture falls in the order of succession and such. Turns out, basically everybody else has to die in order for Roger to land in the hot seat. And if President Bartlet, Vice President Hoynes, and the Cabinet were going down, it seemed obvious that most of the staff would be gone as well. This fic prompt came along just as Designated Survivor was getting started, so I didn't want to go the "terrorists blow up the State of the Union" route, because that felt too done. Unfortunately (or fortunately for real life) there's really not that many ways to take out the government that don't also take out Washington DC and that don't involve targeted building destruction. 

(This got kind of long and involved, so I’m tucking it behind a cut.)

I wound up reaching back into my sci-fi reading childhood, to an original series Star Trek novel called The Pandora Principle. In that novel, the crew discovers an alien artifact and takes it to Starfleet Headquarters for research, only for the artifact, secretly a weapon, to shatter when it is scanned and release a bioagent that eradicates all the oxygen in the air like a self-replicating virus. Everyone in the building dies except for Captain Kirk, who for shenanigan-related reasons is in a self-sealing bunker under the building, and the rest of the novel is devoted to trying to nullify the agent before it manages to escape the hermetically sealed building. It's a great book, evocative and claustrophobic, and I definitely recommend it, but for the purposes of what I thought was a quickie one-shot, I stole the idea of a weapon that could asphyxiate everyone in a building nearly faster than they could realize they were doomed. As the story developed I had to cobble together a little modern-Earth science to flesh it out, but I hoped that the story would hold without much in the way of explanation of how everything had happened. 

One thing that helped was that OaI was not, at its heart, an action adventure story. It was barely a mystery, really. Our main characters were not the ones charged with solving the mystery or catching the bad guy. For the most part, they were not even in direct danger (except for Syl's brief action turn at the end). We spent one chapter with Mike Casper as he investigated and one chapter with the bad guy to get some important creepy exposition, but by far the character we spend the most time with is Roger. It's not Roger's job to know what the Asphyxiant is made of or its exact biological effect, and it's not Roger's job to hunt the bad guys down like dogs in the street. Like pretty much every West Wing story, it's Roger's job to keep the country running, and it's the job of the people around him to help him. The story had to be about what was happening in The White House, with the action-adventure plot clicking along offscreen and occasionally cropping up in a phone call or Sit Room briefing. I had to avoid a lot of temptation, but in a way it made the job easier. West Wing stories are stories about relationships. 

Writing the canon characters was very hard, especially in the beginning. The thing that never caught for me about Designated Survivor was how quickly the survivors moved on after the disaster. Their friends and colleagues were murdered, and there was little indication that anybody even cared. But Margaret, Carol, Mrs. Landingham, Danny and especially Donna, these people were gutted. Every single one of them was utterly devastated, but from Roger's perspective it was hard to see because all of them are so good at their jobs and so dedicated, they'd keep carrying on as best they could until they collapsed. I decided pretty early on that I would start spreading the point of view around so we could see what the characters were going through in their own voices, but that only Roger would get more than one chapter. (I did break this rule right at the end; Donna gets the first and last non-Roger chapters in the story.) Roger's narrative ties the story together but being the President requires one to stay largely in one place while being told things, so spreading out the POV also gave the story a little more momentum.

Donna's first chapter was probably the hardest part of the story to write, both because I am a hardcore J/D shipper and I'd just shut the pairing down in the cruelest of ways, and also because it was through her eyes that I had to bring the scope of the horror home without fully traumatizing the readers. My first draft of the chapter included considerably more time in the refrigerated warehouse with the FBI team, and a lot more detail about the last minutes of the lives of the senior staffers. I ended up going through and cutting a lot of it out, leaving the audience to understand how terrible it was by the way it affected Donna, rather than by my descriptions of it. And yes, it is one of several chapters I cried while writing. There's a reason (several reasons, but my own feels especially) that I had to let Zoey and Charlie live!  And yes, Margaret was speaking for me when she admitted to temporarily forgetting about Annie and Gus, but we got around to them eventually. 

OaI wound up containing most of the material I wrote for it, but it has one deleted scene and one crackadelic alternate ending. The deleted scene occurs shortly before the state funeral and is from Bonnie's perspective; she and Ginger are trying to pack up Sam and Toby's offices to allow the new senior staffers to move in. I got it half-written, then thought I lost it in a computer-related accident. It was so damn sad to write the first time, and it was all character work and only smidgens of plot, and I was really mad about losing the work, so I decided to skip over it and go straight on to the next thing, which I believe may have been Zoey's chapter. It turned out that I did recover most of what I'd written for the chapter, but by the time I found it, the plot had moved on. I tried to make it up to Bonnie by giving her a nice little character bit and a job promotion at the end of the story. 

The crackadelic ending is sort of a long story. Most of the reason that OaI got finished despite all my life changes and busy years and general creative slump is that my parents both fell in love with it. You may ask, "Doesn't having your parents reading your fanfiction make things awkward sometimes?" and in answer I will point you to the number of real sex scenes in my published fanworks, which is zero. And then I will nod enthusiastically. But my dad, especially, loved this story and decided that he ought to be in it. And that he ought to be the Chief Justice. My dad is a retired judge, so he felt this should not be too much of a stretch for him, career-wise. I tried to explain the concept of self-insert to him, but then caved and created a thinly-veiled expy of him to be Chief Justice, then gave him a little ceremony in-story and a few extra mentions here and there. I gave him that chapter as a Christmas present, and he was happy! For awhile. Then he decided that he ought to be the President. I tried to explain to him that this is not how governmenting works, which he of course already knew, but he was firm. His Chief Justice character was great, and he ought to be President. He is nothing if not persistent, and also nothing if not hard to buy gifts for, so for Christmas the next year, I presented him with Chapter 28: The Surprise Noncanonical Epilogue, which has never before been published to the internet. It is very silly. 

This has gotten very long and I still need to write today's Quarantine Journal, so I guess I'll wrap it up there. If you have any specific questions about the story or any other stories, feel free to toss them my way! 

[bartletforamerica]

When Maggie Met Donna

The West Wing-The Newsroom Crossover Post both Season Finales, in a world where somehow all of the show that takes place under Obama actually takes place under Santos. 

Canon Ships, mainly MaggiexJim, JoshxDonna, 

Normally I wouldn’t write fanfiction for either of these, but the plot bunny kicked me hard on the Metro this morning and wouldn’t shut up until I wrote my way through class and knocked it out. It’s not perfect, but it needs to get out of my brain and away where I can’t fuss over it anymore. 

Oh, also, Happy Birthday Janel Moloney!

Maggie Jordan fights to be the one to cover the primary race for the Maryland 5th. Normally someone at her level wouldn’t be assigned to a single non-presidential campaign, but this one is going to be intense, with eyes across the nation on the district.

The incumbent, Congresswoman Andrea Wyatt, is running for the U.S. Senate. That too is going to be an amazing race. Congresswoman Wyatt is, after all, a badass.

The seat is heavily democratic. The congresswoman repeatedly won reelection with 80-85% of the vote. Her constituents loved her. Even if Republicans would do better than average, they weren’t going to make up 35% in one election.

So the focus is on the democratic primary. There’s a moderate democrat, the son of a former congressman, middle-aged and bland, but well-funded. There’s a so-far-left-as-to-practically-be-green democrat, who has broad sweeping plans, very little funding, and very little solid understanding of politics or how to pay for any of their ideas. And then there’s the reason Maggie wants to cover this race.

Then there’s Donna Lyman.

Donna Lyman is one of Maggie’s personal heroes. The woman is just about to hit middle age and has been more involved in politics over the last almost two decades than anyone at that age has a right to have been. She’d been part of the Bartlet administration dating back to the campaign, spent years as Josh Lyman’s assistant, been injured on a trip to Gaza, come back, recovered, and then jumped onto the Russell campaign. When Josh Lyman had led Matt Santos to victory at a contested convention, she’d been brought on and done some wonders with media strategy.  She’d then spent the next eight years as chief of staff to the first lady, a first lady who hadn’t been content to let her husband run all of the legislative policy, who had fought hard to have her own policy goals legitimized and legislated. Donna Moss (who’d become Lyman after the first midterms) had been at the head of that push.

She and her husband had been THE D.C. Power Couple for eight years. When the Santos Administration had come to an end, they’d bowed out to take a break after 16 years of service and plan for what was next.

Apparently, it had been decided that they weren’t ready to be done with politics.

Joshua Lyman was white haired, with a full beard and glasses. No longer the suave swashbuckler of his youth, he’d gained an air of gravitas—so long as he wasn’t speaking. But he was, undeniably, seen as a kingmaker and the top political mind of his generation. But he’d never shown aspirations of being the one running for office, preferring to work behind the scenes. He’d helped countless democrats get elected at all levels, including his deputy, Sam Seaborn, who had rerun for the California 47th and won in the last election.

Democrats had done surprisingly well in the house and senate considering they’d lost the White House.

A right-wing old white Republican had won, a seemingly reactionary step after 16 years of democratic rule. The man was considered a joke and the potential democratic slate to take him on in the next election was longer than Maggie’s forearm. But covering his administration—covering the White House—had lost a bit of the shine it had once had.

Donna Lyman had announced her candidacy with a year until the midterm elections and a list of endorsements. She had the backing of the Santos family and the Bartlets. President Bartlet didn’t get around much anymore, but he and Abbey hosted house parties at the farm in New Hampshire. Emily’s List had backed her, as had N.O.W., and Planned Parenthood. Amy Gardner was on board as Fundraising Director in an instant. Josh Lyman was Campaign Director, though a muzzle had to be placed on him. C.J. Cregg-Concannon had given her backing, though being married to a journalist made it too difficult for her to be Media Director. And Andrea Wyatt had given her seal of approval as well.

It’s not a lock in for her, however. Donna’s political stances put her firmly in a ‘progressive’ column.

The main question of the campaign, the reason that this is the campaign that’s going to attract attention, is that of the voters’ desires. What does the democratic base want in a candidate? Do they want a moderate to bring them back to center? Or are they ready for another progressive to push the country onward? The challengers are all watching, trying to see if they are what the democratic base is looking for. With the strength of the democratic party in the district, it makes it an ideal test case. A democrat is guaranteed to win, but what kind?

Maggie’s practically bouncing out of her seat when she finds out she has an interview with Ms. Lyman. This is a woman who has gone from working for powerful men, to working with them as an equal, to now having them working for her (including her husband, which is a lovely bit of symmetry). She’d come from the Midwest and built herself up out of nothing, taking whatever opportunities had be offered to her and she’d succeeded. Donna Lyman gives Maggie hope. Hope for herself, and for her future, that one day she and Jim will figure out how to be in the same place at the same time and not just keep carrying on long distance. Hope that she’ll make it as a producer and maybe get to do more segments. And maybe, maybe, one day she’ll even be an anchor in her own right (though that dream is kept in the deepest corners of her soul, a dream of her at the desk and Jim in her ear, Mac watching like Charlie used to, backing them up as they take on the world).

Maggie sits down across from the older blonde, whose energy is palpable. There’s doing to be done and the gleam in her eyes makes it clear that she’s eager to be doing it.

Maggie knocks her water over within the first thirty seconds and spends the next minute apologizing. Thank god this is a print article she’ll be writing and not a tv interview. Donna smiles and helps her clean up and retells the story (printed once in a book, otherwise Maggie’s sure this wouldn’t have been said) of the time she left her underwear at an art gallery. By the time the table’s clean they’re laughing together.

Maggie leaves the interview an hour later with a full sound recording and pages of notes on policy positions and various anecdotes and fun facts. She’s smiling broadly as she rushes back to the D.C. bureau to write before the impressions fade from her mind.

Before she starts, however, she pulls a little reporter’s pad from her desk and flips it open. She shifts through a few pages and comes to number 34. With a black pen she strikes out ’34: Meet Donna Lyman’ from her bucket list.

With a grin, Maggie puts it back in the desk and opens her laptop. Time to tell the public about the time Donna pulled a fast one on her husband to ensure the First Lady’s child poverty program made it into the budget. She’s sure she can come to a reason the voters need to know about this in the voting booth.

[actuallylorelaigilmore]

Hey, I saw you were doing headcanon stuff! So, I have this like burgeoning headcanon that Josh x Donna's first daughter is wlw. I don't know if you build off of other people's headcanons, but this one has been with me for a long time, and you are such a talented writer and storyteller in general that I thought maybe you'd be interested in taking a crack out of this very specific headcanon?!? I've just been projecting a lot of brainpower towards it and I want to talk to someone else about it!

Okay, so first, all my future headcanons for TWW spring from this original post that’s gotten around a bit. I’ve written a tiny bit of kidfic using them as well so I decided to connect yours to mine because tbh I love this idea and heck yeah, at least one of their daughters should be queer :D that’s just way more fun than if they’re both straight.

So, given what I’d already sorted out for the future, here are my thoughts. There are oh so many ideas behind the cut because apparently I can’t sleep but I can create a bunch of people out of thin air.

Their eldest daughter, Brianna Joan, started insisting everyone call her ‘Jo’ when she was five. They were both surprised by her stubbornness on the matter, but Josh was secretly pleased since her middle name was a tribute to his sister. Donna assumed it was a phase she would grow out of, like a lot of kids when they’re young and establishing their independence. She didn’t–and Jo later believed it was the first hint that she was never meant to be the girly daughter they might have expected.

Charlotte inherited her mother’s grace under pressure, along with her dancer’s form and creative flexibility. While Jo had Donna’s sass and sense of humor, she shared her dad’s brown hair and eyes, constant need to be in motion, and impulsive streak. Josh liked to say Jo got his athletic prowess, too, but Donna always countered with ‘your what now?’ and made the girls laugh. Jo surpassed him in sports talent by junior high, thanks in no small part to coaching by Charlie’s not-so-little-anymore sister Deena.

Junior high and high school were rough, especially girl’s softball and basketball. The rumors and slurs about which girls were probably gay because they were a little too good on the court or the mound bothered her, especially when she got sick of her unruly hair and cut it off at fourteen and the kids started aiming them at her…but it was hard to do the right thing and stand up to them when she was starting to wonder if maybe they were right.

The first crush she developed on an older, female student that she actually admitted to herself was a crush happened a year later, when she was trying to survive her entrance into high school. She came out to her best friend at sixteen and felt bad that she didn’t tell her parents first, but her dad was still working with the White House occasionally during his “retirement,” and her mom was starting her campaign for Congress, and the last thing Jo wanted to do was make that harder.

It wasn’t like she thought they’d be upset, or disappointed in her, exactly. But a tiny part of her did have doubts, after a couple of her friends had come out to their liberal parents and hit a cruel wall of family double-standards. Surely Josh Lyman and Donna Moss, champions of progressive causes, wouldn’t be that way…she hoped.

Just to be safe, Jo told them the week after her mom won her Congressional campaign, when it would cause the least trouble if they did freak out. Donna wasn’t surprised, not even a little, and only shared her worries at night with Josh. She knew how hard it was to be a woman in the world, and it could only be more painful for their eldest facing additional discrimination on top of that. “We just have to love her even harder,” Donna whispered, “and hope it’ll be enough.”

Unlike his wife, Josh was–as always–oblivious. Jo coming out was big surprise, but one he was happy about. She trusted them enough to tell them, and include them in her confusing teenage life. Surely that meant they were on the right track. “And hey,” he offered up in the initial shock of her disclosure, “I can’t exactly blame her. Women…are great. I’m a big fan. Of them.”

Just like he did with all the girl’s activities over the years, from dance to soccer, Josh threw himself into being a parental ally until he annoyed Jo with his enthusiasm. PFLAG, marches, fundraisers, sponsoring local clubs…"which one of us is gay again?” she would mutter to her sister with an eyeroll sometimes, out of earshot of the DC dad with the rainbow t-shirt passing out mini flags.

She was grateful though, especially after she survived college, and law school, and volunteered at a nonprofit that exposed her to so many kids whose parents didn’t care if they lived or died, simply because of who they turned out to be. Josh started getting handmade cards for his birthday and Father’s Day every year, filled with Jo’s illegible handwriting–that, he knew, she definitely didn’t get from him–telling him how much she loved and appreciated him. He put them on the fridge next to the sketches her little sister sent, like they were both still in grade school. Donna teased him about that, but whenever their friends visited she was the first one to casually point them out.

In the family, Charlotte was the only one that ever gave Jo any grief about her sexuality. It was mostly sibling sniping, because Charlotte was quieter than her sister but even more competitive, and she was never quite able to catch up with the three year gap between them. Still, it made Jo uncomfortable in her late teens because she and her baby sister were always so close growing up, and she couldn’t tell if the snark was coming from someplace deeper. When Charlie was fifteen, she got a week’s suspension for breaking a boy’s nose after he called her valedictorian sister a slur she refused to repeat to anyone. Jo worried less after that, and the sarcastic comments never happened again.

Toby’s son Huck came out as bisexual in college, and Jo joined his twin sister in being his closest support system while he braced for his parents’ reactions. There was a lot of hugging, and some knowing looks between Toby and Josh when the kids weren’t paying attention, and Huck had to pay Jo twenty bucks because she promised it would go over fine and he was certain it would be a disaster. He never learned to love the Yankees but he shared his father’s temperament from an early age. He and Charlie dated briefly in their twenties, causing a minor scandal to ripple through the connected families.

CJ’s daughter Nora, who was like a distant cousin Jo never got to visit enough in sunny California, only allowed the family to use her full name. She got a lot of weird looks when strangers overheard, or friends found out how old-fashioned it was, but Jo liked to call her by it anyway when they chatted. She never got to meet her dad’s mentor, and she thought based on the stories she’d heard that he would be embarrassed but proud to learn that Claudia Jean named her firstborn Leonora after she left the White House.

Nora was the one who introduced Jo to her future wife, an architect based out of Sacramento with an independent streak and temper that secretly reminded Josh of one of his exes. Unlike him and Amy, Jo and her fiance were a happy fit, sharing similar political beliefs but no professional rivalry. They spent as much time at home swapping stories and advice about their demanding careers as they did on community activism. Jo mellowed out a little after they got married–”she’s so much like you,” Donna told Josh with a smile–and they moved five times in three years before buying a house and starting their attempts to have a family.

That was the first time Jo ever really surprised her mom, who cried when she found out they were expecting. “I thought…you never talked about wanting kids,” Donna said carefully, and Jo just grinned that bright grin that was so much like her father’s. “I needed some time,” she told her mom, “to figure out what I wanted. But I think that if I manage to be half as good at it as you were, I’ll be an amazing mom.”

Josh and Donna bantered anxiously in the waiting room while each of their eldest daughter’s three kids came into the world. Two she gave birth to, and one she didn’t. They spoiled them all the same.

And when Charlotte brought the Lyman-Moss legacy back to the White House, Jo’s youngest son got to hunt Easter Eggs on the lawn. He stood next to his aunt during the photo op, just one of a dozen kids surrounding the first female President of the United States.

[etraytin]

"do you have any feelings on the breakdown in season 6 - did Josh realize he'd pushed too far in Germany for propriety's sake? was Donna hurt that he turned cold, or did he just not give her the attention she'd given him after Rosslyn?"

I have a lot of feelings about this time period for Josh and Donna, as I'm sure pretty much anybody who ships them does. I've visited the subject a couple times before, most notably in Closure and Sirens, so if you've read those, you already know a lot of my headcanons for all the things that went unsaid during that time. But let's see what else I can lay on the table here.

Josh was thrown really badly by Colin Ayers showing up at the hospital in Germany. For a few brief hours, he thought he had everything figured out. The threat of losing Donna brought a lot of things abruptly into focus for him, like how completely lost he would be without her, how much she really meant to him. He was ready to call it love, right up until the point that he realized that Donna might possibly not be feeling the same way as he was, a possibility personified by a suave and handsome photographer who seemed to be more than just a friend. Josh is super-duper bad at talking about his feelings with anybody, including himself.  He generally deals with them by either stuffing them into the backmost corners of his mind or channeling them into whatever sort of aggression is handy, whether that's dragging half of Congress to death to get his agenda through or going outside and yelling at the sky. Sniping at Colin passed the time but was ultimately unsatisfying, and he wasn't about to have a go at Donna herself, so he went the stuffing-down-his-feelings route. He got way up into his own head, where it's hard to see what's actually going on. 

By the time Donna was awake enough to be having coherent conversations, Josh had convinced himself that what he felt for Donna was the same thing anybody might feel for a really good friend who'd been put into danger as a direct result of his actions. (Guilt is one emotion Josh is pretty much never able to stuff down.) Donna is adept at reading Josh, so she saw that guilt right away, hiding whatever might have been suppressed underneath it. The trouble with guilt is that it is a very needy emotion. It needs absolution, it needs forgiveness, and for the really stubborn flavors, it might need those things again and again and again. It didn't matter that Donna never blamed Josh; because Josh blamed himself, he needed absolution that at the same time he was convinced he did not deserve. There were only so many times Donna could tell him it wasn't his fault, only so many times she could watch him look miserable because she was hurt. She got stuck in the position where she needed comfort, but showing that she needed comfort just seemed to make Josh feel worse because he was so absorbed in the idea that it (like pretty much everything in the world) was his fault. She quickly started easing away from his efforts to help her because that was preferable to watching him go to pieces every time she couldn't bite back a moan of pain. They talked, sure, they talked everyday, but it was banter, patter, never anything too real or too deep even after Colin left. Josh didn't stay too long after that anyway, since he needed to head back for the peace talks.

There's a very squishy amount of time that passes before, during and after the peace talks before Donna comes back to work. A complex open femur fracture can take between 12 weeks and 12 months to heal, but the most intense period of physical therapy tends to be within the first four weeks after surgery. There is no possible way that Donna would be in a wheelchair and putting in full days at the office a week after surgery, but then again, there's also no way they put those peace talks together so quickly, so obviously there were several weeks encompassed in the montage that ends with Debbie straightening the place settings at Camp David. During that time, Donna completed initial recovery at Landstuhl, then flew home with her mom to Wisconsin and the really excellent orthopedic surgeons at the University of Wisconsin hospital in Madison. Josh pulled some strings to get her transport back to DC during Third Day Story so she wouldn't have to fly commercial with her leg the way it was, which is why she arrived at Andrews that day in pretty decent shape and not needing a lot of personal nursing care that would mean she couldn't live on her own. (Just go with me here, I know it's complicated but this timeline is all jacked up and I'm doing the best I can!)

In any case, by the time Donna got back to work she was getting better, but she was nowhere near better. Sitting or standing for a long time was very painful, and she'd still be spending a considerable amount of time each week in physical therapy. Add to that the incredible stress the entire White House was under during the transition between Chiefs of Staff, and it was not an environment conducive to mental health or healing. Donna understood that, she'd done enough research on stress and PTSD to recognize it in herself, though. Kate didn't have to lay it out for her for Donna to understand what she was getting at, or to be able to name her own list of symptoms. She didn't make Josh's mistake, she did get therapy when and where she could, but federal insurance isn't that great and there was never any time. As long as the symptoms weren't disrupting her life she could get by. As for the "get angry over everything, cry over nothing," well, nobody was responsible for making her feel better but herself, even though when the situation had been reversed, she'd put her life on hold to fix Josh. She tried not to be resentful about that, and tried to ignore the way that her resisting the offers he did make to help were pretty textbook symptoms as well.

Donna had wanted a change in her job even before everything had happened. She was a great assistant, but she was ready to be more than that. She had the brain to be anything she wanted, but she'd thrown away her college opportunities to stay with Dr. Freeride, and now she found herself seemingly in the same position, albeit a slightly more lofty one. She knew Josh needed her support, but so had her old boyfriend and look how that had turned out. Seeing Charlie graduate and get a "real" job with advancement potential was just salt in the wound. Yes he'd had to work hard, but the President had supported him, made room in his work schedule to make education happen, and was now encouraging Charlie to bigger and better things. There wasn't much opportunity for Donna to take classes in the fifteen hours a week she wasn't working or sleeping, and the one time she'd floated the test balloon of a new job or new position, Josh had shot her down so dismissively that it was pretty obvious he couldn't even conceive of her moving on. It hadn't been so bad back then, almost an extension of their endless banter about her wanting a raise, but in retrospect it rankled. By the time she started scheduling lunches with him she was feeling overworked, underappreciated, unheard, and like somebody who'd once been her best friend and more was a huge contributing factor to a lot of her problems.

Josh, for his part, wasn't totally unaware of Donna's problems, but they were nowhere close to being on the same page. Josh had more than enough troubles of his own to be dealing with during this time, reversals and disappointments both professional and personal, and a lot of weight coming down on his head. He understood, mostly, why Leo hadn't chosen him for COS but it still bothered him some, especially when he wound up picking up a lot of slack for CJ while she was getting up to speed on policy. He'd meant to help Donna with her transition back to work, but he found her hard to deal with when she was being prickly, and she didn't seem to want a lot of help getting around or carrying things. He figured she didn't like people thinking she was weak, a major concern he himself had felt after Rosslyn, and tried to back off to let her feel stronger. That was apparently not the right thing to do either, but damned if he knew what he was supposed to do, besides all the things that were very inappropriate for work and absolutely not right for people who were just good friends.

In the ever-shifting landscape of his priorities, Josh wound up doing what he'd been doing for years, shifting what he couldn't deal with to Donna and trusting that she would backstop him on whatever might fall through the cracks. Unfortunately in this case, one of the things he couldn't deal with was Donna herself, and shifting that burden was a mistake. Like the guy who doesn't check or rotate his tires as long as they're working because they've always been fine before, it wasn't until there was serious danger that he started taking notice at all. And like that guy, he made himself a promise that he'd fix things later and just hoped that if he ignored the problem, things would ride along okay for just a little while longer. A blowout was basically inevitable.