#mensaverse

[twotales]

Mensa!Radek is a bit of a grump and nobody can change my mind. Like, at first he was a bit wary of Rod, that chipper attitude rubbed him the wrong way. But it's real hard to dislike someone who learns your native language just to get closer to you.

[spiders-hth-is-an-outlier]

Any/all of 4,5, or 6 for Pretty Good Year? (4: What’s your favorite line of dialogue? 5: What part was hardest to write? 6: What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?)

I answered 4 and 5 in a different ask, so let me tackle 6 here!  I actually very rarely write AUs, in the sense of radically changing a setting from canon.  That seems weird when I think about it, because I definitely read and love AUs, but as a writer, it’s generally the history of a character that makes them interesting to me, and that’s where I tend to generate ideas.  If I do change the setting radically, it’s a story like And Watch What Happens (Supernatural) or Pass/Fail (Stargate Atlantis), which are both based off of AUs that exist in canon -- the Endverse in the first case or the Mensaverse in the second.  (Also Orleans, a BtVS Wishverse story -- see, if it’s important enough to get a fandom name, it’s an alternate universe I will write about!)

But essentially what I never, ever do is Ye Olde Coffeeshop AU, where people who are canonically astronauts or magicians or werewolves or whatever are suddenly just people in regular, shitty jobs living their lives.  Because I’m a genre kid, and I wanna write about ASTRONAUTS and MAGICIANS and WEREWOLVES, why would you not want to write that?

I think the reason I was willing for this story to jettison the magic element was that I was just so goddamn frustrated with the irresponsible way that canon handled Quentin’s depression -- they made it seem very real, like an actual human person with an actual mental illness, but then resolved it in this flashy, genre way, with a Sacrifice to Save the World.  And those two things -- they don’t go together.  In fact, to me, the whole point of The Magicians as a franchise (particularly the books, but the show as well) is that if you have a problem with your brain, you can’t hack it or solve it or really even shift it one inch through Thrilling Fantasy Adventures.  That’s not a thing that happens, and hoping some external thing will come along that assigns meaning to your life is a sucker’s game, you’ll only end up heartbroken and yelling at plants.

So in this case, I really did want to strip out all the Fantasy Bullshit, not because I don’t love Fantasy Bullshit -- I wouldn’t care so goddamn much about Quentin Coldwater if I didn’t relate hard to that.  Just because I felt like it restored a kind of dignity to his story that the end of s4 stripped away from him.  Not that you can’t do a post-s4 canon fix-it, and a lot of people are doing that.  It just felt right to me to let them have as much humanity as possible for this story -- aaaand now I’m thinking about Hale doing that impression of Quentin: “You see his humanity -- it’s grounded! it’s grounded!”  So...that, yeah. :)

Thanks for the ask!