#trylla negativity

[wildflowers-of-trolberg]

Maybe, if she’d been given the choice to be a troll, or to spend time with them, just for a day, she might have been able to hold onto that fun. But looking back, all she could think of was the awful evening when Trylla had refused to change her back, and the horrible texture of her false skin, and the cold, lonely, homesick nights. Even the good memories were tainted, now that she knew they were born from a lie, and that while she she’d been running and roaring and relishing her strength, her mum had been badly hurt and probably crying, missing her stolen child.

It's been a week since the Night of Trolls, and Hilda still doesn't feel safe; she gets scared whenever she's away from her mum, and she can't stop worrying about being taken away again. One sleepless night, it all comes spilling out.

This is for my amazing friend, @sarasplenda; I wanted to explore some of Hilda's trauma after the events of Mountain King. I will just warn that while I've tried to be fair, it is not positive towards Trylla.

[wildflowers-of-trolberg]

How about a directors cut (if you haven’t already down them) for Get Out, YNMM, and uhhh… any wildflower fic of your choosing. And I supposed it would be neat to know if there’s anything I don’t know about Swim Until You Can’t See Land :3

Okie so:

Get Out I think I have talked about before? But I'll talk about it again, cause it is interesting - while a lot of the final fic's inspiration came from the song Good For You, from Dear Evan Hansen, which I initially connected to Hilda because I think it really fits her worst fears in the Runaway AU, it wasn't the origin point; it just provided a lot of the vibes for the nightmare scene. This entire fic actually exists specifically because of two things, the first being this fanart of Luz:

Which made me think about wanting to put Hilda in a similar amount of hurt; I actually directly referenced it for the description of Hilda right after her nightmare, and sent it to @sarasplenda (yes I know you sent the ask :)) as reference for the comic version of this fic.

Hilda was sitting up in bed, hunched over, the covers around her a crumpled mess of red fabric. She was outright sobbing; her mouth hung open, her face twisted with horrible pain, tears running in rivers down her face.

The second thing that inspired this fic was a meme, specifically this one:

I think the specific version I saw had Hilda saying "Terraria is just 2D Minecraft"; I know it's just for fun, but I just couldn't stop thinking about this, and about what it would be like if Johanna had actually reacted to that moment in the Stone Forest by kicking Hilda out. And once I had a thought about hurting Hilda, and a way to hurt her, the fic was inevitable.

Looking back, though, my feelings on Get Out aren't perfect. I don't hate any of my older works, but I think it's probably the weakest Wildflowers fic. That being said, there's really only one line in it I don;t like, and I can see why it's so beloved :))

You're Not My Mum was a weird one, because I think a lot of people have the order of events confused. I actually didn't come up with the idea after reading the Hilda tie-in novels; I came up with the idea after asking @walruses-hilda-variety-hour about his experience of them, because I'd already seen that one bit from Hilda and the Nowhere Space, and was worried about the books' portrayal of Johanna. When he said she was genuinely abusive, I started making plans, and I bought the first three novels specifically to reference for this project.

I didn't expect the situation to be even worse than Walrus had mentioned, but it was, and I ended up having much more to address than I planned. But I think the fic came out really well - the only thing it doesn't really get at is Novel Hilda has a tendency to sass her friends more than Show Hilda, but since Novel Hilda spends the whole thing distraught, and her friends really suck anyway, I don't think it really matters; if she does ever get a sequel where she interacts with David and Frida, and comes out of her shell a bit more, we'll see more of that side of her.

My final fun fact about YNMM is that it's technically not the first thing I made for this AU. That honour goes to this image:

Which is a fairly shonky edit of my mental image for Novel Johanna after losing her daughter (thanks to some comments I got on this, in my head she's now Norwegian Crime Drama Johanna).

I think you do already know everything about Swim Until You Can't See Land. I came up with the thing by combining two of the ideas your headcanons gave me (Summoning Sickness, a Wildflowers about dispelling the Tide Mice making Hilda sick, and Big Sister, a fic about Alfur using his nickname for Hilda and her having to ask Kaisa what it means - I might actually still have to write that, as a sequel to Swim...)

I will say that the final chapter is much longer than the others because my plans changed; originally, Chapter 4 would have ended with Hilda deciding to come back to shore, and then there would have been a separate Chapter 5 from either Alfur or Johanna's perspective, about the final reconcilliation. But I just never can get away from Hilda's POV, so this was the result.

Also - I genuinely have no idea who recommended me the song, which ended up inspiring the whole fic. I'm sure it was somebody, but I asked all the friends I could think of a while ago and none of them had.

And finally, I'll take that Wildflowers offer to talk about When She Wasn't There. That fic basically only exists because of the scene in Mountain King where Trylla shuts Johanna outside; the thing is, in the graphic novel, I don't think it's clear whether Trylla actually saw Johanna, so I wasn't able to acknowledge it in There Was A Kindness In Her, and wanted to retread the concept as a result.

That meant a greater focus on Johanna and her trauma from the incident; because she goes through an awful lot (I would genuinely argue a couple of moments actually go too far for the tone of the show, although it's not as bad as The Fifty Year Night and it being a movie helps it get away with more). The original concept was actually to have her be out when Hilda got home, because she'd gone to talk to a potential therapist, and didn't want to tell Hilda. But I just couldn't get the scene break between Hilda deciding to wait for her and her returning home to work right, so I recycled what I'd written and turned most of it into the start of Hilda's nightmare.

And that's the other thing I wanted to do. There are some fantastic fics about Hilda coping with Mountain King (this fic was a gift specifically because @sarasplenda wrote what I think is the absolute best one and one of the best Hilda fics, period), but one thing I wanted to explore myself was the idea of Hilda getting Separation Anxiety. Especially for a kid like her, who's very independent and really doesn't like imposing on her mum, it would be really hard for her to feel like that, I think. I actually took a lot of inspiration from the graphic novel version of Bird Parade, where Hilda actually does get really worried when she comes home and her mum isn't there, and it ends with Johanna offering to join Hilda on her adventures at the end of the Bird Parade (both versions of that story have Johanna at her absolute best, even if the Johannas are very different characters and good for very different reasons) so I stole that directly (I am still annoyed that the graphic novels never really made good on what was implied to be a change for the better in their relationship).

Still, part of me genuinely thinks this might be the most spiteful fic I've ever published. I have similar bitter feelings towards Infinity Train, and Forests of Oregon does address those in its final Book, but it's never been written; the Afraid series gets some of it, especially in the second part, and so does Authorisation Void, but who would've thought Hilda would be the show to really get it out of me?

[wildflowers-of-trolberg]

What are things you hope to see in Season 3?

I mean, at this point I'm just hoping that we get more of the good stuff from S1 and S2? I think the show tends to be better when the writing team is allowed to be more original (it's not universal - the best episode of S1 is an adaptation and I'm meh on the Jorts Incident - but it's kinda common). I really wish the show would do something to acknowledge Trylla being utterly awful, but unfortunately, as much as I love this show, I do think it has a bad habit of letting characters other than Hilda get away with things they shouldn't, so I'm just hoping she's not really featured and they don't try and push the "she's Hilda's second mum" angle.

I just want more adventures and more cozyness, fundamentally; I want more stories where I can just watch and feel comfy and at-home :))

[wildflowers-of-trolberg]

Also can we please have a Director's commentary on Part Of Her Family and Nobody's Child :0

Okie so - Part Of Her Family is a very old idea of mine. I've been thinking about doing a fic about the Bellkeeper being a parental figure to Hilda, and comforting her, since After Hours (cause I had that for Kaisa looking after Hilda, and A Little Less Lonely for Victoria), and while To The Hills kinda filled that role, it wasn't enough to full complete the 'trilogy'. So I came up with this idea, and it just sat on the backburner until recently.

The only thing that changed in that time was my feelings about Trevor, hence the "he's not hanging out with them lately". I wanted to loosely imply that this is in the same continuity as Learned Behaviour, without needing any prior knowledge, so that's why Hilda doesn't mention the gift or his apology from the end of the first fic in that AU.

Nobody's Child was a complete spur-of-the-moment idea, born from a couple of different things. Firstly, there's Ben; he's the kid Tori is normally seen with, so in my headcanon, he was a long-term foster kid she basically became a mom to:

But then in Mountain King, two things happened. Firstly, he mentions his "parents":

And then, at the end of the movie, he turns up in the same scene as Tori, but with a completely different family (what seems to be an MLM couple - also note that Tori is with Deirdre):

So I wanted to address that. Ben finally got adopted in my headcanon, and that's going to leave a hole in Tori's life. But I also need to be honest; I just wanted to spite Trylla; the entire point of this fic was just "everyone hurts, and it's her fault, and she gets nothing she wanted". I don't know how many actually noticed, but she's the troll that keeps pounding on the walls and trying to get in, but she never will.

Hilda will eventually revert to her real self, due to how I headcanon troll magic works; as for Baba, she'll probably grow up as a human in this AU, although whether Tori keeps her permanently, I don't know. I do also eventually want to do another fic that actually covers how and why Hilda managed to run home (and why she and Johanna haven't tried to take Baba back to the Stone Forest), but it's low priority at the moment because the stuff from the show I want to address with that will also be addressed in one of my high-priority fic concepts, When She Wasn't There.

[wildflowers-of-trolberg]

I understand your opinion and all. Not to mention that I thought it would be best to read your fanfic after the movie is released (meaning I haven't read it). But would it work if Tryla says a similar thing that Hop Pop said in The First Temple? "Take all the time you need. I think it's better to admit that we have issues, instead of pretending they don't exist".

I think it would work a lot better if there was a divide like that, yes; having Hilda need time and Trylla willing to work with that to make up for what she did would fix a lot of my issues with her. The way I've handled it in my own fic is that she is trying to make it up to Hilda, but she doesn't quite get how deeply she hurt the girl; that Hilda isn't comfortable around her and that she's going about things the wrong way.

@great-raven-parade also made a really good suggestion when we were talking about the movie, which is just having Trylla say something like 'This is my fault and I'm helping you fix it' (her words not mine cause they're perfect) when carrying the main cast back to Trolberg. Just some acknowledgement from her that she does need to actually fix things and it's because of her misguided decision that all this happened.

[wildflowers-of-trolberg]

Did you know that The 2nd Dimension is doing a live stream interview about The Mountain King movie this Saturday? And they can answer questions from viewers. ... Actually I'm not sure if you have a Youtube account or not. But if you do, you can vent your issues with the aforementioned film there and then.

Okay, no. I have a YouTube account (it’s how I created the playlist for the Runaway Hilda AU, amongst other things) but I’m categorically not going to do that. I have issues with some stuff in the film, absolutely (in fact my issues with it got worse today) but ranting about those issues to the film’s creators isn’t going to fix them. Mercury and Silvergate and Like and everyone else made the story they wanted to tell, and it’s been made and released already; they aren’t going to change things based on one fan’s opinion.

And more than that, it’s just a really entitled and unpleasant thing to do? I think it’s okay to rant about professionally-made media you don’t like, but confronting the creators about it is crossing all kinds of boundaries and all it’s going to do is upset them. So no, I’m not going to go into an interview with the creators and dump on what they made, because that’s just a really crappy thing to do.