He Picked the Wrong One: 1, 2, 3, 4
He Picked the Wrong One - Carol/Jess, Steve/Natasha Stark - Marvel 616 & 3490
1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?
This was my first serious piece of fic. Iād written a couple of small rare pair fics but that was about it. Iād also started reading Avengers comics - rather than just X-Men - and had just finished Civil War. It was all very raw and I needed fix-it.
Iād read a few gender swaps - mostly MCU but Iād read some in other fandoms - and they frequently bugged the hell out of me for reasons at the time I couldnāt quite put my finger on. They were almost always the same character but with different genitals and a feminised version of their own name. Very few of them stacked up with the understanding of gender Iād begun to develop.
But Natasha Stark really appealed to me. Just with how she was named, it was clear she could be her own character. I started to build head canons for her. Eventually, I had so many, I practically had an armoury.
Sheās Iron Woman and sheās marrying Captain America (which averted the Civil War) so she had to have gotten to a similar point in her life to Tony. But thereās no way their lives would have taken identical paths; there would have been very different expectations on them. Then, I came up with the idea that just because she didnāt try and deal with the SHRA by herself, that doesnāt mean she wouldnāt do it with other things. And so the fertility deception was born.
At which point, I thought,Ā āFuck it, I should probably write this down.ā
Then, I ran in to the problem that I had no idea how to turn my head canons in to something resembling a fic. I liked the idea of writing theĀ āmarriage doesnāt fix everythingā story. Which meant I probably wasnāt going to write a tropey romance plot; it couldnāt be a getting together fic.
But there were two kinds of plot I was intimately familiar with: detective and superhero. I started constructing it as if I were going to write it for a comic. Which meant I needed a detective, someone who could look at the situation from the outside, compare the differences between Natasha and Tony, and figure out whatās going on.
Thatās where Carol came in to things. Jess came along too because sheās a great foil for Carol and a detective needs someone to bounce ideas off. They were never meant to get together but, as I plotted it out, they just felt right. Then, the rest of the mystery fell in to place.
tl;dr Natasha > Toni, I wrote a comic book detective storyĀ ācause I didnāt know any better, and lesbianism was accidental.
2: What scene did you first put down?
The first. I wrote out a highly detailed plan for the plot and then wrote it in order. However, I had the argument Carol and Jess overheard fairly solid in my mind right at the start.
3: Whatās your favorite line of narration?
This is hard because I feel a lot of the narration in this is fairly perfunctory. (It was my first big fic, cut me some slack.) Iām quite proud of some of the descriptive passages - although they tend to sit outwith the action a little - but I hadnāt got the knack of internal monologue and relied a little too much on dialogue for exposition. Letās go for this bit of description:
With one leg raised and no attempt made at modesty, she looks more like Michelangeloās Adam than any Venus. Somehow, this naked woman, composed of paint, feels more true than the one in the Playboy photographs ever could. Itās signed āS. Rogersā.
4: Whatās your favorite line of dialogue?
Just because itās quite funny:
āHi. Jessica Drew,ā says Jess, raising one hand. āPleased to meet you. In addition to saving my best friend from perverts with pheromone powers, Iām also available for weddings, bar mitzvahs -ā
(For anyone interested, those head canons returned with a vengeance and Iām now writing the prequel which covers how Steve and Natasha got together.
Anything else youād like to know? I really like talking about fic.)
