#bedlam replies

What two stories have you written that are most different? Why?

Irina Larionova a.k.a. Irene Lorraine! in CATFA she is only "Private Lorraine" (she has gotten promoted to Corporal by the time of Home, though I think in retrospect I should have kept her at private, but whatever); the name "Irene" is not a reference to Natalie Dormer playing Jamie Moriarty a.k.a. Irene Adler in Elementary because I literally just made that connection tonight. we can pretend I did it on purpose; I did look up clips of Natalie in Elementary to get the vibe right once we were working with Irina rather than Lorraine. I think the name came from just going down a list of Russian female names and trying to work out which ones had a pretty clear Anglophone equivalent and felt right. (this is also how I got Larionova, just going through surnames.)

if I wanted a canon character to be a matryoshka/doll (proto-Black Widow) in the SSR, I basically had...no options, it had to be Lorraine. (while we do see other women in the SSR in CATFA, none of them are named. Rose from Agent Carter appears in Home but since she also appears in AC it couldn't be her.) the other reasons Lorraine worked really well as the matryoshka was because as Colonel Phillips' secretary she would be handling a lot of sensitive information and could pass it on (think of Martha in The Americans), and also, well, she did put the moves on Steve that one time.

Lorraine joined up with the SSR as part of the Women's Army Corps after they had transferred to London (I think if she had been with them at Camp Lehigh we would have seen her there) and was pretty well entrenched by the time Steve rejoined in late 1943. if she actually had managed to seduce him (and it might well have worked if Peggy hadn't turned up when she did), it would have been to her benefit, but it was a very spur of the moment decision to try, and which unfortunately set Peggy against her. (I have...ideas...about how Peggy interacts with other women, especially ones she perceives as rivals.) it did not cost her her job, fortunately, and that takes us through to Home. I knew going into the fic that she was the matryoshka, and so she appears all around the edges of scenes before the Stork Club reveal. but they're all places it makes sense for her to be, so none of the characters are like "wait, why is she ALWAYS here???" she is always there because she is trying to figure out what Steve and Natasha's deal is.

Lorraine is the one who makes Natasha as Red Room, or rather, as Department X, since they don't have the Red Room name yet, and she makes that connection specifically when she watches Natasha and Steve sparring, since Natasha has a very distinctive style. (if you pay attention to the sparring scene, you might notice that Natasha's last move is actually the 'poser' three point landing, which as much as Yelena makes fun of, we do see in both AC and the mainline MCU as a pretty standard Widow move; Dottie does it at one point in AC, IIRC.) she is very intelligent -- she's the only person who figures out that Steve and Natasha are from the future -- but she's not actually as experienced as Natasha was at the same age. she has been undercover for years, but most of her experience is as a spy, not as a killer, the way Natasha's is, and she kind of fumbles a little when she's put on the spot in situations she doesn't quite know how to handle, like the scene during the blackout in Natasha's interrogation room, where Natasha essentially pulls rank on her by being older, senior, and substantially more experienced, and this repeats in their other interactions, including the Stork Club scene.

as Lorraine tells Steve and Natasha during their scene together in her cell, the matryoshki are recruited young, but not as young as the Widows when we see them in the AoU flashbacks or the BW cold open, which is where Natasha screwed up when talking to her later on. Department X would have been founded in the 1920s and they got their recruits by going around and looking at whatever kids had survived the various catastrophes in the USSR during those times -- Lorraine is a Holodomor survivor, and probably most of the other matryoshki from her generation come from similar backgrounds. part of this is just picking up the kids that no one is going to miss and who are desperate to survive, but there was a specific strain of desperation and ruthlessness that Department X was looking for that they really played up in training in a "you will never be able to go back to normal society, we're the only ones who understand" kind of way. they wanted their recruits to be very aware of just how lucky they were that they were chosen for Department X. there is probably a strain of this in the modern Red Room, but because the Red Room went considerably younger when they took kids it's less personal.

Irina probably quite literally never even thought of defecting as an option until Natasha offers it to her, which Natasha tells Steve at some point, in the same way that Natasha herself doesn't seem to have thought of defecting until Clint gave her the option. she is fascinated with Natasha even before the Stork Club fight because everything Natasha is signaling is a bundle of contradictions, and afterwards, Natasha is basically a walking It Gets Better. part of that is because Natasha got out and then got back into the fight, in whatever way that means time travel or otherwise, but part of that is also because Steve is with Natasha. and this is not because Lorraine herself has any real romantic interest in Steve or anyone else for that matter, but it's coming face to face with someone who knows exactly what Natasha is -- and it's pretty clear seeing them interact that Steve is under no illusions about Natasha -- and still loves her, not just despite but because that's simply who she is. that's why it's the thing that she keeps coming back to because she's so flummoxed by it. (Dottie is too, but Dottie comes down on 'okay, so Captain America is a freak, good to know'; she's fascinated by Peggy because Peggy apparently wasn't enough of a freak for Captain America.) it's not about the romance. it's about someone knowing what she is and not being bothered by it in any way, just accepting it, which is why she had to see Steve and Natasha after the SSR got Steve back from the Winter Guard. part of it is apologizing to Steve, but part of it is also just watching them interact without anyone having blinders on.

she is from one of the MCU prelude comics! I think from the BW one, where Ross and Hawley kind of get a summary of Natasha's dramatic backstory. going by the lines of the suit, her belts, and her boots this is supposed to be her IM2 look, but with her CACW batons. (her IM2 suit has REALLY distinctive belts, but you'll notice that the SHIELD insignia is wrong for IM2, that is her Avengers insignia; her CATWS insignia is tiny. those are also her IM2 gloves.)

I think this is the only MCU icon I've had -- in general with my Tumblr icons (I also use this same one on Bluesky and Twitter before it went to hell, and it's my default DW icon, but my Insta has my actual face in cosplay), and when I only have one icon (as contra the old LJ model of several and you choose which one you use to suit your mood/content), I have discovered that I do not want to have the live action actress (not ScarJo, nor Natalie Portman when I had my Padme icon back in my PT/TCW days; my Rebels time predated there being a live action Hera), and thus prefer to go either animation or comics art. I have also discovered that when I only have the one icon, I do specifically want a female character even when my actual favorite characters tend to be men. this is apparently how I dig into my gender identity so we shan't unpack that further, but I do apparently feel really strongly about that.

IIRC, these are the last few Tumblr icons I had:

(I don't remember what I had before I got into SW. I'm sure I actually did have a show Hera icon at some point -- both of these are from the Kanan comics, which are great, everyone should read them, art is by Pepe Larraz. I'm actually not one hundred percent sure I used that second one on Tumblr because I think my ex-bff had a very similar one from the same comic, and people did mix us up occasionally, and then she used to yell at me about it. I did use it elsewhere.)

anyway.

I wanted to go with either animated, illustrated, or comics Natasha, I did not want to use Marvel comics Natasha, because that's a completely different character than MCU Natasha, I think at this point What If hadn't come out yet, so there wasn't an animated MCU Natasha, I'm a little leery of using illustrations from posters or licensed prints because that's people's art, which kind of did leave a default of the only comics Natasha available being the prelude tie-in comics Nat (which obviously is also somebody's art, but in a different way than a poster print), this is the art style I liked best of the ones that were out there (artist for these is Carlos Villa with colors by Chris Sotomayor), and then it was just going through the panels trying to figure out which one worked best on its own for an icon. which there aren't that many options. these are the screencaps I have in my files, apart from the one above:

those first two I also do use on Tumblr as headers, the third one is fine but I wanted her in her suit and I very deliberately did not want my "face" (my icon) to be pointing a gun at the viewer. (Gun safety! it's important!) I do have an icon of the fourth one that I used on another site for a while, but I don't like it as much as the current one. I wanted obviously to have a Natasha from a movie I like a lot (I do actually really like IM2), in one of her looks/hairstyles I liked, and with the right pose/facial expression/not too much dialogue, etc., so I had to do minimal editing because I'm not that great at edits.

they are baby!

like, they are still the same people, but younger -- Steve still has his strong self-righteous streak, but it didn't have anywhere to go until somehow, somewhere in his head, he went "wait. I wonder if I can volunteer." which obvs he also did in canon but it went nowhere and also that's a completely different context, but there's no way grown-up CATFA Steve didn't expect the outcome to be the same as 17yo Flood Steve -- he knew he was going to die. (and CATFA Steve is only eight years older than Flood Steve, the age difference between Flood and beginning-of-CATFA (June 1943) Steve is not that great, though they have different life experiences. but they're not even that different? like CATFA pre-serum Steve did not have the "lived through a war, have worked in a factory since I was 6/7" experience, but Flood Steve's 'I grew up in a tenement, I was in child labor" experience is still pretty heavily based on research of what pre-war NYC would have been like. (though I think there were child labor laws at that point, and there's no indication that pre-serum Steve had factory experience -- but there's also no evidence that he didn't, since for MCU Steve we actually do not know what he did for a living pre-serum. (comics Steve is different obvs, I believe we know more, but MCU Steve? canon does not really care about pre-serum Steve. also have I ever told y'all my reading of how a lot of fandom reads pre-serum Steve as child!Steve despite the fact he's a fully-grown adult but that's not relevant.)

Natasha -- again, this is still Natasha, but younger and arguably considerably more cynical than canon Nat, who is still pretty damn cynical especially circa The Avengers. she is baby but she stopped being baby when she came out of the Games. (though there is a photograph, never released to the public, from her Tour where she is very clearly this tiny 13-year-old schoolgirl with her hair in plaits, holding her cat in her arms, looking completely overwhelmed. Peggy went with her on her Tour partially because there was a very real chance that she was going to have a breakdown on camera.) this is the Nat that we see in the BW cold open, the one who still very much wants things to be okay, the one who I WILL KILL YOU ALL wants to save her sister but still flies a plane out of Ohio, but also the Nat from the BW and AoU flashbacks -- the one who is a stone cold killer but who wishes she wasn't. so with Natasha even more than Steve it's canon Nat but it's the Natasha we only see in flashes. and like Steve this is a Natasha who's really not that far removed from canon Natasha -- this is only a ten-year-difference from A1 Natasha; she's six years forward from the BW cold open Natasha, and if we got by the deleted BW scene timeline she's only four years back from BW flashback/defection Natasha.

IDK it's not really running the years back for them? like it is -- they are more likely to act like teenagers than twenty- or thirtysomethings, see Steve furiously slamming doors and Natasha having her "wait, I think I LIKE like him" moments -- but they're really not that far off where they would have been in canon, minus their different circumstances. which are significant -- but not that significant for these two specifically, given their canon backgrounds.

also, THEM:

Sure!

So one of the things going on here is not necessarily that Natasha, Steve, and Tony got aged down but that everyone else got aged up -- you can actually see a bit of this in the original concept and even in the first chapter (where Peggy and Pierce are talking), since I didn't settle on Bruce and Clint being significantly older than Natasha, Steve, Tony, and Thor until well into the second chapter. Originally they were all meant to be within about ten years of each other. (For the record: Steve and Natasha are seventeen, Tony is eighteen, Thor is twenty-one, Bruce is thirty-three, and Clint is thirty-nine.)

Part of it is that THG is, by definition, a YA franchise -- if I aged Natasha and Steve (and Tony and Thor and Howard and Peggy) up, then either they are further away from their own Games or I have to change the fundamental conceit of the Hunger Games themselves to no longer be about the child murder death olympics, which, then, why am I even writing a THG crossover.

I don't want them further away from their own Games; Natasha is almost five years out from her Games because she won her Games at age twelve. Steve is less than a year out from his Games because it's crucial to his experience with the Games in general that the Games after his hadn't happened when he was kidnapped; he has a really set idea of what the Hunger Games are and he doesn't see how it changes after him. I also wanted to keep Steve and Natasha with the same age difference as they have in canon, which is nothing except for the icebox years. depending on what year you have (canon) Steve coming out of the ice, he and Natasha are both the same age (twenty-seven in The Avengers, since Natasha's birthday is in December). also because they are the romantic couple here, it is easier to have them the same age. (I do go back and forth on whether or not I should have made them eighteen, though this actually goes back to an original misconception of mine about the reaping age span and by the time I'd figured that out it was too late.)

Tony should not have been in the Hunger Games not because of his age, but because of his status and his class; his age is not a discrepant factor here, he's the same age as several of the actual tributes in his Games. also one of Tony Stark's core conceits as a Marvel character is that he will always be beefing with Steve and it's much weirder to have a forty-year-old man beefing with a seventeen-year-old than to have an eighteen-year-old beefing with a seventeen-year-old. also, if I make him any older? he's not a minor anymore. he has to be a minor (age of majority in Panem is nineteen) because otherwise he's not in school and he has control of Stark Industries and the Stark fortune. he has to not have either of those yet for plot reasons.

Thor is twenty-one because his trauma surrounding the Games and his family are both very recent; his presence here does not work if it's older. he's got a pretty similar background to his canon background (at least insofar as the arc goes), which would not work for an older character who has had time to come to terms with this and what happened to Loki. It has to still be pretty fresh for him the way it is in MCU canon ca. The Avengers. which means he has to be one of the younger Victors.

so the question isn't really about the younger characters. it's about the older characters -- why age up Clint and Bruce from young adults? one, I thought it would be interesting to actually keep the age difference between Clint and Natasha from MCU canon, because it really does affect their dynamic and how you read them. (if I'm doing my math correctly for Flood, they have a 23-year age difference vs. canon's 13-year age difference, which is also the Renner-ScarJo age difference, 1971 and 1984.) it also means I can put Clint directly into the Haymitch "winner of the 2nd Quarter Quell" role. Clint is however much more stable than Haymitch for various reasons. (fun fact: Clint is actually married in this 'verse too.)

Bruce -- I went back and forth a lot on how much older or younger he should be than the others and finally gave him the 60th Games; he's an adult, he got the Captain America anniversary Games, he also had a full ten years in the Capitol prior to Natasha showing up.

the other reason goes back to the core conceit of the Hunger Games themselves: you get one winner every year between the ages of 12 and 18. that means that barring some funky stuff, none of these people are going to be the same age. I could have made them the Victors of the last five Hunger Games. that completely changes the dynamics between them, their experience of the Games and the Capitol, and their relationship with the other Victors and the Gamemakers. it also does not make sense for the THG worldbuilding, where there are going to be seventy-four years' worth of Victors, and only these five are the ones who live here? there had to be an actual reason for that.

also, because of the conceit of Catching Fire and the 75th Hunger Games, the 3rd Quarter Quell, pulling its tribute from the Victor pool, it works much better to spread the main characters out across the last twenty-five years of the Games. (The reason why and the actual process of the Quarter Quell Reaping is significantly different in this fic than in CF, because Alexander Pierce is not Coriolanus Snow and this Panem's problems are different than CF Panem's due to the 74th Games here going basically the exact opposite than in canon). I knew I would be pulling in MCU characters from outside the OG6 to fill out the rest of the Victor pool and because they're all different ages too, by spreading them out it means I can figure out the different dynamics between them, the different events that happened around and between their Games, all of that fun stuff that becomes significantly more difficult than if they're all within a ten-year age range from the last five Games. also why are they in the Tower and no one else? there are specific reasons for each of them! like I could have just gone "these are the winners from the last five years, they are required to live in the Capitol," but that's boring.