1 and 5 for the fic asks?
Have you pulled inspiration from media sources other than the property your fic is related to (a plot point from a TV show that has nothing to do with the characters/setting of the fic, a line from a book, etc.)? If so, for which story? Why did you find that media source compelling?
Yes! I'm always on the lookout for interesting bits to work into my fic, but the most blatant that I've published is Civilian With A Badge. The title comes from this Terry Pratchett quote, that I felt was very on theme for Nightwing:
It always embarrassed Samuel Vimes when civilians tried to speak to him in what they thought was “policeman.” If it came to that, he hated thinking of them as civilians. What was a policeman, if not a civilian with a uniform and a badge? But they tended to use the term these days as a way of describing people who were not policemen. It was a dangerous habit: once policemen stopped being civilians the only other thing they could be was soldiers.
-Snuff
Pratchett had a way of cutting right down to the core of something in just a few sentences, and I think this is a very distilled version of what I'm trying to use Nightwing to say (or part of it, at least). If Nightwing is a more perfect vision of what Batman could be (and in many ways he totally is), then this is where Batman has failed and Nightwing succeeded. Batman frames his work as a war, his team as soldiers. But Nightwing isn't a soldier, and he can't be, because the framework of justice-doers as soldiers is what he's trying to dismantle. He's already fought through the corruption that happens through bribery and greed, but that doesn't mean that the systems that make Bludhaven what it is have been dismantled. It means that he now has to contend with the horrors of militarization and punitive justice.
In a way, this is what keeps Dick from ideologically turning into a cop even when he is literally a cop. Nightwing is not a cop. He's not a soldier. He is, fundamentally, a civilian with a badge. In this fic, he's retired from Nightwing and is working in Internal Affairs, but the same principle applies. There is no difference between Nightwing the superhero and Dick Grayson the IA lieutenant. In terms of demeanor, yes, but they are not cross purposes; they are both entities that exist as an extension of Dick Grayson and his desire to help and fix.
This fic also references another Pratchett quote, this one through Dick quoting Pratchett:
“I’ll take that as a no.” He tucked the lighter back into his pocket. “When my brother kills a man, he just does it. Just aims his gun, and blam. Says he doesn’t like to watch them suffer. And he reads so much, he’s got a quote for everything. What’s it he says about killing..? ‘The evil like power over people. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.’ You didn’t arrest me quickly, and you didn’t kill me when I started stalling. You’re enjoying this. Of course, there is the second reason, too.”
The unabridged quote is thus:
If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you're going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat. They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar. So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.”
-Men at Arms
Its use here is very deliberate and multifaceted. First, Dick is reminding Amy that if she goes through with killing him, she'd better spend the rest of her days looking over her shoulder. Dick is the merciful one in the family, and he's very likely been the wall holding back Jason, and possibly Tim and Damian, out of a desire to see things done the right way, with as little collateral damage as possible. By killing Dick, Amy is unleashing Hell not just on herself and her underlings, but on all of Bludhaven. And while it may (may - nature abhors a power vacuum) be better for the city in the long run, in the short run it's going to be very, very bloody.
Dick is also kind of nodding at the fourth wall here. This fic is written on its own as a oneshot, separate from the longer arc that I have planned out that contains Dick's death because I thought it would be more impactful that way. This fic is pulling on canon threads for Amy's characterization, but they're relatively subtle threads in a comic from 20 years ago. What both of these things mean is that a lot of readers aren't going to come into this fic with the idea that Amy's morality and Dick's morality are in conflict already in their heads. But Amy is, in multiple ways, very clearly the 'evil one' in this scenario. She's about to kill Dick, our hero; and she is doing it in a way that the text itself is calling out as self serving. Amy may be justifying it to herself as punitive justice, means to an end, but she is enjoying it, and Dick is calling her out on that. He's saying I know what you're doing, and now our audience does too.
The third layer is it's referencing times Dick has killed people. At this point in this universe he's killed Balsik, the Joker, and (by his own count) Roland Desmond. Dick has enough time and distance to be able to say that he knows a good man kills with hardly a word because he knows how he and Jason and Terry kill. So it's also a sign of growth, from where he is in canon to where he is in this future-fic, because he's a lot more self assured and able to set aside his guilt.
5. Is there a tiny detail in one of your fics that you feel goes tragically unnoticed?
This is SUCH a tiny detail and honestly probably went unnoticed because I had to cut most of it, but it's an important detail TO ME and nobody has asked me, so here you go. It's from the opening paragraph in Fly Straight And Do Not Waver:
“They say the Hero of Ferelden is an elf,” Hawke says one day over supper. They’re sitting in Anders’ clinic, hands washed with hastily boiled water, eating bowls of the stew Hawke calls hamin and Merrill knows as cholent. It’s a thick, slow cooked stuff with chickpeas, barley, and occasional chunks of some kind of meat - goat or miniature halla most probably, since the food stall it came from was in the Alienage. It’s not up to the cholent Maren makes, in Merrill’s opinion, but it’s warm and filling and she can buy some any time she likes instead of waiting for the rest day.
Okay actually it's two details, but they're about the same thing so it counts. The first is hamin versus cholent - Tzipporah Hawke's family is Arlathani elves from Tevinter, approximately analogous to Jews living in the Byzantine Empire, while Merrill was raised in Ferelden. Since they're on opposite sides of the continent, and Tzipporah's family are from the city and Merrill is Dalish, they have different traditions and dialects. Kirkwall is smack in the middle between the two, so I went with chickpeas over beans since we know Kirkwall has those.
But more important, why hamin in the first place? Who sells hamin as street food? How would you sell hamin as a street food? Since Kirkwall was originally built by Tevinter, I imagine it as having a lot in common with Ancient Rome in terms of the actual infrastructure. During some periods of Rome for example, horses were generally not allowed within city walls except after dark. This would explain the lack of horses in Kirkwall, and certainly fit with what we know about their streets (namely, twisty and confusing - and probably narrow, as well). But for our purposes I'm more interested in what Rome did have: namely, the thermopolium.
The thermopolium, or hot food place was a kind of permanent stall that sold food. It's essentially a counter with holes in the top you can put pots in, and then stoke a fire underneath. Hamin, which is cooked overnight and often for several hours into the day, would be a perfect dish to sell this way, because it's intended to get mushier and stewier as it cooks for a long time. It's also likely to be fairly popular; its ingredients are cheap, yes, but it's filling and known to the residents of the Jewish quarter Alienage as a beloved cultural dish. Merrill, coming from a traveling background where cooking something for 12+ hours is a rarity, is particularly likely to think of it as a treat now that she's living somewhere more permanent and can buy it any time she likes.
....but all that ended up on the cutting room floor because the worldbuilding about Kirkwall's street food isn't the point. Somewhere in my head there's a fic that is about Kirkwall's street food, though.
