#stormwind13

I’m also really excited to see what happens next with Steve and Natasha!

Thanks for sharing your writing

Thank you! I have wanted to get Other Side AU up on AO3 for a while now, since the first part is a complete story, and I really wanted to get it up before the Star Wars Celebration announcements that are probably coming next weekend, since the second part deals with The Search for Ezra.

Z: Is there a story you’ve written that doesn’t seem to get much love?

Probably Horizon, tbh; it was initially popular, but it's an incredibly weird story and it has lost readers pretty significantly from chapter to chapter. That might pick up when it wraps, but I think people were hoping for a fic that was a lot more similar to Yonder and Horizon, despite being set in the same universe, is not that. I don't think it even picks up Steve/Nat shippers because of the threesome in Chapter 1. (Horizon is actually way more typical of my style than Yonder; Yonder's an outlier for me.)

U: Is there a pairing you would like to write, but haven’t tried yet.

Darcy for you!

do...do Clint and Natasha even get five moments together where they are not fighting each other, which they do in three of their four shared movies. I think most of those moments come from AoU, the only movie where they don't fight each other at least once. (and their only interaction in CACW is fighting each other.) like, I believe they're friends, but at lot of that comes from scenes where they're not interacting doing a lot of heavy lifting on that front (which is pretty well done considering how little they actually do interact; the nature of their actual interactions is well done too). (okay, I know there are more than five but not by a lot.)

uh, Steve and Bucky. (not in order, as I think of them.)

Tag-team fighting in CACW, particularly the apartment fight. They haven't seen each other in two mores and that time they were trying to kill each other, but they're still working really well together -- despite the fact that Bucky's style must have completely changed since the last time they were fighting on the same side. You can tell Bucky knows what Steve's capable of even if Steve's not a hundred percent sure what Bucky is, and Bucky is reacting appropriately (like kicking the grenade over to him so Steve can cover it with his shield).

The rescue scene in CATFA, where Bucky's very "well, I guess this might as well happen" about the whole Captain America thing even before Schmidt peels his face off. He's pushing it aside as a "wow, I guess I will deal with this later," but then there's the panic when he and Steve get trapped on opposite sides of the burning factory and he realizes there may not be a later. Meanwhile Steve's just like "this is normal now, I guess?" about the whole situation.

The wordless communication during the train fight in CATFA. It's a bit of a precursor to the CACW fight -- you can see how well they know each other and they don't have to talk about what they're doing, they just do it.

The conversation on the jet in CACW -- Steve telling Bucky that it wasn't his fault, which I think is still the only time in the MCU anyone's actually said that. (FATWS is pretty...yikes...on that front.) You can tell from Bucky's face that he really needed to hear someone say that.

I did a full rewatch recently! I actually watched it more or less as it came out last year -- I think I watched the first five episodes at once, then the others as they came out. I went in...mostly blind, tbh? Before last year I hadn't kept up with the MCU since 2014 (I had only seen three MCU films that came out after TWS, which was when I more-or-less topped watching); I'd never actually seen Wanda or Vision in anything, which was an interesting way to experience it for sure, but I am really good at putting contextual clues together to work out previous occurrences. I don't have super strong feelings about Wanda or Vision as characters and I also don't necessarily have very strong feelings about it as part of the MCU or whatever Phase Four's Plan is. (I suspect with Phase Four I'm going to need to see the whole thing to figure out how I feel about it as a whole.)

But I did enjoy it a lot. I think it did some really clever things; it was explicable to me as someone who was barely familiar with any of the characters involved, which, considering the MCU, is not a given. I think it will be interesting to see what happens from there (which is kind of a Phase Four problem, tbh, it's not unique to WV). It did make me care about the characters and I'm pretty sure I cried a couple of times (I cry at everything, though). I'm really impressed by how well they hit the specific speech/environment tones for each sitcom decade, especially once we got into the eras that I am familiar from growing up with them ('90s and '00s); that was very definitely, like, full body sudden flashback. I don't have like really serious thoughts on it because I don't really care strongly about anyone involved and it does kind of feel like set-up (which is a huge Phase Four problem), but I liked it and I'd watch it again.

14. What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever come across?

Well, what's worst for me will be great for someone else, because we all have different styles and different approaches, and I don't read writing advice anymore. So, nothing that is super, super bad comes to mind -- I'm sure I've read or heard a lot of it, but none of it stuck with me.

37. Talk about your current wips.

Sure! So I've got several at present:

The Horizon Line: Prequel to On Yonder Hill, a Loki lives/Thor dies IW/Endgame AU set six months after the Snap, with flashbacks to the period just before and sometime after the Snap. Like Yonder, this is a Natasha POV; it's the first Avengers mission post-Thanos, and Loki's first Avengers mission, a.k.a. "I will take all of the underused Phase One and Phase Two villains who weren't explicitly killed onscreen and put them in a post-Snap blender." It's dealing with the absolute mundanity of surviving an apocalyptic event that isn't a smash-and-grab apocalypse (there's an upcoming scene of Darcy on the phone with her graduate school, because what do you do when half of your dissertation committee has been snapped?), about coming back into the world (because Steve and Natasha were out post-CW, Bruce was post-AoU, but now they're back in, officially; Loki's dealing with stepping into Thor's shoes and having to be an Avenger), and the superhero stuff of "and somehow, on top of all this nonsense, killer robots." (The killer robots are actually a red herring, I'll give you that one for free.) So I get to do a lot of plot stuff, I get to deal with some things canon has not dealt with that I would have liked to see it deal with (let's talk about how much damage has been done trying to recreate Erskine's super soldier serum and how Steve has to live with that), I get to do worldbuilding, character stuff, and also I get to write my weird Steve/Nat/Loki trio because I might as well.

Better in the Morning: My Loki series fic. Goes AU immediately after episode 1 and incorporates literally nothing else from the rest of the series; series!Loki joins up with a TDW!Frigga, a IW!Thor, a Ragnarok!Hela, and a TDW-but-sideways!Odin -- so it's every member of the Asgardian royal family from a different point in the timeline where things went just slightly sideways, except for Odin, who has a timeline which diverged two years earlier but was still proceeding along normal events until TDW. As of chapter 8, they're finally out of the TVA and into Odin's timeline, which is the altverse -- the timeline where Odin didn't send Mjolnir after Thor in the first Thor movie and Thor fell off the Bifrost as a result, ending up in Thanos's service to play the villain role in The Avengers, while Loki got to be The Good Son (no pressure). So there are some familial issues there, plus it's Avengers!Loki so he's pretty messed up anyway. I get to play around with six (?) different AUs -- it's great characterization practice -- plus Asgardian cosmology and what I wanted the TVA to be doing (but didn't end up happening in canon) and do a lot of worldbuilding.

Reaches Past These Ghosts: A Yonder spinoff -- what happened to the 2012 that the chaos trio accidentally altered during the Time Heist? I'm treating this one less seriously than Horizon and Morning, because it was originally supposed to be a series of different possibilities of what could have happened in 2012, and then it was supposed to be part of the Yonder sequel, but who knows at this point. Thor takes Loki back to Asgard, and Loki accidentally-on-purpose brings Steve and Natasha along; in Asgard Steve and Natasha speed run acquaintances-partners-friends-lovers, Loki spends a week unconscious so can't immediately antagonize his family, Thor is Very Concerned, and on Earth Fury is just like "why is this happening" and has to call in everyone.

and two untitled stories:

the Yonder Disney story: Yonderverse; epistolary story of how Walt Disney World dealt with the Snap from its closure through the reopening of Animal Kingdom, Magic Kingdom, and EPCOT, told via Disney Parks blogger headlines, tweets, occasional full blog posts, and YouTube titles. It's very niche; I have to be in the right mood to work on it, and it's going to get about six readers. But it's also more of that "mundanity of living through an apocalypse" thing.

the Yonder Thor POV story: exactly what it says on the tin: Thor POV from his desnappening in Yonder up to...whenever I decide it ends, I guess, maybe all the way up to the end of Yonder. I was thinking about doing this even while Yonder was in progress because Thor has had The Worst And Weirdest Day Ever.

On a craft level, two specific things: how well the flashbacks are integrated, especially when there are flashbacks from multiple timelines (there’s an incredible scene in, I think episode 3 where they’ve got two flashbacks and the present-day all seamlessly integrated).  As anyone who reads my fic knows, I love flashbacks, but they can be really hard to do well, and I think Yellowjackets is pretty amazing at them.

The other craft thing is -- everyone in this show thinks they’re in a different genre.  I know some people don’t like this and think it makes the show feel muddled, but I honestly really love it, especially when those multiple genres intersect and bang up against each other.  I think the show works really well at having the characters’, mmm, interpretations and expectations of that genre, of the roles they’re playing work for/against them and for/against the audience.  Jackie thinks she’s in one genre and acts that way, Lottie thinks she’s in a completely different one, Taissa is in another one entirely.  And the same thing is true in the present-day timeline, where sometimes it’s very Desperate Housewives or Weeds but at the same time someone else is in a murder mystery, someone else is in a politics show, you’ve got a character who’s a bit character in The Sopranos, that sort of thing.  And it all ends up weaving together in very fun ways as you start seeing the characters realize that they’re not in the story they think they are -- or rather, they are, but they’re in a different story too.  Nothing is only one way.

On a character note, these all feel like real women, with real trauma; the high schoolers feel like high schoolers in ways that are very familiar to me.  There’s this awareness of the very real grief, the very real trauma, that the main characters have and share that no one else can understand.  There’s an absolutely devastating present-day scene where Taissa asks someone else, a rich white woman, “why do you you get to have that?” and the delivery KILLS me.  This show is also really good at balancing the viciousness and the tenderness between women, both at the high school level and at the adult, and it’s just...a LOT.