I'm a little late, but if you're still doing director's commentaries, could you please do one for The Highwayman's Baronet or the Trouble With Roommates series?
Thanks!
I am!
The Highwayman's Baronet is possibly my favourite fic that I've written for Marvel. I just love it so much. The regency-esque setting was just totally out of my comfort zone... I bought myself a handful of regency romance ebooks to try and get into the vibe and none of them hit right. So I went to Jane Austen instead, who is a lot more the vibe I was going for. I also rewatched Sharpe.
I love Nomad Steve. I had just read the comic series where he gets all sad and cries in a dark room while hugging the flag. And his level of drama in those comics is just... *chef's kiss* And then I rewatched Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for the eleven millionth time and there's a scene in that film (probably my favourite film of all time) where Robin is robbing a noble woman and he says "A woman of your beauty has no need of such trinkets" and kisses her hand and my brain went 'yes. YES. This is the level of drama Steve has. THIS, but with STONY.'
The opening scene was the first thing I wrote, over two years before I actually published it on AO3. I had this feeling of complete and utter melancholy that I wanted in that opening scene. I just wanted Steve to be totally lost and alone and grieving
I had a lot of trouble with this fic. I wrote 14k of it, then stopped for a year. Wrote another 15k, stopped for another year, then I saw the post for the cap-ironman big bang and decided 'you know what, fuck it. Let's go back to that Regency highwayman fic'. It wasn't easy after that, either. I almost gave up several times. At one point I started writing a whole load of scenes from Tony's POV, which didn't end up being a thing. It would have made the whole fic twice as long. But it did help me work out where I wanted to go.
I wanted to use Indries, because she seemed to be used so little in Stony fic, and in the comics she works with Obadiah so she fitted really well into the plot I was working with (which, let's face it, is sort of the plot to Iron Man 1).
The ending was so difficult as well... Steve and Tony just kept refusing to communicate properly. I don't know if it was the regency language that I was using or if I subconsciously just knew it needed the action climax and the romantic climax to be spaced out a bit more, with Tony on a more equal footing rather than in his sick bed and barely able to move. I think it works better as I have it now than how I originally planned it, though.
Steve and Tony's conversations were my favourite part to write; they were difficult but so much fun. The way both their personalities and the social mores of the setting combine to make this really acrobatic dialogue where they go from playing off each other in good humour to mistaking each other's meaning. And then you add in Obadiah - who was surprisingly interesting to write. Having to walk the line with him of everything he says being entirely reasonable, but also if you read it another way creepy/rude/manipulate af. That was a lot of fun. I love word play.
Loved writing Sam as well, a bit torn between wanting to tell Steve to calm down and stop being so dramatic, and just full on throwing himself into it. So in the end he compromises by judging him for his romantic drama and leaning in to the mad highwayman hijinks. Totally reasonable.
Basically this fic was a massive slog to write, but I love it and I am incredibly proud of it.
The Trouble With Roommates despite being a different pairing, different setting, entirely different tone, has a similar story, actually. They too were sitting in my WIP folder for years.
I first started writing it in response to the Winterhawk Week 2017 prompts, and I wrote the first 4 one after another, they practically wrote themselves. Then I left them sitting on my computer for ages until I had a bingo deadline coming up and I looked at them and I think that was when I added the fifth one, which is why that one doesn't really follow the prompt unless you squint. I think the 'game' I was going for was musical statues? And I found that they could all fit prompts from my bingo cards as well, so I... posted them as bingo fics instead. Is this cheating? Probably. Do I care? Not really.
On the other hand, my method of writing for them was completely different. With The Highwayman's Baronet, I was trying to write something good (fatal mistake). With The Trouble With Roommates I just wrote whatever seemed fun at the time. They are very silly fics written entirely for my own entertainment and they all flowed pretty easily when I got started. Although both play into my love of identity porn and ridiculous miscommunication nonsense.
The only one that didn't flow was number 6. I tried to stick to the Winterhawk Week prompt at first, which was soulmates/reincarnation, and I think I have a few thousand words of that. The basic premise was Clint is kidnapped by someone who believes that the Winter Soldier is their reincarnated soulmate and Clint has been systematically trying to break them apart over the course of several lives. It was kind of trippy and there was going to be this dream sequence where Clint got drugged into seeing his past lives and realised Bucky's true identity that way. It was just way too much, so I decided to ignore the prompts, because no one even knew I was using them in the first place, and just simplify it down to vengeance kidnapping but the reason that one took so long to finish was because I kept going down the reincarnation rabbit hole and getting lost.
