if you were flipping samantha and nellie from their poses as main historical girl and best friend, how would you envision their story arcs?
OKAY so two answers to this actually. if we're talking that sam and nellie like literally swap lives, this is actually something that @kits-communist-manifesto's and i have chatted a bit about for a role reversal au she is working on! it's not all hammered out, but here's a few of our thoughts:
sam's family is english immigrants (that were a wealthy family but no longer are), nellie's family is wealthy but still irish, the stories are set in nyc for like the whole run
sam's parents drowned on the voyage over, sam has been able to be provided for by grandmary and gard but now (book one) is needing to work to contribute to the family
sam struggles to be subservient for the first time in her life, whereas nellie has needed to be So Good (the catholicism and eldest daughter of it all...), so their temperaments are still pretty similar
samantha's abandonment issues are ramped up to 1000
the stories generally still focus on family/grief/rebuilding/cross-class dynamics, but there is added nuance around the class issues since the o'malley parents do still end up dying and samantha's remaining adults do not
as for if we kept the plot of the original stories but positioned nellie as the main character... i think the stories would largely have to have a shifted timeline to account for the fact that it wouldn't be a great look for ag to sell a character who spends the majority of her series as a poor child laborer. in that way, i would imagine the stories become:
first book starts maybe where nellie's promise begins. however, it focuses much more on the adoption adjustment issues/uncle max plot line (alongside introducing all the crazy backstory of the parkington-edwards-o'malley family) because...
nellie learns a lesson would then take place in the early fall of 1906 and cover the parts of nellie's promise where she is struggling in samantha's school. the settlement house stuff actually also doesn't come up until this book so we can look at it as another form of education. the book still concludes with nellie heading off to her more practical school, but we maybe get a full final chapter at that school to see a little of what that school is like (and concludes with her meeting up with samantha to walk home!)
okay now bear with me. i think we are going to swap happy birthday and surprise so we don't massively draw out this timeline since, after all, nellie's birthday is in october. this book would explore her trying to figure out what birthday traditions she would want to continue from her old life (because i like to imagine that she did get a couple of acknowledged birthdays when her family was at the van sicklens) and what new traditions she wants to build with the family she now has
now we get to nellie's surprise! this might be a little gutsy, but i think this could be a really neat book to explore a) more familial grief because i'm sure that everyone is REAL NORMAL about their first found family christmas and b) some negotiation between the catholic celebrations the o'malleys are used to and the protestant ones that the parkington-edwards follow
okay now we go back to the regular order, so it's time for nellie saves the day. we're now in really uncharted territory because the saves the day books really do take on any number of plots, but maybe we either have something involving an incident at the settlement house OR we better develop the aunt-cornelia-suffragist-plot and use it as the background of this story? also, i imagine this would be more of an early-spring story rather than a summer story unless we're really jumping ahead
changes for nellie (this girl does not need any more changes in her life eek). i have one really out-there idea for this story: some more of nellie's extended family shows up but they are not impoverished or terrible, so nellie has to figure out how to integrate these people into her life while feeling pulled in two directions. ultimately, she realizes she can continue to blend her family and having her blood relations in her life doesn't mean she made a bad choice by letting her and her sisters be adopted
samantha's best friend story! i think she still deserves a piney point summer, so i would maybe blend part of the mystery book and saves the day so we can get some good old piney point vibes but also now nellie gets to be there:)
