I remember in one of your fics (pretty sure it's AATJS) there was a part where someone (I think Lisa?) Points out to Barry that he has been abusing Len who's an abuse survivor.
I've been racking my brain trying to find that conversation. If you can pretty please point me to which fic and which chapter that conversation takes place. I'll be so grateful
You're looking for AATJS chapter 30 "Bond Family" :)
Specifically the last section of the chapter, after the "**********" break, because the first bits are... not that.
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Most fun part of writing AATJS? Most difficult part of writing Tumbling Together?
Most fun with AATJS?
Hmmm. I suppose the scenes that helped to defy expectations a bit? Barry being jealous of Len and Hartley in such a way that he decided to seduce Len instead of making a conflict. James’s entire PoV was really fun. I loved writing chapter 4 (5 if you count the glossary), maybe because Barry sort of swooning and falling into Len’s arms is one of my favorite mental images. Writing the moments where they come together and understand each other were also some of my faves, all throughout.
Idk if that’s the most fun ‘part’ or those were just things that were fun to write, but heh, that’s all I got.
As for TT... the most difficult part was just the whole ‘sticking with it’ element. I let it get a little too long and winding. Some parts were genuinely difficult for different reasons, like Len’s birthday part was tough in part because that was in my original outline for the fic as a totally different thing than it turned into, and in part because the “they don’t know we know” thing was really difficult to write in a way that made sense and seemed even semi-plausible, even within the world of TT. In general, TT posed me some difficulty the longer it went because it involved injecting some realism to a fun/silly fic and trying to keep the tone of the story relatively ‘even’ over the whole thing, so that people didn’t end up reading something they hadn’t signed up for.
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When An All Too Jagged Snowflake was going through a lot of angst I shared this headcanon I made with @coldtomyflash. Cause I needed something funny to get me through all the sad and I dunno, guess I finally feel like sharing.
I am just now starting aatjs and adoring it. please be honest will the ending hurt me because the tags say “angst with a happy ending” and then “at least I think it’s happy but that’s subjective” and idk if it’s gonna end with len and barry in a happy relationship after many hardships, where one had to leave their old life behind for the other to even begin to consider loving them, or with len and barry never talking again because of the inherently abusive nature of a villain/hero enemies to lovers dynamic
since you said be honest, i assume you're actively looking for spoilers, in which case i'll say that:
yes, they end up in a happy relationship after hardships, and yes one has to leave their old life behind (but not like, entirely/forever).
it's bittersweet because there's things they lose along the way and some readers were not happy with me about that fact and made their displeasure known in the comments, but it's an ending i'm still really pleased with and was always the intended ending for the story (and other people have since reread and commented on how clearly foreshadowed and fitting it is so...?).
i can give you more specific detail about that bittersweet element if you're looking for it, but for now just confirming that in love and still together coldflash is the endgame.
I'm sorry to bother you, but I had to ask once I found out about the earlier soulmate idea for These Violent Delights! (Your soulmate system is maybe the best I've ever read, if not at least in my top two)
With the way you ended up writing TVD (incredible btw), how would your decisions effect/change the idea of a soulmate spin to the story? (I hope I worded my question properly!)
From what I read, what you had planned wound up a good bit different. So I was just wondering if you thought that would inspire changes to the thoughts you had about the soulmate tie in?
Much curious!
Hope you're doing well in all the madness of the world <3
What a lovely question :) Oddly enough I was actually thinking about this just the other day for some reason so the answer I have for you is top of mind and a bit long ^^;
The full history of These Violent Delights is that I wondered what it might be like to turn one of my fics into an original story and then things spiralled. I was specifically making notes on what AATJS might look like as an original, and my instinct was basically that to "file off the serial numbers" of fanfic for that piece, I'd keep the soulmates element but ditch the superpowers.
Actually to go back further, an even earlier idea i'd had with VP -- who wrote the amazing Zombie au -- was a co-written collaboration that would have both superpowers and soulmates in an original story, but it became unwieldy with all those separate worldbuilding elements into it.
as she moved on to other things and i stuck around longer in coldflash and dipped my toe into other original ideas, i ended up mentally splitting that concept in two:
a no-powers yes-soulmate story which later became These Violent Delights, and
a yes-powers no-soulmate story which has since turned into my original novel i'm working on at a snail's pace called Rest for the Wicked (also the chapters of that i posted are out of date since i've revised and changed them since then whoops).
Anyway, for the original concept of These Violent Delights...
In the first mental draft of that no-powers soulmate story, I kept most people's roles/relationships to each other similar (barry being a CSI, joe being a cop, iris being barry's pseudo-adoptive sister, len being a criminal, etc), took out superpowers, and made Grodd (from his role in AATJS) into a serial killer, and Eiling/the military into the FBI being called in on this local serial killer case.
Then someone dropped into my inbox to ask about a no powers / pre-lightning AU, and it basically gave me a chance to flesh that out.
And then someone asked about what it would be like with no soulmates and I thought that was fascinating! Because soulmates is convenient and a narrative shortcut, and how unhinged would it make that opening scene if there was no soulmate bond and yet these two people still responded to one another the same way??
i love unhinged dynamics more than i was willing to admit at the time, and it was a perfect excuse to write that dynamic in a way that was a bit more fun for me, i've i'm being honest. because without that easy narrative push from the bond, how do i play their attraction? can i effectively sell that they are drawn to each other enough to make all these terrible decisions, with no obligation or bond keeping them connected and bound to this?
(And my tags on the third ask about this seem to imply I was writing a len/savitar AU at the time and rolled my ideas for that into this fic, and I don't even remember that lmao. i think it had savitar stripped of the speedforce and working at a bar?)
But to your question of how the original "yes soulmates" version went?
Basically playing out like a no-powers AATJS. Barry the unsuspecting CSI stumbles on to the big bad criminal Leonard Snart and they bond and Barry fucking bolts and he's fast and Len can't catch up after killing his hired hands to protect Barry and Barry's identity.
(also sidebar but although that didn't happen in the final version of These Violent Delights, there is a scene later in Rest for the Wicked where the villain shoots two people for the hero once there's this identity reveal thing, so i guess i'm wedded to that mental image and the ensuing shock and horror on behalf of the hero? RftW is all about unhinged people doing unhinged things in sexy horrifyingly violent ways and dealing with the consequences of what that looks like)
anyway, in this original soulmates version of TVD, Len then tracks Barry down and confronts him and we get another sort of 'swoon' scene where their bond and attraction draws barry to len and is super physically charged. and the story progresses in ways where their bond forces them together in ways that Barry isn't comfortable with because he's pretty sure this guy is a serial killer. meaning he's also busy hating himself for the fact that his soulmate is a serial killer, and as things unfold, especially with their age difference, barry becomes genuinely concerned that his soulmate might have been the one to kill his mother. #yikes
at the same time, despite his misgivings, he's trying to protect len from the FBI that have been called into town and those FBI agents are creating issues for barry at work and he's not a genius actor, they can sort of figure out something is up. i wasn't sure how i'd fold other things in, but without metahumans and superpowers, i wanted the soulmates thing to be more central and wanting the experimentation with their bonds to be more central, more foreshadowed and plot-driving. i was thinking the FBI (at least Eiling) would need to be corrupt and maybe know something, and for the serial killer (Grodd) to be a victim in some manner, and although i hadn't fleshed it out to this level, i think to make it good Eobard or Hunter would fit well here like he did in TVD as someone working alongside the FBI who is super sus because he's actually the one who's fucked up experiments they're covering.
tbh it would fit a bit better if i was doing a sort of CIA parallel with MK Ultra and their experimentation because the CIA are really the ones who have done a lot of that specific type fucked up shit in real life (not that the FBI is innocent!) and are more rife for conspiracy narratives. so thinking it through, maybe i'd have the Eobard/Hunter character as a CIA agent masquerading as an FBI agent (eiling would know this, it would be above board from the government standpoint but covert and 'need to know' because the CIA like to operate under the radar).
and he's there to clean up a former mess they made related to some unethical government experiments with soulmates, and he killed Barry's mother to clean up as well once shit went off the rails however many years ago, because she was either a research on these experiments (remember barry's parents were not soulmates, and the only people to work on this project would probably have been UnMarked), or else she wasn't a researcher but found out and Knew Too Much. and that's why they pinned it on barry's dad and locked him up before he could investigate and figure out who killed his wife and why (because he's also a medical doctor and would have been tangentially aware of his wife's research!).
you can also see the TVD / AATJS parallel come out a bit here with mercury labs and the role that Dr Tina McGee played in AATJS which ultimately was only brought in for one scene at the end (even though in my original notes, barry handing star labs to tina and mercury labs was intended from the start, the story just got too long and convoluted for me to build that into a more cohesive subplot).
in this converged version, Nora would have worked with Eobard(?) and Tina at mercury labs and that would be a bit more central to barry's experience as well. so you can sort of see how that translated into the final TVD version by way of the soil chemical analysis and the forensic evidence and ultimately interviewing Tina and finding out Hunter isn't who he says he is.
anyway i did not have all that figured out at the time but now i'm thinking that's how it would all have needed to together and makes the most sense. and i guess that all would put henry in some very real danger once Eobard/Hunter realizes just how much barry has been scratching at this secret, which fits with the stalking and cameras in TVD, and the developing obsession with barry (nora's son and all that creepiness still in effect from TVD).
and i guess i'd try to find some way in this version for len to help save henry or keep him safe in prison without barry having to ask him, and for barry to discover this and for this to be what wins him over ultimately into trusting len in a full sort of way, and len being this wild card that Eobard/Hunter cannot and does not anticipate as part of how and why barry is able to uncover so much more of the truth of what's going on, and helps connect him to Grodd who is maybe not like, super innocent, but has also been framed for shit he did not do and isn't the cunning cruel serial killer he has been purported to be.
so that's... idk if that's what my answer would be if you'd asked this question 3 years ago tbh, but it's a bit of history and a bit of perspective on the soulmates angle, and how little it would change the story ultimately, and how much closer to AATJS the original concept was.
Random Aside
as a random note, you can also see a bit of my writing process leaking through here. because i've spent literally the majority of my life thinking about writing and story structure, even from the time i was a young kid, i don't necessarily feel the need to think about every detail in advance, but i have sort of these ideas that form a skeleton of a story and a tone of a narrative and then i'm able to plug details in as i go, or translate the story whole-hog to a new setting and tone and change up the details but keep the structural elements the same. it gives me a lot of space to 'play' and to 'discover' the story as it unfolds, but the unconscious back of my mind has already crunched the numbers on a lot of details i haven't bothered (haven't needed to) think about in so conscious of terms, until asked to spell them out or put them on the page.
that trips me up too though, because if i have story beats largely figured out before i write it but then i consciously want to change it, it sometimes stalls me out. because my brain has figured out all these elements already and says "no, that's how we're writing it" and that part of my brain wins every time. the unconscious brain has 500,000x the computing power of the conscious mind, so when it makes a decision, it's hard to contradict it consciously without good reasoning it can then go and crunch new numbers on. in fact our conscious 'choices' are really the result of our unconscious minds having already made a choice, and then barely-perceptible moments later, our conscious minds become aware of that choice and provide us the sense that we are making this choice consciously and deliberately, when it actuality that sense is just our brain translating the decision for us and making us feel in control of our conscious actions.
anyway this is why Mighty Fine Predicament stalled out. i know the full story, or at least the story beats that made me start wanting to tell the narrative in the first place, but it's mostly all deeply problematic elements and especially some bad/terrible tropes stacked into a trenchcoat disguised as semi-excusable plot. and at the time i just wasn't sure if i wanted to post and deal with all that, but i thought if i started writing and posted chapter 1, i could nudge myself over to a tidier version of it as i went. but i couldn't get chapter 2 down because my brain said "no, you write it this way or you don't write it" and so i never wrote it.
Thank you for answering ! I did finish the fic and chapter 3 does a great job of establishing Snart's history with his soulmark, but it's also specific to that fic ? Like it's an explanation for how he came to feel that way about his soulmate in the context on that particular fic, I was wondering more about what it was about their canon characterization that made you decide this was how they both would react to finding out they were soulmates in the first place.
hmmm i didn’t come at it that way and i think therein lies the disconnect with what you’re asking and how i’m able to answer.
i didn’t start with “what would barry be like if he met his soulmate” or “what would len do if he met his soulmate” in a way that started from canon and then extended to a new setting.
i mean i sort of did, in that i went “what if they were soulmates” then went “len is a dramatic ho who would think that bank robberies and heists are the right way to woo his beloved and barry would be progressively more annoyed with this bullshit” then went “oh nevermind let’s take that idea but make it angst”
but in many ways i couldn’t start perfectly linearly from canon because i was started in a world that exists just to the left of canon. the way soulmates are setup in that world makes everything just sightly different, and i had to take that into consideration.
so while i started with “haha what if len was a total brat” (much like i always start with tbh), the crux of the story’s starting point was the shape of the soulmate bond, the bleed. i’m a hopeless romantic who loves the idea of soulmates but i get stuck on worldbuilding details. soulmate AUs with the “first words” or “see in colour when you meet your mate” really leave me wanting more because -- what the heck would society even look like if that were the case and what are the millions of ways it would be different?
so the bleed was baked in from the beginning, from before the beginning, half because there was a post that went around about “what if barry and len accidentally got psychically bonded thanks to a meta”. so psychic bonds and soulmates, that’s the setup.
then i dropped barry and len into that setup -- into that alternate universe i’d made with all its societal backdrop. and i knew i was writing for angst, and i knew i wanted it to be messy and complicated. i wish i could say that i sat down and was like “okay so if barry were soulmates with len here’s how he’d react” but i didn’t. instead i sat down and said “i’m making a story where barry and len are going to be bonded with an emotional bleed and they’re going to be soulmates and it’s going to cause problems.” and i implicitly knew i wanted to explore themes related to separation, expectation, and identity navigation.
so why was barry the one who pulled away, and len the one who wanted to bond? in part because it just seemed a lot more interesting to me, and i’d already written stories where barry is the one who is “all in” and len is the one who is reluctant to commit.
i also felt it very true to len’s character from a “i’m a thief” standpoint that he’d be a bit greedy/possessive over someone who the universe has literally said is supposed to be his, in part due to his past and how much he keeps people at arm’s length (but how obviously he thaws for the people he does let close). len might not want to open up or commit or be emotionally vulnerable under normal circumstances, but this is a sort of ‘sure thing’ in his mind, at least at the outset before that faith is shaken.
barry though - barry was tricky, actually. i did have to figure out that if the central romantic conflict was going to be him pulling away -- why?
if he was on board with it quite then it would be a much shorter story. i knew he would plausibly balk at being soulmates with len at the outset, but barry is a forgiving and kind person, so realistically how/why might he pull away?
so of course they bonded in/under terrible circumstances. that was like - step 1. otherwise, if len had been like “oh should we bond” and barry agreed, then there would be a lot of cognitive dissonance involved that would make barry retroactively justify his agreement to bond by interpreting it as being because he wants to be close to len. so i had to take barry’s choice away, and then realistically i think he’d react negatively because that’s overwhelming and the whole thing was a mess and very confronting.
but i also -
there’s this line from season 1 when he first asks Len for help, right before he goes to the bar. the thing that gives barry the idea to ask len, when he’s talking to joe at the precinct. “we only break the rules to help people”
it tells you so much about how barry sees the world. so. much. i could unpack that for days. and it’s wild that he immediately thinks about len as a result of breaking the rules for somewhat noble reasons???? just - what???
but barry sees himself as the good guy. it’s fundamental to his worldview in this really really huge way. and what we know about self-concept is that very close others become enmeshed/embedded into our self-concept: our partners literally become included in how we see ourselves.
if you see yourself as the good guy, and that is fundamental to your identity and worldview and necessary for you to be psychologically healthy because you’ve made it a cornerstone of your self-concept.... how the hell do you respond when a giant fucking grenade lands right in the middle of that self-perception and says “actually part of your self-concept now involves kidnapping, tormenting, and torturing your friends, also killing a dude just to test the cold-gun, also a lifetime of theft and murder, also betrayal can’t forget that sweet sting of betrayal.”
barry coming to len over time in his own way is one thing. barry having len bond with him as a soulmate out of the blue is about the biggest psychological threat possible. it’s threatening his sense of self, his worldview, the structure of his self-concept, his expectations for himself (which are too damn high, he has to save everyone, he ‘has to try’) and leads him to believe that others he loves will be disappointed in him or reject him for this because len has hurt them, and because barry is disappointed in himself for wanted to connect with len, with his soulmate, despite all the harm he’s caused.
as soon as that clicked for me, as soon as i put it in context of barry’s self-concept, everything kind of flowed from there really really easily.
i was overly ambitious in writing that out though i think because most people, barry included, don’t introspect a lot about the structure of their self-concept, and don’t have the language related to social psychology to articulate what it means to be psychologically threatened. so he doesn’t really understand his own reactions and why they’re so visceral, and when he does he’s lying to himself about how much of it is coming from the fact that he wants len and wants to be with len but he’s upset with himself for how deep he wants that because the absolutely massive guilt he experiences because of it.
aaaand all that brings me to pointing out that the obvious resolution there is having barry’s loved ones find out about len and accept len as part of barry’s life and show that these people aren’t rejecting barry for being with len. if/when that’s the case, barry is able to more authentically work through all this shit. but because of how they bonded and how goddamn secretive his is (canonically) about personal shit, he decided to hide his bond with len, which meant he wasn’t able to deal with literally any of this during the first several chapters and all of it compounded and magnified until it reached it’s first breaking point.
whew - okay that was a wall of text sorry not sorry i hope this helps answer your question but it probably just complicated things a lot.
