do you have any more thoughts about scoteng in the tintin au? i remembered cuthbert calculus, who is fantastic at provoking both of them, but couldn't really make him fit - feliciano perhaps? or even a oddly absent-minded matthew/alfred
I think of the Tintin AU often and dearly!
An absent-minded professor, staunchly insisting that he is not hard of hearing but it is simply that his right ear has gone you see...
Truth be told I had it in my head that I would very much like to write India into this AU, and I thought he would make a fantastic Cuthbert Calculus with only a few alterations to the original character. But it didn't take me long to shift gears and realise that Yao is right there.
Where the original professor is naturally inclined to hm distraction and whimsy shall we say, I feel like Yao would be a delightful mix of the absorbed-to-a-fault academic and somewhat of a purposefully 'forgetful and inattentive' sophist. In the sense that he canNOT be bothered with the shenanigans that Alasdair and Arthur get up to. He is a professional, and an academic (and one with an extremely generous stipend courtesy of the Campbell estate). Fleshing out his character a bit more, I would like him to be hard of hearing (not through an accident but congenitally) and about as old as Cuthbert is depicted as being (if not older). With Daffyd playing the straight man and enabler to Arthur and Alasdair's shambled attempts at courting, I'd like Yao to carry the underlying plot forwards, having some personal involvement with the affair du jour as the shadows of his youth come back to haunt him.
As for Matthew and Alfred, they're well-established in my mind as the villains in this AU. A force to reckon with when they are working together and a legitimate threat to our heroes...
but not, perhaps, the men pulling the strings from above as all our players fall into place.
