He Picked the Wrong One: 1, 2, 3, 4
He Picked the Wrong One - Carol/Jess, Steve/Natasha Stark - Marvel 616 & 3490
1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?
This was my first serious piece of fic. I’d written a couple of small rare pair fics but that was about it. I’d also started reading Avengers comics - rather than just X-Men - and had just finished Civil War. It was all very raw and I needed fix-it.
I’d read a few gender swaps - mostly MCU but I’d read some in other fandoms - and they frequently bugged the hell out of me for reasons at the time I couldn’t quite put my finger on. They were almost always the same character but with different genitals and a feminised version of their own name. Very few of them stacked up with the understanding of gender I’d begun to develop.
But Natasha Stark really appealed to me. Just with how she was named, it was clear she could be her own character. I started to build head canons for her. Eventually, I had so many, I practically had an armoury.
She’s Iron Woman and she’s marrying Captain America (which averted the Civil War) so she had to have gotten to a similar point in her life to Tony. But there’s no way their lives would have taken identical paths; there would have been very different expectations on them. Then, I came up with the idea that just because she didn’t try and deal with the SHRA by herself, that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t do it with other things. And so the fertility deception was born.
At which point, I thought, “Fuck it, I should probably write this down.”
Then, I ran in to the problem that I had no idea how to turn my head canons in to something resembling a fic. I liked the idea of writing the ‘marriage doesn’t fix everything’ story. Which meant I probably wasn’t going to write a tropey romance plot; it couldn’t be a getting together fic.
But there were two kinds of plot I was intimately familiar with: detective and superhero. I started constructing it as if I were going to write it for a comic. Which meant I needed a detective, someone who could look at the situation from the outside, compare the differences between Natasha and Tony, and figure out what’s going on.
That’s where Carol came in to things. Jess came along too because she’s a great foil for Carol and a detective needs someone to bounce ideas off. They were never meant to get together but, as I plotted it out, they just felt right. Then, the rest of the mystery fell in to place.
tl;dr Natasha > Toni, I wrote a comic book detective story ‘cause I didn’t know any better, and lesbianism was accidental.
2: What scene did you first put down?
The first. I wrote out a highly detailed plan for the plot and then wrote it in order. However, I had the argument Carol and Jess overheard fairly solid in my mind right at the start.
3: What’s your favorite line of narration?
This is hard because I feel a lot of the narration in this is fairly perfunctory. (It was my first big fic, cut me some slack.) I’m quite proud of some of the descriptive passages - although they tend to sit outwith the action a little - but I hadn’t got the knack of internal monologue and relied a little too much on dialogue for exposition. Let’s go for this bit of description:
With one leg raised and no attempt made at modesty, she looks more like Michelangelo’s Adam than any Venus. Somehow, this naked woman, composed of paint, feels more true than the one in the Playboy photographs ever could. It’s signed ’S. Rogers’.
4: What’s your favorite line of dialogue?
Just because it’s quite funny:
“Hi. Jessica Drew,” says Jess, raising one hand. “Pleased to meet you. In addition to saving my best friend from perverts with pheromone powers, I’m also available for weddings, bar mitzvahs -”
(For anyone interested, those head canons returned with a vengeance and I’m now writing the prequel which covers how Steve and Natasha got together.
Anything else you’d like to know? I really like talking about fic.)
