#bedlam replies

[bedlamsbard]

Alright I'll bite: what's the gorge and do you recommend it

I LOVED it, because I like (a) extremely competent, extremely screwed up people in love and (b) horrifying government conspiracies and (c) living environments and (d) genre flips that aren't quite genre flips because they're telegraphed in advance but you wouldn't get from A to B on your own.

the premise is that since the end of WWII, the West and the East have maintained two watchtowers on either side of a mysterious gorge, each staffed by a single soldier for one year whose job is to keep what's in the gorge from ever coming out. the occupants of the gorge are mysterious humanoids who periodically attack the watchtowers and other defenses on either side and who were nicknamed the "Hollow Men" by the first guardian of West Tower. in 2024-2025, the two new guardians are Levi Kane (Miles Teller) in West Tower, a former USMC scout sniper, and Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), a former mercenary (?) sniper, in East Tower. even though the two guardians aren't supposed to have any contact with each other, they begin communicating with signs and over several months fall in love. they set up a zip line and Levi travels over the gorge so that he and Drasa can meet in person. on his way back, the zip line snaps and he falls into the gorge. Drasa goes after him, and then things get Weird. (this is at almost exactly the halfway point of the film. very well done genre flip.)

the best way I can describe the level of Weirdness is that it's like seeing a T. Kingfisher horror novel onscreen. if you have problems with body horror this film is probably not for you; the trailer hints at it, but there's significantly more in the film itself and it's beautifully done. (I have no idea how much was practical effects vs. CGI, though googling tells me that it was an interesting combination of the two -- that link will give away parts of the twist, btw.)

anyway I LOVED it, half this movie is a romantic comedy and the other half is action/adventure + horror, and they actually do work pretty well together. (I should say that even though I say "romantic comedy" and there definitely are funny parts, it's not actually a comedy.) some parts of this movie are "don't think too hard about it" but that's true about anything.

also but seriously if you have problems with body horror do not watch this movie. it is beautifully done, but it is significant.

[bedlamsbard]

Will you tell us more about the political history of Asgard in your MCU universe? I have no specific questions, I just find everything you mention in fic really interesting.

untold eons ago the aesir split from the vanir and leave vanaheim for asgard, stealing the tesseract in order to do so. this results in a massve war between the aesir and vanir that lasts for untold eons. (it does not end until odin's rule and the situation is pretty tense, but the balance tips towards asgard during bor's time.)

asgard's political system is an elective monarchy with a parliament called the Althing. there are smaller things across Asgard. in theory the Althing deals with domestic matters and the monarchy deals with everything else. over time this has dramatically shifted to the monarchy doing most things and the Althing being more ceremonial though it does still have power. the Althing elects the next monarch following the death of the previous one, but under Bor this shifts to affirming the king's choice of heir because Bor really wanted his second son (Odin) to inherit, not his first son (Cul) or his two youngest sons. Odin did the same thing with Hela, it massively backfired, and then there was a period of several thousand years for everyone to forget about that before he tried again with Thor. that also backfired but differently.

no one really knows the origins of Yggdrasil and the Nine Realms but the Nine themselves have a semi-governing body called the Conclave. this has largely been ceremonial for years since Asgard gained the upper hand in the Nine Realms, which happened under Bor though under Buri things were trending that way. the Aesir-Vanir war kind of got put on hold when Malekith started acting up and Asgard knocking out the Dark Elves pretty firmly put them in the driver's seat across the Nine. under Bor Asgard had claimed to the protector of the Nine and after he died and Odin became king he pretty much made that a reality (though obviously if you ask the other realms they may not agree on it actually being protection). he backed off after the Hela disaster but Asgard is still officially in that position and will enforce it if pressed. they are occasionally pressed.

this all happened over a period of tens of thousands of years.

I am either not drunk enough for this or not sober enough lol

[bedlamsbard]

can you talk about how you assigned the districts to mcu characters/concepts? like red room = career academy and clint being from 12 bc he's an archer like katniss are fairly obvious, but like... why 8 for howard? and are there any equivalences that haven't shown up in the fic yet? (i think at one point you said 13 is probably wakanda?)

I have talked about it a bit before! but I will talk about it some more.

we can talk about the OG 6! or 5, technically, since Tony's not district.

Steve: District 2 because of the military/arms manufacturing connection; Steve is literally a manufactured weapon and the same goes for Bucky, but they would have to have come from the same district anyway. Steve is not a Career, because the concept didn't exist when he was a tribute, but his role as the first volunteer gets held up as the template for Career tributes much later on. Some of the other District 2 Victors include Brock Rumlow (Crossbones), Ava Starr (Ghost), and I think (but am not totally committed to) Frank Castle (Punisher) and Matt Murdock (Daredevil).

Natasha: District 1 because of luxury goods + Career aspect, the District 1 tributes (specifically the women but the men to some extent as well) look really good but are also trained to be deadly, it's almost the Bolshoi ballerina cover story for the Red Room here. Natasha is a Career, or would have been; she was trained, but she ended up being reaped early for various reasons. Some of the other District 1 Victors include Alexei Shostakov, Melina Vostakoff, Dottie Underwood, and Ivan Vanko.

Bruce: District 5, the power processing district, because of Bruce and the Hulk's connection with nuclear energy; this is the closest we can get with the twelve districts. District 5 being a more technologically capable district also works for Bruce being more tech-savvy than some of the other tributes would be; he grew up with the opportunity to be so. Other District 5 Victors...I have not decided yet.

Thor: District 7, lumber and trees -- the Asgardian district, the only alien one I'd put in here because you can't have the OG 6 Avengers with Thor. Aesthetically from the films, District 7 (when we see it in Mockingjay) best match the Asgardian kind of grungy woodsy aesthetic that predominates from TDW onwards, but also the tree connection ties them in with Asgardian cosmology surrounding Yggdrasil the world tree. also, Thor's weapons in canon are a hammer and an axe -- that's the lumber/woodworking connection. Other District 7 Victors include the Valkyrie and maybe Heimdall, I go back and forth on him. Loki was reaped the year after Thor but was not a Victor. Thor is somewhat in the Johanna role, but not directly.

Clint: District 12 -- this is less about the coalmining connection, he's got the archer connection to Katniss, of course, and he's occupying the Haymitch role as the 50th Victor and mentor/father figure to Natasha (he is less messed up), but this also comes from District 12's Covey connection and Clint's own background as a trick shooter, plus in the comics he was in the circus. Covey is singing, but it's also performance, so that's the other connection for Clint. No other District 12 Victors.

Other characters:

Howard: District 8, the textile district, because in Agent Carter he said his mother sewed shirtwaists for a factory. This also means that, like Steve and Natasha, he's coming from a manufacturing district, where he would have different experience growing up than kids from some of the other industry districts. It does give him a pretty close connection to Steve for that reason, but also this is an industry where he would be able to use his technological genius and have it get seen in the right circumstances, but it's not useful in the way it might have been in a district like 5 or 3. Peter Parker would also be from Eight (spiders spin webs...), but because of the age difference he is too young to be reaped, so he will not appear.

Hank Pym, Janet van Dyne, Hope van Dyne, Scott Lang: all District 3, the technologically capable district! Pym particles are the most technologically based of the MCU powers, so the ant fam gets it, but also this means that Hank is closest to the Beetee role, except that Hope lived when Ampert didn't. (She was also older when she went into the arena.) The Pym-van Dyne family is a non-Career family where two Victors married each other, had a kid who was reaped and then became a Victor.

Wanda and Pietro Maximoff: District 6, transportation -- Quicksilver, of course! and they have to be together. they were reaped together (very drama! twins!), Wanda made it, Pietro didn't.

Sam: District 4, fishing -- this is a very loose connection, due to his Louisiana background and the boat from FATWS. Sam does not work as a District 2 Career, but none of the others really seem to fit for him.

Wakanda is District 13, the one which got out and has lived in isolation for generations, but it's very easy to see a Wakandan District 13 sending War Dogs into Panem to scope out the situation. (Possibly Erik Killmonger was a tribute/Victor?)

[bedlamsbard]

How do you envision Natasha's relationship with her foster parents in the Hunger Games AU? Are they still around now?

they are still around now, but district one has not let them come to the capitol during the games for the past five years. it is pretty obvious that natasha was being punished because district one has not produce a twelve-year-old tribute in decades, but it is unclear who was actually responsible for that; outside district one there is an assumption that she was being targeted for something her parents did, but outside d1 no one knows how the red room works. clint does not know that her foster parents are both victors. (fun fact: melina and alexei actually bracketed his games as victors; alexei is actually really pissed that he was not in the second quarter quell because he's convinced he would have won, but he won the 51st games. melina won the 49th.)

natasha's (and yelena's) situation with alexei and melina was really unusual for district one; she does not know what a normal parent-child relationship is like and neither did they, tbh (well alexei kind of did because he wasn't raised in the red room system; male d1 tributes aren't). but it was a pretty decent relationship and she doesn't really blame them for what happened because it was on her, but it does weigh on her.

they know she is alive (obviously) and they know she is in the capitol, but it's unclear if they know she was exiled or if she chose to stay in the capitol. alexei probably thinks she chose to stay but melina knows or at least suspects she was exiled. as victors they would be fully within their rights to come to the capitol at any point in time but that would mean breaking with d1.

at one point I played with the idea of alexei or melina coming to see natasha and clint during natasha's victory tour, but ended up going with the 'they didn't go to district 1 at all during the tour.' so clint does personally know them (he knows every surviving vicotr, but he doesn't know many of them that well), but he's never put together them not coming to the capitol for the last five years with natasha, because district 1 has enough victors that they don't always all come.

[bedlamsbard]

Talk about district 7 and Loki backstory in particular if you have any?

District 7 is widely considered to be the weirdest and most culturally unique of the districts! They got hit particularly hard during the Uprising, something that is still very much remembered in the present day, and resentment against the Capitol runs both very deep and closer to the surface than in any of the other districts. The atrocities that got the Red Skull his nickname occurred in District 7 and left permanent marks behind; District 7 cannot forget and will not forgive. There is a heavier Peacekeeper garrison in District 7 than in any of the other districts, and Peacekeepers stationed in District 7 have a higher casualty rate than any of the others. As the logging district, your average District 7 resident is much more likely to be capable with an axe, hammer, or maul than any other district resident, and despite some very determined crackdowns, there's only so much that the Capitol can do about that if they want to keep the lumber coming in.

You would think that this would lead to a higher percentage of Victors than usual from District 7, but traditionally District 7 has mostly had pretty young tributes reaped, with some notable exceptions, not all of whom ended up Victors. Thor was the first District 7 Victor in a while, though he isn't the only living one.

District 7 has a religion, one that is unique to them: no one else really understands it and District 7 is unwilling to explain. The Capitol has unsuccessfully tried to stamp it out on numerous occasions, which has resulted in a lot of Peacekeepers being killed under suspicious circumstances.

District 7 is one of only a few districts that actually shares a border with another district (most have a no man's land of several hundred square miles between them) and being what can gently be described as batshit insane, District 7 has developed the tradition of sneaking over the border to bother both their neighbors and the Peacekeeper garrison in that district (with the aim of blaming any resultant unrest on their neighbor). Their neighbor also does this and it is a source of great stress both for the mayors of the two districts and for the two Peacekeeper garrisons, who would prefer not to let the Capitol know because it looks pathetic that they can't handle a bunch of teenagers, since this is usually (but not exclusively) a coming-of-age thing. It's fallen out of practice over the past few decades, for various reasons; the rumor is that Odin lost his nerve but the actual reason is that that is how he found Loki back when Hela was doing this sort of thing and Odin went after her. Hela got caught by the Peacekeepers; Odin and his companions made it back over the border safely with the newborn baby Loki.

(It is illegal under Panem law, but some of the districts practice exposure with unwanted children, especially the poorer districts. The other options are considered to be worse.)

All of this happened the same night that Frigga was in labor with Thor, so they were able to pass the boys off as twins. They had the very bad luck to be born in the short interval between Reaping Day and the Hunger Games themselves -- Thor got reaped at seventeen and turned eighteen before the Games actually started, and Loki got reaped at eighteen and turned nineteen (when he would have aged out of eligibility) before the Games started. This was the first time this had ever happened in the history of the Games, so there was actually some debate over whether Loki could go into the Games now that he had aged out. However, since the Treaty of the Treason explicitly specifies the "twelve to eighteen" age range at the Reaping, not the Games, and also because Loki's Reaping was rigged, he did go into the arena and did not come out again.

Hela going into the neighboring district, Odin going after her, Frigga going into labor with Thor, Loki being discovered, and Hela's subsequent arrest and disappearance all happened between Reaping Day and the start of the 53rd Hunger Games. It was not great for anyone, especially since the period between Reaping Day and the end of the Games is traditionally a period of heightened unrest in the districts. No one knows what happened to Hela; it is assumed that she was executed by the Capitol, but if so, it was never made public.

[bedlamsbard]

tell us more about THG/Flood industrial child labor, which I think you mentioned earlier this week?

ahaha it was YESTERDAY because it was part of my "wow I am REALLY not vibing with the actual books" mostly-contained rant but yeah! I went into a little more detail in my ongoing Bluesky WIP thread (you get a lot more of my writing stream of conscious there though I'm trying to bring more of it over to Tumblr since like...most of my readers are here), but I will expand on it.

so in Steve's day we have full Industrial Revolution-type child labor, which both he and Howard talk about for their two factory districts in Chapter 2. child labor is obviously still a huge problem today worldwide, but for Steve's day what I was looking at was specifically the types of child labor we see from the Industrial Revolution through the early part of the 20th century, which seems to match the very, very little we see of -- not to put too fine a point on it -- of the vibes in the TBOSAS film. we don't see anything of the manufacturing districts in the films (except for District 2 in Mockingjay, I guess, but that's in the middle of the war and in the present day), so this is really a place of "what feels right for the vibe."

by the present day, which in THG canon would be Katniss's period, we definitely do not have child labor or formalized industry child labor in District 12 at the bare minimum. again, we know nothing about the manufacturing districts or any of the other industry districts tbh. nothing about Panem, either in the highly stylized fairy tale world of the books or the more realistic-ish world of the films, suggests that this is a world that would be morally opposed to child labor...so why don't we see it? like, from what we see of the districts in Panem, they should all look like this. IRL coal mining was notorious for child labor even in the "child labor is good actually" era and if I remember correctly was one of the earliest industries targeted by reformers. (in a child labor situation Katniss and Gale and Haymitch and their siblings would all have been breaker boys or girls from a very very young age -- obviously IRL this was a male job, but it is honestly kind of funny to me that District 12 has such a strict gender division where the men work in coal and the women...do...not...?)

what that implies is that Panem probably did have reformers aimed at child labor in the districts and probably like IRL child labor reformers, they mostly targeted industries like manufacturing and mining, but not industries like agriculture or fishing. what we also seem to see in Panem are compulsory education laws (which IRL in the United States and other industrialized countries was a major blow to child labor, but not an end to it). Katniss and Haymitch and their contemporaries in both their timelines have gone to school; I don't know about Lucy Gray's timeline. we do see in both the books and films that boys usually start working in the mines around age 18 (when they are still eligible to be reaped, since the eligibility does not end until age 19).

so the way that I have approached it in Flood is that in Steve's day, ten years post-war and sixty-four years prior to the present, we are at basically an early 20th century level of child labor in the districts. it is very common, it is part of every day life and expectations; it obviously takes different forms in the different district industries, but the expectation is that children in the districts would be working as soon as they are able -- but still paired with compulsory education laws up until age 14 or so. wealthier children in the districts may or may not be working but would also be able to continue in school to some extent.

that changes over time; raising the school leaving age and enacting child labor laws in the districts (specifically the manufacturing and mining districts) is an easy way to get a win amongst Capitol reformers who want to improve the districts that also keeps them from (ideally) sympathizing with rebel dissidents or anti-Hunger Games types. we also probably see increases in technology as well. so by the present day we don't have the formalized child labor in industry, but you'd still get it in the agricultural districts where it is not as legislated about. same for family businesses. (which btw is still true today IRL! yikes.)

what you probably also get in districts where you can take the work home is a certain level of home industry where child labor is not affected by the laws. you can sew at home. you can do fancy lace or knitting or beading at home. you cannot take a coal mine home. so a district like District 1 and District 8 (and probably a couple of the others) can actually get around the laws that prohibit child labor in the factories because it's happening in the household. this is similar to the putting-out system, but we also see it in the early 20th century and even in the mid-century.

what does this mean in the districts? well, in practice what it means is in the districts where child labor for that district's industry is not legal and there are no loopholes is that kids who would otherwise be bringing in money for their families either have to work illicitly (as we see Katniss and Haymitch doing) or are only in family businesses like the Mellark bakery, or are not able to work at all. which means they're more likely to take tesserae, which means their names are going to be in the ball more, etc., etc. which is not to say that child labor is good, obviously, child labor is very bad! but in this context creates situations where some districts are going to be more or less affected by child labor laws that will then have knock-on effects.

anyway if you want to be really depressed go down a child labor rabbit hole on Wikipedia. it's not great. it is in fact quite bad. though it could and has been worse!

[bedlamsbard]

what Gets You about Steve/Natasha?

They just like each other so much; you can tell that they genuinely are friends as well as teammates, and there's that instant connection they have back in The Avengers that stays for the rest of the MCU. In A1 Steve is so completely unmoored and Natasha has already been introduced wearing so many masks (even in A1 when she's using her own name in her opening scene and with Bruce, she's still clearly playing a role), but that helicarrier meeting neither of them is actually pretending, and there's something painfully raw and earnest about it -- jeans and leather jacket is Natasha's default look throughout the rest of the MCU, but this is actually the first time we see her in that outfit, and it's meeting Steve. These two absolutely see each other as equals from A1 all the way down the line to Endgame, with complete and total respect that we don't always see them give to other people.

They are also two very messed up people, but they're messed up in ways that are compatible with each other. They both have very sharp edges that I think aren't apparent to a lot of the other characters, and there's never any interest in fixing each other or changing each other; they both accept each other for who the other is, including the messy and unpleasant bits. One thing that gets me particularly is that these two have never known each other at any other time -- Natasha didn't know pre-serum or pre-ice Steve, Steve didn't know Red Room Natasha. Natasha's background makes it extremely unlikely that she had any attachment to the Captain America propaganda machine in a way that any of the American characters would have; growing up with Alexei also means she's probably not even mildly impressed by the serum. So they're just dealing with the people whom they meet on that helicarrier deck, with no ghosts, and with those two, that's a lot.

also, I love a battle couple who apparently decided to start communicating mind to mind approximately five minutes after meeting for the first time. why bother asking questions when you can just stare meaningfully at each other and come up with an answer.

[bedlamsbard]

in an AC mood today so I thought I'd ask: in the Flood backstory, have you decided if Dottie is a Victor or if she died in the games?

Dottie won the 11th Hunger Games, the year following Steve!