#slashmarks

[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]

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.

[jaz-the-bard]

🔥 and 🗺️

I feel like my hottest silm take is the one i turned into a paper for mereth aderthad (tinúviel = lómion = undómiel). The rest of my hot takes are mostly just "I'm right about <x> and everyone else is wrong / has bad taste / can't read"

For location, i NEED to give young elrond and elros headpats. So sirion or whatever secondary location they get yoinked to lol

[bedlamsbard]

△ Another Natasha question if you don't mind: iirc your canon-ish verse Natasha knew she wanted Steve for a fairly long time withotu realizing it was reciprocated. If she fantasized about him - sex, relationship stuff, whatever - what did she fantasize about? If not, what would she have fantasized about?

Mmm, like a 9, but that number moves lower depending on who asks the question. Like, it's the sort of thing that could come up during sexytimes with Steve once they're together and then it's much less fraught because it's dirty talk. There are literally only two, maybe three, other people that she would ever actually answer the question if asked: Clint, Yelena, and maybe Laura, depending on how close Natasha and Laura actually are. (They seem to be pretty close in AoU?) Yelena would only ask in the kind of situation where she asks in Home, but Yelena only cares about Natasha, not Steve, and she wouldn't be interested in the sex or relationship parts -- just the parts where Natasha is actually figuring out how to want something and what she wants. Clint does not want to know about Natasha's sex life in any way, shape, or form, but they're close enough friends that I think Natasha would probably tell him without being prompted (much to his horror), because she's figuring all of this out, but she'd only do it if it actually like...surprises her? If that makes sense? She would have done so prior to CATWS but not afterwards. (I swear this distinction makes sense in my head.) Clint would never ask. Laura might.

Natasha and Steve are both so abnormal (and she's aware of that), that relationship fantasies are pretty much not going to register even at the fantasy level. It was a hazy "it would be nice if --" but there was nothing behind the "if" except the vague knowledge that Steve Rogers probably doesn't do casual relationships, and Natasha's background is so messed up that she has no idea how to do any kind of relationship if it's for real, and she also knows the ones she can play-act perfectly are fake.

She did fantasize about sex; while Natasha herself is pretty sexually experienced due to terrible Red Room reasons, I don't think she's actually all that interested in sex and has a pretty low sex drive in general. Even in fantasy it's less specifics and more "how does this even happen (with him)????" But obviously some specifics. (I think they are both pretty vanilla, tbh.)

[bedlamsbard]

Character ask, △ Natasha - top things she remembers about the week after defecting from the Red Room?

Maybe about a 5 -- Natasha doesn't like answering questions period so I'm not sure she'd ever get much lower than that, but this is the kind of question that's mostly pretty harmless to answer, depending on who asks it.

the color of Antonia Dreykov's backpack as she went up the steps into her father's building

the smell of the vents in that metro station in Budapest where she and Clint were hiding after the bombing

the first time Clint left her alone in the flat they were hiding out in before the bombing and came back with kakaós csiga

the smell of the hand soap in the Triskelion bathrooms once they got to America

the expression on Nick Fury's face when Clint walked her off the airplane (she did not know this at the time, but Fury had just flown in from Los Angeles an hour earlier after cleaning up from the Iron Man - Ironmonger fight that was all over the papers)

sitting completely frozen and terrified in the SHIELD safehouse she had been installed in in Falls Church. she was aware that there was a SHIELD response team in the house across the street, but she had been left completely alone in the house as a gesture of trust and had absolutely no idea what to do

[foruli]

6 :P

I am not available in my area at all which is a crime tbh. Have to drive to California to find my brethren. But I am indeed seasonal there.

[bedlamsbard]

Could you talk about how you come up with the Asgardian rituals in your MCU fic? I'm thinking particularly about the coronation one, which stands out the most in my memory, but in general, too.

Some of it is cannibalized directly from other sources -- for example, the "there beyond them do I see my father" ritual language in the coronation is based on the Viking prayer in The Thirteenth Warrior (itself based on Michael Crichton's novel Eaters of the Dead, loosely based on Ahmad ibn Fadlan's account of his travels); Thor: Ragnarok also borrows that same one. There's a healthy dose of S.M. Stirling's Emberverse thrown into both Yonderverse and Morning. Some comes from Norse mythology, heavily filtered; I've talked before about how I conceptualize both Norse mythology and historical/literary/archaeological background as functioning within a world where Asgard and the Asgardians (and the rest of the Nine) are real. It's why there are a lot of very deliberate differences between Asgardian cosmology and Norse mythology. I suspect there's also a lot of sci-fi/fantasy influence that's swimming around in the back of my head that I'm not super-consciously aware of. Some of the rituals are also coming directly from canon! Altverse Loki's coronation is a pretty close mirror to Thor's in Thor, though with some added ritual around Gram.

I did a DVD commentary of the coronation a while back. With that one, part of it is establishing that Asgard is an elective monarchy (MY AGENDA), so Loki has to be acknowledged by the Aesir in a lot of different ways, which includes establishing himself. This is a legal rite as well as a religious one, but it's also very much a religious rite. One thing I think about with the rituals is what's going to be possible for an Asgardian that isn't going to be possible for a human -- thus Loki getting his throat cut. (I regret is not making this a visible scar, but that's partially just Yonder being written first.)

Something else I really wanted to do with the rituals is to make it clear that these matter. It's left deliberately vague in the coronation if Loki actually sees into Valhalla or if he's just having drug-induced hallucinations (there's a Yonderverse fic coming up that makes it clear that he did), but they matter -- because Loki believes, because the Asgardians believe; because there are actual real world legal repercussions -- but there are also actual real world magical repercussions, too. They also echo each other -- Loki's and Sif's pre-battle rites echo Loki formally giving Thanos over to death echo Loki's coronation. They matter; but they're also existing within the same universe. (Morning's rituals are flashier: they're for public consumption, not Asgard-only.)

[bedlamsbard]

If you still want Marvel questions, what do you think would have happened if either (your) Howard actually found Steve, or he was still alive when Steve was found by other parties?

Pretty inevitably if Howard finds him -- it almost doesn't matter when -- he is immeasurably relieved, and then they probably have sex. (I think Steve hasn't explicitly said this in Home, but if Natasha hadn't been with him when he got back to 1945, he would have slept with Howard in that first week. He's very aware of that! He will never tell Tony.) And then Howard delivers him back to a very relieved SSR/SSR vets and everyone gets their fairytale ending until Steve gets bored and/or finds out about Bucky, and then all hell breaks loose.

if other parties -- I mean, it depends who. U.S. government, Howard pitches an absolute fit and probably actually manages to get Steve released, because the government would not be normal about it. If it's not the U.S. government (and I do think that Howard spent years chasing super soldier rumors just in case), then Howard pitches a private fit and then calls the Howling Commandos out of retirement to go do whatever needs to be done. He is not going to involve SHIELD. He's not going to get Peggy involved unless he's absolutely one hundred percent certain, he wouldn't do that to her, or unless there's no other way. He will be very obsessive about it, but he won't micromanage; Peggy probably thinks he's actually taking an interest in his company for a change.