#squireofgeekdom

[bedlamsbard]

Can I ask 🔎 and 🧭 for Flood?

What detail(s) in the story are you particularly captivated with? Is there any behind the scenes info or backstory?

I am trying to think of something I haven't talked about extensively before, which I have with most things I'm particularly captivated by, like assigning characters to districts or Tony's whole Deal or the citizenship/peregrine worldbuilding.

okay wait here's something. one thing that undergirds a lot of the characters' behavior and a lot of choices made, particularly in the TBOSAS/CATFA timeline, is the effect of the Uprising on everyone involved. we see a little of this in the canon TBOSAS, particularly in terms of what it did to the Snow family, but I wanted to carry that outwards, especially since the Carter family isn't really hit as hard as the Snows -- obviously Michael was killed, but they don't lose their fortune, both of Peggy's parents are still alive, they're not made vulnerable in the same way the Snows were. but Peggy still has the strong memory of living through bombings and food shortages, etc.; there are characters like Daniel Sousa, who lost his mother and his leg in that bombing, and there's all the background detail like war orphans or families who were bombed out, which also leaves an opening for Howard to present himself as a war orphan rather than a charity case from the districts. (I will say that this is partially based on the Blitz, thinking about it further, I realized that it probably should be more like the Siege of Leningrad, but I know less about that than I do the Blitz.) then on the flip side, there's the effect that the Uprising had on the districts -- Steve mostly only knows his own experience in District 2, which was actually pretty bad! since he talks about it being bombed and gassed during the war, about collaborators being lynched; this isn't dissimilar to the other districts, but the details for each district differ for various reasons. and then bringing the effects of the war forwards, out of the immediate aftermath, there are places where that still affects character decisions and worldbuilding, especially vis-a-vis the Capitol's relationship with the Hunger Games.

a lot of this comes out of my WWII and post-war research, though the post-war research I've done was for Home and is pretty focused on other stuff, just background knowledge. it is on my list of things to look at.

What was the key choice or decision you had to make for this story? If you had chosen differently, what would the story have turned into?

how to deal with the Steve Rogers problem, which is the serum/timeskip combo -- like, you have to have both of those to really pull this kind of premise off, in my opinion, and I think most AUs in similar genres don't want to deal with one or either, but they're really critical to who Steve is as a person. in this particular case, I could run the double timelines: CATFA/TBOSAS on the one hand and then Avengers/Catching Fire on the other. it makes it deeply complicated for me, but I do think it's the thing that's making this fic tick. (besides, it lets me do all the worldbuilding.)

I guess the alternative would have been to do the whole fic as a straightforward CF AU, presumably with Steve directly in the Katniss role as the winner of the 74th Hunger Games, but that just...it doesn't work. that's no fun.

[severeannoyance]

I have a mad half idea of doing illustrations for every chapter of Where Angels Fear to Tread. Anyway here’s Chester during her stint as Dooku’s involuntary apprentice, having a very bad time. Dooku is shortly about to have a worse one.

[fezwearingjellybananas]

'star' for the wip guessing game?

Another Snowest v Zoom one! It's the plural version, but it still counts

There were stars above them, fighting to be seen against the city’s glow.

Thank you!

[WIP Word Guessing Game]

[astriiformes]

🌹

From one of my LotR WIPs!

Like the lifeblood of a heart, noise tumbled through the camp, defying the silence of the dead that would have replaced it had the fight gone more ill.

[brinnanza]

🌹

"Honestly, and here I thought pirates were meant to be enlightened on these matters. The fact that I fuck men is really the least interesting thing about me."

[the-faultofdaedalus]

5 and 15 for the fanfic meme!

5. What’s your favorite headcanon you use in fics?

ADHD Tony because Relatable. also i don’t.... use this quite as much but also ace tony. basically just. project very hard onto the boy. also migranes. i give tony migranes a lot.

i also have, just, a lot of headcanons based around maria stark and tony’s childhood, and also around the arc reactor and how it Works and time spent in the cave that does, to some extent, make it into every mcu fic i write.

15. Give us a snippet of something from your WiPs!

this is from a wip that i just call longing fic, or fluff pollen which is.... early 616 stevetony featuring. well. PG sex pollen. a disease that makes u wanna Cuddle. (and, uh, causes immense physical discomfort similar to migraines if you don’t)  i have iterated through this same idea like 3 times since the summer of 2018 and this is the current and (hopefully dear god since ive written 12k of this thing) final version. feat. secret identity shenanigans and also chestplate-based angst, and tony just really really really wanting a hug. also HARDCORE projecting re: migraines. its very fun.

They’re not friends, not really. Just acquaintances forced into living together — and it’s not like living in the mansion, not even close — and the conversations they do have are formal, stilted, pleasant but not familiar. The only difference between how they, as Steve Rogers and Tony Stark, interact on any normal day is that there’s so much more of it, and still, Tony knows he’s gonna miss this. He thinks that if he was here as Iron Man, as Steve’s friend, the easy familiarity along with the closeness would’ve already doomed him.

As is, it’s already hard enough for Tony to keep distance between him and Steve, when all he really wants to do is break the ice with a dumb joke or an offer to break out the pack of cards they have (Tony’s seen Steve playing solitare, has never offered to join in) and play poker or the like. He knows that if he did, he and Steve would more than likely end the trip closer than they’d been before. They’ll be friends, properly, friends that share inside jokes and nicknames, and maybe Steve’ll touch him like he does Iron Man — a pat on the shoulder, a lingering handshake, maybe even a hug — and Tony won’t have to make excuses to run off and change every time it was him and not Iron Man that catches Steve creeping into the mansion’s kitchen far too late at night, and—

And he can’t have any of that, because the carefully constructed professionalism between them is all that’s keeping Steve from figuring out something that Tony really doesn’t want figured out.

So, he doesn’t offer to play cards, doesn’t reach out when Steve shivers from more than cold, doesn’t push when Steve calls him Mr. Stark instead of just Tony. They don’t ignore each other — when you’re living in proximity like this, that’s really not an option, and Tony doesn’t think he could ignore Steve if his life depended on it, hell, even now with Steve asleep, Tony finds his attention being drawn towards him, magnetic — but they don’t revolve around each other the way they do when they’re Captain America and Iron Man, either.

More than once, Tony’s found himself with Iron Man’s nickname for Steve on his lips, has stopped himself from actually saying the name just in time.

[raemanzu]

I associate you with Rex, Cody, and Cloud (I don't play the game but whenever I see him on my dash I go 'ah that's Rae blogging)

This makes me smile xD thank you!

[philcoulsonismyhero]

1, 7,10, 22, 74, 75, 78, 81, 100 for the DnD character questions! (Feel free to pick and choose, I know that's a lot :D )

(I’ve answered a bunch of these already, so here are the ones I haven’t!)

1. If your character wasn’t an adventurer, what livelihood would they lead?

Well, Sam already thinks of himself as a doctor first and an adventurer second. The main reason he travels instead of establishing his own practice somewhere is that he feels that he can do more good be going where he’s needed rather than waiting for people to come to him. Also the idea of going back to a ‘normal’ life after his stint as a battlefield doctor is. Difficult for him. So, he travels and gets into high stakes situations and tries not to think too hard about why the idea of a more peaceful life is such a problem for him.

7. Describe your character’s current appearance: clothes, armour, scars they’ve picked up along the journey, etc.

Sam is about 6′1′’, kinda gangly (he’s stronger than he looks), and your classic pasty-faced, freckly Ginger™. He’s sporadic at best about shaving, so he’s usually sporting some degree of stubble. His hair is vaguely wavy, usually around jaw length, sometimes longer, and he’s got warm, grey eyes, and his prominent pointy ears make it obvious he’s part elvish. He almost always looks like he’s smiling slightly (you should get Very Concerned if he looks dead serious), and he’s good-looking in the way that would probably be described as ‘pleasant’. He looks like a friend, basically. Although, notably, his nose is wonky in a way that looks like someone might have broken it once and it wasn’t set properly.

As for clothes and armour, I really need to actually design him an outfit, but outside of an adventuring context he’s a shirts and waistcoats kind of guy, although he always looks a bit scruffy despite that and his clothes are usually well-cared for but worn from use. (He very rarely spends any money on himself, so he’ll wear things until they fall apart.) When he’s adventuring, he wears a chainmail coat that’s disguised as a regular (if heavy) tunic-y coat, and bears a symbol on the right sleeve identifying him as a doctor. (His holy symbol is hidden underneath that other symbol, attached to his chainmail, so if you watch him carefully when he’s using magic his hand will sometimes be placed on that symbol.) He’s keeping the cleric thing on the down-low, hence taking steps to disguise the fact that he’s walking around in heavy armour. The fact that he’s kinda gangly helps with that, since it disguises the extra bulk to a degree. 

He’s also almost always carrying a pack that’s basically a portable pharmacy, and has the classic conspicuous potion bottles hanging off of it. There aren’t a lot of medical emergencies that he can’t deal with using the contents of that pack, and he’s got magic for when they’re not enough.He does openly carry a shield, but his mace is usually strapped unobtrusively to the side of his pack, where he can get at it easily but he doesn’t look obviously armed. He Does Not want people to clock him as an active combatant, because he really isn’t. He’s a healer, first, last and always.

74. What makes your character feel safe?

I don’t think safe is a big priority for him, at least not his own personal safety. He cares about other people more, and danger to himself is just part of the job. And he doesn’t really have a specific place that he calls home, except for the orphanage where he grew up and which he thinks of relatively fondly. But that’s a home of the past, not of the present. Honestly, he just doesn’t think about whether he feels safe or not. If he knows the people in his responsibility (which is anyone that’s every around him, pretty much) are safe, then he’s happy, but that doesn’t especially make him feel safe himself, it just makes him relax a bit.

When he was a kid, he always felt the most safe when he was around the doctor who took him under their wing (don’t ask me more about them yet, I don’t know who they were quite yet). But ‘safe’ has been an irrelevant concern for him for decades. Wow, that’s actually making me feel kinda sad. Congrats on picking two questions that inadvertently tapped into Sam’s buried angst!

75. If your character had the chance to rename the party/give the party a name, no questions asked, what would it be?

There’d definitely be a bad pun involved. But I’m bad at names and the party hasn’t named themselves yet (they’ve not really been a group for long enough), so nothing is coming to mind.

81. What does your character’s name represent to them? (Or: why as a player did you choose your character’s name?)

Okay, so both parts of Sam’s name have meanings (shoutout to @astriiformes for helping me come up with them!) in Tolkien’s elvish languages, one in Sindarin and the other in Quenya. ‘Sammarion’ means ‘son of the neighbour’ in Sindarin, and it’s a name he was given because he was abandoned next to an orphanage as a very small baby. He looked vaguely elven (although no one, least of all him, knows exactly how much elf and how much human is in his ancestry) so one of the staff dredged up their knowledge of elvish and named him that because they presumed he was probably left there by someone from their neighbourhood. (I’m very amused by his name essentially meaning ‘the kid/boy next door’.)

His surname, he actually chose himself when he decided he wanted to be a doctor. (He had a simple orphanage-specific surname before that, although I haven’t actually decided what it was yet.) ‘Harnendil’ means ‘friend to the wounded’, and that pretty much encapsulates what Sam considers his role in the world to be.

Thanks for asking!!