An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
I have an immense debt with I Don't Hate The Gravity. It's still my favorite fic that I've written, and as far and Johann and Avi's relationship, I think I did a pretty good job. I also tried a lot of new things that ended up becoming staples of my writing (for how little I write nowadays), and I'm very happy that people to this day still see traces of it over my work, and viceversa.
HOWEVER.
Bitch, I put so many fucking easter eggs in that fic that I never ended up addressing.
TL;DR: Gravity is now a series. I'm writing a sequel and spin-offs. Yay!
Spoilers for all of Gravity, obviously.
1. Magnus, Lucretia and the Voidfish.
This one is probably the less affected, I think knowing about their relationship and seeing it in snippets throught Gravity does a good job conveying the secret nature of their relationship, both from the point of view of a third party (who will never get to know the depths of someone else's life just from standing next to them) to the actual plot reason Magnus and Lucretia had to be quiet about it. On top of that, they both had their own personal character arcs that didn't rely on the relationship, which is something I'm very proud of.
That said, I did put a lot of effort into developing their backstory, and even if I summarized it quickly and consistently during Chapter 4, when Johann finds out Magnus' connection to the Voidfish, the way I wrote it was meant to be, I'm not sure you guys picked up, spin-off bait. I totally meant to write a little oneshot of their Voidfish heist.
2. Sweet Flips
Again, there really wouldn't be much to say. They are an stablished couple with their own life. They have (what I hope is) good rapport and are a nice resting point for the narrative when all the other relationships in this fic start getting dramatic.
Except:
"(...) Just because you didn’t PDA back then or even now doesn’t mean it wasn’t obvious to everyone you had it for each other.” “Everyone but us?” “Everyone but you, yep.” “Now you know how we felt in first year,” Avi muttered. Carey started sparkling. “That was different. I actually hated Killian’s guts.” “Yeah, you sure did.”
"Wow, Shi! That sounds like there's a story there! Are you gonna write it?" Well, sure! That's literally why I put that specific conversation there!
3. Taako, from TV?
This is the worst one imho, because unlike the other two where we kinda know what happened and how it ended. Taako's whole TV crisis thing was mentioned ONCE and then never brought up again. I was talking to @crystallizedkingdoms the other day about the Gravity spin-offs I never wrote and they told me they just assumed Taako had poisoned a bunch of people again, which is totally not the case. I planned an entire saga for him about his adventures as the only teenage contestant in a very famous and widely televised cooking show, which ended in betrayal and international embarrassement, and the consequences of putting popularity over those you love.
BUT YOU WOULDN'T KNOW BECAUSE I NEVER FUCKING WROTE IT.
The problem with these three stories isn't that I didn't write them. Everyone in school (at least the named characters) has their own thing going, it's part of the main message I wanted to write with Gravity, that everyone is the protagonist of their own life, even those who don't seem to have much going on, be it because you really can't tell the high stakes everyone is going through, or simply because what might be a nothing burger to you might feel like the end of the world to someone else. Realistically I could've never written every single backstory for every single character. The problem is I actively referenced and, again, baited with these three stories.
Well, I'm here to atone for my sins.
Gravity, the series, has officially launched as The Laws of the Universe, a series of fics centred around Gravity, the fic, exploring the lives of the teenage characters in more Astronomy metaphors.
As a reward for reading this far, and because I really need to be held accountable for this shit, you get to see the titles before anyone else. In no particular order of posting:
Pluto Is Not A Planet (Sweet Flips origin story)
And Then Copernicus Came And Ruined Everything (Taako backstory)
[TITLE TBD] (Magcretia+Voidfish backstory)
All of these are working titles and thus subject to change. As you may have guessed, each title references something related to astronomy, which in turn references the main struggle of the characters in the stories. I also wanted to keep up with the negative sentence structure (I Don't Hate The Gravity, Pluto Is Not A Planet) but found out it didn't work with what I had planed for the sequel, so that has been scrapped.
So, what is up with that sequel?
I need a new post to talk about that, but the most important thoughts have already been written in the notes of that fic. So, to quote myself:
This is a story that's been five years in the making. Some of the themes were originally part of Gravity, but I ended up cutting them out of... cowardice, basically. The thing is, Gravity was always meant to be a more """""realistic"""" take on a High School romcom, and the absence of these themes is not realistic.
I know what you're thinking. Let's talk about it in another post.
Thank you for reading, and see you in future updates!
