So, we’re doing this again. Didn’t do one for the first chapter, because I put it straight into the newsletter. There wasn’t a whole lot to say, and I’m not sure I have much to say here. But I know people always liked these notes, so it seems worth doing them. I expected to do a lot more tidying up on this fic, but I’d forgotten that it had already got that treatment a couple years back, so there isn’t much to do on it. And if I had done notes on it at the time, I’ve no idea where they went.
I remember at the time I originally wrote this fic, somewhere around 2013 or so, Darcy was not a terribly popular character. She was really only well-liked amongst Tasertricks fans, but otherwise the greater fandom found her rather irritating. I’m not sure how much of that has changed, because I don’t really engage with this fandom at all, but I always thought it was a shame that within fic even where she was a main character, she was often boiled down to this weird Tumblr persona of a person whose greatest ambition in life was getting boned by the hot guy in the fic. So what I did immediately with this fic (and the Other One, tbh) was set out to immediately establish her as someone who had very ambitious goals, but who was also deeply burnt out and at severe risk of not achieving any of them. Because that was the part of her character that always resonated with me. Her first appearance within the MCU is someone who is, quite reasonably, unwilling to die over a handful of college credits. She’s taking this absurd internship that isn’t even remotely suited to her major, presumably because she needs a goddamn break from what is from her perspective probably looking increasingly like a bullshit major in the first place. And instead of getting a vacation like she expected, someone drops a literal space alien on her head, and she has to deal with the Men in Black crawling up her ass before the town she’s camping out in gets blown up.
If that’s what my college experience looked like, I’d handle it a lot less well than she did, frankly. I mean, mine wasn’t great either. To give you an indication of how my college experience went, I had a nervous breakdown, ran away to Las Vegas and became a table magician. So, ya know. That’s where that half of the plot comes from.
But I wanted to keep as much of that part of Darcy’s character intact as possible, and it’s largely all still there. Instead of an internship, it’s a student job that has nothing to do with her major. She’s burnt out and barely achieving any of her goals, on the verge of dropping out. I didn’t want to set her and Jane up as friends, because that isn’t what they are in the first film. I wanted to keep that awkward, slightly uncomfortable relationship between them as close to its original context as possible. But I also wanted to fully restore Jane’s relationship to Don Blake as well, because removing that clown from the MCU was an actual crime. A single name tag on a shirt and a forged ID is not enough to appease me. I wanted to see this dork in the flesh, and it never happened. So here he is, and he is the ticket to showing Darcy actually does have a brain, and can use it. Don, and by extension, Thor, plays such a weird role in this fic. He’s both tertiary and pointless, and yet everything at the same time. Because to Darcy, he’s nothing. He’s her boss’ boyfriend. She knows he exists only because he wanders in a few times a month, and part of her job has become relaying messages to him. But she doesn’t really care about him, because aside from star parties, which she takes a casual interest in because they’re fun, Darcy and Jane’s lives don’t overlap outside of this job. Because it’s weird to socialise with your boss. And your boss’ boyfriend. And Darcy knows it.
But even with these few interactions she does have with Don, she’s picked up something weird about him. She notices there’s something funny about him. He dodges subjects, and he speaks in a funny sort of way, but she stays in her lane because it’s none of her business. She could probably dig up dirt on half of her friends if she had any inclination to do so, because everyone in Las Vegas is weird.
And this is all done, of course, with the audience presumably knowing that Don and Thor are the same person, and with Thor being the entire reason Loki is at this same moment sitting in a terminal at SeaTac waiting for his connecting flight. His entire story revolves around Thor, and whatever it was he did before leaving the country and winding up in America. And it’s just because of Darcy’s bad luck in knowing him, despite not being aware of it, that gets her mixed up in all of Loki’s bullshit down the line.