A funny thing happens sometimes when I sit down to work on fic, even if “work on” means reading it over real quick to make sure it’s free of ancient, missed typos, and getting it all fresh in my head so I can write up these notes since apparently I don’t have the old ones anymore. I’m sure I wrote notes for this chapter once upon a time, but everything’s a mess and who knows where they’ve gone.
But I was sat here at my desk, with my arch nemesis Morrissey playing at volume from my speakers, and that playlist was entirely the wrong music for this fic. Tarbell was written to Otyg and Týr and Skálmöld, and can apparently only be read back to that same playlist. I have no idea if the music I listen to while writing a fic ever comes across in the overall tone for the reader, but something about it does seem to become baked in for me, because there are definitely fics that have playlists that must be playing when I work on them, or when I read them back, or it becomes impossible to get anything done (Ours to Keep is trip hop and downtempo, with a heavy emphasis on Groove Armada and I Monster, for instance. And just wait til you see what I wrote Midgard Legends to).
Actually, since I’m talking playlists, this is the one for anyone curious. It’s my main Viking Metal playlist, and is the one I’ve been curating for about ten years. A lot of my Norse Marvel fic gets written to this playlist, but not all of it. Some goes off to weird places, like Ours to Keep did.
Anyway. Tarbell. Back to Loki’s perspective on this budding situation. One thing I’d forgotten I’d done with this is deliberately code-switching within the text itself. Normally when I write something, I pick a voice and stick with it throughout, but I didn’t do that here. The narrator is neither Darcy nor Loki, but a secret third entity, and I don’t know who it is, or if it was ever meant to be anyone or anything in particular. Because it’s definitely not Loki in his chapters, and it’s not really Darcy in hers. And that’s something I would have done deliberately to keep the narrative voice from becoming too jarringly different as it bounced between the two. That’s something that I always really dislike about stories that shift between multiple points of view, is they’ll sometimes radically shift in tone, and it can become very off-putting.
You can tell that it’s not entirely Loki’s point of view narrating this chapter because the prose is occasionally at odds with the language Loki uses. He tells the cab driver to open the boot, and then immediately after, the cab driver opens the trunk. The narration also tends to call Loki out on his bullshit a lot more often than it would if I were leaning into the more typical unreliable style, where this would be more in his head, and therefore he is always right in everything. As for Darcy’s chapters, I’m not sure how much different they are from usual, because I never really leant into the tropes of letting the prose go full stream of consciousness with her anyway. She could sometimes get into a bit of a flap here and there, but I’ve always written a more subdued Darcy to begin with, so it’s harder to tell with hers.
One of the routines Loki auditions with in this chapter is an altered version of one I performed a few times during open stage nights, way back in the day. A simple Easter picnic, heavily inspired by Penn & Teller routines of the past with awkward fails, fumbling, and a payoff with a lot of blood and mess at the end (mine used a Bible for the book, and ended in stigmata, because it was Easter; I never liked how his version doesn’t really have an ending, but I didn’t know how to end this one without making him look absolutely insane either). If I remember correctly, the one Darcy’s learning last minute is a riff off of an Amazing Jonathan routine, but it’s been so long I can’t recall any specific details about where my brain was going with what was ultimately a few throw-away details meant to put them in the same place at the same time so he had a reason to nit-pick her in a future chapter. I’m not even sure if anyone ever picked up on that being Darcy in this chapter, but just to be 100% clear, yes. That is Darcy that Loki’s watching learn a new routine last-minute at the audition.
Loki’s second routine is kind of inspired by a bunch of different things all at once, and one I just made up for the fic. I made up a lot of his set that way, picking bits from the books on my shelf, or from routines I’ve always liked and altering them slightly. But one thing I wanted to focus on with his audition, less necessarily than his routine, was his stage presence. I focused on his costume early, as well as what everyone else was wearing, because that was becoming true years ago, even when I was down there. The reason magicians “wear tails and top hats” is because when the act as we know it today became popular, that’s what audiences wore to the theatre, and magicians wore what the audience wore to appear on their level. Eventually, that kind of became forgotten, and over time, magic acts developed this reputation, I guess, for being over-dressed and ostentatious. I’m going to mention them again, but it’s why Penn & Teller never wore that costume on stage, because they knew it set them above the audience. When they started in the 70s, wearing a business suit was more appropriate, because it looked more like what the audience might wear. It didn’t take long for tails and top hats to become the costume of the acts that were either older and respected enough that it was expected anyway (Johnny Thompson) or extremely up their own ass (Lance Burton), but a lot of the younger acts moved on. But even by 2006 (which is roughly when this fic was meant to take place), when I was doing this shit, the business suit was already outdated. The audience was wearing jeans and t-shirts, and Nathan Burton, Amazing Jonathan and even Mac King by some bizarre metric had the costume right.
And Loki absolutely hit the nail on the head. He’s the only one who goes into this audition not wearing the outdated costume, and (obviously), he’s the one who gets the job. Spoilers if this is your first time reading this fic, I guess, but that’s the whole premise of the thing. Because the people hiring don’t know that the trends within the industry have changed. They expect to see magicians showing up, over-dressed, looking stuffy and uncomfortable. Loki looks the part, and that overshadowed everything else about his frankly mediocre audition. He probably shouldn’t have got it. There probably were better, more established names in the pool who deserved it more.
And because of that, everybody suffers.