I’m gonna be honest, I like posting chapters for longfic, because it’s a lot less backend work to deal with. The most taxing part of posting any fic is getting the whole process started, because of all the crap that goes into setting up the actual upload. Also, I forgot how short some of these early chapters were. Barely more than 1,000 words, this one was.
This chapter really does one thing, and I think it does it quite well. It highlights Darcy’s burnout. She’s not in control of anything that happens in her life. Everything happens around her, and she’s an incidental part of her own story at this point. This is very much by design, because it’s often what it feels like when you reach this level of exhaustion with life. She doesn’t want to be where she’s at, but she can’t find a way out of it. Everything she tries is met with a roadblock, and she can’t really muscle her way out of it because it would only be edging in on what someone else is already doing. Steven and Hannah have their own thing going, and Darcy was just a last-minute stand-in for him because Hannah couldn’t get the time off work. She knows this, and she’s able to push it aside without feeling too big of a sting from it, but it still hurts. That kind of thing always will. But she’s also too focused on trying to find a way out of this situation she feels like she’s stuck in that she has missed what has turned out to be a rather crucial plot point. It’s another thing I’m not sure anyone ever picked up on, because it’s subtle. But the lecture she wasn’t paying attention to is about Thor. I didn’t want to be blatant about it, because I didn’t want it to be the sort of thing that jumps out and makes the reader spend the next 50,000 words tear their hair out and scream at her for being stupid. Last week, I mentioned the unreliable narrator not quite being from the characters’ perspectives, but it’s not not from their perspectives either. Darcy confuses Iceland with Sweden, which is a very American thing to do. The lecture is obfuscated and muddled, because she isn’t paying attention, so the details get mangled in this game of telephone to the reader. By the time they make it to the page, all we know is that some drunk politician apparently said something he shouldn’t have done. Which is all the information Loki gave us in his chapter as well. A bit more comes out over the course of the story, but even if Darcy had been paying attention in her lecture, she’d still have no way of knowing at this point that it was about her boss’ boyfriend, because he never talks about anything before he moved to the US.
Her PolySci degree has always fascinated me, because there’s quite a lot that can be done with it IRL, but it’s not really relevant to anything at the core of the story we’re given. And that’s the point. She’s burning out, so she takes this bizarre internship that has nothing to do with it just to get away for a while. Every time I use it, I like to give it a different slant. I’ve had her genuinely pursue it to completion, I’ve played the story straight exactly as it’s presented in Thor 1, and I’ve had her drop out to take a totally different direction (not knowing at the time that’s what Marvel would eventually do, but in a different way). I’d like to also eventually play it straight the way Marvel did, having her pivot to astrophysics. In Isla Nublar, when she completed it, I spent some time looking into how her degree could be used in a way that could be relevant to a Jurassic Park story, landed on media and journalism, and stuck her in the editing room for a news station and gave her a job she actually enjoyed for a change.
Tarbell is the one where I let her drop out and take a totally different direction, by contrast. I feel like that’s probably obvious, if you’ve not read it before and you’re here for the first time. She and Loki do manage to cross paths eventually, as should be evident from the tags, and I do have a whole series planned out that sort of mirrors the actual Tarbell Course in Magic book series (which sounds insane if you know what those are). I want to do a whole thing about celebrity relationships and public personas vs the private individual, and if I actually manage to make it work, it will be done in eight parts. And nothing about it will be sane or healthy for either of them. But that’s showbiz.