Tag: fic notes: tarbell

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.

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.

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.