the meta i announced (on Annie Cresta, writing crossovers, and Highlander the Series)
More Annie Cresta meta for marble_sharp
I've recently already said a lot about Annie on Tumblr, so I'll try to not just repeat myself. My Annie head!canon is limited, though.
I haven't gotten a chance to write Annie much yet, baring her short appearance in "Moss On The Ruins" and a short Annie/Finnick ficlet called The Reverse Hitch. TRH is actually a good example of one thing I like so much about the pairing - the way they're complimenting each other in terms of support. Each of them can give something that the other one needs.
A long time ago when I first entered the fandom, I wrote some Annie/Finnick meta too so I'm just going to quote myself:
There's something so beautiful about the idea of two trauma victims steadying each other and being each other's anchors. There are some great unusual contrasts to work with: The oppression by Snow vs. the honesty of their feelings, the false beauty of the Capitol vs. the raw trauma revealing itself in their intimacy, public!Finnick vs. the sweet man who gets married and makes babies at the first glimpse of freedom, the competent alliance partner vs. the psych patient who can't stop crying. Also the woman with panic attacks, a nutcase in Kat's eyes, showing most sense and kindness of all when the Capitol Hunger Games are proposed.
If beauty is associated with the Capitol and Snow, logic dictates Annie should see Finnick at his worst and take it as a sign of love. I adore a fic context wherein seeing the worst of a person makes you love them more (I'm not even thinking lack of mental stability, but character flaws, wince-worthy stuff). Likewise, being with each other and creating a safe, trusting environment together goes along with mental breakdown and insecurity. These are wonderful dichotomies to use in fic. Also, obviously, happy established relationships are usually boring and this is a rare dynamic that's both happy and tense at the same time.
Like I already implied there, I mostly look at Annie (and other characters and pairings) in terms of how I would write her. This also means that I try not to repeat what other writers have already done. So I'm not necessarily going to take the most obvious approach, when others have already done that successfully.
In canon, Annie predominantly is described as basically a crazy person. I'm not even going to say PTSD because we all know that whatever Collins did there, she didn't get it from a textbook. She's a crazy person. She's an idea (in Kat's head) more than a person. On Tumblr, where I get to stare in befuddlement at the THG fandom shenanigans, there is this big battle between the two Annie factions, the ones who narrow her down to the "poor mad girl" saved by Finnick, then the other people who'll argue that she's a strong person and whatnot. So if I would write Annie, I would find very interesting a story wherein Annie has to deal with similar perceptions by the world around her.
I know a thing about being stereotyped for craziness. It was different for me, though, because my own brand of crazy is much less public, and people around me have spend a lot of time finding alternate explanations for yours truly, everything that might make me something other than the unbearable label "crazy" - such as lazy, callous, or generally a bad person. This isn't happening to Annie. Her crazy is so damn obvious that there is no other reaction than being very embarrassed to have witnessed it. People who don't know her well will either dismiss her as not a full person, not somebody you can have a conversation with, maybe a circus attraction you point fingers at - or she'll be pitied and not be taken seriously as an adult. People probably approach her if she visits the Four equivalent of a supermarket and offer to take her arm, asking if she really should be here on her own. I think probably a lot of people call her "dear."
We know there's a good chance Annie received Career training, so she'd have a sense of competence, a sense of things she can do. And she did go into the arena at eighteen, which means she would have gained a much more insightful and complex impression of the Games than a young dumb kid like Finnick. I think she was very aware of it, she was smart about it as long as she could, and she gained an awful lot of life experience out of that. And she was an adult before she was hit by trauma, so she'd be pretty self-sufficient.
Putting these two bits of information together, I think Annie would be very frustrated with the way people treat her. She would be very angry, because she's a smart mature person and she doesn't get why people don't understand that. But she would also be struggling to keep it together. She would be working on regaining control of her mind, likely mostly on her own, because uneducated people tend to be so useless when it comes to helping, victors or not. So I think she lives alone in her house on Victors' Village and she's very determined to get her act together. She's working on it, very practically, every day. She's fighting a fight. She won't have time for idiots trying to take her arm and bringing her home. She'll be aware that she knows how to throw those people with a martial arts move and to break their necks on the sidewalk gap with her boot.
At the same time, we know that Annie is a rather feminine, quiet or shy person, she's withdrawn and she doesn't seek out much contact with new people. So she's frustrated, she's angry, she's practical, she's quiet and insecure and probably frustrated about being quiet and insecure. She must be very self-confident and at the same time very unhappy with herself, like she's not doing well enough.
I think all that taken together would make one hell of an interesting character.
I think her thoughts on Finnick, before she gets to know him better - which in my MOTR timeline is over a year after she wins her Games - could be pretty much summed up by, "Oh, him. Yes, he lives here, too. I don't know what his deal is. He never even came over to say hi like all the others. No idea what Mags' deal with him is. He seems smarmy. But whatever, no time to think about Finnick Odair, busy not having a flashback. Fun day yet again."
So that's how I would write her. A veteran at dealing with mental issues, who has to deal with the fact that most people don't treat her like a person anymore, and who really has better things to do than meet Finnick Odair. Until he knocks at her door. :)
On my approach to writing crossovers for scribble_myname
It's a funny thing, me and the crossovers. Because I adore crossovers. I think there's nothing better than a crossover. But I barely ever write them because I find them so, so hard. I've only written three in my life. I wrote "Allegiance," which was a novella-sized ER/X-Men Movieverse crossover that really clicked for me. I also wrote "Message In A Bottle," which was my Harry Potter/Battlestar Galactica crossover of hell that I was never happy with, though that was partly because the British English was giving me so much trouble, and also there were time loops - yes, in the plural. And then there was a cute little Harry Potter/Mighty Ducks crossover that I wrote in German once, wherein that old guy Hans from the Mighty Ducks movie is actually a retired Auror who fought in the Grindelwald war alongside Alastor Moody. That worked out strangely well.
I think that to be able to write a crossover, I really need to find something that makes the two universes click. Each storyverse comes with its own tone and tropes, and I want to retain parts of those in my crossover. If I can't find that, I produce garbage like the HP/BSG thing. I mostly figured this out from "Allegiance." ER/X-Men Movieverse sounds like such a weird combination but it actually is extremely compatible. Both universes make a point of being unexpectedly "real" - X-Men by delving into these really gritty issues of mutant hate, and ER, not just with the blood and the gore, but also by having a trope of showing the worst way a given situation can go wrong. X-Men can be rather psychological at times, showing the consequence of a power that means you can't touch anybody anymore, basing Magneto's agenda in his Holocaust trauma (the Holocaust thing is also an excellent illustration of how this show is trying to be gritty), the whole thing with Wolverine's amnesia. ER handles psychological topics as a part of handling medical topics. So that came together very smoothly. The protagonist Ray's backstory is a great example: He has a backstory of coming into his powers, which is an X-Men trope. It goes wrong, which is also an X-Men trope. It goes wrong in the worst conceivable way because of stupid human error, which is an ER trope. And it has consequences, which is X-Men again, but in a very textbook psychological way that can be diagnosed, which is ER. I also noticed this compatibility when I was writing the ER ensemble's reactions to Ray being a mutant. Obviously, there are no mutants in the original ER. However, ER never shies away from making series regulars racist or homophobic or just thoughtless assholes, so it's no problem at all to figure out who might have unfavorable reactions to mutants. It's not character bashing, it just works. (imagine, as a comparison, trying to decide which Harry Potter characters would be homophobic; I think you'd get in trouble with any number of fans about your choices very quickly)
So I think when I want to write a crossover, I look at the source canons first to try and figure out how they would work together. I'd want the feel of the original stories to still be present in the crossover fic. I find that very hard. And so I don't write many crossovers, sadly. But I do have a cracky Avengers/Hunger Games on the backburner, so we'll see how that'll work out.
What parts of the plot I would have changed in Highlander The Series, for rap541
This is a curiously hard question. I liked Highlander quite a lot but it's not like I thought it was perfect.
The one thing that always bugged me most about Highlander was that it rarely provided us with storyarcs that covered more than a handful of episodes. The stories that caught my interest were always the ones that fit into an arc - the whole thing with the Watchers, the entire Duncan/Methos interaction, Richie's growth as an immortal. I also think that those had a lot of flaws, though. If there had been more focus on the bigger storyarcs, rather than the writers moving mindlessly from episode to episode, I'm sure there would have been a lot less of those flaws.
Highlander was always curiously void of worldbuilding. Obviously that's a hard thing to do in a show that is set in the real world. But it still did have the Watchers, it did have the Methos myth and the occasional bizarre magic well, the Dark Quickening and such things. I think the show would have profited from it a lot if the writers had sat down at the very beginning and brainstormed all the worldbuilding bits that could be introduced, the order in which to use them, the possibilities of what to do with them in a story. If the backstory of the Watchers had been made up in one sitting instead in little bits and pieces by whoever was in charge of writing a given episode, they surely would have made a lot more sense.
So if it was my show, I guess I would have expanded on the existing storyarcs, making them richer and bigger and more coherent, and then I would have added some others. I'd have done more with Methos, challenging Duncan's narrow world view more; I would have challenged my audience a little more on that front, the way it was done when Methos turned out to be formerly evil and he defended himself by saying, "The world was different." I'd have made the Immortals vs. Watchers story an arc to span at least three seasons, asking questions like, are the Watchers trying to control the Immortals and how do they do that? Should the Immortals band together to get rid of the Watchers or are there good things about the Watchers that need to keep existing? And what stance should Duncan take in all of that?
I wouldn't have answered more questions about "where do Immortals come from" and "how does a Quickening work" and "how will the Gathering work" because I think that would take the fun away. I liked those unanswered. It was always stupid when the movies went there.
Thanks for playing. :)
I've recently already said a lot about Annie on Tumblr, so I'll try to not just repeat myself. My Annie head!canon is limited, though.
I haven't gotten a chance to write Annie much yet, baring her short appearance in "Moss On The Ruins" and a short Annie/Finnick ficlet called The Reverse Hitch. TRH is actually a good example of one thing I like so much about the pairing - the way they're complimenting each other in terms of support. Each of them can give something that the other one needs.
A long time ago when I first entered the fandom, I wrote some Annie/Finnick meta too so I'm just going to quote myself:
There's something so beautiful about the idea of two trauma victims steadying each other and being each other's anchors. There are some great unusual contrasts to work with: The oppression by Snow vs. the honesty of their feelings, the false beauty of the Capitol vs. the raw trauma revealing itself in their intimacy, public!Finnick vs. the sweet man who gets married and makes babies at the first glimpse of freedom, the competent alliance partner vs. the psych patient who can't stop crying. Also the woman with panic attacks, a nutcase in Kat's eyes, showing most sense and kindness of all when the Capitol Hunger Games are proposed.
If beauty is associated with the Capitol and Snow, logic dictates Annie should see Finnick at his worst and take it as a sign of love. I adore a fic context wherein seeing the worst of a person makes you love them more (I'm not even thinking lack of mental stability, but character flaws, wince-worthy stuff). Likewise, being with each other and creating a safe, trusting environment together goes along with mental breakdown and insecurity. These are wonderful dichotomies to use in fic. Also, obviously, happy established relationships are usually boring and this is a rare dynamic that's both happy and tense at the same time.
Like I already implied there, I mostly look at Annie (and other characters and pairings) in terms of how I would write her. This also means that I try not to repeat what other writers have already done. So I'm not necessarily going to take the most obvious approach, when others have already done that successfully.
In canon, Annie predominantly is described as basically a crazy person. I'm not even going to say PTSD because we all know that whatever Collins did there, she didn't get it from a textbook. She's a crazy person. She's an idea (in Kat's head) more than a person. On Tumblr, where I get to stare in befuddlement at the THG fandom shenanigans, there is this big battle between the two Annie factions, the ones who narrow her down to the "poor mad girl" saved by Finnick, then the other people who'll argue that she's a strong person and whatnot. So if I would write Annie, I would find very interesting a story wherein Annie has to deal with similar perceptions by the world around her.
I know a thing about being stereotyped for craziness. It was different for me, though, because my own brand of crazy is much less public, and people around me have spend a lot of time finding alternate explanations for yours truly, everything that might make me something other than the unbearable label "crazy" - such as lazy, callous, or generally a bad person. This isn't happening to Annie. Her crazy is so damn obvious that there is no other reaction than being very embarrassed to have witnessed it. People who don't know her well will either dismiss her as not a full person, not somebody you can have a conversation with, maybe a circus attraction you point fingers at - or she'll be pitied and not be taken seriously as an adult. People probably approach her if she visits the Four equivalent of a supermarket and offer to take her arm, asking if she really should be here on her own. I think probably a lot of people call her "dear."
We know there's a good chance Annie received Career training, so she'd have a sense of competence, a sense of things she can do. And she did go into the arena at eighteen, which means she would have gained a much more insightful and complex impression of the Games than a young dumb kid like Finnick. I think she was very aware of it, she was smart about it as long as she could, and she gained an awful lot of life experience out of that. And she was an adult before she was hit by trauma, so she'd be pretty self-sufficient.
Putting these two bits of information together, I think Annie would be very frustrated with the way people treat her. She would be very angry, because she's a smart mature person and she doesn't get why people don't understand that. But she would also be struggling to keep it together. She would be working on regaining control of her mind, likely mostly on her own, because uneducated people tend to be so useless when it comes to helping, victors or not. So I think she lives alone in her house on Victors' Village and she's very determined to get her act together. She's working on it, very practically, every day. She's fighting a fight. She won't have time for idiots trying to take her arm and bringing her home. She'll be aware that she knows how to throw those people with a martial arts move and to break their necks on the sidewalk gap with her boot.
At the same time, we know that Annie is a rather feminine, quiet or shy person, she's withdrawn and she doesn't seek out much contact with new people. So she's frustrated, she's angry, she's practical, she's quiet and insecure and probably frustrated about being quiet and insecure. She must be very self-confident and at the same time very unhappy with herself, like she's not doing well enough.
I think all that taken together would make one hell of an interesting character.
I think her thoughts on Finnick, before she gets to know him better - which in my MOTR timeline is over a year after she wins her Games - could be pretty much summed up by, "Oh, him. Yes, he lives here, too. I don't know what his deal is. He never even came over to say hi like all the others. No idea what Mags' deal with him is. He seems smarmy. But whatever, no time to think about Finnick Odair, busy not having a flashback. Fun day yet again."
So that's how I would write her. A veteran at dealing with mental issues, who has to deal with the fact that most people don't treat her like a person anymore, and who really has better things to do than meet Finnick Odair. Until he knocks at her door. :)
On my approach to writing crossovers for scribble_myname
It's a funny thing, me and the crossovers. Because I adore crossovers. I think there's nothing better than a crossover. But I barely ever write them because I find them so, so hard. I've only written three in my life. I wrote "Allegiance," which was a novella-sized ER/X-Men Movieverse crossover that really clicked for me. I also wrote "Message In A Bottle," which was my Harry Potter/Battlestar Galactica crossover of hell that I was never happy with, though that was partly because the British English was giving me so much trouble, and also there were time loops - yes, in the plural. And then there was a cute little Harry Potter/Mighty Ducks crossover that I wrote in German once, wherein that old guy Hans from the Mighty Ducks movie is actually a retired Auror who fought in the Grindelwald war alongside Alastor Moody. That worked out strangely well.
I think that to be able to write a crossover, I really need to find something that makes the two universes click. Each storyverse comes with its own tone and tropes, and I want to retain parts of those in my crossover. If I can't find that, I produce garbage like the HP/BSG thing. I mostly figured this out from "Allegiance." ER/X-Men Movieverse sounds like such a weird combination but it actually is extremely compatible. Both universes make a point of being unexpectedly "real" - X-Men by delving into these really gritty issues of mutant hate, and ER, not just with the blood and the gore, but also by having a trope of showing the worst way a given situation can go wrong. X-Men can be rather psychological at times, showing the consequence of a power that means you can't touch anybody anymore, basing Magneto's agenda in his Holocaust trauma (the Holocaust thing is also an excellent illustration of how this show is trying to be gritty), the whole thing with Wolverine's amnesia. ER handles psychological topics as a part of handling medical topics. So that came together very smoothly. The protagonist Ray's backstory is a great example: He has a backstory of coming into his powers, which is an X-Men trope. It goes wrong, which is also an X-Men trope. It goes wrong in the worst conceivable way because of stupid human error, which is an ER trope. And it has consequences, which is X-Men again, but in a very textbook psychological way that can be diagnosed, which is ER. I also noticed this compatibility when I was writing the ER ensemble's reactions to Ray being a mutant. Obviously, there are no mutants in the original ER. However, ER never shies away from making series regulars racist or homophobic or just thoughtless assholes, so it's no problem at all to figure out who might have unfavorable reactions to mutants. It's not character bashing, it just works. (imagine, as a comparison, trying to decide which Harry Potter characters would be homophobic; I think you'd get in trouble with any number of fans about your choices very quickly)
So I think when I want to write a crossover, I look at the source canons first to try and figure out how they would work together. I'd want the feel of the original stories to still be present in the crossover fic. I find that very hard. And so I don't write many crossovers, sadly. But I do have a cracky Avengers/Hunger Games on the backburner, so we'll see how that'll work out.
What parts of the plot I would have changed in Highlander The Series, for rap541
This is a curiously hard question. I liked Highlander quite a lot but it's not like I thought it was perfect.
The one thing that always bugged me most about Highlander was that it rarely provided us with storyarcs that covered more than a handful of episodes. The stories that caught my interest were always the ones that fit into an arc - the whole thing with the Watchers, the entire Duncan/Methos interaction, Richie's growth as an immortal. I also think that those had a lot of flaws, though. If there had been more focus on the bigger storyarcs, rather than the writers moving mindlessly from episode to episode, I'm sure there would have been a lot less of those flaws.
Highlander was always curiously void of worldbuilding. Obviously that's a hard thing to do in a show that is set in the real world. But it still did have the Watchers, it did have the Methos myth and the occasional bizarre magic well, the Dark Quickening and such things. I think the show would have profited from it a lot if the writers had sat down at the very beginning and brainstormed all the worldbuilding bits that could be introduced, the order in which to use them, the possibilities of what to do with them in a story. If the backstory of the Watchers had been made up in one sitting instead in little bits and pieces by whoever was in charge of writing a given episode, they surely would have made a lot more sense.
So if it was my show, I guess I would have expanded on the existing storyarcs, making them richer and bigger and more coherent, and then I would have added some others. I'd have done more with Methos, challenging Duncan's narrow world view more; I would have challenged my audience a little more on that front, the way it was done when Methos turned out to be formerly evil and he defended himself by saying, "The world was different." I'd have made the Immortals vs. Watchers story an arc to span at least three seasons, asking questions like, are the Watchers trying to control the Immortals and how do they do that? Should the Immortals band together to get rid of the Watchers or are there good things about the Watchers that need to keep existing? And what stance should Duncan take in all of that?
I wouldn't have answered more questions about "where do Immortals come from" and "how does a Quickening work" and "how will the Gathering work" because I think that would take the fun away. I liked those unanswered. It was always stupid when the movies went there.
Thanks for playing. :)