roystory4

[roystory4]

still kind of funny that tua’s fake husband in when in rome is kellogg, who nick immediately recognizes, but who tua doesn’t know at all, so they’re fine to keep him at arm’s length w their usual healthy amount of distrust while nick immediately tackles him and beats his ass in the front yard

[roystory4]

i should also add that nick's involvement with mira's upbringing makes tua feel one thousand times more confident that they aren't gonna fuck up this kid's life by proxy of being Her Parent. it is so meaningful that he's there to help teach mira how to ride a bike or write in cursive or read poetry. and tua is attracted to nick for other reasons but this is definitely on the list.

[roystory4]

PLEASEEE do talk extensively about tua's relationship with mira i'm so curious... i ❤️ complicated relationships with parenthood

augh thank you for asking!!

firstly i think it's important to remember the context for fallout's setting... it's fifty years in the future, yet culturally locked in the 1960s, which means tua is grappling with a lot of expectations for someone who is middle-aged and perceived as female, like the idea that she needs to get married and leave their job to have kids.

tua meanwhile has no goals to get married or have a family. but it IS important to note that this is somewhat a response to a lifetime of feeling ostracized for how she presents. they don't have any family, and being of mixed background means she has been made to feel untethered/unwanted. growing up aware of these things, there never seemed to be room for someone like them in that picture of the american dream, so tua never really learned to want it.

(sidebar but... they supplement whatever loneliness comes of that with her job, which obviously leads to a really unhealthy relationship with her concept of worth. but i digress)

there's also another layer in the fact that tua's mother left her and her father at a very young age, taking infant miriam with her to the west coast. as a child tua came away with the belief that they had done something wrong, that they were too difficult/complicated and their mother couldn't handle her, when in reality their mom was a young mom and didn't know what to do while being so far away from her extended family in mexico. so tua's relationship with motherhood is that, well, they don't want to be a mom because they'd mess it up and be imperfect and couldn't handle it. etc.

(in fact the whole point of the penultimate chapter of act i is that tua learning to love herself is fully realized by coming back to mira and loving her. spoilers lol)

something i especially hope people keep in mind with tua being of mixed background is that she inherently has a different relationship w the concept of gender identity, with concepts of femininity and masculinity, and before the war there is definitely this concept of motherhood that tua absolutely cannot relate to and despises and as consequence despises the expectation that she have children. THEN because tua was so out of touch w their own body from decades of dysphoria they also just did not realize the signs until miriam made them go to the doctor. the fact tua's detachment from her own body means she didn't know she was pregnant until like 3-4 months in is kind of Part Of The Whole Thing!!!!!!

after the war, when tua is allowed to dress the way they want to, present the way she wants to, and there are no expectations for them to live a certain life, she ends up more willing to take on the responsibility of raising mira. a couple years in they do not feel that level of vitriol, BUT they're definitely not interested in having more kids to be clear.

(which ok other sidebar: i will also say doing the research into writing act i helped my dysphoria out a lot too, so it became important to me to present pregnancy/childbirth from a gender neutral perspective and to avoid using any of the weird motherhood = womanhood themes you see a lot. i think by the end of writing act i i had fixed a few of my own personal biases and i find that was invaluable!!)

all in all i really tried to make tua's relationship w/ being pregnant and raising a child as nuanced as possible without falling into the usual tropes around the topic... ultimately tua sees mira as her sister's baby, and sees themself as mira's guardian and not necessarily her parent. because of this, while tua does make an effort to provide for/support mira as she grows up, tua is also just very emotionally distant and standoffish by nature. i wanted tua to feel more like an awkward uncle who is making an attempt to be parental but does not have any natural instincts for it. in the end, mira grows up far closer to nick than to tua - while at the same time ending up exactly like her... always distant, always moving, and always self-isolating.

there might be more to it than that.... but basically it IS complicated and i put a lot of work into avoiding making it seem like everything "clicks" for tua once they have mira when in reality she was so manic they walked across the glowing sea and fought a horde of feral ghouls barehanded. normal new mom things lol

[roystory4]

an important distinction to make in webh is that tua does not undergo some sort of newfound purpose and identity by raising mira. its actually nick who experiences that. for the record ☝️

[roystory4]

here's a funny conversation topic i had a with a friend: if you're over the age of 25, when's the last time you really *ran* in a panic (like you were late, chasing after something, etc. things like a marathon don't count!) and what was it for?

[roystory4]

i feel like there are two specific aus/side plots of webh that ive been talking about for so long i just assume everyone knows what the hell im talking about (untrue) so here's a quick break down, if you have ever wondered.

fo3 venture/when in rome

side plot that happens about 7 or 8 years after the events of webh's first act. maccready, having returned to the capital wasteland to take care of duncan, finds out that little lamplight is possibly getting pillaged by a local group of slavers, so he hires nick to find out where the kids are getting shipped off to. it turns out they're not getting shipped anywhere: they've discovered vault 112 and are using it as their own personal arcade. nick and tua must then deal with tranquility lane as it escalates into braun playing sims 4 with their memories, including forcing them through the canon intro of fallout 4 (lol) and a few other goofy settings.

gen4 au/out of body, out of mind

side plot that (potentially) takes place 9 years after the events of webh's first act, and during the events of the third act (aka while tua is in nuka world). a small group of synths co-existing with the gunners in vault 95 are collecting the surviving gen2 units to use for spare parts; after nick gets caught in the net, a former bioscience synth named holly decides to try and "fix" nick's deteriorating memory by offloading him into an organic body. cue the body horror/dysphoria/temporary insanity

[roystory4]

huge as fuck claims court. im suing you for one william dollars asshole

[roystory4]

world's first marine psychiatrist trying to wrestle a knife out of a suicidal sea sponges hand in serbia

[roystory4]

i like to laugh and joke but always remember that i am damned

[roystory4]

[roystory4]

i like making nick beef w other robots. i just think its funny. he’s also kind of a little shit about it so it doesnt help

PROBLEM BOY

[roystory4]

Inspired by this fic <3

No flowers version

[roystory4]

i deliberated for such a long time about writing/posting blue heaven bc i am just not comfortable posting public nsfw about my ocs but then i didnt want people further reducing tua based on appearances and assuming theyre sexless bc theyre middle aged and fat, bc ignorant people make that kind of assumption all the time and i hate that. so i got kind of competitive about it. the moral of the story is that i hope it shows in blue heaven that tua loves nick and would have given him a real tune-up way earlier if they werent crazy dysphoric and depressed and scared of everything.

[roystory4]

idk why but one of my fav sintin details is the way nick is attached to tua in times of stress. like so

i just think its cute really. bc i dont think nick really notices he does it, and bc tua is usually not as worried abt whats happening as he is. i think its the equivalent of clutching his pearls in distress except his pearls are tua

[roystory4]

whenever you take too much time to write something know it is because stephen king has been stealing your life force

[roystory4]

I can sense that one of you has turned on me

[roystory4]

Idc if you're a Monk on a vow of silence you need to listen to Doechii