#(it is not in flux and everything that's published is Midnight Oil Canon)

[thecryptidzenith]

hi! I love your Midnight Oil fic, it’s so good! I have a question about it-more specifically Baron. In the fic, Baron seems to be based on Fig’s lies instead of Riz’s, but during the baronies/con era, it seemed implied that Riz was at least dreaming of them. Am I wrong, and if not, will the fic ever expand on that?

Hi! Thank you for the question! There are a lot of moving pieces in Midnight Oil and in all honesty, I don't know for certain where they're all going to end up, and I certainly didn't know for sure what the fic would look like up to this point when I started, let alone beyond that. All this to say, when I put that Baron foreshadowing in the Baronies era, I had no idea what I was going to do with them and simply trusted myself to figure something out in the future. Obviously, I did! But unfortunately that foreshadowing does not match what I ended up doing with them. If/when I go back to do any edits, I'll definitely change it.

This strategy of leaving myself threads and trusting that I'll pick the back up has generally worked well in Midnight Oil--I had no idea what I was going to do with Jean when I left him alive, and I didn't decide that Nazca was going to be Poxson's red herring mom until I wrote the last chapter where she's alive--and it maintains my enthusiasm for writing, but there are drawbacks to it.

Baron specifically was a huge question mark for a long time in terms of how I was going to incorporate them, or if I was going to incorporate them at all. There was a version I played around with for a bit where Kalina basically created Baron and thrusted them in Riz's direction after Aelwyn got captured as a replacement for her (predictably, he took it extremely poorly) but that's not what ended up happening. I didn't know Baron was going to be Fig's thing until I wrote the chapter where it's first mentioned.

So that's my answer, but that's very much from a writing perspective. As for an in-universe explanation (and this is largely me talking out of my ass) Baron is already semi-formed at this point in time and wants to play with their cat?/sister?'s toy for a little bit before daddy says he's off limits because Riz is doing important work.