#*wdawe : director's cut

[latibvles]

Sending something for your weekend yapping 😉 For When Does A War End, what has been your favorite relationship to write? And were there any surprises in a ship that you didn't quite see coming?

[WDAWE : DIRECTOR'S CUT] — Hi Killy!! This is a fun question <3 No clue if it’s a cop out, but my favorite relationships to write have been the ones between the girls themselves. When I was transferring everything to AO3, I was actually quite surprised at how many of them lacked a “main ship” (with a few exceptions, of course) but I was actually quite happy with it!

I think I enjoy it so much, because there’s something small that connects each member of the crew to one another. I could break all of them down but that’s an essay in its own right (so please, take this as an invitation to ask me about any specific crewmate/crewmate dynamic. I’ve thought about it). As an example I’ll just state how Inez and Jo are both middle children, and this has led to them feeling somewhat invisible at home — and this aspect of their lives is specific to their dynamic and how they interact. Another one I’ve talked about a little is June and Viv’s explosive anger — how they both understand that natural instinct to bite at what harms you.

It’s little things like that, that I felt really breathed life into the dynamics themselves. It really helped me write Points on a Map, because I knew why certain people would be grouped together, or interacting in certain ways. It even boils all the way down to who, in their narration, calls Viv and Willie “Viv and Willie” or “Savorre and Neumann.” I am also a big fan of female friendship in fic, and it’s one of my favorite things to write. I think one of the biggest compliments I got was being told Willie & Viv did read like Winnix or Clegan: two opposing personalities that just jive together; which sparked a lot of joy, because it was what I’d been aiming for.

The ship that snuck up on me, without a doubt, was Inez and Alex. I knew that Inez was one of the ones struggling quite a bit after the war — that her story doesn’t end when she goes home. I knew I wanted some “clouded vision” foreshadowing through her cracked glasses in the Stalag. I didn’t know how quickly I’d become obsessed with Alex and Inez and “maybe we didn’t fall in love during the war, but we’re falling in love now.” June & Benny were actually the first ship I wrote (so I knew about them from the jump), and then it was Willie/Brady, Viv/Bucky, Jo/Rosie. Inez and Alex pretty much completely snuck up on me, because I just… really enjoyed that visual of them always next to each other. The mapmakers. Of course they’d find each other at the end. And I got one of my most cinematic pieces out of their little post-war romance, so there were wins all around on that front.

[latibvles]

⭐️!!!!! We love some yap round these parts

[WDAWE : DIRECTOR'S CUT] — Poet is my name & yapping is my game. Or something.

Okay, for this one I want to talk specifically about Keep Me Pretty because that is, essentially, the scene that inspired the whole of me tackling ten prompts in (almost) ten weeks like a lunatic. Anyways, I want to talk about this part of it because I feel like it encapsulates the intention of the piece and where “kinship” lies for the girls in all of them making this decision to cut their hair:

“June was cutting her hair and… and we wanted in, I guess,” she can’t help but feel small — being the last one to want to do it. Lena’s idea to give them something to stare at echoes in her head, but she knows those words wouldn’t sound right on her tongue. She could do without the staring, honestly, hadn’t been used to it when they arrived in Utah and still wasn’t used to it now. But there was something… freeing about it. Like shedding old skin and letting something fresh and new breathe. “Like a sendoff, I guess.”

This is not a collective rejection of femininity nor is it an implication that in order to be taken seriously they all have to be more masculine and act more like “men.” The kinship doesn’t lie in a rejection of femininity (I think that this is further shown by the fact that they don’t all cut it to the same lengths. Harrie goes full pixie, but Fern gets a bob) but rather in the fact that they all have a reason for doing it. It’s not just something they’re all doing on a whim. Carrie understands that deeply, which is why she doesn’t give Viv Lena’s reason, but rather her own.

For Carrie, this is a shedding of old skin and the point where she truly begins to come into herself as a woman — especially as the youngest member of the crew. For June, this is a rejection of femininity in some way, for her own reasons (even if it’s implied that she just didn’t want to be photographed, it’s more than that). For Lena, it’s a bit spiteful — “give them a reason to stare, make them uncomfortable.” For Jo, it’s stepping out of her comfort zone, doing something that her family would never approve of if she were home. You get the point, they’ve all got a reason even if it isn’t the same one.

It’s that debilitation that makes the prompt. It’s unspoken, quiet kinship — we may all be doing this for a different reason, but we’re going to do it together and that’s what matters. Even if we don’t all keep it, we did this. We did everything together.

[latibvles]

director’s commentary on true north from your when does a war end? series please!!

[WDAWE : DIRECTOR'S CUT] — Something that I really, deeply enjoyed about writing True North is highlighting that the problems don’t just end when the war does — and this is something that I’ve talked about with friends about what the appeal of writing post-war fics is. It’s about the hurt/comfort, “the war is over… now what?”, and finding where you fit in a world after being changed by what you saw, what you felt, and what you did.

I think Inez really embodied that (and it also made me realize I would love to write more of her in the Stalag, because this is really where these changes in her personality take hold). I could’ve gone down the route of just writing June and Benny’s wedding, since it’s the biggest one (and I will, one day, because I have a lot of feelings about them postwar as well), but I liked how in spite of the prompt not everything is just tied off with a neat bow. I gesture to:

So maybe it’s not the invitation itself, but the reminders that stem from it. Everything, from the moment she set her bag down in her family’s doorway, has felt unequivocally wrong. She loves her family — Inez is sure of that — but maybe there was a reason Ben married so quickly and then moved all the way to Texas that Inez is only just now seeing. The only things that feel right are the things she’s done that are separate from this house. [ … ] That’ll be May of next year. A nice spring wedding in Chicago — because some people really do have it all figured out. Inez is not one of them. Part of her, pessimistically so, thinks that she never will be. She’s not resentful of her friends for moving on with their lives. She’s just angry that she can’t seem to do it herself.

I really like this part. One, because it’s the only fic out of the ten I wrote that explicitly dives into a familial dynamic (and once again, made me realize that I’d love to do this for most of the girls) and two, I like that it encapsulates a feeling that I think is shared by a lot of people in this period. Inez doesn’t fit in this house anymore like she once did. Neither does her brother, who also served. But she feels… wrong being there. A puzzle piece that doesn’t quite fit, because she is not the same as she once was.

The progression of the fic is what I’m proudest of, but I am especially proud of encapsulating that unshakeable sense of feeling stuck where you are as opposed to adrift. Because that’s what it is for Inez. In the beginning of the war we see that after the war she wants to go home, wants to resume what she was doing prior. But now that type of future feels incorrect for her. So being able to establish a feeling of being in a rut and being able to work with it until she reaches the beginning of something that feels more correct for her after the war felt like an achievement for me.

I think, ultimately, True North doesn’t serve as an ending for Inez’s story but really just the beginning of another one, which I think is a fairly apt way of how people navigate their lives after the war. They didn’t die, so now they have to move onto the next chapter in whatever way they can, in whatever way makes sense for them. For Inez, it starts with going to Detroit instead of remaining at home. I just really enjoy how it feels, to me, like that one ends not on an “ending” but on another beginning.

[latibvles]

hi poet, ⭐️ for anything viv/bucky that's on ur mind? 👀 — @shoshiwrites

[WDAWE : DIRECTOR'S CUT ] — Hi Sho!! They are always on my mind , rent free, 25/8 etc. I do wanna talk specifically about Playing Pretend & a line in this fic that I completed on request, because one thing that I think is interesting is how Viv and Bucky are both, well, performers in some respect, or, more bluntly put, liars. So first I want to point at this part of Playing Pretend:

“Got caught up with a friend,” Savorre’s reply is breezy as she lifts her head once more. “Missed you like crazy though.” Bucky swallows, harder than he means to, at how easily the words come to her. And if it weren’t for the clamor behind them, he could easily forget that she was just saying it to say it. “Like crazy, huh?” he counters with a grin of his own. Savorre’s nose scrunches, her eyes narrow. “Don’t tease me.” “Can’t help it,” he counters. She huffs, and he chuckles. “C’mere.” Bucky moves his arm from her grip to drape around her shoulders, pulling her into his side and dunking himself further in the scent of her, the warmth of a body pressed against his own. Her hand finds his heart through his jacket, hand curling against fabric. She’s too good at this.

And then, from When You Go:

“Not gonna get over it.” He mutters frankly. It squeezes at Viv’s heart like a snake wrapping around her throat, strangling her beyond words. Goddammit Bucky, her free hand balls into a fist. What the hell do you want me to say to that? Trying to come up with something he’ll believe feels near impossible — the type of thing they would’ve laughed about if the situation weren’t so dire. How you can’t bullshit a bullshitter.

Even though “When You Go” was written before “Playing Pretend” — I do like how the bit in Playing Pretend sets up Viv’s lament about how she can’t give him any false optimisms or assurances: because he’d know she was lying and she can’t spout “bullshit” with him. Viv’s ability to lie and play a role is one of my favorite aspects of her character. She can be the propaganda pilot on your magazine cover and have all the charisma of a starlet, but in reality has none of the upbringing of either of those things.

Paralleling that is Bucky, who (in my interpretation) is playing a character from a Runyon novel more often than he isn’t. They’re both playing characters and that’s how they meet, in a proper sense. Viv needs him to play this part of her “boyfriend” and Bucky is up to it, and she’s so good at it that he almost forgets that she’s not coming onto him for real. He knows, from the jump, that she’s a very good liar — which not a lot of people know. And she can say the same of him in that regard.

And having this established early on helped me hammer home this point to them that the line was always blurry between them. Maybe it wasn’t love at first sight, but Bucky knew from the very beginning something that not many people knew about her, and Viv knew that same secret of his.

This feeds into the next piece (which, in my head, definitely takes place after the jacket piece, but that’s besides the point). In it, Bucky (drunkenly) telling Viv that her death will be the one to do him in is agonizing to her. It’s weird and uncomfortable and intimate because there’s nothing she can do to comfort him, or at least nothing that she would do if he were anybody else. But he isn’t. He is Bucky, who knows that she’s a liar, because he’s a liar too, and you can’t bullshit a bullshitter because they always can clock your falsities.

It makes her angry, and upset, because there’s nothing she can say in that moment that can comfort him. But the fact that she… can’t sweet talk him into being satiated adds an intimate aspect to it, I think (Viv also has some strong feelings about drunk men that she alludes to, which adds another layer to the fact that she stays there for him, but that’s a different conversation).

I can’t lie to you because even like this you’d know that I was lying, but you asked me to stay, so I’m staying.

Them both not being 100% honest to the rest of the world, but kind of being forced into this position where they can really only be honest with each other is fun to mess with, because it (alongside multiple other factors) add to this idea that there was never really a line between them. They could act like there is, that it’s all just jokes and banter and two charming people just knowing how to Talk — but it’s more than that. Sometimes it shows itself in a way that’s painful for one (or both) of them. And it’s fun to see which boundaries they push and which ones they don’t as a result of being in that strange position but not verbally acknowledging it beyond a joke or two.

Thank you for the ask, friend!! <3