#Sharpwood's end-story is one of the few het pairings I ever actively daydream about

[not-poignant]

Hi Pia! Hope you don't mind me asking but is Mihail from TGATNW autistic? I love the way he's written. And I also love Sharpwood! He's a really interesting character and I'm curious about what a scene between him and Pitch would actually look like.

Is Sharpwood a character you would ever put into one of your original stories like Anton and Flitmouse?

And did Jack ever actually end up letting Anton top him?

Hi anon!

Mihail is definitely neurodivergent, but Lune doesn't have things like 'autism' as a diagnosis, so within the world, he's not autistic. To that end, characters like Mihail can be interpreted how you like!

I write a lot of neurodivergent characters because I am neurodivergent, but unless they say 'I have ADHD' (like Arden), or 'I'm autistic' - they can be what you want them to be in terms of specific diagnosis, because there's multiple neurodivergences that can cause Mihail's behaviour!

I've been tempted to write Sharpwood, but I'm not sure how I'd do it. In The Golden Age that Never Was, I know his final kind of 'partner' he ended up with was a woman, and as I don't like reading or writing heterosexual relationships, I don't really want to write (or read) that. But it also puts me in a quandary of how I'd put him in other stories. His relationship with Pitch wasn't exactly healthy, it was just all he had, until he got home again to something good for him. And I imagine he's going to need many many decades to heal.

He's probably one of the most interesting (to me, I'm biased) characters I've written for a very side character who got hardly any screen time, lol. I was fascinated with the culture of Grisaille (which I threw together haphazardly and then was like 'wait, this is cool'), and sometimes I think about writing something within a version of that world? But it's a bit brain-breaky to think about.

Like, I could keep his world and mind very kind of 'alien' when he was a side character. But I think at this stage in my writing I don't know if I'm good enough to preserve that if he was a POV character, or if I wrote his world. I think I'd be very tempted to humanise it into something more recognisable to me, and that's a big challenge!

But I do love Sharpwood, I have a very big soft spot for him and his awkward ways, and also his...life of heartbreak and loss and being manipulated and essentially being so servile to Gavril out of pure desperation to get something back home after he realised he made a mistake.

Maybe I'll write a human Sharpwood one day! But the things I loved about him most were how...not human he was, and how his biology influenced so much of what he did. I wonder how much of him would be left - at least the parts of him I love so much - if I turned him into a human in the process.

ETA: Forgot to answer this, but yes, I definitely think Anton eventually topped Jack! :D