#anyways bj i love u but literally all the options are off limits bc i respect peg too much

[bardengarde]

I won't vote in the mash swamp fmk polls bc I'm not strong enough to sentence anyone to death, but I will marry Hawkeye bc even tho I can't fix him I Can and Will take care of him and make sure he has good food until his dying day, and in return all I'll ask for is the occasional hug and compliment

And in the other one voting against marrying Charles is actively voting against my own interests, I could be so rich can u believe it, and it would also be so funny bc he would Hate marrying someone from lower Appalachia >:)

[amrv-5]

OK OK OK As a writer myself I know this is BAD to ask… but considering there are two major ways of reading the AoS epilogue (they are both actually dead and in an imagined/real afterlife vs BJ was ‘turned’ and they both run off into the sunset together)… in your heart of hearts… what do you feel happened? I ask only because yday when I expressed my EXTREME sadness you commented back something that would imply to me that the latter interpretation might be the ‘true’ one? I KNOW IT doesn’t WORK LIKE THIS BUT!!! I KNOW it’s MEANT TO BE OPEN TO INTERPRETATION I KNOW THIS!!! I do! But.

@partlyironic SADLKFSJFJA I AM SO SO SORRY I NEED U TO KNOW IN MY HEART OF HEARTS I THOUGHT THIS WAS A HAPPY ENDING. I THINK I AM POSSIBLY BAD AT CATEGORIZING GENRE IT TURNS OUT AND I AM. SO SO AORRY. INTERPRETATION UNDER THE CUT BC IT GOT REALLY LONG

Ough again I am so sorry LOL. Okay I'll say in my mind when I initially wrote this, I was thinking of a sort of "medium" happy ending. Like, they're both too deep in at this point to just Go Home like nothing has changed. Hawkeye would be an active danger to his father / community, and, if BJ brought him home, would be the same to his wife and kid, hence "You found me in a war zone, BJ. There’s nothing you could pick up in a minefield you should take home to your family." He sees the path he's on and thinks, okay, well, this could be the last time I'm really "human." Maybe I can get this under control, maybe I can't, but I can't know, and it's the best thing to do to remove the risk entirely.

And so I envisioned that as a sort of dual Lot's wife / Orpheus moment for BJ. I wanted to sort of set up this idea of, okay, if he 'looks back,' so to speak, what's going to happen? Well, one idea is that Hawkeye kills him, now or later. Pillar of salt'd, and Sodom still burns. But then again, if BJ can do this, maybe Eurydice/Hawk is "saved" from the underworld (becoming monstrous), and lives on in memory, not as a shade. But he doesn't really account for a third option, which is, like, what if Orpheus looked back, saw Eurydice get yanked into the underworld, and just...followed? Like, okay, not ideal, but better to be together in hell than separate in life. And the thing about pillars of salt/ash is that they don't burn. They can just hang out in a flaming city no problem. Sure, some things are worse now: their options are really limited, for one, as it's pretty damned hard to go back to your old human life when you're just loose ash, and also it's hard to do a lot of other things when your city that you love more than anything, more than even God, maybe, is on fire all the time, but if you really love your city (and it turns out that you do) you're going to stay with it.

That's more or less how I saw this ending. It's the "happiest" ending possible under the circumstances. Though I will say I initially wrote it with the idea in mind that BJ's still fully human (in body.....) and Hawk's in some ambiguous, you-interpret-how-much-of-him-is-still-human state. But so far people seem to be reading it as they're both immortal, which, while not something that honestly ever entered my mind while writing, makes total sense, and is definitely not a bad reading at all.

Re: the afterlife thing... hmmmmmmg very very very interesting. I'll say that interpretation literally never came to mind at all LOL I was thinking of it as all very concrete, especially after Hawk's speech to Frank and later BJ about the Nothingness of death, but I'm intrigued! But then again what's an afterlife, really. This could be an afterlife of sorts. Especially given that one (or both, depending on your reading) of the guys did definitively die. It's an afterlife of some sort for Hawkeye, at least, and the rest is who knows what.

anyway I AM SORRY IF THIS WAS VERY SAD UNINTENTIONALLY BUT THANK U SO SO SO MUCH FOR READING AAAAAA <3