#ice is straight-up libcoded im sorry
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compacflt Ā· 2 years ago
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okay so something I love in what you've written is the running thematic element of how the "lack" of a character is treated as its own entity/character, not only with Goose--how heā€™s the ā€œcenter of the universeā€ as you say--but also with Sarah. Idk if I just focused hard on Iceā€™s childhood/adolescence the entire time reading because Iā€™m obsessed with how you wrote him, but the way there were bits and pieces thrown in about her as the story unfolded (Tom's pot-smoking era, the way they grew up so different but had a similar childhood, the unreturned letters and phone calls--also, Ice seeing Chorus Line on Broadway alone was so silly I loved it. Iceman Kazansky: pilot by day, musical theater fan by night. why was he so interested in fucking Chorus Line of all musicals.) but she never actually made an in-the-flesh appearance makes the entire fic, and Iceā€™s characterization, so dynamic and moving. Like Ice didnā€™t grow up as a sad little kid with no siblings and some evil overbearing Admiral father that turned him into a Navy-regulated cog in the machine; he had a sister (and grandmother?? A hipster Woodstock grandma?) who loved or at least cared for him a long long time ago, and her presence left a very visible mark (both emotionally and career-wise) on him no matter how ā€œice coldā€ he made himself. And in the very very beginning of WWGATTAI, he and Mav were bro-talking about their families and Ice was all like ā€œgrr I might as well not have a sisterā€ because heā€™s secretly Popeye he was grouchy and young and Sarah had stopped talking to him, but then 9/11 happened and he kept trying to get in touch with her just to make sure sheā€™s okay, and then they finally get to talk at the end of Debriefing and it's like...he's reached the top and he's become the person he's always wanted to become, but he's still the exact same. He wants his sister. He's ā€œThe Iceman" and can probably run the Navy on his own, but heā€™s also just someoneā€™s little brother that used to smoke pot with all the other California hippies. He misses her but he can't talk about it.
Also, you didn't just shoehorn her into the story as a character that would be the Tom Kazansky Version of Carole-and-Goose (or as Ice's wife LMAO) and I loved how you gave her personal depth and a purpose/life outside the story while still adding to Ice's characterization through giving him another person to (a) care too much about and (b) shove into his closet of skeletons because the relationship he has with them is breaking some sort of federal regulation. I hope this all makes sense hahaha, but anyway I loved Sarah and how you treated her. It was so entertaining/heartbreaking to watch Ice wrestle with how the main three people he loves are his communist sister, a male romantic partner who is also a subordinate he bails out of sticky situations constantly, and the son of the man he was involved in the death of. crazy stuff.
ok this is so funny & I love this so much becauseā€¦ it wasn't really how I was thinking about it at the time & I'm so glad it comes across as much warmer than how I originally wrote it... okay like i could explain everything but muh ā€œdeath of the authorā€ā€¦ā€¦ eh fuck it okay. Iā€™ll put it under a cut so you can choose not to watch me auto-fellate. another long post, sorry.Ā 
so, on Sarah.Ā 
I should start this post by saying straight off the bat that sheā€™s literally just a self-insert for me, the author, as a leftist who lives in New York and would not give someone like Tom the time of day, so I could feel better morally/ethically about writing Top Gun fanfiction. So, thereā€™s that. But she (just like everyone else in this fic) is just a tool to get across information about Ice and the story as a whole, and thereā€™s a reason she was introduced in chapter one (two if youā€™re reading on AO3 i guess. no prologue, wtf is up with that AO3 you guys need to fix that). I wanted to convey a shitload of information at the start, especially because I was posting semi-weekly and wanted people to know what they were getting into because itā€™s a slow burn.
To summarize what happens in chapter one:
Goose is dead.Ā 
Ice and Maverick kill some MiGskyites in addition to killing Goose and it cements some weird fucked-up hyperinterdependent relationship between them.Ā 
No, this does not make them instantly friends. They are still fundamentally different people who dislike each otherā€™s outlook on life.
Ice kills some more Soviets and becomes Maverickā€™s equal, though still not in rank/honor.Ā 
Ice writes to his sister Sarah, who doesnā€™t answer.Ā 
Ice hooks up with a girl, but finds that he canā€™t relate to her as much as he did before the experience of TOPGUN. Also, he canā€™t relate to women at all.
Ice tries to visit Sarah, and is rejected.
Ice sees A Chorus Line on Broadway by himself.
Ice and Maverick talk to each other as semi-equals, and Ice explains that his sister is a Commie who will never talk to him again. He also explains that he wants to get to the top because he thinks it will make him a good man, or that he can make the Navy better because he himself is a good man. Maverick says, yeah right bozo.
So weā€™re 5,000 words into a 90,000-word fic and already you know the following:
This entire story and everyone in it revolves around Gooseā€™s death and who gets the blame for Gooseā€™s death.Ā 
Ice and Mav are brought together not because they like each other, but because the experience of killing both their friend and their enemies has made it impossible for anyone else on Earth to understand them to that same extent.Ā From the first word, they're already both so fucked-up it really is each other or nobody.
This is gonna be a sloooow burn.
Ice and Mav might end up as superior and subordinate, but they are fundamentally equal ("you can be my wingman anytime/bullshit you can be mine"), and start out as equals. They are now directly responsible for the same amount of death.
Sarah is Iceā€™s sister, so Ice is definitely not getting married to a woman in this fic.Ā Good news for everyone scared by the slow burn.
Ice had previously had fun with women, and still wants to marry a woman because it "follows all the rules," but after meeting Maverick/the whole TOPGUN experience he finds them annoying/unrelatable. He canā€™t relate to women at all and doesn't believe this woman when she tells him she loves him because he himself has never been in love with a woman. He is gay.
Ice sees A Chorus Line on Broadway by himself. He is gay.Ā 
Sarah will not be in this fic, and Ice is a categorically lonely man who is isolated from anyone who could possibly help him talk about how he feels.Ā 
Sarah is a Communist who rejected her military brother, not the other way around, so this is a leftist fic from a leftist perspective, but about conservative men whose conservative personal and political opinions will be repeatedly challenged by the end. This is not a pro-Navy story.Ā 
As a corollary to that, the ship for Ice to ā€œbe a good manā€ has already sailed. Heā€™s gonna try his best to be a good manā€”emphasis on manā€”throughout the story, but heā€™s already failed from the very first line.Ā 
And Ice steadfastly and stubbornly refuses to be honest with us or himself about how he feels about any of the above.
So you basically have everything you need to understand the rest of the story. Now you (reader) and I (author) can meet each other in the middle on equal terms, and the real story can actually finally get started in the next chapter. Itā€™s a lot of information. Which is why itā€™s not written very well and the pacing is fucked.Ā 
But yeah I just used ā€œSarahā€ as an expository tool to help first-time readers understand the political lens of this fic from the get-go, so we donā€™t have to have a lot of hand-wringing when Ice becomes a war hero of the Persian Gulf War or anything like that (though in my a/n for chapter 5 i did admittedly do some hand-wringing. i gotta delete those a/ns). So, Sarah becomes kind of a weak stand-in for Iceā€™s political guilt. Sheā€™s only mentioned four times besides chapter one, i thinkā€”once when Ice is with ā€œLauraā€ (he is still incredibly guilty about all the people he killed & feels like he let ā€œSarahā€ down); once with 9/11 (he still thinks about ā€œSarahā€ often enough that sheā€™s the first thing he thinks of when the country has been attacked [still haven't decided if this is the real Sarah though]); once when heā€™s getting high with Maverick (he is constantly reminded by the brass of the ways in which he is not a good man); and once at the end of ā€œDebriefing,ā€ where they actually get to talk to each otherā€”because he has finally ā€œsnapped out of itā€ and left the Navy.
This fic wasnā€™t meant to be my sorta-kinda-but-not-really-anti-military soapbox preaching, though, which is why Sarahā€™s hardly in it at all. Itā€™s a D-plot. Maybe even an E-plot. All in service of the Icemav A-plot. That end scene has a couple different purposes, actually. The second is that Sarah, who at this point is pretty much just a stranger, becomes a receptacle for Ice to prove that he can finally be honest with himself and others about his relationship with Maverick. Andā€¦thatā€™s pretty much it. I did do more with her in my Slider one-shot but i honestly dk if thatā€™s getting posted at this point (ITS ROUGH) so im not gonna talk about it now.Ā 
Butā€”that was all Sarah as a symbol, which is very un-fun. Sarah as a character is kind of a blank slate, but how Ice thinks about her/misses her is not, as you said :) Iā€™m wary of posting headcanons that are dependent on my fic, though I do have many, because I feel like thatā€™s not really the point of headcanonsā€¦ ā€œcompacflt!Ice-specific headcanonsā€¦ā€ idk that seems a little self-aggrandizing even for me. But, yeah, I guess I would characterize my Iceā€™s childhood as not greeeaaat, because his dad apparently died in Vietnam when he was like eight and his mom apparently died in a car crash when he was twelve (which is why heā€™s such a good driver [ch 8 notwithstanding DO NOT DRIVE 120 ON I-5]), but also not, like, abusive or anything. Raised by his grandmother (in the Slider one-shot, which I might as well spoil for you since Iā€™m feeling quite hopeless about it, Slider kinda helps Ice deal with her death in the second year theyā€™re at the Academy together, and itā€™s how their friendship really starts) who might have been hippy-ish and encouraged him breaking the rules, but also he & his sister were very very impacted by the death of their father at war. This is getting kind of deep into it, and Iā€™m just kinda making it up, but I think there was probably a lot of strife between him and Sarah when he was gearing up to go to the Academy/getting his recommendations etc., like actual arguments and screaming matchesā€”yes, sheā€™s disappointed in him, but more than anything she wants to keep him safe so he doesnā€™t die like their dad (relevant for ice/rooster later)ā€”and he ended up losing her, so it made a deep, deep impression on how he handles (avoids) confrontation about serious stuff like this when he knows he's gonna loseā€¦Ā my ice has a confrontation issue, obviously. but so does canon. see him "apologizing" to maverick for goose's death in the movie for another example of this. bro is struggling.
But thats just me makin shit up so whatever.
But thatā€™s me just makin shit up so whatever.
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