#my fics: bitym | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bad-surprise · 1 year

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⭐️directors commentary of your choice please?

i held onto this for a minute because i knew i wanted to wait until the fic was complete (same for museum, that’s sitting in my inbox for now)

apologies in advance, this is a long one.

but i thought you might

haladriel modern au | E | 135.4k | 26/26

but i thought you might (bitym) began as a promptfill i posted on december 9th, 2022— the day i created my fandom twitter account.

at very basic level, bitym is a story about purity culture and the impact it has on those who grow up within it, even if they believe they never bought into the conditioning. it taught me that i love writing about sex— particularly deeply psychological sex scenes that reveal new info about the characters and their relationship, motivations, and overall dynamic.

it really only exists because my husband had covid that week, and because i was exposed but tested negative we were isolating separately. i had a lot of time to fill and spent a lot of it daydreaming, listening to music, and writing little bits of a story in my notes app. there was a very clear moment where hal’s voice just clicked for me and the first chapter came together from there. chapters 1, 2, the last half of 4, and 5 were all written first, back when i thought it would be an 8k one shot. i still have the draft of this, along with another one shot version of it.

it was inspired by memories of high school, particularly one off-campus lunch senior year where a friend confessed that she and her boyfriend had sex and she enjoyed it and didn’t know what to do with that. i believe my response was “i’m pretty sure you’re supposed to like it,” but she started crying. hal and gal’s high school is largely based on the private religious school i attended, and when i imagine their campus, that’s the image in my mind.

i really struggled to find a title, and sort of impulsively chose a line from home by daughter because i thought that song captured the right vibe.

personally, the story only becomes something i’m not embarrassed by around chapter 6. i knew what i was writing towards at that point but only in vague terms. going back into hal’s pov there for the first time since chapter 2 really clarified things for me. i’m not proud of it until chapter 10.

note: spoilers for the entirety of but i thought you might below.

many of my favorite elements were happy accidents, including the introduction of luthien, the two year time jump in chapter 11, the entire diner scene, and hal going to therapy. in conversations with my husband, i was adamant for so long that bitym!hal would never go to therapy. i underestimated what he would be willing to do for gal.

i didn’t really know the ending until around march, and a key aspect of it changed while drafting the penultimate chapter. the original ending i had in mind was incredibly dark, much closer to the shark in your water. it was initially going to be a story about hal thinking he was free from the religious conditioning but turning out to be just as toxic as fin, and galadriel coming to terms with being trapped. i was terrified when this changed and so so scared that hal would lose empathy from readers because of what he did, but ultimately that doesn’t seem to have happened.

the process of writing felt like constant excavation. i felt my way through the story intuitively, with a very flexible list of some plot points in my mind, but i was pretty much flying blind here. i’m so glad it worked out alright in the end.

easter eggs/random bits of info

references

“but they say you have the voice of an angel” is a reference to the music of the ainur

many celebrian moments were inspired by tiktoks and reddit posts.

“the last person i dated was awful” from chapter 17 (i think?) is the only morgoth reference in the whole fic. i debated including him but it ultimately felt like too much work to add it in and i don’t think the story needed it.

when hal’s telling galadriel how he lost his virginity, he says “she had a boyfriend anyway”. this is a reference to the song sex by the 1975.

in chapter 18, the event the girls go to is a reference to revolve tour (the girls who get it, get it)

the conversation hal and gal have about the differences in sex ed for girls and guys at their school is intended to slightly reference “then why is it not gone from here?” in the show, which is largely how it felt for me to leave evangelicalism before recovering from a lot of the related trauma. i didn’t believe it anymore, so why was it still strangling me all the fucking time?

depression as anger turned inward comes from my therapist, who knows i used it in this fic.

takes 20 attempts for halbrand to get the ring right because 3 rings for the eleven kings + 7 for the dwarf lords + 9 for mortal men = 19 before he forges the one.

hal is an aeronautical engineer working in the defense sector. this is a reference to some legendarium stuff around sauron in numenor.

writing process + personal shit:

in the first draft, hal was morgoth’s son and there was a plot point involving the theft of the silmarils.

the nursing student line in chapter 1 is based on some people i knew at university.

i am too embarrassed to read chapters 2 and 3. like i just want to curl up and hide whenever i think about either of those chapters, i think they’re terrible.

there are many “deleted scenes” from bitym that just didn’t fit into the narrative in the end, so they live in the unused scenes folder in my scrivener project. one of these scenes— a description of hal’s apartment— actually ended up being used for museum, and another scene i deleted was reworked for chapter 7 of shark.

i wrote the infamous chapter 5 car scene in the middle of the night, during what felt like a dissociative state, because i knew if i wasn’t exhausted my inner critic would start shame spiraling due to my own religious upbringing.

every single purity culture experience in the text, with the exception of chastity club and the purity pledge, is something that actually happened in my life. the only reason i didn’t do a purity pledge is because i missed youth group that week.

“they cannot convince her she’s sinned” is 100% from my own experience of being surprised by my complete lack of guilt lol.

i really want to have a longer convo about the consent stuff in it because i’m fascinated by some of the responses i got to the chapter 5 car scene. some people were really angry with me for it, which was interesting bc i really had the archive warning on there because of the birth control tampering.

i fucked up the time skip in chapter 11 and added an extra year. this changed the story dramatically (and is why the ending ultimately changed) but i prefer the way it turned out. i also fucked up the age gap between fin and gal, and don’t ask me what grade celebrian is in bc basically i cannot do math to save my life.

i find it really interesting how many readers seem to think galadriel’s POV chapters are more reliable than hal’s, because i definitely see it the opposite way.

i get super nervous about the references to their jobs because i’m terrified of getting something wrong but definitely don’t know the ins and outs. i do research, but i still feel super inadequate there, which is why you never see her at work and only see him at work twice.

chapter 13 (diner scene) was so difficult to plan, but once i decided to use those two songs, it became fairly straightforward. it’s one of my favorite chapters in the entire story.

you probably know this by now if you’ve read chapter 25, but their first kiss being in a closet was 100% deliberate.

i’m so so proud of the sequence with the pregnancy tests in chapter 15.

i decided celebrian would be in this while writing chapter 6.

the drive home from the bachelorette party was written about five days after i started working on bitym.

i knew as soon as chapter 6 that hal would wait until celebrian was born to tell galadriel that he loved her, but holy shit it was so difficult to wait that long.

the scene I’m most proud of is the opening to chapter 23.

misc. in universe info:

the night out with elrond and miriel in chapter 22 stresses me out so much bc gal doesn’t understand what she’s doing and it’s such a horrible position for hal to be in, seeing how she’s basically asking him to come out to her before he’s ready. this all happens only a few days before galadriel leaves for the first time.

hal doesn’t know that galadriel doesn’t think they’re a couple until B+L’s wedding. his response when she tries to bring it up earlier is because he’s worried officially defining it its going to either set him up for failure, or scare her off completely, but in his mind, they were basically together together as soon as he said “yeah, i think i’ll keep you” in chapter 5.

there are subtextual references to substance use issues in hal’s family. this is why he doesn’t drink much or do drugs— though by his 32nd birthday his attitude is a bit more relaxed, considering that their second child is conceived while both of them are drunk lol

in chapter 12, galadriel left her car in accessory for too long and the battery died. hal is fully aware of this and totally could’ve just jumped her battery but he missed her and wanted an excuse to spend time with her.

galadriel’s apprehension about motherhood doesn’t come from a lack of interest altogether, but because the only model she’s really had is one of 100% loss of identity, which is something she’s not willing to do. initially, i planned on this being her ultimate fate and good lord i’m so happy i didn’t go there.

i’m very careful in hal’s therapy sessions to have him refer to “people” he’s dated/slept with, rather than “women.”

galadriel’s friends 100% thought she was sleeping with hal AND celeborn in high school, hence their confusion at her response to finding out they were sexually active then.

hal’s parents aren’t actually homophobic or biphobic, they just didn’t know how to handle that situation and so they sort of pretended it didn’t happen. and if you want to know what happened, it’s just your usual homophobic bullying— the boy he liked turned on him to avoid being a target himself.

hal has had panic attacks his entire life but wasn’t diagnosed with panic disorder until shortly before galadriel moved out for real. he’s very resistant to using rescue meds and thinks he should just be able to tough it out.

they split bills proportionally based on income, with hal contributing 66% and gal 34% around the time of celebrian’s birth. galadriel doesn’t know much about hal’s finances until they buy the house.

i loved seeing how responses to amarie changed as she challenged expectations in the later timeline. i feel really bad for her— it’s implied in the final chapter that she married fin when she was 20 and he was 24, and she dropped out of college as a result. what they’re struggling with by the end is the fact that she wants to finish her degree and has made peace with the fact that they don’t have kids— more of that will be in peppermint for sure.

another aspect in the background that i knew about but decided against mentioning is that celebrian was born just before covid, which is a huge part of why they fell out with galadriel’s family. hal’s health anxiety meant nobody was getting anywhere near his baby and they were not feeling that at all. this might come up a little in peppermint, we’ll see. i doubt i would directly mention covid, just the fact that both of them were working from home for a large part of celebrian’s first few months.

celebrian’s first word was fuck. hal insists it doesn’t count. gal disagrees.

both hal and gal can be read as neurodivergent. it’s revealed in peppermint that celebrian does have adhd. hal also can be read as meeting the diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder— that was unintentional but i think it makes a lot of sense.

significant influences on bitym

films/tv

like crazy

normal people

about time

saved

couples therapy

the worst person in the world

before midnight

lady bird

500 days of summer

non-fiction

leaving the fold: a guide for former fundamentalists and others leaving their religion by marlene winell

complex ptsd: from surviving to thriving by pete walker

hold me tight by sue johnson

adult children of emotionally immature parents by lindsay c. gibson

three women by lisa taddeo

fiction

normal people by sally rooney

beautiful world where are you? by sally rooney

little rabbit by alyssa songsiridej

the unbearable lightness of being by milan kundera

atonement by ian mcewan

musical theater

the last five years

spring awakening

once

my favorite lines

Fighting is foreplay, so they never fight fair. Grievances are grenades, painstakingly primed for maximum impact. If the situation escalates to all-out warfare, consequences take a brutal turn. All hope of a ceasefire hangs on her eventual surrender to submission. — chapter 8

“Stop fucking running from what you want,” he murmurs, slipping his free hand beneath her shoulders, golden hair tangled around his wrist and laced between his fingers as they sink into her skin. “You’re not scared of me, you’re scared of yourself.” The words sear into her with the precision of a cautery pen, burning through any vestiges of self-denial still humming in her mind, loosening each thought at the root. — chapter 10

Galadriel murmured the words over and over again, whispering them against his lips, pressing them into his mouth, until the taste of each syllable was as familiar to him as the salt of her tears. — chapter 11

“Deciding to leave is very different from deciding to not love you anymore.” — chapter 13

If Galadriel is sunlight, Celebrian is made from the stars. — chapter 21

“I’d be first in line at the gates of hell,” Hal says slowly, with all the steadfast solemnity of a vow or a prayer, “if it meant I could keep this beautiful fucking life of ours for just a little longer.” — chapter 25

“You can stop beating yourself up for this shit, honey.” Hal’s thumb brushes her temple. “It’s not on you to fix something you didn’t fucking break.” — chapter 26

Maybe Hal was right. Maybe these moments only matter because of their fleeting, ephemeral nature. Maybe that overwhelming ache she once believed would shatter her served as a method to hollow out space for feeling to inhabit— this precious alloy of quiet contentment and contagious joy, irresistible wonder and the recalcitrance of love, all bound together by a strand of defiant hope. — chapter 26

“I might never be able to heal the parts of you— of us, of our family, our life— that I’ve broken. But you have my word, Galadriel,” his voice drops, each syllable low and firm, carrying the weight of an oath, “I will keep trying— until my last fucking breath, until the end of the goddamn world.” — chapter 26

that was probably a lot more than anyone wanted to know haha, so i’ll stop myself there. this fic means so fucking much to me and i’m so so proud of it. i never thought i’d be capable of writing anything like it and it’s so overwhelming in the best way to know that it means a lot to other people too.

hopefully this answered a lot of questions, but my ask box is open for anything at all— i could talk about concepts in and the process of writing bitym for days (i’m usually holding back bc i don’t want to be annoying) so please feel free to reach out with whatever.

and again, thank you all for everything. you’re amazing.

#answered #my fics: bitym #my fics: but i thought you might #fanfic directors commentary #poeticmemory

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