#OMG ice saying i love you & maverick hasn’t even died yet whoa

[compacflt]

hey! seeing your post about iceman and hamilton reminded me of the 1812 au that you had posted about previously - do you mind sharing any of your thoughts on that, specifically Ice & Mav's reactions to the politics of war back then, before the US military and Navy were such huge institutions (in today's standards)? EDTS Ice & Mav are decidedly anti-war (more Ice than Mav I think), but would that same sentiment be true for them back then & how would Ice feel about war hawks like Calhoun & Clay? there's obviously a pretty big role that war plays in forming national identity, especially in early US history, and with external forces like impressment & embargoes & all of the international relations nightmares that came w/ early state building, I'm really interested in how that may have an impact on how Ice and Mav view military service and duty. I would love to read this fic if you're still planning on writing it (really I love to read everything that you write tbh) - also hope you are doing well!! 😊😊

hiya!! i hope you are also doing well!! I am not sure if im ever going to post the 1812 au to be honest—i would really love to but i think it would be so long it would have to be my first priority for a few months, and I’m not sure when I’d have time to do that. but i have it all planned out at least, so maybe we can compare notes.

So here are my notes.

IF i were to complete my 1812 AU… It would not be about Ice at all. Which is how I’d be able to stomach writing about Ice’s death. AND the characters would be very very different from the characters i wrote about in EDTS (i.e. confessed their love for each other way back in the 1770s). And what I want to tackle in this AU is exactly what your ask is about—duty to your fledgling country! Im interested in a version of TGM maverick who had to be away from the love of his life, on his deathbed, to serve the national interests of his country. *questionable* national interests, in TGM’s case, or *forgettable* national interests in the War of 1812’s case. The War of 1812 is sort of America’s forgotten war—its causes were nebulous & hard to rally around/understand today, and there were no real heroes until the end, unless if you count Andrew Jackson as a hero (i really try not to). So this would be a direct attack on the heroism we are presented with in TGM: what is mavericks mission really accomplishing in the grand scheme of things? Using the 1812 war, itself forgotten and largely irrelevant, as a meta backdrop for that question of heroism.

So—this version of Ice & Mav are: actual factual war heroes. Revolutionary war heroes who were genuinely educated & truly believed in the American experiment of representation & freedom from tyranny. Fighting the British 36 years apart. (Something i really really like & will take advantage of… the 36 years between 1776 and 1812 exactly equaling the 36 years between 1986 and 2022… it was meant to be.) They’ve spent their whole lives together in the romantic sense, in a world where they couldn’t live openly together but at a time when sexuality was also understood completely differently. But they have to be apart when Ice is dying because Maverick has been handed a mission, a duty, by the USG that he has to take care of. (Part of the reason I’m stalling on this project is because I don’t really know what that mission would be… something something naval warfare, something something Captain of the “USS Dagger…” but im a better romance writer than an action writer… idk how to come up with those plots at all. And I’m not super well-versed in EARLY naval warfare [I prefer wwii navy stuff] so idk how ships like sailed clippers & schooners etc actually work. That’s a completely different wheelhouse for me & is integral to a story like this, and fundamentally im kind of a lazy person who doesn’t put a lot of effort into research if I don’t have to)

the AU would be written in two parts—the warm summer of youth vs cold winter of old age. Confronting my own fear as an author of getting old & dying, tbh. What does it mean to be a hero and die of old age? Shouldn’t you want to die WHILE being a hero? Part one: 1776-1782 is… ice & maverick falling in love and dealing with goose’s death together and cementing their hero status in American naval history (like they do in the original top gun). Then part 2; 1812/1813… ice is retired from being the first USN commodore/secretary, but he’s dying and maverick has to choose between being with his de facto husband in his last days VERSUS being out at sea, serving his country, but for a war that he (a bit metaphysically, to serve my metaphorical aims) knows will be forgotten. He can be a hero or he can be there for the love of his life but he can’t do both. Duty & sacrifice. Ice persuades him it’s time to let go, maverick goes out to sea, and then ice dies while he’s at sea. & the 1812 war was kind of forgotten, and their love will never be known by history because they were two men, so what was that sacrifice really for? Shouldn’t he have been home with ice?

Which leads me to: I am also slightly interested in an interpretation of the TGM mission as a possible su*cide attempt on mav’s part, post-ice’s death. Trying to die a hero. So, there’s that. That would be in it as well.

Some issues: that’s pretty simple & i submitted a 4k short story with this exact premise (1776 war hero has to choose between one last shot at heroism in 1812 vs staying with his male lover at the end of his life) to one of my writing workshops last semester and they loved it. But, by god, does it get 10x more complicated once you add Bradley to the mix. It’s ALWAYS made it more complicated & it’s why I’ve had so much pain trying to edit EDTS over the last 8 months (as you know). Because LETS PLEASE BE REAL TGM did NOT give me much to go on there. Like the emotional turn that is I think SUPPOSED to happen in the scene where ice and mav talk in TGM—I don’t understand it & I think that scene was only written for fanservice because it serves no purpose in the story and I’m not sure what emotion we’re supposed to take away from it. Maverick says “please send me ice, don’t ask me to send someone else to die,” (is he asking ice’s permission??) and ice DOESNT actually answer that request, doesn’t even acknowledge it; he says, in a COMPLETE AND UTTER NON SEQUITUR, “It’s time to let go.” Maverick says, “yeah I know,” so what does that actually mean? Who is he letting go??? Bradley??? Goose??? ice himself??? Is ice giving mav permission to go or not???? It’s so vague it means absolutely nothing, and i have no idea what ice’s emotional/story purpose in TGM is except to bail mav out of sticky situations and nostalgia purposes, and don’t even get me STARTED on how out-of-character it was for MAVERICK (guy who hates having his papers pulled from the Academy) to pull Bradley’s papers from the Academy in TGM, both of which are why ive struggled so much trying to fit Ice into the mav/Bradley narrative of betrayal & loss etc. And in a two-shot piece where all those years in between are kind of skipped over… idk. I feel like I would sort of have to sacrifice the Bradley storyline for the overarching icemav duty-sacrifice-heroism theme. With WWGATTAI, i was KIND of able to do both, but only after MULTIPLE rounds of very very intense editing & like 50k words of rewrites and even then it’s kind of awkward so… idk. For a quick two-shot like this I’d have to pick. I don’t have the energy to write another 50-100k reinterpreting that story all over again lol

So to answer your question it would be way less about the actual weird politics of the 1812 war and more about providing a place for me to get into mav’s emotions dealing with ice’s death and the historical implications of a mission like that, kind of glossed over in the movie … though this ice & mav are veterans of the XYZ affair / battles with the Tripoli pirates, so that probably affects how they see things… but mostly, duty is still duty & orders are still orders, but sometimes following orders means sacrificing what little time left you have with your family… following the TGM timeline where ice only has about 2 weeks left to live from Mach 9.

So, pros of the 1812 au: lots of the purple prose poetic writing i shamefully really like. Icemav open and honest with each other from the very start ❤️. Dealing with the themes and emotional consequences of ice’s death finally. Focusing only on mav instead of only on ice. Penny & sarah in a lesbian relationship. Some discussion of the cyclical nature of queer history (i.e. we’ve always been here making history and we always will be). Mav finding reasons to live after ice is gone.

Cons of the 1812 au and why I’m hesitant to really get invested in writing it: don’t know much about pre-diesel naval warfare so can’t come up with the technical action elements of the plot & too lazy to do that much research. I have a sailing license, so I know like… knots and rigging and mainsail vs jib/genoa/spinnaker and sloop vs schooner etc, but i do NOT know anything about THAT kind of sailing. Warship sailing, tactics, “dogfighting” equivalents, etc. Also: would probably have to sacrifice the whole “getting Bradley kicked out of the academy-equivalent” storyline, just to make the story less complicated. Not sure how much of the original ice and maverick the story would retain as a result. Also: i know wayyy more about the early national period (1776-1800) than anything after about 1808, but even then the last time i was really into this period of history was my freshman year of high school, so i can’t necessarily claim to know what im talking about when it comes to the intricacies of the early American state (as i think is pretty obvious here). Also too lazy to do that much research.

But, here are some notes/snippets etc if you would like. they’re solidly 6 months old now & unedited & largely unresearched, just throwing words on the wall in writing phase one, but whatever

#oooo that’s a lot of words to just say ‘im lazy & self-conscious of the fact i don’t know what im talking about’ #thanks for the ask ily ❤️🥺 #i think you know more about This period of history than i do so honestly we should chat #OMG ice saying i love you & maverick hasn’t even died yet whoa #ice goes to yale instead of the academy. yale guy. ☹️ #pete maverick mitchell #tom iceman kazansky #top gun #top gun maverick #icemav #asks #top gun fanfiction #if someone wants to pick up this idea & do it please do #not feeling very articulate with my not-fiction words today; sorry if this post is incomprehensible