#also i honestly love the fact that all 5 (including my grandpas second wife) grandparents were teachers

[unganseylike]

sorry random thought. but i just remembered grading exams as a TA last year and the professor said “oh dont worry about the multiple choice i have my kids grade those” and i was like that is the strangest thing ive ever heard this is an advanced biochemistry course and shes having her 7 year old daughter help grade. so i mentioned this to my parents as a funny anecdote and they were confused by my surprise….having forgotten that my grandparents were all teachers. they were both like “oh yea i helped my parents with grading all the time, my older siblings did the multiple choice and i did the true/false.” so apparently teachers using their children as junior grading TAs is normal across generations.

#i do feel like professor vs school teacher is different tho since professors have TAs and normal teachers dont #so the child labor is probably more in need and the content would be easier presumably #also i honestly love the fact that all 5 (including my grandpas second wife) grandparents were teachers #my maternal grandpa got photographed for some big news outlet about teacher strikes in like the 70s and that picture is still hanging in the #house. he also has some of the most incredible anecdotes about teaching in a big city public school and knows the most random people

[one-that-had-to]

On Musilová

As requested by @orcinus-wanderer, on the development of Tatiana’s similarity to her mother. I’m still not entirely sure this answers the question, but hopefully it will still give you all some insight on how Tatiana came to be.

Also, putting this at the top since this gets long: My inbox is always open, not just for prompts. If you ever want to hear more about how I developed  a character or if you have any questions about the actions or motivations or anything, feel free to ask!

I developed my Commander with two major themes in mind. One, I wanted to explore the relationship between the Council and a Commander who didn’t come from one of the member nations, someone who maybe wasn’t as under their thumb as they would have liked. Two, I felt like no other Commander went far enough on the sort of trauma they should have post-tank.

So, I started creating my Commander with a few basic facts. First, she was going to be horrifically traumatized post-tank. Obviously. Second, she was going to be dual-national. She was going to be something-American, because I am American and I know I can write Americans without much extra research.1 Third, she was going to be a she.

My Commander was going to be a woman for entirely obvious reasons. I’m a woman, technically, and I like to see myself represented in media that I like. I’m also bisexual and so a woman in power? Wielding authority with ease? In uniform? With muscles? There’s a reason I sometimes refer to her as my wife.

Early on there was a time when I really doubted that decision, though. The internet People aren’t generally kind to female characters and I’ve experienced that myself firsthand plenty already. So, for a while, I considered having a “backup” male commander who would essentially be identical to Tatiana in all respects. Except he’d also be a total asshole, because if I had to use him then it was because other people were being assholes, and I guess I figured it would be a good way to take revenge, or something. That eventually got folded in with how I write Van Doorn sometimes.2

I eventually settled on my Commander being Czech-American for honestly rather meaningless reasons.3 I then settled on her first name, Tatiana, because it was relatively popular in Czechoslovakia at the time, it had different pronunciations in Czech and English, and I just liked the sound of it. It also didn’t start with an L, which is something a lot of my characters have.4 Then, to find her last name, I just googled for a list of most common surnames in the U.S. and scrolled down until I found a French name I liked. I specifically looked for French names because I could have some pronunciation goofs and I just like to bag on the French language. Thank you, William the Conqueror.

To make the dual-national part of her story work, I knew Tatiana had to spend a significant amount of time in her non-council member country and have significant ties to it. So, obviously, she had to have been born there and raised by her mother and maternal grandparents. 

Despite knowing this, I never intended to give Tatiana a Czech last name.

On a whim one night, I decided to look up common Czech surnames regardless. I ended up finding the name Musil, derived from the past tense of the word “must” and roughly meaning “he had to.” I saw that, went “what kind of chosen one name bullshit is that,” and made it Tatiana’s birth name.

It was only after finding the Musilová name that I realized that Tatiana is a woman whose entire life is influenced by the other women in it. Most of her teachers in the U.S. would be women, including some of the ones that she likes and some of the ones that turn her off of education for good.5 She joins the army in part because there is an attractive woman who comes to her school for the pull up challenge. Once she’s in the army, she finds an older woman mentor who teaches her how to toe the line to keep herself safe without crossing the line. She’s almost outed by a woman to the army.6 To ensure her bisexuality7 was never erased, I made her most significant prior romantic relationship (which eventually became her only other significant romantic relationship) with a woman. Her grandmother is the reason she can live on her own with ease, unlike some certain other commanders.8 And of course, Tatiana’s mother is the single most important person in her life.9

On this I realized that if I were to make a second male commander, he absolutely could not just be Tatiana, but a man. So I dropped that thought and dedicated myself entirely to building Tatiana as a human and as a character. At this point, I don’t think I could make a second commander even if I wanted to.

So, realizing that Tatiana is a woman almost entirely influenced by the other women in her life, I realized that Tatiana absolutely had to take after her mother. Most importantly, she also had to get her stupid high will from her mother, and her mother would get it from her parents, Tatiana’s grandparents. Stupidly high will became a Musil family trait -- one that brought Grandpa Musil and Grandma Musilová together fighting in the Czech resistance, one that brought Libuše to the United States after fleeing from her home for her children, one that brought Tatiana to XCOM to save the world.

Thus, my favorite line from Tatiana’s flower character study: (And she must, because it is her name. Not the one shortened and butchered by foreign tongues, and not the one forced upon her by the stranger that is her father, but the name passed from father to son to her mother to her.)

That being said, it’s not as though Tatiana doesn’t take after her father at all. He’s an American man who somehow manages to visit communist Czechoslovakia multiple times, falls in love with a Czech woman, and spends ten years trying to figure out how to bring her and their kids to the U.S. to have a better life. Or, at least supposedly better. That takes tenacity and a strong will of his own. His side just doesn’t have anywhere near the influence on Tatiana as her mother’s.

Ultimately, it made sense for her to have a Czech name. She’d identify much more strongly with Musilová than with Mercier, that she’d identify with her mother’s side much more so than her father’s. That was going to be how I highlighted the tension between her and the Council.

Everything that one needs to know about Tatiana, everything that informs her character comes from the other women in her life. The Musilová name ties everything together neatly, the influence of women in her life, her struggle with her dual-nationality, and her very reason for doing everything she does. Even though Tatiana’s gender does not matter to her story,10 being a woman is important to who she is as a person. This is why I usually write her full name as Tatiana Musilová Mercier even though she technically doesn’t have a middle name.

Everything tied together perfectly, all on accident. I had this whole realization in bed at 3 A.M. while trying to fall asleep.

In short: Why does Tatiana take after her mother so much? Because she had to.

1. Oh, how wrong I was. She ended up being an east coaster, and to me as someone who has only ever existed on the best west coast, the east coast just like. doesn’t exist to me? Not to mention all the army stuff.

2. He’s really only a huge asshole in Amelia AU, where he is for sure the one who outs Tatiana to the army.

3. Honestly, I didn’t want Tatiana to be Czech, but we don’t always get what we want.

4. Tatiana was very almost nearly named Lýdie, but  Lýdie didn’t sound the name of a military commander.

5. The teachers that turn her off of education are almost certainly all women. Two of her good teachers in high school are her world history teach and her physics teacher, who when I imagine them are my US history and physics teachers, respectively, who are both men. I go back and forth on this.

6. Similarly, I go back and forth on this, too. Thematically it makes sense for it to be a woman who nearly gets her discharged, but I usually imagine that it’s a man that does it.

7. Attraction to one gender? In this economy? Absolutely not.

8. Please learn to cook, Lizzie and Weir. 

9. To break Tatiana’s will enough in both canon and in Hunter AU, the Elders use her mother against her. I have some cut content from Hunter AU, if anyone would like to see that.

10. Since Tatiana is very much “me, but a better me,” it’s debatable whether she fully identifies as a woman since I sort of question my gender myself.

#meta post #tatiana mercier #sendtoarchives #character study #character development #tanya study