#jailbreak jon and helen

[catwings-writes-things]

Febuwhump day 1, prompt “helpless!”

Helen exists, helps Jon escape the Circus of the Other, and does some self-reflection.

#febuwhump #febuwhumpday1 #the magnus archives #tma #helpless #captivity #aftermath of captivity #nudity cw #child death mention #jon sims #helen distortion #the jailbreak verse #jailbreak jon and helen #(those last two tags are for me. the fic stands alone)

[catwingsathena]

5, 19, 21 for the writing meta asks?

Thank you for the ask, friend! You sure do know how to pick these, huh 😂

5. What character you’re writing do you most identify with?

Thinking about the Jailbreak Squad, it’s funny, because Jon, Mike, and Karolina are the three I tend to relate to (and project on) the most, but like… in extremely different ways, because they’re very different people! And yet the things they do have in common are very much places I can relate: smart, stubborn, intense, autistic, nerdy, and incapable of doing anything with less than 110% commitment. There’s… I don’t know how to say it, a directness to them? Almost a purity, though not at all in the moral sense. What I mean is that they are what they are at all times and at full volume. You know they’re not being manipulative when they talk to you, not because they’d have any issue with it on principle, but because they’re just flat-out incapable. Sincere by lack of other options. Which is SUCH a me mood. It’s not that I wouldn’t lie to you, I’m just really bad at it…

19. Is there something you always find yourself repeating in your writing?

Thistle, you know the answer to this question. You know all of the many answers to this question. However, as per your request, I will expose my faults to the world, because I love you and it will objectively be funny.

My characters breathe to express emotion way too often (this becomes especially annoying when I’m writing about characters who don’t need to breathe) (confession time: I established early on in A World of His Own that Jon still takes deep breaths to calm himself, even though he doesn’t need to, because I knew some would inevitably slip through even if I tried not to have him do that, so I decided to just give myself an excuse). In particular, people take deep breaths, or deep, shaky breaths, or deep, shuddering breaths… you get the picture. Like many writers, I overuse nods and head shakes. People also say or do things slowly a lot. (As you would imagine, people in my fics nod slowly far more often than they should.) I’m much too fond of the words “wry” and “rueful,” which probably says as much about the kinds of characters I gravitate towards as it does about my writing, but still. People “give” expressions or sounds (“she gave a shaky smile”) instead of just doing them. I do, in fact, overuse the phrase “in fact” in that particular construction. There’s more, but that’ll do for now.

As for tropes, plots, characters, et cetera… sorry, disclosing my word choice sins on this webbed site was quite enough oversharing for one night :)

21. What other medium do you think your story would work well in?

I’ve definitely imagined some Jailbreak Squad comics! You could do super fun things with perspective for the Vast people and Helen’s corridors, I bet, and Helen would have a great time interacting with panel boundaries/sound effects/etc. and ambiguously breaking the fourth wall. Jon is also an occasional fourth wall breaker, and you could do some really cool playing around with text boxes for him, I feel like? Incorporating speech into the images in various ways, having an entire panel background that’s just words, that sort of thing. I actually have some little scenes in my head as comics, including but not limited to “may the gods ensure your suffering,” “go to horny jail,” “SoL,” “squeaky,” the carnival not-date, and the Pacific Rim movie night idea we were talking about. I also think Do Not Ignore the Mermaids (for everyone who isn’t Thistle, Harriet and Oliver’s first meeting) could be FANTASTIC as a comic.

Once again, thank you for the asks, my dear! Hope my answers were satisfactory 🙂

#answered asks #my writing #tma au #the jailbreak verse #thethistlegirl

[catwings-writes-things]

Summary of Jon and Helen's relationship in AWOHO

#fic: a world of his own #jailbreak jon and helen #ask game #asks and answers #thethistlegirl #thank you for the ask!

[catwings-writes-things]

If you still take questions from the Tree writer ask game: Gingko: What part of your story is the oldest, has stuck around from that original idea?

Paper Birch: Which character has the most layers peeled back?

I am indeed still taking asks! I am always taking asks from any ask game I’ve ever reblogged, by the way. Just tell me which one and preferably include the questions, especially if it’s from a while back. You did this exactly right 💚

Gingko: A World of His Own has actually changed shockingly little from the original idea. From the first “hey, what if” series of texts about the concept I sent to @thethistlegirlwrites, the basic premise and who was involved were set. I had the basic plot sketched out in its entirety within a few days. So to answer this question, I’m going to have to go back to a few days before the actual germ of the idea, when I read this fic by @mikecrewsteacup and started thinking about Mike a lot more than I previously had. One of the things I noticed was that Jude said Mike “hangs around with the Fairchilds sometimes,” so he clearly knows and gets on with them but isn’t one himself, and I started wondering if they hadn’t invited him to join or if they had but he’d declined, and if so why. I did eventually decide it makes total sense with his character that he would prefer to remain as unaffiliated as possible with anything and anyone except the Vast, and especially that he’d be uncomfortable with the idea of a family of any sort, but it led to wondering what, if anything, might have been different if he had been a Fairchild. That led to me thinking more about the Fairchilds in general, which led to me going back over Freefall and wondering who Harriet was (besides the only Fairchild besides Simon we get a name for. We get the names of more Lukases, for crying out loud) and what the deal was with Robert Kelly and Open Skydiving (more on that in chapter 11), and that led to me writing a ficlet where she gets sent to invite Mike to join the Fairchild family a year or two after his Becoming. Even then, when they both suspected that the other might start trying to kill them at any moment, I could tell within a few minutes of them interacting with each other that their dynamic had, pun intended, vast potential. So, probably the oldest part of this story is the relationship between Mike and Harriet. (My interest in Jon and Helen’s dynamic is even older, but the way I think about it has evolved enough over time that I think the above answer still stands.)

Paper Birch: surprising no one, I’m gonna have to say Helen. Not just because she’s been a thousand different people over the past who-knows-how-many centuries, not just because she’s often a mystery even to herself, but because one of the many consequences of the fact that this fic is being told entirely from Jon’s point of view is that what gets conveyed to the readers is limited by what he knows and thinks and believes, and even though Jon is hands-down Helen’s favorite person and (by this point in the story) the person who loves her most, he’s also fundamentally unable to understand her (for practical reasons and for her safety), not to mention just. Kind of shit at actually understanding other people in general. However, he’s also inclined to keep trying to work around that, partly because it’s hard for him to grasp any other way to love someone. He’s definitely getting better at that, but in the meantime, the upshot of all that is that he will keep forming new misconceptions about Helen only slightly more slowly than he learns better. Sooner or later they’ll both realize that that’s not a bad thing, but for now… yeah.

Thank you for the ask, friend! Best!

#fic: a world of his own #jailbreak mike and harriet #jailbreak jon and helen #asks and answers #anonymous

[catwings-writes-things]

I would like you all to know that I’m working on A World of His Own chapter 11 and:

1) Helen and Martin are in the same room for the first time in… possibly ever, if you don’t count the time Martin spent as a prisoner of the Distortion before it was Helen. Definitely since Jon woke up from his coma.

2) the room Helen and Martin are both currently occupying is Jon’s bedroom.

3) Jon and Martin are in the bed, having just been woken up by Helen, who, since Jon has of course told her that it’s impolite to barge in on friends when they’re sleeping, elected to do so by loud and repeated knocking.

4) Naturally, Martin did not react to this particularly well.

The interaction is going about as well as you’d expect from there. Jon is having a Time.

#fic: a world of his own #AWOHO ch. 11 #jailbreak helen #jailbreak martin #jailbreak jon and helen #jailbreak jon and martin #jailbreak helen and martin #eyyyy new tags!

[catwings-writes-things]

AWOHO chapter nine is just

Helen: *is a bear trap, not a sword*

Jonah: *tries to drag Jon back to the Magnus Institute against his will*

Helen: fuck it it’s swordin’ time

#fic: a world of his own #jailbreak jon and helen

[catwings-writes-things]

Everyone else about Jon and Helen’s relationship:

Jon and Helen about each other:

#in the case of jon @ helen hopefully not literally lol #jailbreak jon and helen #the jailbreak squad #fic: a world of his own

[catwings-writes-things]

Chapter Eight has been posted! Enjoy!

#fic: a world of his own #the jailbreak verse #jailbreak jon and helen #(they’re the major focus of this chapter so I’m tagging)

[catwings-writes-things]

“your habits tend to get a bit stuck in whatever they were at the time.”

I’m so sorry but for the past day or so all I can think of is Mike and Harriet being HORRIBLE with iphones or whatever type they got. The only one worse is Helen and that’s bc she’s the fucking distortion. and I KNOW you probably didn’t mean it that way but just I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it until I sent it

No, I absolutely did mean it that way. Harriet has mostly figured hers out because she’s really good at engineering-type stuff (she doesn’t talk about it much or make it as obvious as some of the others, but Harriet is brilliant) and also deeply socially motivated. Mike, who is also brilliant but could hardly be less socially motivated, could probably learn but hasn’t bothered, except the basics of texting and phone calls (and emojis, which are sometimes easier than words).

(Nothing electronic works around Helen. As you said, she’s the fucking Distortion, and nothing that runs on binary logic can function in her presence. Some days, this includes Jon.)

#the jailbreak squad #jailbreak harriet #jailbreak mike #jailbreak helen #jailbreak jon #asks and answers #anonymous #thank you for the ask!

[catwings-writes-things]

how did harriet meet helen and karolina?

Harriet met Karolina because someone in her network told her about a new avatar and she went to check on her. She introduced Karolina and Oliver after Oliver reached out to her again because she knew of Karolina as another fairly young avatar in the same geographic area and enough about her personality to suspect that she and Oliver would get along, but they didn’t really know each other until Helen reached out to Oliver for help convincing Jon to leave the Magnus Institute and Oliver reached out to both her and Karolina for backup on that. Harriet was aware of the general existence of the Distortion, but she hadn’t met Helen before the Jailbreak Squad assembled for the first time in Jon’s office.

Many of these people knew each other, but the group as a whole didn’t exist until Helen asked for help to help Jon. The group dynamic has been developing in real time, and it’s great.

#fic: a world of his own #the jailbreak squad #the jailbreak verse #jailbreak harriet #jailbreak harriet and karolina #jailbreak harriet and helen #asks and answers #anonymous

[catwings-writes-things]

3 and/or 6 for the ask game!

Thank you so much for the ask!!

3. What is one scene you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all the set-up and context it would need (consider this permission to write and/or share it anyway)?

This is from a planned Dracula/TMA fusion AU (yes, another one) where Jack Seward is the Archivist. The other characters all have their places as well, but the point is that I don’t have to give the context, and I think there’s enough background woven in that it’ll make sense, so let’s just say that this was part of my reaction to loving a particular section of TMA s4 but thinking it would be even better if the person going through it actually had some support. I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to the entire canon rewrite, but either way, I’ll share this now. Here you go!

(The other answer to this question is a proper TMA/Dracula crossover where Jon Sims and Mina Harker are vampires, best friends, and hunting partners. The scene in question is one where they hunt down a victim and feed on them in an extremely polite manner. Juice and pastries are involved.)

6. What character do you have the most fun writing?

Oh, this is a tough one. I love every member of the jailbreak squad SO MUCH, whether they’re the ones I tend to relate to myself (Jon, Mike, Karolina) or the ones who are loosely inspired by or remind me of people I love (Helen, Harriet, Oliver). They all have things that make them incredibly fun to write, but at this moment… I’m gonna have to say Harriet. As a character who does technically exist in canon, but only for about ten seconds in which we learn almost nothing about her, and who I filled in and developed in ways only loosely inspired by canon, she exists in a funny gray area between canon character and OC, and I’m super proud of the way I’ve developed her as a character. She’s endlessly fascinating to me, at least partially because she’s so profoundly unlike me in so many ways—and yet we have enough things in common that I usually very much understand where she’s coming from. I also love writing her because she’s so good at what I can only describe as manipulation (value-neutral)—using her knowledge of people to persuade them to do what she would like them to do. As I mentioned in my ask answer on main, I have exactly zero ability to do this, and honestly I respect and admire the heck out of people who can do it well—especially when, like Harriet, they primarily use it for the benefit of people they care about. (Side note: the Fairchilds sometimes joke that they’re lucky their patron snapped Harriet up before the Web got to her, but the Web probably wouldn’t have been interested for the simple reason that she genuinely has no desire to use that ability to scare anyone.) It’s always a fun challenge to write characters who have skills you very much do not possess. (It’s fun in a different way to write characters who are smart in similar ways to you.) And, of course, she’s just a fun character. Some of her carefree persona is just that, but she genuinely is a cheerful, fun-loving, fairly easygoing person (depending on how you feel about heights, her idea of fun may or may not align with yours, but that’s not her problem 🙂), and a delight to write about.

Thanks again for the ask! Have a great day/night!

#answered asks #elliotpireflyy

[catwings-writes-things]

Current Main WIP

A World of His Own is a TMA canon divergence AU that started as an idea that I thought would be, at most, a cracky oneshot: what if, after the Archival assistants stage their “intervention” in season four to stop Jon from taking live statements, a group of other avatars—including Oliver Banks, Karolina Górka, Harriet Fairchild, and Mike Crew (who in this verse is also a Fairchild and still alive), and led by Helen—show up in Jon’s office to stage a different intervention directly contrary to the first, focused on getting Jon to stop letting these humans bully him into starving himself?

Well, over a year and 132,000 words later, the fic has lost the “Crack Treated Seriously” tag, and I have lost any illusions I may ever have had that I wouldn’t become obsessed.

I have eleven chapters posted and I’m working on the twelfth, but the outline (fourteen chapters planned) is complete, although there will almost certainly still be surprises. Currently, I’ve completed the “first act,” which concerns Jon’s (complicated) escape from the Magnus Institute and (equally complicated) adjustment to avatar life and culture, the assembly of a found family, the queerplatonic slowburn of Jon and Helen, and the various (delightful) dynamics within the group I refer to as “the Jailbreak Squad.” The second act, which is currently being written, will involve more of the same stuff as act 1, Martin, and both the difficulties that arise from that combination and the ways those difficulties (among others) are navigated. It will also involve further Jailbreak Squad friendship development, character backstories, Jon and Helen hunting together (finally), a Fairchild family Halloween celebration, further exploration of avatar-human culture clashes, and Jonah Magnus getting killed with extreme prejudice.

If any of that sounds good to you, or if you just want to find out how many TMA-related heartbreaks I can fix by letting Jon join a flock of queer and neurodivergent fear vampires, give this one a go!

Tags:

#fic: a world of his own - for notes about that fic specifically

#the jailbreak squad - for thoughts, backstory tidbits, AUs of my AU, and anything else that concerns these specific characters with the specific backstory expansion and AU modifications I’ve given them

#the jailbreak verse - for writing and process-related stuff about future fics in the same continuity (which exist, and hopefully at some point I will post some of them)

#jailbreak [firstname] - for when I want to talk about something specific to my version of a character without putting it in the main tag

#jailbreak [name] and [name] - see above, but for relationships

#my fic #my writing #tma #tma au #tma avatars #fic: a world of his own #the jailbreak squad #tma jailbreak verse #disordered eating mention #(the avatar kind but to be safe)

[catwings-writes-things]

Playlist time!

Here’s one of my Jailbreak Squad playlists (yes, I have many)! This one is divided up by character, with three songs for each of the main six (in alphabetical order by first name).

Format: Title - Artist (movie title if it’s from a soundtrack)

Harriet:

Jump - Van Halen

When Can I See You Again? - Owl City (Wreck-It Ralph)

MMMBop - Hanson

Helen:

Sweetness - Jimmy Eat World

The Greatest Show - (The Greatest Showman)

The Technicolor Phase - Owl City

Jon:

The Great Unknown - Rob Thomas

Human - The Killers

Shake It Out: Florence + The Machine

Karolina:

Underground - Cody Fry

Lights - Ellie Goulding

Strawberry Avalanche - Owl City

Mike:

You Can’t Take Me - Bryan Adams (Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron)

St. Elmo’s Fire - John Parr

Beautiful Times - Owl City ft. Lindsay Sterling

Oliver:

Good Problems - Joshua Micah

Into the Ocean - Blue October

Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen

#the jailbreak squad #character playlist #yes i’m aware that’s a lot of owl city #what can i say. the vibes of his music are extremely jailbreak verse