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roguestorm · 9 months

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My headcanon has always been that Betsy's mother was French; this is undermined slightly by Excalibur v4, where her maiden name is revealed to be Hartwood, which sounds pretty English to me.

I think about Elizabeth Braddock (née Hartwood) a lot; she was chosen to be "genetically compatible" with James Braddock, so that she could give birth to good and heroic children. (Her first child was Jamie Braddock, so clearly that didn't work out so well.) We don't have any idea what this selection process was like, how much agency James had in falling in love with her or she with him. We also don't know anything about how much she knew of James's past.

She has extraordinarily few appearances, and all of them relate to Brian, and most of them relate to Brian's guilt over the fact that he was making out with a girl in his car while his parents were being murdered by his father's supercomputer. There's no information on how Betsy feels about her mother. There's no information on who Elizabeth really was, outside of her role as dutiful wife and mother.

I'm not mad at this exclusion; Betsy and Brian have enough going on without getting too into their mother's history. But I find it a really fun space to play in, to play with the idea of her living with her husband's secrets. Her husband exists at this weird space where he is on the cutting edge of technology, even while he is steeped in magic. What does it mean to stand outside both of those, to be human, but to be just outside it, so that it affects your life and your children's lives in ways you can't imagine?

I think I like her as French because it marks her as an outsider in a way that parallels the way she is outside magic and technology but also parallels how deeply enmeshed she is in all those things that she is outside. The histories of France and England are very much intertwined; to the English, France is an enemy or an ally, a great nation or a weak one, an economic partner or threat, depending on the time period, but it's always been very important.

I also like Elizabeth as French because if she isn't British, then Betsy and Brian are 0% British by blood. One way of saying that is that they are the children of immigrants, but I think that's a weaker and more boring reading; the framing I want to put on it is that the Braddocks are playing at being British, that they are trying to be like what they think old-money British aristocracy should be like. They are stereotypes of themselves whose entire history is lies, and, yes, they are representative of Britain itself.

In my dreams there's a gothic fantasy graphic novel (illustrated by Stephanie Hans) about the young French woman who comes to a foreign country to marry a brilliant inventor who is building something strange in his basement and who believes in other worlds and whose family no one will speak about. I love the idea of this incredibly unsettling world, with a first son who wants to drive too fast and has a strange gleam in his eye, and what it would have been like for the woman who was asked to navigate it her whole adult life. It would also be like a tragedy, with an end that was terrible but unalterable, where the eldest son grows up to be a supervillain and the invention in the basement does come alive and kill her.

#m.txt #x men blogging #betsy braddock #brian braddock #ch: eat your heart out bruce willis #i have such specific thoughts about the braddock family dynamic #i have such a Vision for them

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magnetosfavorite · 9 months

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superposition ch. 1, extended author’s notes

i’m going to be doing these for every chapter, just to give anyone who doesn’t read the comics a bit more context, and make some notes i’d like to share. this fic has been in the works for a very, VERY long time, and now i don’t have to shut up about it anymore!

first off, this fic was inspired by michael fassbender’s road to le mans show on youtube, which is incredible. all the pictures of him in his racing gear are real! his trainer being named “felipe” is a reference to felipe laser, michael’s coach, teammate and good friend — because sometimes you just gotta add a reference only you will understand.

the first song for this chapter is, predictably, superposition by young the giant. “when things fall into place, superposition…” i mean, these two meeting is kismet, right? the second one is the night we met by lord huron. ignore the sad part — this song is the tentative beginning of something. and, i mean… this is the night day they met.

the daily bugle is the publication where most mutant news comes out in the comics. trish tilby is a human reporter from the x-books — she actually works for a made up TV station, but that’s fine.

charles accidentally pulling erik’s coffee order out of his head is an homage to tough little baby telepath, where charles accidentally orders erik’s thai food without having asked what he wanted. in the same way, he doesn’t even realize he did it.

we get a light introduction to a couple of characters here:

emma frost (our dear white queen of both the comics and movies, of course — but i’ll be relying more on her comic characterization, where underneath she’s just in it for the people she loves, and terrifyingly brilliant), erik’s best friend & agent

a couple mentions of scott summers, a driver who races against erik & emma’s boyfriend (our beloved cyclops, of course.)

a one-off mention of miss lorna dane (the crown princess polaris). if you haven’t read the comics and don’t know lorna, you’ve probably seen her used as erik’s child in lots of fics. while she’s cannonically erik’s daughter, in this fic she’s not — just a badass who has erik’s same power set and incredible green hair. y’all are going to love her. :) (don’t worry, we may see dad erik yet.)

and yes, erik’s ex-team lead is brian braddock, the brilliant captain britain! i adore brian, but someone had to play that role. if you’re not a comic fan, i don’t think you need to worry much about this one.

p.s. if you’re confused about why erik’s life sucks so much right now, don’t worry, you’re supposed to be.

feel free to hit the replies or inbox if you have any questions. :-)

#superposition #my fic #authors notes

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