I realized today...

[agilebrit]

After reading the not!Iron Man story for the eleventy-dozenth time, that I swap back and forth rather religiously between not!Tony and not!Pepper's viewpoints.

Except once.

I decided to do something about that. And now I've written the scene where the terrorist dude is "softening him up" by breaking the ribs not crunched in the plane crash.

And really, this isn't because I love beating the everlovin' shit out of my characters (although *cough* that may be part of it), but it also lets me describe my terrorist, gives us not!Tony's state of mind when he first wakes up after the crash, and shows us what sort of person he is under stress. Honest, I'm not being gratuitous just for the sake of it. *adjusts halo*

Current word count: 12,225

I'll probably end up expanding this scene a bit, because it's kind of bare bones right now, but the babble is in there and OMG SO FUN to write.

Comments

[lady-moriel.livejournal.com]

I find Alex's babble adorable, for what it's worth--that and his protectiveness (which, I don't know if it counts as a kink in the same way that h/c does, say, but I do love it). He's a little like the Tenth Doctor with the babbling, only more of a smartass. A lot of his and Megan's interactions made me go awwww, especially the last bit. And you did great with scraping the serial numbers off the names--it's close to impossible for me to pick a good name for someone who, for whatever reason, already has a name that I can't use, and when I finally try to give them one, the unusable name is so ingrained that I have to pick one with the same feel to it, just aside from the normal requirement that the name have the right feel for the character in general. Like--I'm doing a novel that started as a sci-fi retelling of Oliver Twist from the Dodger's POV, so I'd been thinking of my protag as Dodger because I didn't have anything else. Ended up naming him Daemin--not the same, obviously, but it's still two syllables and it starts with a D, and finding it was hard. I'm guessing it was at least a somewhat similar process for you, but "Alex Jarrett" in particular really has the right feel to it for the character even though I sort of know him as Tony.

For what it's worth, though, letting us see that softening-up scene might make it less necessary for Alex's second declaration of how dead the terrorists were if they'd hurt Megan--the first sounded very real, but the "I vowed" bit not quite as much. But letting us see what they did to her and why helped a lot, so this new scene should too.

And really, this isn't because I love beating the everlovin' shit out of my characters (although *cough* that may be part of it)

*raises hand guiltily* Uh, yeah, I love doing it too. And, um, watching when other writers do. Torture of bad guys does less than nothing for me--makes me think the good guys are down on their level, really. Torture of (er, almost always male) characters I really like...? Not gonna lie, I have a bit of a thing for that. Partly because I'm a Mean, Mean Person when it comes to dealings with my characters, borrowed from their creators or no.

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

Is is awful that I actually borrowed his last name from my favorite NASCAR driver? I swear, it's almost like naming a baby.

Gah. *changes the "I vowed" part, because that's just way too melodramatic and cliche* Seriously, though, I think we always hurt the characters we love, because it's an interesting shortcut to seeing what really makes them tick.

[texanfan.livejournal.com]

CAn I just say, YEAH!

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

And now I'm going to go over it again... *dies*

Seriously, this story has eaten my brain.