Done? Not quite, but it's time to unspool.

[icarus]

Ah. I just finished my last class for the quarter. Now I have just one 12-page research paper and a five-page essay (I have a first draft, need a second draft). Due next Tuesday.

Witness the Icarus unspooling.

And now, from auburnnothenna: Ask me a question about one of my stories. It can be absolutely anything in ANY fic and I will tell you the honest-to-God answer. Don’t hold back. Ask about posted fic, WIPs, series, or things I've only briefly mentioned, and I will do my best to answer. All my fic is here.

Comments

[winstonmom.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much for giving the closing I was craving. (I sound so pathetic) I enjoyed this wrap up a lot and will thank you for it again.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Well, this was only the general ideas I had floating around. I never committed to this story so I never had an outline, it was just an "update as I feel like it" fic. I was writing it because I didn't like MPreg. It's not that I hated the idea of MPreg. Just the cliches. I made a list once of the things I didn't like about MPreg, and Reunion was dealing with each one of them.

Let's see if I remember.

- Anal birthing (a.k.a. ass babies). Yuck.

Baby will be conceived via hermaphrodite potion, delivered via C-section.

- Magical baby "born of our love." How irritating.

Intentially planned baby born of ill-conceived scheme with little thought to the consequences. Instead of baby materializing easily, it will take tremendous effort, so much so that they'll give up.

The two men have no concept of what they're going to do with the baby after it's born and don't even have a solid relationship. They haven't communicated their intentions to each other so they're operating out of mismatched assumptions. Their ideas about parenting are radically different, so only slowly are the differences in their ideas about raising this child revealed to each other.

- Feminizing the pregnant male character. Argh! This is my number one complaint about MPreg. The aim was (before I rolled out of the HP fandom) to deal with that annoyance. Ron, once pregnant, was going to approach this from an unmistakably male perspective.

For example, instead of worrying about how fat he's getting, he's going to obnoxiously pull up his shirt and show off. He will cheerfully indulge any and all food cravings--and ask for seconds, pleased at the amount he can put away.

The mood swings of pregnancy were going to involve testosterone (his body trying to compensate for that potion), so his temper is going to be a major issue, along with the fact that the yelling will be accompanied by physical force. Ron will be dangerous. Fist through the wall. And then... sappy. And completely unaware that there's any change.

Rather than pregnancy being "private" and "special," he'll inform his friends of every new weird development -- whether they want to hear it or not. "Crazy, huh?" Some will beg not to be told. Others will just blanch. He will ignore this. "A friend will stand by me through thick and thin." He'll point to his growing stomach. "And you can't get much thicker than this." Harry: "You can say that again."

He will not have grown up with the cultural concept of bonding with the baby in the womb, so he'd regard it the same why you or I would regard a wart: a purely physical growth, nothing else. It's inconvenient, sure, but not a big deal. This won't change until he feels the first kick. Then it will totally weird him out that fuck, this is a baby. Then rather than being all warm and fuzzy about it, he'll wish he hadn't done this to himself.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

- The whole world revolves around the damned baby. *eyeroll* Either everyone is cooing or everyone is against it.

Ron and Draco both have complicated lives involving their other kids, ex-wives, jobs, friends, and family. The baby impacts these things, and you can see R & D's reasons for doing this, but even once Ron's pregnant, life is business as usual for everyone except Ron and to a lesser extent, Draco. Rather than cooing or being against it, most people just think they're a little crazy.

90% of the people in their lives treat the whole matter as either a joke or the way you treat in-vitro parents... with confused uncertainty, because you've heard ba

Draco, rather than being indulgent and understanding, will have never had to deal with pregnancy (his wife was handled by a medi-witch). He will react with fury, confusion, and disgust, finding the whole thing very, very disturbing. Even though it was his idea.

Rather than the baby being a beautiful lifetime event, Ron is downright casual about it, and they both have completely materialistic motives (Draco's inheritance, Ron's financial situation).

This isn't their first baby, and their kids (Ron and Draco's) will take the idea of another brother or sister very badly.

Ron's ex-wife will be disdainful, while Draco's estranged wife will manuever to keep her fortune.

Much of the story will not revolve around the pregnancy but around everything else in their lives that has led to them wanting this baby. So it will be a tour of what a mess both of their lives are, and how this dumb-idea-baby might not fix things but might actually make them worse.

The story is, in fact, about Ron and Draco (and screwed up relationships and the dumb reasons people get married, have kids, etc). The baby is just a device. The resolution is not in having the baby, but in the changes in their relationship. The baby never once even appears in the story.