Worldbuilding Exchange 2020 Letter

[vegetarianvampireduck]

Hi! I'm H, ThisPolarNoise on AO3 and vegetarianvampireduck on tumblr. Thank you for writing for me!

For this exchange I've requested Oblivion, The Hunt for Red October, Mission Impossible, Minority Report, Edge of Tomorrow and The Shadow. 
(I still need to write the section on The Shadow, bear with me please)

 

General DNWs:

-pwp

-non-canon character death

-pregnancy/mpreg

-terminal illness

-hopeless endings

-unrequited love

-Scat, watersports, emeto and the similar

I don't tend to like character death fics, especially not when it's not canon, although I do like a certain type of angstier afterlife fics, specifically the sort about watching the people they've left behind. Oblivion is the exception to not liking character death, I'll go into further detail with regard to that in that section.

 

General likes

My favourite type of fic tends to be the sort that elaborates on details not covered by the original media, whether that be missing scenes and post-canon stuff or stories about the characters in other situations entirely.

 

For Worldbuilding specifically, I love mission and crime scene reports (especially if they’re the sort of first drafts you write when you’re really annoyed at something before you make it anywhere near presentable), medical reports about characters’ injuries or mental states, especially if it’s for longer term issues or suppressed or ignored for the purposes of a mission (for Red October, MI, Minority Report and Edge of Tomorrow).

 

Oblivion has a whole world to explore in terms of the Drones and other technicians and comms officers, because we only actually see Technicians 49 and 52, and that means there’s an absolute minimum of fifty others out there. The 49s were on Earth for five years but there are at least seventy years between the invasion and the setting of the movie: do technicians have a specific lifespan? A time that the Tet gives them before it became too obvious or they’d remember too much? Or are they only replaced when they’re an ‘ineffective team’ or something happens like a Technician being hurt or killed by Scavs or a rogue Drone?

Do different Jacks remember different things depending on what they see in their day to day lives? After the Tet is brought down, how do they find out about what they are? Are the Scavs they encounter hostile or welcoming or somewhere in between? What is Scav culture like seventy years after the invasion? How do humans live in 2077 under the constant threat of elimination from misguided clones?

The Hunt for Red October has a lot of details in the movie, but even more are implied that it never really goes into. Jack has a serious injury that seems to affect him long term (when he groans when he lifts his daughter and the way he leans over in the shower). Does this affect how he acts during the movie? Does the way he reacts to the situations he ends up in have consequences afterwards, and how would the characters around him react to this? How does it affect him in the long term?

How would things change if it was this Jack Ryan in Clear and Present Danger or one of the other Jack Ryan adaptations?

What happens to the Russian officers during their debrief, and what are their lives like afterwards? What were their reasons for leaving in the first place? We know Ramius’s reasons, but why did Vasily and Melekhin and the others make the choice to risk their lives?

On a totally different note, what does Jack actually write for the CIA? Are his books available for the public to read? What does his report on Ramius look like, and how does his opinion change after the events of the movie? He wrote a book about Admiral Halsey, who else has he written about? What would it read like if he was writing about someone he knew like Greer or Mancuso?

MI has a lot of possibilities when it comes to in-universe documents like field reports from agents like Ethan and handlers like Hunley and Kittridge, medical documents when missions go wrong, even a fic like Memos from Q-Branch with the internal emails etc between agents and departments.

Does Hunley’s reinstatement of the IMF run smoothly or does he run into trouble from his former colleagues at the CIA and even from agents of the IMF, still suspicious about his intentions?

What’s it like when they have to work with agencies like the CIA who clearly don’t like them? Do they ever plan to work collaboratively with agents from other countries like Ilsa or Sidorov, or are such decisions made on the fly at the discretion of the head field agent on the mission?

It’s a dangerous job and the IMF agents on screen get injured or even killed fairly regularly, what is that like for them? What are their recoveries like? Do they get enough time to heal or are they sent out when they should still be resting up? Does that change between different directors?

 

For Minority Report, what actually happens after the movie? It doesn’t seem realistic that Anderton could just go back to Lara after everything they’ve been through; she got him in trouble when he needed support when he tried to kill himself, reported him to the police, and divorced him because he reminded her too much of their missing son, that isn’t exactly a healthy relationship. What does he do about his Neuroin addiction? It’s ‘new heroin’, it’s not gonna be an easy habit to kick.

Are there long term consequences of being haloed? Can Anderton find any support to deal with that?

Also like why in the sweet jesus fuck were they allowed to just arrest random people who are allegedly about to kill someone for so long? There has to have been resistance to that, right? Who? What did they do about it?

 

For Edge of Tomorrow, what are the consequences on the world after they’ve finally beaten the Mimics? How do people rebuild?

What are the consequences of being what probably adds up to literal years of time loops for people like Cage and Rita? Does she remember him after everything or does she slowly realise that this man being sent with her knows far more than he should? Are there medical consequences of being contaminated with Mimic blood, especially when they’ve all been killed?

I’d like to know more about all of that, plus more character focussed details exploring J-Squad, Rita and Cage and their relationships when it’s all over.

Is there magic in The Shadow’s universe that isn’t painfully orientalist? What are the other forms like and how do Lamont and his powers react to them?

What would happen if Lamont himself fell victim to mind control like he uses on others or is used on his compatriots, how would he react to that? Could technology be utilised to the same effect as magic?

Are all his agents people he’s saved or are some just getting paid for this? Who else is in the network other than scientists and cops and Moe? Are they only there to give him information or has he utilised some of their other abilities too?