notes on getting ambushed in a dark alley at knifepoint by a demented plot bunny

[edenfalling]

How I know I have gone off the deep(er) end:

I have just spent more time researching the US military (army application process [so complicated! how anyone has the time to get in is beyond me], layout and organization of Fort Meade [argh, don't even ask], Arlington funerals [read this if you want to feel patriotic and teary-eyed], whether Arlington has a Metro stop [yes], standard-issue army pistol models [Beretta M9, currently, but that may soon change!], etc.) for a freaking GI Joe fic than I usually spend researching anything for any story. *headdesk*

Okay, bed now.

(4,300 words, incidentally. What on earth am I doing???)

Comments

[branchandroot]

*sympathy* Yes, this is how they get you. All that desire to worldbuild and be accurate bites down /hard/ when it's an unfamiliar setting.

[edenfalling]

I am sitting here going, essentially: "But I don't know anything about the military! Ack, help!" Which leads to trying to figure out how quickly a person can get assigned overseas after basic training, what it takes to be awarded various medals, and just, oh, all kinds of things. Also how scientific research and the military interlink on a practical day-to-day level, how to sneak in and out of America when you're as memorable as Rex after his misadventure with the airstrike, how exactly nanomachines could be used to fight cancer (let alone for mind control), and so on and so forth. It's just... there's so much. *tears hair*

[askerian]

*cackles*

/unsympathetic because yay fic! XD though i'll need a plot summary to get what's going on, I'm not even sure I remember all the names, so the plot... XDDDD

[edenfalling]

*shakes fist* *does more research*

I think the plot should be fairly self-explanatory. It's basically a set of five divergences from the movie, each of which should make sense on its own. I will summarize, though.

So, Rex and Ana Lewis are siblings, and Ana is engaged to Duke. Duke and Rex are both in the US Army; Rex is also a scientist of some sort. They go on a mission to raid a terrorist lab . There is an airstrike scheduled on the lab once Rex gets the data, but it comes too soon and Duke has to leave Rex for dead. Rex is "rescued" by the bad guys (MARS), and winds up working for them because his moral compass is a little bit off and he's also angry at Duke and the army. Meanwhile, Duke finks out big time and abandons Ana because he can't face telling her that he failed to bring her brother home safe.

After Rex is more or less put back together, he sneaks into Ana's home and injects her with mind control nanomites, because he's crazy and thinks that this is the best way to get her over her grief and depression (and perhaps also to keep her with him, since they have no other family). Four years later, Ana and Duke meet again as she leads some MARS agents in a mission to steal a set of metal-eating nanomite warheads that Duke has been assigned to guard. Ana has become pretty badass... but she's also in a relationship with her boss (McCullen) which she has been brainwashed into, is married to and having sex with a French baron (because MARS needs to use his lab later on), and is unaware that Rex is alive and working for MARS as the mysterious Doctor (because Rex makes no sense). Plus Rex is planning to betray McCullen and turn MARS into his own organization (COBRA) for no apparent reason.

This bugs me because A) oh my god, skeevy, B) can we please get Ana some agency right the hell now, and C) how about some coherent motives for Rex while we're at it? Hence my five things fic.

Section one is where Rex makes Duke delay the airstrike by ten minutes, and therefore gets out and home safely with knowledge that McCullen was behind the terrorist lab he was raiding; the entire movie is thus derailed.

Section two has Ana channel her grief into something productive and join the military before Rex can brainwash and kidnap her. She gets recruited into the GI Joe program (because she is awesome like that) and is therefore part of the team that rescues Duke when MARS tries to steal the nanomite warheads.

Section three has Duke just a little closer to the exploding lab, so he gets knocked out and wounded and left along with Rex. MARS picks him up too, but he's not useful to them and therefore winds up dead in gruesome experiments. Rex is not amused and decides to take MARS down from inside, possibly with the help of Ana and the Army.

Section four has Ana wake up before Rex can jab her with the nanomites, and they actually talk about things, like their childhood, his bizarro ideas about science, and how they feel about Duke abandoning them both. She joins him of her own free will. (Presumably when she next sees Duke, at the ambush with the warheads, she will not be so reluctant to shoot him. *grin*)

Section five has Rex decide that it's all well and good making Ana come with him and be loyal to MARS, but prostituting her to McCullen is a step too far; therefore, she remembers Duke. A while later she and Rex kidnap and mind-control him, so when the NATO convoy is ambushed, Duke promptly turns around and massacres his own men. MARS takes over the world; then Rex takes over MARS, as planned. *is evil*

Section six is not AU. It's just a coda to the movie wherein Ana tries to figure out what the everliving fuck Rex was thinking (and also what Duke was thinking when he ran away and apparently didn't even check up on her to notice she'd been kidnapped), and then does something about it. Of her own free will.

[askerian]

... *________________________________*

I WANT IT NOW PLZ. it sounds full of epic fun. Also I love how so many different events can change the character interaction and endings so drastically. It's fun how Ana and Rex especially keep shifting sides. XDD ♥

[emmee-kay.livejournal.com]

Teary-eyed military research is always interesting. I went that way on a WWII story (still not yet finished, sigh). That stuff is hard going. And one does want to do it right. For me, I wanted to honor those soldiers and citizens who went through those times. That a little bit of my stumbling block, actually.

I agree, it is hard. But people can tell you've done it right, even if it doesn't show up in actual words on paper. (At least, that's what they say and I am so desperate to believe the work is worth it, I take them at their word.)

[edenfalling]

I am easily susceptible to patriotic tugging at the heartstrings -- I get teary reading the quotes in my passport, for crying out loud. So of course I got sniffly reading about the Arlington ladies. *wry*

I am sure the research will show through in the implicit structure of the story, even if it's never made explicit in the text! It's like, oh, knowing that in New Jersey you don't say how many miles any trip will be; you say how long the drive will take. Or that you can't use pennies in a vending machine. Basic knowledge about how the world works, only I don't have that kind of familiarity with the military and am thus forced to research it, so I can fake the background assumptions. :-)