Subject: re: The Last Word Is Always Goodbye + 20
Author:
Posted on: 2022-04-26 04:08:22 UTC

(edited to maintain title consistency)

Ah, what a lovely palate cleanser after "Daughter of Darkness!" This is a very PPC spin-off, and I quite enjoyed reading it. peeps ahead Only two missions? Blast. Wish AnyAmy had written more! I think the joke rooms/hallways she makes about HQ in her opening paragraph are some of the best I've seen anywhere, and I need to try to live up to that standard from now on. Although, I'm not sure why HQ would have a mini-Balrog training room? That's very much OFUM's responsibility. Unless it's maybe an early incarnation of the Mini Adoption Center? It's kind of great that this story's depiction of the cafeteria fits into the timeline of the PPC's downward slide from financial security following the Reorganisation. There's still some good food in the Cafeteria now, but you can only get the good stuff through a lottery. (Although I suspect the agents who "win" the pudding will be hungry a lot sooner than the "losers" who got the asparagus!) During the assassination, I love Ela supplying her own surname and shrugging off its pronunciation, as well as Aragorn getting so disgusted by Ela tampering with Arwen's family tree that he straight-up abandons Ela, even while ostensibly still under her influence. I really love the charge about the horse's hoofbeats. It would be so easy to just say something like, "making a horse's feet unnaturally loud," but AnyAmy looked at it from a more physics-based perspective and made it more of a reality-warping point about tampering with atmospheric conditions. Clever!

There are some choices that confuse me, though. That pronoun joke has aged poorly, and . . . what's this about Legolas sleeping with a lot of women? I can't find anything about that on Tolkien Gateway, and it sure doesn't sound like something Tolkien would have written about his elves. And what on earth is Downstairs? Retroactively, it feels like a reference to the DIA, maybe as a co-opted holdover from the DIS's time, but of course, neither of those concepts has been introduced yet at publication time. And you can guess what I'm going to whine about next: they kill the horse, but take the wolves with them? Just a weird, weird decision. The way the horse gets described is maybe meant to signal to the reader that AnyAmy was interpreting it as a Suvian horse, but I still feel like leaving it in Rohan with Ela dead would have been fine for canon. The Rohirrim take real good care of their horses, so an unusually healthy one wouldn't have stood out too dramatically. The fact that this is meant to tie in with the OS's impending flame-based barbecue does give it a little pay-off, but. Still feels weird. I also would have assumed the wolves could assimilate fine, but it turns out Middle-earth is weirdly short on non-demonic wolves, according to Gateway? Middle-earth does have a white wolf that seems to be an analogue of Earth's Arctic wolves, but nothing like Earth's more common brown or grey wolves. The mission doesn't describe Ela's wolves, so maybe they were stated to be brown/grey in the original fic and they couldn't assimilate. Still don't know what Amy and Brent are going to do with wolves in their bathroom now, though. (Oh, hey, look! The first private bathrooms we've seen, I think? Maybe that's where the food budget disappeared to after Reorg?) I won't timeslide ahead, but I am VERY curious. I hope we can justify saying they end up in roman's pack in the modern day!?

Brent is . . . different. I got very bad vibes off him at the beginning of the story, but he did seem to mellow out further on. He's almost got an Atticus Finch vibe to him: stern and unquestionably an authority, but still pretty compassionate and thoughtful when it matters. Brent just needs to learn a bit of patience from Mr. Finch! Oh, and I think this is the first agent team we've had where both agents are veteran? (Other than Jay and Acacia, of course.) Brent does feel more experienced, but it's clear from Amy's comments about HQ that she's been living there a decent while.

—doctorlit feels bad he isn't catching up faster, but it's 30 minutes past bedtime, and 4:30 am will be here all too soon

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