I love how fully formed even the OCs are in this story. I think I said the exact same thing on the last chapter, but Captain Boyd felt so real and I loved the complexity you gave her, of being well-meaning in some ways, but ultimately failing to follow through of those good intentions. In part because the system eroded her ability to do it, but also in part because she stopped fighting for a different outcome.
It was really interesting to see Dean investigate a case as the down-on-his-luck drifter he is - that was something we saw too rarely on the show. The only instance that really comes to mind at the moment is the prison episode, and how well Dean is able to fit in with the community there. Also, I love how persistent and resourceful he was throughout this chapter in following Cas' trail, even when it looked like he was hitting dead ends all over.
Thank you! Yeah Captain Boyd ended up developing a lot I think just from my own discomfort writing a cop tbh. I started out from a fairly simple position of "give Dean a cool authoritative older butch woman to bounce off of" and then pretty quickly realized that combining that with the utilitarian necessity of giving Dean a point of contact with the police just didn't sit right. So the anxiety about uncritical depictions of police became part of her character, and ultimately I felt like well you know. Expressing that uncertainty and anxiety isn't actually enough. It doesn't fix the fact that she's a cop and police aren't actually there to help you, so I didn't want her ambivalence about the nature of her job to lead to her doing something heroic and truly changing her ways. She might see the problems with her work, but she can't actually get past them while still being a cop.
Yeah I think I mentioned in one of my author's notes but I restricted myself to one use of the FBI ruse for the fic, I wanted it to feel like a high risk high reward gambit, the way it does in the early seasons when Sam freaks out at the idea of pretending to be from homeland security. I had a lot of fun writing things like the montage in the first chapter where Dean talks to a dozen people and uses a different backstory on each of them, but it did start to wear on me after a while. Their are definitely later referenced cases where the investigation gets a lot clumsier because I was out of ideas 😅 but I really liked how the first three turned out
Comment on Romancing the Exit Sign
FriendofCarlotta on Chapter 4 Fri 18 Oct 2024 02:10PM UTC
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anandroidinatutu on Chapter 4 Fri 18 Oct 2024 04:12PM UTC
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