wawamouse

Short director's commentary on Ten Toes Down / Highway to Hell, my two Long Walk AUs which I can talk about now that Oz Magi is done.

So first things first is that fun fact: I actually chose Wish #3 as my no.1 claim because it had the high concept prompts, which is what I think I figured I'd try my hand at again this year (after the personal success of last year lol)... And because I'd watched The Long Walk movie a few weeks before the prompts came out. Obviously, I ended up being assigned 9cbff's wish, my second choice (which I probably would've done for dress factory otherwise)…. aaaand Ten Toes Down was going to be my Dress Factory fic until I went overboard with the word count, so that's the story of how I wrote two Oz Magi fics.

Note to self for next year: you can fill as many wishes as you want besides your assigned wish :3

I knew from the start that I always wanted to use this AU prompt to write some characters I'd never cast in the role of protagonist, and Beecher and Said's relationship, to me, was the immediate choice for the two runner ups of the Long Walk. The next question, really, was who would be Stebbins in the AU. Keller came and went as an option; frankly, I didn't think that he'd last that long lol. The alternative that first came to mind was maybe Ryan—now there's a tenacious little worm. But I didn't really give it too much thought for a couple of weeks when the actual Oz Magi assignments came out.

The idea of Stanislofsky as Stebbins came to me after I'd finished Fool's Game and was turning my attention back to my meager Wish 3 notes; all I had up to the point that I began writing the fic was the idea of Toby and Kareem at the end, the fic being Toby's POV, and a snippet of the sideplot with Guerra and Alvarez. Look, I'm still ME, so even though I didn't want to use Miguel or Chico as the leads of the AU, after fandom wiki'ing the various book deaths to see how explicit the endings for the Walkers in the book were (compared to the movie), I liked the idea of mirroring Scramm and Mike's demise with Miguel and Chico just sitting down and getting shot. Drawing inspiration from Olson's catatonia also worked for Miguel with his canon dialogue about turning into a zombie, and I thought the idea of Miguel and Chico stubbornly dragging each other forward after being enemies (something that became meaningless once they were both on the path to their doom) was fun and poignant.

While I'm talking about stuff I didn't really like… I think I bungled Stanislofsky's ending a little by not making the whole "only ghosts in his past" thing come explicitly full circle, but then again, I guess it wasn't SUPER necessary to hit readers over the head with his whole deal. The story is from Toby's POV after all, so not really knowing what was going on there was… maybe okay? I hope. Stebbins in the book died pretty suddenly, too, and that was something I drew inspiration from as, in the course of writing Ten Toes Down, I borrowed a copy of the book on Libby and just skipped to the end to see how King/Bachman handled the final chapter. I knew, having looked up the novel after watching the movie, that the movie had been significantly changed, but the novel ending and style was very much more the type of ending that I enjoy writing myself (for psychological stories, anyway). That's why I ended up having Toby survive instead of Kareem for the fic… It also just made more sense with the planting of his family hallucinations and longing earlier in the fic. (Me reading the final chapter of the book for inspo is also why I included the Crowd in Ten Toes Down whereas had I just gone off the movie, there wouldn't have been a crowd at all, really... Boo!! One of my gripes with the movie after reading the book)

I think if I'd had more time to sit on it and edit, I would've liked to have tightened up Kareem's whole thing in the fic (speaking of planting and pay off). I'm still not sure if his death was really earned in my fic—I wanted to give him a poignant death but I also feel like I did a really shallow job of writing him. He comes off more as just support for Toby throughout 💀, which he certainly is... I mean, one motif I wanted to work into the fic was the idea that many of the other characters significantly contributed to Toby's survival over the course of the walk, and Kareem was definitely Toby's biggest emotional support... But I guess if I'd started the fic in more of the middle of the walk instead of the end, I could've built up Kareem's story from Toby's POV more—sketch out more moments where Kareem began to lose faith in the idea of his participation as martyrdom of some kind. My logic going into the fic was that Kareem would have signed up in solidarity with the other walkers (referencing him refusing Devlin's pardon in the show and remaining in Oz), only to begin to suspect as the walk went on that maybe it didn't matter… I sort of failed to give Kareem much depth, considering he's the secondary character in the fic. Boo me.

Anyway, I wrote the Highway to Hell for the dress factory having at that point finished reading the original novel. Basically, I read the ending to help figure out the spirit of the ending for Ten Toes Down, and then decided "hey, what the hell, might as well read the entire ebook—I've been wanting to read more books this year, anyway." So, having finished King/Bachman's book, I realised that there were a couple of things I couldn't handled differently in Ten Toes Down. At least, I found that there were elements of the novel that I would have liked to include in an AU because they just made so much sense for Oz in the first place.

One of those elements? The grapevine.

As such, Highway to Hell heavily features the little news network of the book, which I fully believe the inmates of Oz would have replicated, given how gossipy they are in the show. I also took this second attempt as an opportunity to indulge in making Miguel the protagonist and to try setting the fic in a different season but also earlier into the walk. Once again, Miguel and Guerra cast aside their rivalry because why not. Casting Jia Kenmin in a kind of Barkovitch inspired role was too good to pass up, although I ended up not making him as annoying. I had him walking with the O'Reilys in the fic as a sort of self-reference to my trend of using Oz fandom events to revisit Jia's dynamic with them and play with "what ifs" there. Speaking of the O'Reilys—I was tickled to read the book and realise that there were two brothers in it, after having already included both Cyril and Ryan in Ten Toes Down. It just makes sense that they'd both enter the walk. I can see Ryan rationalising to/deluding himself that despite the rules saying only one winner, if they out-walked all the others, they'd somehow bother make it.

In conclusion... I feel a little more confident in my writing for Highway to Hell in general. I think it's a tighter story and I sort of wish I'd read the whole book before writing Ten Toes Down, but at the same time, I think the only things I'd really change would be a couple of line edits and maybe more pointed dialogue and another conversation of some kind between Kareem and Toby.

Oh yeah, and I had fun brutally killing the Aryans in both fics, although looking back, I realise I sort of let Vern off the hook in terms of torture for both of them. I guess walking until you have a heart attack before the guy you were taunting was going to have a heart attack and no one giving a shit when you keel over, isolated and worn down, will have to be poetic justice enough.