Archive of Our Own

Hey everybody. It’s impravidus here. So, Starry and I wanted to put out some bonus content during this trying time to try and give you guys something to smile for and to give you something to read while we are working on the fourth book. Originally, we had recorded a podcast, but the footage has been lost, so I decided to do a little write up instead.

This is just a little behind the scenes about Starry and I and how “and they were roommates” came to be. So, we hope you enjoy!

OUR BACKSTORY

So, Starry and I have been neighbors basically all of our lives. We met on the bus when we were in second grade, but only really became close when we were in the same third grade class. I don’t remember much of elementary school, but I do remember going to the zoo with Starry and being paired with her for the big science project and doing tests on different soils and their effects on the growth of plants. 

The two of us drifted during middle school when Starry went to private school and I stayed in public school, and we only got back in touch last year when we were in the same physics and AP Lang class.

Starry was constantly typing on her phone, and she was quite secretive of her personal projects. It wasn’t until we got closer did she finally reveal to me that what she was writing was Marvel fan fiction. (It was her “Just gonna let ‘em hate” series, if you were wondering.)

Neither of us were strangers to fan fiction. Starry had previously written Naruto fan fiction and I had an embarrassing past of middle school My Little Pony, One Direction, and Minecraft fanfiction. However, in December 2018, I entered the fan fiction world again with a more professional writing style with Miraculous Ladybug fanfiction.

I personally was never a fan of Marvel movies. I had seen the Guardians of the Galaxy films and Spider-Man: Homecoming, but I didn’t know their affiliation to the Marvel universe, and I didn’t even know who Tony Stark was.

Starry was the one who really got me into the fandom. We had watched Iron Man 1 together, but after that, I just got hooked, and ended up binging them every night for weeks.

The fandom that Starry had specifically got me hooked on was Parkner. I had never seen Iron Man 3 before, so my only impression of Harley Keener was through the fandom. Authors like MayWilder and PeachyKeener made me love Parkner, and the characters, and I knew I wanted to be part of it.

Coming up with the roommates series was unexpected. I had been reading Parkner fan fic and noticed that there was a lack of one of my favorite tropes. Here are some screenshots from our first texts:

The concept of the enemies to friends to lovers roommates fics actually came from a Miraculous Ladybug fic called “Obsidian” I was writing. The original idea was that Harley would be and ass just for the sake of being an ass and to test Peter and see how he could push all of his buttons. However, we strayed from that idea and added the orphan edge.

When we first started planning the fic, we had thought to make them college roommates. Starry was very set on the college roommates edge whereas I was leaning towards the flatmates. However, I persuaded her to join my side when I brought up the idea of Harley bothering Peter with bringing people over to “woohoo.”

I will further cement the fact that I knew nothing about Harley Keener and bring up that I had no idea that Harley even knew Tony in canon. (Starry helped me a lot with that part.)

So, Starry and I hopped on a three hour call and we outlined the first book. Here is a peek at the original outline:

Writing roommates has become a big part of our relationship. We have our own language when it comes to the roommates series. Some of those vocabulary words include:

• uwu: when Peter and Harley are having a fluffy bonding moment
• November Rain/Sweater Weather: The drabble chapters that each book has
• First/Second/Third fight: This is how we differentiated the chapters in the first book before we had named them. Fun Fact: We had thought that the third fight at the end of the first book was the best thing we would ever write for the series. However, as the series has progressed, so has our writing, and our fights have gotten more intense each time.

We also have learned a lot about each other and our writing styles working on this fic together. Starry is the master at angst, animated action scenes, and everything that has to do with kidnapping and torture. I, on the other hand, love fluff, emotion, and dialogue. I will, first and foremost, be a script writer, and that bleeds into my writing a lot. After writing two one-acts, three short films, and a full two act musical, I’ve focused a lot of my life on realistic dialogue, and that is my main concern when it comes to my writing. Starry makes sure that each moment is expanded in its action and I show emotion through their words, and that’s how we balance each other.

A lot of time has gone into this series, and will continue to be put into the series as it progresses. One thing that I put a lot of extra effort in is naming the chapters. I always try to reflect the feeling of the chapter through the song, and also want to share some awesome music with the readers.

If you ever want to take a listen to all the songs, I have made a playlist, and am constantly adding new songs as I continue to write new chapters. Here is the playlist with all the songs the chapters were named after!

Now, for what you all are probably here for: the behind the scenes commentary about the three books that are out and first look at the fourth book. 

LOATHING (UNADULTERATED LOATHING)

CHANGES

• Here is a deleted line that Harley was supposed to have when we first planned for him to be more like Adrien Agreste in my MLB fic: “I’ve been pushing your buttons and seeing what makes you tic, but you haven’t cracked once. You just put up with everything. But what was the last straw?”
• Macy died of cancer originally. She also didn’t die on her birthday in the original draft.
• There was originally going to be a chapter after the First Burn where it listed the problems Peter had with Harley but we moved that to be the second chapter because we had thought it was better to address their issues earlier in the fic.
• We regretted not making the connection that Ty Simpkins was in Jurassic World, and we mentioned that Peter has met Peter Quill, but we have specifically implied that this fic is not Infinity War and Endgame compliant so we made a very recent change to the line. 
• “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” was originally named “We Don’t Have To Talk (We Don’t Have To Dance).” However, Starry pointed out that they did in fact dance in that chapter so it didn’t make sense. 
• There was originally a fake relationship side plot where Ned or MJ was going to pretend to date Peter to get Harley to stop digging into his “abusive relationship.” We scrapped this idea when we realized it would cause more conflict that we didn’t want to deal with. 

COMMENTARY

• We didn’t expect to write more than one fic at first. We thought it was going to be a long fic a mid-fic climax and cliffhanger. After we started writing, we had figured it would be two books long, three at most, but now that we have three more in the works in addition to the four we have already written, that expectation has gone out the window. 
• Abby was never supposed to live with them at first; we never planned to make her as big of a character as she became. We honestly never expected Abby to become the character she did. She was more of a one off character, one added in obligation because of her relationship with Harley, but as we explored her relationships with Harley and Peter, she just grew. 
• There are plot points we have forgotten as we’ve written. Some of those include the fact that May didn’t know that Peter was Spider-Man when she passed (which we fixed in recent edits) and the fact that Abby is nine years old. For the last months, for some reason we do not know, we were under the impression that Abby was twelve, despite the fact that we knew she was in fifth grade. If anything, it brought up more questions like why she was twelve and in fifth grade, or why we wrote her like a nine year old. 
• The whole series snowballed into angstier and angstier content that we never planned. 

THAT WOULD BE ENOUGH

CHANGES

• We started writing this book June 18, only two weeks after we had first outlined the first book. 
• Aftershocks and Model Behavior (originally named Misunderstandings) were originally written in the first book before we realized we wanted to have a several book series.
• We also had prewritten excerpts of This Is Halloween and Holdin Out For A Hero before we had written the rest of the book.
• The kissing scene for thanksgiving was written before most of the book. I had written it as an out of context drabble and inserted it later when had more of the fic written. 
• We planned the final chapter, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, very early on. and it was written before we had written the chapters leading up to it.
• We had originally thought this would lead to them getting custody and everyone lives happily ever after but that’s not what happened.

COMMENTARY

• There is a timeline of the first book and second book from when we planned the series on Starry’s bedroom wall. We had gotten together one day and wrote out all the plot points we knew we needed in the second and third book and taped them up into a timeline. (Yes, there is a full timeline to this story, and we follow it strictly and make sure our pop culture references make sense for the dates.)
• We never planned for Abby to be trans. Starry had read a fic with trans!Abby and suggested we implement that into our fic. Neither of us have a personal relationship to being trans rather than me being nonbinary. (Update 1/31/21 I am now a trans man.)
• After the first book had some complaints about pacing, we made a big note not to have Peter forgive Harley too quickly. We wanted his redemption to be realistic and for reactions to make sense, so throughout the series, we have tried to make the slowburn be true slowburn and for things to take time to resolve.
• The paragraph break format changed in the middle of the second book due to my fic, “The Proposal.” I had created .-~*~-. for that fic and had become so attached to it, that I had to add it to this series. 
• Harley and Peter were supposed to kiss before Thanksgiving but we decided the wait should be as prolonged as possible. Starry was the one who brought up the idea of Peter with the custody papers and that being what prompts the kiss. 
• We wrote the Abby kidnapping before we planned the big Harley kidnapping, but we consider it to be good foreshadowing though we never planned it to be.
• The physics projects they do in the fic are the ones that Starry and I were partners on in our IRL physics class. (We failed the mouse trap car.) 
• We never address the consequences of them going in their suits on Halloween. You would think that someone would notice them, or at least, Tony would notice Peter was in his suit. 
• In this second book, we made a lot of references to the first book and how things that were once a problem are now resolved through their new relationship like the allen wrench or the groceries. 
• We really did plan for Ned and MJ to be bigger characters, but they just never ended up being ones. 

IT’S TOO LATE

CHANGES

• We started writing this on September 16 and posted January 1.
• It was planned to be so much fluffier. We had a whole page of outline with bullet points of Abby & Peter & Harley fluff, but we decided to wait to use those for the later installments. 
• The first thing we thought would be in this book was a “Peter blood loss” chapter that Starry wrote. It was two pages long. It featured loopy Peter due to blood loss acting like drunk Harley.
• The kidnapping was one of the first things we outlined for this fic. Originally it was because Harley was going to get a last minute ingredient for Christmas supper. This was before we had even planned for another kiss. 

COMMENTARY

• I spent two hours researching custody cases to try to be as accurate as I could be, but it was very difficult because it’s such a specific case. I ended up doing a lot of made up law. We also planned for them to adopt Abby, but guardianship was the faster, easier process. 
• The way that Peter and Harley process their grief through repetition and dissociation stems from my personal experience with it. I feel like repetition really showcases the mindset of inner turmoil.
• I wrote the majority of the third book while Starry was a major idea maker. By this book, Starry had been drifting from the Parkner fandom and was moving onto Batfam, so she did a lot of the outline work while I did the majority of the writing.
• Starry likes to insert Team Red into the fic; that is her specialty. Anything written about Team Red is done by Starry.
• We didn’t plan to have another two kisses in this book but I love writing kisses and it felt appropriate.
• We also didn’t plan to have three kidnappings in this series. However, they now all have an overarching reason, and it will be addressed. 
• Starry did most of the planning for the kidnapping. She has an extensive knowledge on torture techniques and PTSD, so she helped a lot with that. 
• How and why did we make up Oglaholland and Iyezbeckestan? As writers, sometimes it is easier to make up your own places so that you don’t have to do extensive research on something you don’t have to. We ended up just keyboard smashing and deciphering the nonsense. There is no relation to Tom Holland. That was an accident.
• We had to do intense research on Olga Holland when we realized we wanted a real life connection to Oglaholland for Peter to get his clue from. We didn’t know she existed before we started writing, and she has basically zero reviews on Amazon. We were originally going to reference her book “Dragons of Autism” but we didn’t want to offend anyone and didn’t know how to incorporate it.
• We are planning a one-shot to show an inside eye on the rest of the months that Harley was gone.
• Starry wrote the break in scene for the last chapter and it was heavily inspired by batman fanfiction, specifically Red Hood.

BOOK FOUR SNEAK PEEK

• We are planning to write about 25,000 words for book four.
• It only has ten chapters.
• We will be having four “November Rain/Sweater Weather” chapters including over fifty drabbles.
• It will be the heaviest and angstiest of the series.

Thank you all so much for reading. We cannot thank you enough and show you how grateful we are to have such amazing readers like you guys. We have a lot planned and we hope you stick around for all of it. Thank you for your kind words, and your commitment, and all the time you’ve put into this fic. Thank you for being you.

Stay safe.

-impravidus