This page is not what the link you clicked said it was; sorry about that! When links in the fic you're reading don't go to a real-world webpage or to a fake social media post, they send you here instead, where you get out-of-universe author's notes. Most of them from here on out will be bonus headcanons or process blogs, but this one is a boring regular A/N, sorry!
I'd like to thank avery_p, adastreia, cataliepaquette, and projynova for helping me come up with all these fake usernames, and unravelledclementines, for listening to me slowly go insane for a month, providing feedback on the first draft, standing in for Riccardo, and also coming up with a username or two.
This fic originally started out in the drafts as an in-universe r/AskHistorians thread, but I don't go on Reddit that much, and wasn't sure if I'd be able to pin down the tone as easily as more overtly fannish meta. So tumblr it was! A huge part of the outlining process was trying to figure out what Daniel would put in the book, what an in-universe reader would be able to figure out for themself, and what assumptions they might make. I ended up deciding that it was most fun to leave things very open-ended: here's a variety of options and potential readings with their own complications, here's an outsider POV reading a very biased and limited POV and making certain assumptions while presuming IWTV to be fictitious in-universe (like, Noor's opinions about Alice might be very different to a truther's), and you can take from all of it what you will. Like, please take something out of this fic. Anything. I'd be over the moon if someone was inspired to explore some of the concepts in here in a more traditional format.
My enemy number one was the timeline. Dates are really weird here, and because dates are weird, ages are also weird, and coming up with a way to approach the inclusion of in-universe archival documents and certain unavoidable hard dates without forcing a particular interpretation of the timeline one way or another was brutal. I think it ended up working out in the end, but honestly, if it didn't? Don't burst my bubble. Let me pretend I can do basic math.
Lastly, thank you for reading - both this note, and the fic as a whole.
Love,
graiai @ ao3/dw