Fanfiction Reviews: Tea With The Hatter (TGIF).

This will be my first public Fanfiction review.

The reason for this is fairly straight-forward: I think fanfics are amazing. I also think nobody really reviews them aside from commenting on them. I think if more people reviewed and signal-boosted good fanfiction, its virtues would become more well-known and more people would benefit from it.

The rules of how I will rate fanfics here are as follows:

1/2 of the score will be the “fanfiction as literary work” standard. With it, I will judge the work on its literary merits, and it will be composed of the following properties:

• Grammar / Spelling
• Character development
• Worldbuilding
• Structure
• Tropes

1/2 of the score will be the “fanfiction as its own thing” standard. With it, I will judge the work on its fanfiction merits, and it will be composed of the following properties:

• Respect for the original work.
• Adherence to the features that make the original work valuable enough to make fanfiction of it in the first place
• Alignment with the original work (this is different from “respect”, and may be considered “compliance” as in “canon compliant” or thematically compliant, etc)
• “Fandom value”, namely whether the work “contributes” to the fandom in what I deem to be a meaningful way
• Fun, by which I mean… How fun it is to read, given that you are a fan of that thing.

I have chosen Tea With The Hatter as my first fic for a very specific reason: It’s really really good. Therefore, this review will in part be a review of a fanfic I find particularly wonderful and widely recommend, and in part be a demonstration of how I think these features ought to be evaluated.

Additionally, there are the obvious disclaimers: This is about my taste, so on. However, I will do my best to review only fanfics I enjoy. My mental health requires it.

With all that out of the way… Let’s review.

Tea With The Hatter (TGIF): As a Work of Literature

Tea With The Hatter (TGIF), is a fanfic published in AO3 in 2018 by Theorytale, author of The Saga of Hug Fortress (which will also be reviewed here, eventually, because it is also so good). TL;DR? It’s good. Read it.

The fic begins on Thursday, November 14th, of 2013.

And then it stays there.

A lot.

The premise of the fanfic is that Tony Stark (our primary PoV character, written in a tasteful but still quirky 3rd person limited that aligns well with the character’s voice) is in a day-long timeloop. The fic has seven chapters, the first of them titled “Six More Weeks of Winter”. Its summary sets the perfect tone for the first chapter before it even begins:

It’s seven a.m., Thursday fourteenth November, 2013.

It always is.

The proceeding three chapters are an in-depth exploration of what the psychological consequences of Groundhog Day would actually be. Especially for someone in a position of power.

In theory, the idea of being able to do anything you wanted with no consequences sounded like a lot of fun. When you were Tony Stark, however… you’d already done most of the things you wanted with no consequences. It turned out not to be particularly different to any other day that ended in -y.

But there were no new movies. No new jokes. No new proposals from R&D to review.

I’m going to try to refrain from quoting it too much, because I have already linked to it and I don’t want to unnecessarily pad the length of this review, but suffice it to say that it’s incredibly interesting. The human brain isn’t… built in such a way that it is easy, or healthy, to deal with that kind of monotony and reading this again during the pandemic made me it feel astonishingly relevant.

There is no “time” when you are trapped in a time loop. There is no real “before” and “after”, it all blends together. The idea of the timeloop works incredibly well as a metaphor for other, similar circumstances that can warp somebody’s psyche. The menial job, the pandemic lockdown, the experience of having particularly bad executive skills or ADHD or anxiety problems. All of those involve a warping of the perception of time, the perception of what a consequence is.

Time and time again, in the first few chapters, Tony struggles to regain a concept of “consequences”. The timeloop affects him so much that when they finally get out… He needs to leave a cup on the table overnight. To see it stay there. There’s even this beautiful little exchange:

It wasn’t four in the morning, he realized. Or, it was — according to his watch — but there was daylight under a dull, overcast sky. He barely registered Loki speaking, too busy frowning out the window. Unease stirred in his chest. “I don’t think it worked.”

Loki moved closer, tone sharp and concerned. “What makes you say that?”

Tony gestured outside. “The sky… it looks fake. That’s not Manhattan sky.”

Tony has lived what probably amounts to years (the actual amount of “time”/repetitions they spend in the timeloop is left fairly ambiguous) of the same day over and over, and the same day means the same weather. Different weather in Manhattan does not… compute. It “looks fake”. That’s not “how the day goes”. Because there is just one day.

This is another psychological consequence of the timeloop that gets explored very well in this fic. Tony over and over questions the idea that there is a time outside “the day”. That there is a before or after, that the entire world around him is not simply a glitch in a bizarre simulation, and any illusion of a time past is subject to the same logic as the 5-minute hypothesis. “The world was created at the beginning of the day, with all of the features that would suggest evidence of the past being created at that time too”. Every memory from before the time loop, every person clearly born before it, everything just a product of the same mechanism that starts the universe over every single day.

Fri…what? That wasn’t even a thing, that was like ‘tomorrow’ and the other imaginary words.

The exploration of the psychological toll that a timeloop would have on the one person who knows it’s happening is very good, but there is also more to the story. An entire second central character, for one, and he is written equally brilliantly.

Loki.

For a character so prone to shapeshifting and deceit, chaos and destruction, Loki seems to have a surprisingly stable characterization in fanfiction about the MCU. He’s often framed as a tragic and traumatized figure, with the real blame being laid at the hands of Odin, who really really sucks. In the writers’ defense, Odin does really really suck.

This fanfic has a very sane Loki. A version of him that has had the time, however long it took, to work on his own issues and to be separated from the immediacy of his own pain. This Loki is not blinded by wrath or by inadequacy, or by his own nature. He is in many ways very different from the Loki we have come to know in the MCU, but he is in other ways more himself than we have ever seen him in the MCU. More… Whoever he would be, if he was not constantly under stress. Smiling and joking in the manner we see glimpses of in Thor: Ragnarok.

This Loki is unburdened.

It’s an incredibly thin line to walk, keeping him in-character with everything we know about him up until his appearance in the first Avengers film (this fanfic is set before even Captain America: Winter Soldier) while at the same time showing him having undergone so much growth and change off-screen by the time we see him for the first time.

It doesn’t hurt that the first thing he does is, of course, literally murdering our protagonist. Some things change. Others don’t.

The central relationship between Tony and Loki is very well-written, and it evolves in great part through delightful bits of snark. How well it is written is to be expected, though. The relationships between all of the characters, especially once they finally leave the timeloop, are all handled masterfully by Theorytale. The same is true of the worldbuilding.

You might think that worldbuilding is very specifically one of the things you don’t have to do in fanfiction. After all, is not the whole point that the world comes at you pre-made? If you don’t think that, good job paying attention.

The world of the MCU is incredibly poorly built, largely due to a combination of A) being written by a lot of different people at different times trying to do different things, and B) being based on Marvel comics, which have problem A times infinity. How specific mechanisms work is very unclear and inconsistent, and there are a million nerds on the internet at the ready to explain how and why, so I won’t really bother with the details. Google “MCU plotholes” or something, and you’ll find it.

As such, every single MCU fanfic writer has to ask a question of themself. What do they do with that world? How much do they throw away? How much do they keep? How will they explain things? What things will they simply avoid explaining or even bringing up?

In Tea With The Hatter, Theorytale walks a lot of very fine lines, but the finest of them all in my eyes is the way in which the fic handles the science/magic dichotomy in which magical space vikings use wormholes and fight people in robot-suits. A world with one system that ancient people would have called magic, and we may call science, but…

Doing this not only requires having a good-enough handle on the physics and philosophy of the situation to explain it competently (and as far as I can tell, the whole thing makes sense given the constraints we’re given) but also having a good handle on what would or would not be explainable using modern science, and what things to interrogate or not to interrogate.

For example, the whole idea of epiphenomenalism is just explained without ever using the term “epiphenomenalism”, and many of the questions that the time loop creates are not fully answered in great part because how could they? With what equipment? Using what falsification criterion?

It’s not just a question about the motivation characters may have to inquire about certain things, it’s also about the intradiegetic limitations with which they have to struggle. The ways in which the world of science can sometimes move one inch at a time, and you just have to accept a 0.01% increment in your certainty about a thing as “a win”.

The world of Tea With The Hatter is a world in which someone has actually bothered to think through “how the fuck does that even work?” exactly enough to create an illusion of consistency derived from the raw materials of a deeply inconsistent franchise. It explores little quirks of language, the culture of the frost giants, the freedom and also the caged and cornered feelings that can both come with the notion of “no consequences”. On the one hand, you can do anything and nothing matters! On the other hand, you can do anything. And nothing matters.

It’s beautiful. Reading it is a little like watching an olympic gymnast flipping through the air, suspended in graceful defiance of what we may think the human body is capable of. Or perhaps a little like seeing a particularly beautiful mechanism in a machine work perfectly.

In terms of structure and tropes, I think its beauty is in its depth and not necessarily in any further innovation. It’s all well-executed, but the focus of the story was clearly in its characters and its world, and further innovation may have made it a little too avant-garde for pleasant consumption.

Tea With The Hatter (TGIF): As Fanfiction

You may have noticed that Tea With The Hatter is a particular flavour of slash. It’s a curiously tame form of slash, for one, enough that I would label it more in the vein of just “shipping” given the prevalence of M/M pairings in fanfiction. “Slash” has always had this transgressive connotation in my eyes, while Tea With The Hatter has a sense of inevitability about it. Of course that would happen. Obviously. It is the mark of a good shipper, to place characters in just the right positions for their love to feel like a necessary consequence of the established world.

It’s a good ship. There’s something simply fun about it, about the banter, Ironfrost always looks to me like the kind of ship that will please now-angry fans of Game of Thrones or Gilmore Girls. The kind of ship that relies on the little pleasures of banter and snark. The same charm of a buddy cop movie, without the obligatory compulsory heterosexuality to be found therein.

In judging how well a work of fanfiction functions “as a work of fanfiction”, I have laid out certain criteria. Tea With The Hatter features all of them.

Firstly, it is very respectful of the original work in my eyes. There are no Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality shennanigans here, where it becomes progressively more self-evident that the writer of the fanfic is coming from a place of distaste or even disdain for the original work. Tea With the Hatter comes from a place of love, and perhaps a small amount of disappointment with the MCU in its canon form. Then again, who isn’t a little disappointed in the MCU’s canon form?

Secondly, it adheres very tightly to the virtues of the original work. The banter is delightful, the worldbuilding is vastly improved upon, the dynamics are well-explored and fascinating.

Thirdly, for something so innovative and bizarre it is also hilariously canon-compliant. There’s not one fact out of place, one event out of time. It diverges after the point when it is set, but never before. Not relevantly, anyway.

Fourthly, it contributes greatly to the world of Ironfrost shipping in particular, as a delightful example of why that ship works at all. It’s the banter. The wit. Take two of the snarkiest characters in the MCU, shove them in a room together… and have fun.

This is a fun fanfic.

I have dedicated a lot of words to why it is good, but there is something simply fun about it.

When Tony and Loki first realize that the other is aware of the time loop, they are necessarily enemies (as that was their position immediately after the first Avengers film) and proceed to just murder each other for several iterations of the day.

Many of their best scenes involve arguing about science and magic and the overlap therein, scenes in which they are both curious about whatever the other one is capable of teaching them, while also thinking they know more than their interlocutor and their whole discipline is a little bit stupid and annoying. That mirroring of their arrogance, of their path towards growth… Is fun.

I love that Loki is simultaneously interested in and done with basically everything. He talks like a man who has become so removed from his own life that the drama of his own near-death experience has “worn off”. Even in the little moments, there is a casualness about him, a comfort. The patience of someone who, well, has had time. Not always. But more. Much more than in canon, and for a good justified reason.

I love that Darcy Lewis thinks Tony Stark is a creep. That the fic doesn’t shy away from what it means for a character to be constantly “seductive” throughout his pre-story life, in a way that the MCU itself doesn’t really acknowledge. It has to be a breach of something to sleep with a journalist writing a story about you, and that’s just in the first act of the first film. The fact of Ironman having a positive character arc in which he is progressively less of a dick itself requires that he have been more of a dick at previous times, and people don’t just automatically get updates when someone grows as a person. The Tony Stark of the start of the first film is probably the only side of Tony that Lewis and Foster would have had any access to, and she would have had no reason nor opportunity to update on that judgement.

I love that people are suitably freaked out once the timeloop ends. That there are consequences to them outside of our protagonist(s), that we cannot fully know what those were beyond “what do you think would happen if Odin and Tony Stark both vanished on the same day with no explanation?”.

I love that SHIELD thinks Loki did some brainwashing bullshit, because that would be the simplest explanation for Tony Stark vanishing for a few days and suddenly reappearing with a vast new skillset, the ability to use Allspeak, and an inexplicable fondness for the guy who tried to take over the planet.

I love that Tony keeps thinking “okay, next time, I will — ” and realizing that he can’t. There is no next time. There are just other new moments. The timeloop has broken and it will remain broken. Cognitive inertia like that isn’t usually explored very well, and this fanfic does it.

I love the consistent repetitiveness of everyone. The way it makes the reader experience a little bit of the exhaustion Tony and Loki do. Not enough to be unpleasant, but enough to understand some of the toll this can take on a human psyche.

I love the lines. There are some really good lines in this fanfic. Like:

“Whoa, whoa.” Tony rapidly motioned ‘stop’ with his hands. “What happened to ‘O Great and Magnificent Stark, I bring you the gift of please-help-me’? You know, that’s your problem, Loki; you don’t commit.”

And:

Loki lifted his chin, haughty and scornful. The evacuation alarm was still going in the background. “So you’ve discovered nothing.”

“Well, if you count formulating a new theory of the universe as nothing, then sure.”

Loki’s expression suggested he did, in fact, count that as ‘nothing’.

And:

“Did you literally just compare consciousness to CBS,” Tony said.

It’s just… a lot of fun.

It’s been a hard year. Hell, it’s been a hard year-and-a-half for me, personally.

I like fun.

IN CONCLUSION

Tea With The Hatter(TGIF) by Theorytale is a delightful fanfic to rival many traditionally published “original” fiction books I have read. I highly recommend it. It has a handful of typos, but not more than a few traditionally published books I have purchased.

As a piece of fiction, fan or otherwise, it is fantastic. As a fanwork and as a piece of Ironfrost “slash” specifically, it is also fantastic. It is a study in proper shipping, in which the bond of the characters feels natural and inevitable. It is a study in proper fanfiction worldbuilding, in which the hodge-podge of the original work is crafted into something marginally more sensical. It is a study in the exploration of the psychological consequences of repetition and time-displacement, where the consequences it has on characters don’t stop the moment they get out.

And it’s really funny.

A++, 10/10, will reread.