han100894:

mzminola:

I always assumed Gil & Agatha were both 18 but I can’t find it actually stated explicitly in the comic or the Secret Blueprints (though those say he’s only been dragged around the Empire getting tested for a month, he pretty much just left Paris, I’d thought it had been a little longer than that) but it seems a lot of the fandom is saying Gil’s a few years older than Agatha. Is that from the novelizations or something?

It’s stated in the novels that Gil turns 22 while Agatha is with the circus (giving him a spring birthday and having him be 21 during the Castle Wulfenbach arc) It’s also implied that Agatha has only recently turned 18 that winter (as the comic starts in March). In a reddit interview from a while ago someone asked for Zeetha and Gil’s ages and was given 21/22 as well. (Which means they are almost 25 (Will be once spring comes) post timeskip since they lived through it). Tarvek’s age is never stated though as he seems to be around Gil’s age in the backstory on Castle Wulfenbach. It’s pretty simple to think that happened around when Gil was eight (or late 7) since Zoing was his breakthrough project and breaking through because he lost his only friend makes some sense there.

My understanding is that a lot of the timeline weirdness is because originally the Other war lasted only a year but was then retconned into three years, forcing Gil’s age to increase. The retcon happened pretty early on I believe but it dose mess with a little bit of the early stuff.

professorsparklepants:

iztarshi:

firecoloredwater:

iztarshi:

firecoloredwater:

iztarshi:

firecoloredwater:

han100894:

firecoloredwater:

iztarshi:

firecoloredwater:

professorsparklepants:

theroyalzookeeper:

*reading through some Klaus discussion things that have popped up again*

Y’know… Has anyone yet considered the notion of what would’ve been different if all three Wulfenbach brothers had lived?

Firstly on a level of Heterodyne Boys era… Would they all have gone on adventures together? Would there be one of more that’d be distrustful, even disapproving of Bill and Barry? Would Klaus have had a couple extra people that would’ve tried to talk some sense into him about his relationship with Lucrezia, or would it have gone down as it had canonically, leaving his siblings with the worry of what’d happened to him, to search until they’d started to wonder whether or not he was even still alive? Certainly there’d have been someone to stay back at their home town to try to defend it from the Other’s attacks, but two more people probably wouldn’t make much of a difference against the wasps. They might try to rebuild, but when the Heterodynes vanish and the whole rest of the world starts to fall apart, they decide they need a new strategy. Perhaps the beginnings of the empire are already in motion when Klaus comes staggering back from Skifander with a son in tow. Perhaps Europa is already won.

Comic era, they’d split their duties of running things. Don’t make any of us come over there. They are essentially a single, seamless unit of power, though Klaus is the best-regarded out of them. People gossip about how it wasn’t all his idea, he was just roped into it, and how he’s really secretly working to bring the Heterodynes back. Truthfully he’s every bit the same as he is in any universe, but people need to hope for something, and it may as well be the meta-Spark whose role isn’t quite so defined as say, the brother directly overseeing military operations.

There’s a lot less external pressure on Gil in this environment, but perhaps it goes too far the other way. Klaus is probably still a disaster of a father, and if anything the poor boy might get lost in the shuffle. After all, he’s not the sole heir of a single man anymore. Heck, he might even have cousins, and God only knows how they all get along (At the same time, this might gain him a bit more sympathy towards Tarvek. Just a bit, mind. It’s hard to get more messed up than the Sturmvorauses). He may have to fight a bit for his own relevancy, though falling head-over-heels for the Heterodyne-Mongfish girl probably does a very good job at that.

Naturally Agatha is the rift where this whole setup starts to fall apart. Everybody’s got a different opinion on what to do about her. Interesting plot conflict ensues.

Other less painful more silly rifts include: one uncle definitely ships Agiltha while the other wonders whatever happened with the Sturmvoraus boy. Klaus says shut up they’re both terrible and why are we still talking about this

Okay. So. First important question: if they do get along with the Heterodyne boys and go adventuring with them, would they help fight the wasps? Would they go to the final battle to save lucrezia? Would they know about Agatha?

Second important question: Is Klaus the oldest, the youngest, or the middle child? Because that’s going to have a bit of an impact on whether they decide to work with him, against him, or knock him upside the head. 

Third important question: Would Gil be the gay cousin?

“Third important question: Would Gil be the gay cousin?“

*suddenly dies of laughter*

OKAY.  That aside.  If Klaus’s brothers went searching for him, what would happen if they found him?  Like, Gil and Zeetha are a month old, Klaus is starting to panic about the twin thing, and then suddenly his brothers show up, possibly with their families.

Or, if they didn’t, would they have been able to do something that kept their parents alive?  (Intentionally, or just accidentally went on vacation at the time Wulfenbach was attacked.)  Because if so, then 1: Klaus would wander into Wulfenbach that, yes, got destroyed, but also there is at least some start to rebuilding, which could change the impact it has on him, and 2: either his parents would definitely be able to hit him over the head and tell him not to take over the continent, or if they were inclined toward peace via conquering, they could be the emperor and empress and Klaus would be the heir.

Assuming that there was an empire and Klaus was in charge of it… hm.  It would depend on exactly what Klaus’s brothers were like, especially if they were or were not also very strong sparks.  It seems fairly likely to me that like… they’d split up the work, but also Klaus would be in charge?  His brothers would be his closest support, sort of like Van (should be) to Agatha, or like Boris but also able to order him to go to bed when he needs it or tell him he’s being too ruthless and to cut that out.  Which, moral support and limits on Klaus has its own effects, but also: then he already has family as weak points that assassins are going after.  He can’t just hide his brothers to keep them safe, and they wouldn’t let him anyway.  So he has to find a way to keep them (and any family they have) safe that doesn’t involve pretending he has none, and once he can do that, why not also protect Gil the same way?

I think, especially if the brothers had children, it might change the KoJ plans too because once you have a whole family ruling that’s a dynasty, they’re not going away.

On the other hand if any of them had daughters that’s an alternative to a Heterodyne Girl that is more practical and less predicated on legend.

Actually Tarvek’s entire family would probably be trying to marry Gil’s entire family to get in on that.

…Can you just imagine if they did this by sending all the kids as hostages with instructions to find a Wulfenbach cousin and flirt.  Like.  Tarvek is seven and supposed to find a Wulfenbach and make her like him but the only Wulfenbach that’s remotely close to his age is Gil, so….

If I remember right, The Wulfenbach family was known for both being a spark run town, and surprisingly staying out of everyone else business and not acting like a normal spark run town.

So If any of them are alive I see that highly decreasing the chance of an Empire, or at least an Empire that big. Klaus only decided he needed to do the Empire thing after finding out his home and family was destroyed.

So maybe a smaller empire, actually built only of people who attached Wulfenbach at most?

That’s about what I remember hearing, yeah.  I do think that no or very small empire is much more likely (which makes me wonder what the whole Storm King set would have been doing…), just that if Klaus managed to get from ‘stay out of things’ to ‘conquer the empire to make it safe,’ it’s not impossible that his family might too, or that he might be able to persuade them to back him up.

Klaus kind of went “Attack my home and I will CONQUER YOU so you can’t do it again”. No one listened.

I could see the Wulfenbachs doing something like that. On the other hand, if Wulfenbach was still standing, Klaus might feel less aggressive towards the idea of it being attacked and be content with defending it rather than retaliating.

I could also see them winding up with something more like Gil’s current Empire where people keep joining because they seriously need help from someone who still has resources, but it probably wouldn’t get anywhere near as big. For one thing, it couldn’t be patchwork the way Gil’s is without an airship to run it from.

*considers* The KoJ might do the same thing, actually. They still have resources – more of them – because Lucrezia was avoiding their holdings. So they might be the ones to wind up with people willingly joining an Empire rather than starve. Klaus would probably hate them less if they did something useful too.

Ooooor they might do what they usually do in an emergency and all fight one another for the right to get the credit for solving it, in the process making everything worse.

I do remember he at least started that way, but he seems to have eventually… I don’t know, picked up momentum?  I think I remember a comment about Aaronev “rolled right over” when Klaus arrived, which doesn’t sound like he was attacking Klaus to begin with, and presumably Beetle wasn’t but Klaus was quite certain he’d taken over Beetleburg long ago too.  So even if he started out limited to retaliation, he doesn’t seem to have stayed there very long.  (Although, I could see the family all starting there, and when Klaus starts to go further a brother/parent hits him over the head and drags him home to be yelled at until he cuts it out.)

…All fighting each other sounds right to me.  Which would change Tarvek’s childhood a lot, I’d think, if his family is all actually going to war with each other and not just sneaking around with politics and assassinations….

There are, iirc, two accounts of Klaus’s Empire building. One is that he took over everything that attacked Wulfenbach. The other is that he drew circles around Wulfenbach and conquered everything inside them in turn.

It’s entirely possible he started with the first and then moved onto the second, because if he’s going to have an Empire he’s going to commit dammit. (And, yeah, someone smacking him over the head at that point might have been good.)

Starting with retaliation and then later (although, more like a few years later) moving to the circles is more or less what I’ve settled on, yeah.  (Honestly someone smacking Klaus over the head at key points would solve 95% of everything in that world, really.)

Haha. Although, honestly, I’m not entirely sure Klaus was wrong to create the Empire. Like, morally, I guess conquering people is wrong. Practically he probably saved a hell of a lot of lives.

It’s mentioned in the novelization that the Baron offered supplies during a particularly bad winter in exchange for Beetleburg folding into the empire. 

I can’t recall where (or even whether it was the comic or the novelization) but I remember someone mentioning–either Klaus or Gil–that in the early days, people were perfectly happy to get absorbed into the empire. Everyone was so devastated by the Other War that they didn’t care who they were getting aid from, so long as they were getting it. It wasn’t until later, after the rebuilding had ended, that people started resenting the Baron and calling him an upstart.

Man, I wish I could remember where it was, that’s gonna bug me. 

hands-of-blue:

constancecomment:

tanoraqui:

asukaskerian:

hands-of-blue:

Where is my 20s Girl Genius AU with mob boss Agatha who has taken over the family business and is more than a little bit out of her depth versus rival detectives Gil and Tarvek who are having to (extremely reluctantly) (they have a History™) work together to track down the new criminal in town who is not actually doing anything that bad? But it’s the principle of the thing, and also their orders because Gil’s father is the chief of police and they’re both screwed if they don’t get this sorted.

(Tarvek’s father is a ridiculously important businessman who is constantly breaking laws that Klaus can’t get him for, and who is eternally angry at Tarvek’s decision to get the hell out of the family home ASAP.) (Anevka is the socialite who is a very good front for her father’s money laundering and is slowly plotting his downfall, so basically canon there.)

Gkika’s bar is the front for the Heterodyne crime empire, Agatha is a vaudeville actress there as her ‘day job’ since she can’t be manager like the previous Heterodynes were, alongside Zeetha (who is totally in on it) and a few others including Lars (who is very much not in on it).

Cue the antics including Gil and Tarvek simultaneously falling madly in love with Agatha ‘Clay’ while sneakily investigating Gkika’s. (Zeetha basically tells her to seduce them in order to get them off their backs and stop investigating them. It doesn’t work. Well, the seducing does – the leaving her alone bit definitely doesn’t.)

oh god i want this so badly D:

oh! oh oh oh! @constancecomment and I have a thoroughly-planned-but-mostly-unwritten-but-we-SWEAR-WE’RE-GONNA-DO-IT-SOMEDAY Prohibition AU set in Atlantic City where Agatha has just taken over/resurrected her family’s mob “business” and Tarvek is her business/political rival moving into town expanding the Tammany Hall outfit, and Gil is a police detective trying to deal with all of the above plus a string of mysterious disappearances! Klaus is Police Chief and Zeetha is part of Bang’s all-female smuggling gang.

coming eventually to an archive near you! 

I did not expect for someone to already have something in the works

super-who-do-you-think-i-am:

a-land-lacking-sleep:

super-who-do-you-think-i-am:

a-land-lacking-sleep:

lesbiandelphidiggory:

a-land-lacking-sleep:

lesbiandelphidiggory:

tflatte:

lesbiandelphidiggory:

au where everything is the same but agatha is fucking ripped from assisting with the clays mechanic shop

gil falls for her when she’s sleepwalking and he’s in her way so she just. picks him up. gets what she’s after. puts him down again. goes back to work.

im not even remotely surprised he’d be into that

I’m pretty sure she already has muscles already from occasionally helping, but I mean she would definitely have much more from helping all the time.

yeah i mostly chalk up her difficulty dealing with zeethas training as zeethas training being like…crossfit from hell…and i don’t really think she’s OUT of shape but like. shredded!agatha. 👌👌👌👌

That, and training with Zeetha is much more stamina based rather than helping at the shop, which is probably lifting and some mechanic works. But nice, big, buff Agatha is a beautiful thought.

Imagine lucrenzias reaction when she gets into Agatha’s body and its just shredded.

“Y-You mean, I could break Klaus’ spine? *Bites lip in happiness.*”

You know she would be running around smashing windows and breaking down doors for the hell of it and Tarvek would be running around going “no not the mahogany” “ lucrenzia no” “lucrenzia yES”

hands-of-blue:

tflatte:

lesbiandelphidiggory:

hands-of-blue:

lesbiandelphidiggory:

hands-of-blue:

lesbiandelphidiggory:

a-land-lacking-sleep:

lesbiandelphidiggory:

tflatte:

lesbiandelphidiggory:

au where everything is the same but agatha is fucking ripped from assisting with the clays mechanic shop

gil falls for her when she’s sleepwalking and he’s in her way so she just. picks him up. gets what she’s after. puts him down again. goes back to work.

im not even remotely surprised he’d be into that

I’m pretty sure she already has muscles already from occasionally helping, but I mean she would definitely have much more from helping all the time.

yeah i mostly chalk up her difficulty dealing with zeethas training as zeethas training being like…crossfit from hell…and i don’t really think she’s OUT of shape but like. shredded!agatha. 👌👌👌👌

shredded!Agatha would make her beating up Martellus so much better

oh my GOD, yes

she also kicks off an exercise craze in paris. its fashionable to be as swole as agatha heterodyne.

Gil would exaggerate the Mechanicsburg statues so much. very unrealistic expectations for the poor Paris girls who are just trying to look good. (idek what Tarvek’s reaction would be to ridiculously ripped Agatha statues. he knows that it’s Gil’s kink. then again it’s also his so…..)

oh my god

#girl genius#i have nothing to add to this except maybe that im visualizing agatha in a suns out guns out tank#it has a print of a death ray on it

GOOD

agatha has like 8 of those shirts. the jagers keep getting them for her. she wears all of them.

she also has a Humongulous Dost Thou Even Lyft? shirt that the Corbettites gave her as a thank you

(yes. yes she does lyft. a lot.)

hands-of-blue:

violettamondarev:

hands-of-blue:

I wonder how long Barry had intended to leave Agatha’s locket on for? We know that he put it on her initially because he thought that Klaus was working with Lucrezia, and it would be dangerous for her to be known as the Heterodyne, and that Adam and Lilith kept it on her because it wasn’t safe for her to be a female Spark without powerful protection, and they didn’t trust Klaus either.

I’m not excusing what either of them did – giving Agatha the locket in the first place was a shitty thing to do, and so was keeping it on when they knew what it was doing to her. But at the same time I can sort of see why they thought it would be necessary for a short period of time, at least at first, since she’s having a bad enough time of people wanting to use/kill/kidnap her now, and she’s a) now pretty much an adult, and b) Klaus doesn’t actually work for Lu (let’s ignore the wasping for now). If evil!Klaus or anyone had got their hands on kiddie Agatha after she broke through for the first time, it would have been catastrophic.

But surely he hadn’t intended to leave it on indefinitely? There was no way of him knowing for sure that it would work forever (you can tell that Agatha’s spark is easily strong enough now to not be kept in check by the locket, Barry had no way of knowing that wouldn’t happen even if she’d kept wearing it). And surely she’d have taken it off eventually? No matter how much she’d been told to wear it, there’s no guarantee that she would. Barry disappeared when Agatha was nine, right? Eleven years ago. But he was planning to come back.

Maybe he’d gone to track down some more of Lu’s machines? The only thing we know is that it had nothing to do with Klaus, because he didn’t know Barry had come back in the first place. I don’t know, I’m just hoping that he’d gone to try and make Europa safe enough for Agatha to take her locket off and be the Heterodyne. Looking at how sad he was at having to give her it in the first place, I can’t imagine he intended it to be a permanent solution.

I agree with you that it was probably a temporary solution meant to protect her when she was young. He had to leave her and the Clays for some reason, but he intended to return earlier. At some point I hope we’ll find out what happened to him? I think Punch and Judy let it on simply because they had no idea what to do once Agatha broke through. And when you consider what happened once she did break through, well… I kind of understand. Even if it was painful, life didn’t really get any easier once she knew she was a spark.

I think with all the set up we’ve had regarding Barry (him suspecting Klaus, Klaus apparently knowing why he would be suspicious, the mystery of why he went missing (I wonder if it has anything to do with the Muse of Time? Everything has to do with the Muse of Time) and Lunevka and Luzola being absolutely terrified of him) we’re probably going to meet him, or at least find out what happened to him.

And yeah, I doubt the Clays would know what to do with Agatha if she went into breakthrough. They were built by Bill and Barry post-breakthrough, so it’s not like they’ve got experience with managing it, and from what we know about breakthrough survival rates… Not to mention they were probably waiting for Barry to come back and help/tell them what to do. When Agatha loses her locket, doesn’t Judy say something about “Confound him, we’re not equipped to deal with this!” (can’t remember the exact quote)? If they’re not equipped to deal with it at 18, I doubt they could deal with it as a child.

iztarshi:

readalong:

brawltogethernow:

Aw, man. I really want to do this justice, but I have no idea what to contribute – how to contribute – to Teodora headcanons. Everything we know about her life is so dark. She was forced into a marriage she was eventually driven to murder her way out of. Every hypothetical about this situation fills me with so much anxiety.

I see readers get displeased with Bill and Barry for not appreciating the Jägers, but if I were coming out of that parental situation I would be angry about everything related to it within two degrees of separation for the rest of my life. I’m not surprised they preferred to be away from home, and I am surprised they did as well for Mechanicsburg as they did. To them, the Jägerkin signed up to stand by and watch atrocities happen forever. They willingly outsourced their moral centers, to monsters. And they’re jolly and lighthearted about it, but really?

This answer is entirely digression. Sorry.

Oh, not to stand by. They were the Old Heterodynes’ hand-picked army. Everything the Heterodynes set out to do, at least outside the town, the Jägers actively helped. I can’t fathom why Bill and Barry didn’t want to take them visiting (even after they stood up for them against the rest of the town).

…I think that the general reader perception that the high value Jägers place on free choice means they’ve never really gone around raping people is probably in line with the Foglios’ intent, and I don’t blame either party for that. I don’t want to attribute that to fun characters either. But… hmm… I think it’s more a rationalized preference than a logical consequence?

That said, and to bear on the original ask… I do headcanon, myself, that Teodora was clear-eyed enough to acknowledge that the Heterodynes had the virtues of their vices, as the saying goes. That part of their exceptional awfulness was their level of success, which was founded in apparently being among the very small fraction of Sparks who grasped the concept of the carrot as well as the stick, at least for their own people. Perhaps that Saturn going to war for her hand, while a terrible thing, was simultaneously something many Sparks (or their beautiful daughters) would have found immensely flattering – and that because he honestly saw it as a courtship, she had leverage to get a few things she wanted, like the non-Castle house. That she had a very long uphill climb to teach her sons to be good men in that environment, but also that she might have a few things to work with. Certainly their approach to being good men was in some respects very, very Heterodyne.

So I think it is plausible that one of the things she found to work with was doing her level best to do her duty to the town… whatever that was considered to be… and teaching Bill and Barry that they had a responsibility to Mechanicsburg (in fact, reforming it and creating an environment where its citizens could more readily become better people might be considered part of that responsibility) as well as to protect the rest of the world from it.

I also think Mechanicsburg itself may have tended to interpret their relationship and its conflicts, up to a point, in somewhat the way the Castle interprets that one argument between Gil and Zola through its own… particular… lens, culminating in his furiously sarcastic “Then we can build a nice doomsday device and wipe out all of Europa” being summarized as “he has asked her out on a date.”

…On the other hand, I think since she killed Saturn, she’s probably got pretty much the same level of respect from Mechanicsburgers as Lucrezia currently does.

I got this ask a while ago and wasn’t sure what to say about it either – I’ve been saved the effort now.

I think, as a fandom, we do soften our Jägers a bit in highly specific ways. We’re willing to deal with them being remorseless killers, but not with them groping waitresses. We want them to be Good On Gender even though they are, at base, a bunch of angry young men who fell under the sway of a charismatic dictator who legitimated their worst impulses.

They are capable of growing up, though.

Mechanicsburg itself is a strange place because it defines itself by being monstrous in both senses of the word. It tends to deliberately set out to shock and then define itself in opposition to the people who hate it for its atrocities. Bill and Barry seem to have steered it – eventually – towards being an oddity more than a horror. It still defines itself as weird and morbid but it’s something it’s safe to look at now.

Teodora – I suspect – did untangle those definitions of “monster” and see that Mechanicsburg could be better without being remotely normal, but the Jägers are always both.