Cowboys and Archangels, Author Notes and Acknowledgments
Time to talk about this fic! I know it's long, but this is the part where I cite all my sources and give credit where it's due, so hang in there!
First, off people to thank:
HUGE thanks to serenada_art, my extremely awesome artist. She came out swinging with sketches and ideas and she produced so much lovely artwork for me, I was just amazed. I'd chosen this prompt to write almost entirely because I hoped my artist would be able to run with it, and run she did! And how lucky was I to get one of the only people out there who can draw a horse? :D Thanks, serenada, for making my first big bang such a creative, collaborative and productive endeavour, and for indulging my desire to dress Crowley up like Badger. :D
I should also thank my betas: ezazahaz, who turned it around in about a day, and my RL friend and writing partner C, for listening to me whine about this fic and then still being willing to beta it even as I dragged him all over the city to RPGs and interpretive dance shows. He made it much better than it would have been otherwise, and I only wish I'd had the time/talent to make all the changes he suggested.
And thanks to ezazahaz, morganoconner, my flist, and my parents for all their encouragement, enabling, help and cheerleading while I complained about this fic. :D (And to Morgan for the early posting date! You saved my anxious brain from asploding, I swear!)
Things I Stole
A tremendous amount of this fic came from other people's brains. An incomplete list:
My writing partner C provided not only a beta, but the original idea for the fic ("Gabriel takes everybody back to the Old West"), the idea of Bobby Singer as a wizard, the idea of that Gabriel is the one behind Crowley's ridiculous deal (my personal retcon headcanon), the Charles Fort Community College and so many lines and moments that I can't even list them.
There are also references, quotes or inspirations from Wizard of Oz, Bonanza, the MST3K episode Final Sacrifice, Westworld, Disneyland, Back to the Future, the Man With No Name series of Sergio Leone Westerns and Ennio Morricone's awesome theme music, A Christmas Story, Futurama (for the term "kong-donkey" which for some reason sounds like a very Gabriel thing to say), Brokeback Mountain, Samuel Peckinpah Westerns, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Milton's Paradise Lost, the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game, Lord of the Rings (sorry JRR), Highlander, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and there are a few blink-and-you'll-miss-them quotes from Doctor Who, Good Omens, and Firefly thrown in for fun. Be warned, anything cool in this fic is probably stolen from a much cooler source.
I feel the need to point out specifically that the drinking game Castiel and Gabriel play is not mine -- it's a drinking game Ford describes playing with Ol' Janx Spirit in the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I decided not to subject them to the real penalty for a loss, which is obscenely biological.
The most obscure thing in here is probably a tiny reference to a one-act David Ives play called the Universal Language. Find it and win a goldfish! (I didn't do it on purpose. I didn't notice until a beta pointed it out.)
Also, the phrase "bless his cotton socks" is from my mother. Lord only knows where she got it from.
From fandom: upon re-reading while preparing to post this, I realized how much the opening of the fic (and all of Gabriel and Lucifer's interaction in general) owes to littlehollyleaf's The Die is Cast. It's a fantastic fic that clearly got inside my head, and I apologize for any unconscious and unintentional resemblance in my opening setup. I also took the idea of Castiel as the designer of the Key of Solomon and other magical weaponry from a few fandom sources, mostly aesc's A geometry for spirits. What can I say, head canon! :D
Lastly, Samuel Colt
I did enough research on gun-making to end up on a government watchlist, but I also did some reading on our boy Samuel Colt, who's a surprisingly fascinating figure in his own right and I hope I did him justice.
Samuel Colt really was only 21 in the year the show says he made the Colt. He was also in France at the time. Instead of sending Sam and Dean to nineteenth century France, I decided to delay his trip by a year or two. Since the show gave us a Colt with cartridge ammunition several decades too early, I'm not too bothered by the inconsistency. :)
Colt really did travel around the West for a while, demonstrating nitrous oxide as Dr. Coult. He was a consummate showman and he used that ability later, marketing himself as "Colonel Colt" and selling his own myth almost as much as he sold his guns. He was a utopian dreamer who thought industrial progress would help build a perfect society, but he also sold guns to anyone who would buy them, serving both sides of more than one war. He was a bit of a narcissist, so determined to be famous that he hired an artist to document his own achievements. Ego and ambition -- "If I can't be first, I won't be second" -- and an outsize personality I don't think I quite managed to really capture.
I got the feeling he and Gabriel would have gotten along wonderfully...when they weren't trying to kill each other. :D
All right, that's it, I'll shut up now I promise! It's only left to say I had a great time writing this fic (no matter what I may have said at the time), and I only regret not being able to cram in all the events and backstory this universe inspired in me. Thanks to the mods of the gabriel_bigbang for hosting this rodeo, thanks again to my lovely artist serenada_art and thanks of course to my readers (if any of them are still reading)!
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