“Texts from Avengers Tower” - 53. Houseguests

“Texts from Avengers Tower”
By Phoebe Roberts
~~~

Summary: “There are a lot of great things about being on a close-knit team like the Avengers. The group text chains aren’t one of them.

A collection of funny conversations in text messages between the cast of the MCU.”

~~~

( Previous Texts )

This text: Barton home, Iowa, 2015. Clint Barton to Laura Barton.

~~~

( Message 53 - “Houseguests” )

~~~

Next text: 54. Doubt

Turning Texts from Avengers Tower into Tiktoks

While I have only posted fifty-three of them so far, as of today I have written sixty messages for my MCU chat fic, Texts from Avengers Tower. With my daily posting schedule, that is two solid months’ worth of installments. I’m proud of both that consistency and the quality of the jokes. I’ve been pleased with how generally funny I’ve been able to make them, while still keeping them reasonably in character. It’s been a neat new challenge in that way, particularly in capturing the “voices” in the semi-epistolary format and imagining a way each one might text.

And it’s been quite popular. Unsurprisingly, since this is a short, low-effort thing that I haven’t put a fraction of the thought, work, or soul into as other projects, it turns out it’s the most popular thing I’ve ever made. Sigh, of course. It gets between 350 and 400 hits every day on AO3, with more on Fanfiction.Net. It’s a nice feeling. I kind of wish it did more to get new readers to my other works, which are all more important to me, but I guess it’s too different in form to really have a lot of overlap with interest in that stuff. But the positive response has been appreciated.

It occurred to me that I might be able to take the gags into a different form. They struck me as having good potential for short Tiktok-style videos. I’ve been messing around with how best to adapt them. The challenge, I’ve found, is to create something televisually engaging that still captures the spirit of a text message exchange. AND it has to be within my independent production capabilities— I have enough high-intensity, high-productive-value projects, and this is supposed to be something easy and fun. Most in the way of animation is beyond my powers, but I think I have an idea to combine images and sound effects in a way that might balance those two needs.

I’ve assembled a prototype using the first text I wrote that I am reasonably happy with. I even devised kind of a general intro sequence that I think is really cute. It’s definitely low-fi, but I think it gets the point across. I’m going to try to make a few more in the same vein to make sure it works, and start posting them to Tiktok and Youtube, which I will link to or embed in the fics. AO3 allows for that kind of code, apparently, which is pretty cool. I’m curious how they’ll be received, but I’m excited to give it a try.