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Tractors
Tractors is a 63,000 word complete longfic. It's probably my magnum opus for the DC fandom.
On this page you'll find some background info about Tractors, mostly miscellaneous stuff that doesn't fit neatly into my chapter-by-chapter commentary.
Visit other Tractors-related pages on my site
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What's the best way to read Tractors?
At the moment, Tractors is on the web in quite a few formats. I personally think the PDF version (formatted by me) is the nicest way to read on desktop. I don't love the look of PDFs downloaded from AO3 so I made my own. I think the chapter formatting is significantly nicer and more immersive in a PDF compared to just reading on AO3 web.
Having said that, Tractors will always be available on AO3. If you're reading on mobile, this is probably the best format, since the PDF isn't really suited to mobile dimensions. If you like reading chapter notes and seeing comments and stuff, it's nice to read Tractors directly on AO3. Tractors is also available on Superlove, a fanfiction archive self-hosted by @uuuutan. The Superlove version is basically the same as on AO3 but has very slightly different chapter notes, plus the added cool factor of being on a self-hosted archive.
At the moment, the body text of Tractors is the same across all of these versions. For a while the PDF was an updated version and the AO3 version wasn't, but they're the same now. If you read Tractors a while ago, or when it was coming out chapter-by-chapter, you'll have seen a slightly different version of the text, but I've only done minor clean-up since because I didn't want it to be jarring for anyone rereading the fic.
This section on geography is partly taken from a response to an ask on my Tumblr
Where is Gotham in Tractors?
As you may have realised, despite Tim spending a lot of time travelling from place to place in Tractors, if you take an American geographical approach of Smallville in Kansas and Gotham in New Jersey, Tim can't possibly get from place to place as quick as he does. That's because Tractors is set in a soft AU that moves DC continuity over to Britain!
Tractors geography is a little bit nebulous and doesn't quite match up with real cities all of the time, but when I was writing it, I had London in mind for Gotham. Transport-wise, Tractors Gotham has a lot of London features - the Tube system and also good transport links to the rest of the country, and various Gotham settings are vaguely inspired by the vibes of real London geography.
For me it made sense (considering relevance of main DC cities) to have either Metropolis or Gotham take the geographical place of our capital city, and out of the two I preferred Gotham to be London. This means that both Bruce and (insert XYZ younger Batcharacter, maybe Tim isn't the best example) could both have a "Gotham accent" (in this case a London accent) but sound totally different, which is an idea I like. I like how land-locked this would make Gotham as well. To me, Gotham should be buzzing and dynamic but also expensive and weighed down by tradition and the air quality is terrible. Which suits London.
The only problem with Gotham-as-London is that it does make it hard to place Bludhaven. Because all the distances are squished, I'd want Bludhaven to be REALLY close to London. I could make Luton or Slough or somewhere into Bludhaven, but it might be interesting to just consider Bludhaven as an unusually distinct London/Gotham borough.
What about Metropolis and everywhere else?
If Batman's territory is the South of England, that means Superman is the hero of the North. Which makes perfect sense when we consider Bruce's old-money history versus Clark's working-class mythology. I originally had a vision of Metropolis as Liverpool (a scouse Superman! Look what we could've had!) but over time it's shifted east a bit, and I'd now place Metropolis as Leeds or Manchester. I'm especially keen on Leeds because if Metropolis is in Yorkshire, we have all of this lovely country backdrop and it's easy to picture Smallville as some tiny fuckoff village in Yorkshire which would probably still have a decent bus link into Metropolis. It does still take Tim quite a long time to drive / travel to Metropolis, but it's not as far apart as they would be in "real" DC geography.
Keystone is in the Midlands somewhere - the characters don't spend a lot of time in Keystone so I didn't bother hashing it out in great detail. Jack Drake has Irish heritage (although he doesn't really talk about it) and Dana is still American. The parts of Superboy (1994) that took place in Hawaii would take place in Cornwall, maybe - or if that's too sleepy then maybe I'd take it up to Cardiff or Swansea. Maybe Brighton at a push, but I want Kon to be further away from Gotham in that period.
It was obvious to me that all your fics are set in England!
You'd be surprised.