Let's talk the Nitty Gritty.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS LARGE QUANTITIES OF RAMBLE AND SPOILERS.

Flora and I knew we'd each tackle one OC. Soviet snipers working as pairs made it easy. So then we started sort simultaneously trying to come up with who these girls were. Why would they be in America? Why, why, why.

WHY?

That's to me the biggest, most important question you need to answer to create an OC for the "Girl Joins Easy" trope. Everything else will flow from that point right there.

I mentioned in a comment on the last chapter that any trope can work, but the reason I see the "experiment" answer being the least effective is that it is an explanation not (inherently) tied to WHO the OC is as a person. Lemme explain.

Let's say a female nurse is chosen to be a combat medic. This has been done ad nauseum. Honestly it's been done so much to the point that I probably won't even click on a story if that's the premise. But how did she get chosen?

An experimental program with a single person doesn't make much sense to me. It's a program. There should be many participants, probably chosen as a cross-section of whatever group they're pulling from. So if it's gonna be a single girl, she better be special.

And then you run the risk of stepping into the "She's Not Like Other Girls" cliché. Yes, I see this as a cliché and not a trope because it's inherently a negative. By being "not like other girls" she becomes like next hundred thousand other "not like other girls" GIRLS.

But let's say you take that out. No experiment. Where, then, do you draw from? Well you're writing HISTORICAL fiction. So, take stuff from history.

I'm going to use Alice as an example of this real quick. To be, an American woman being in the paratroopers makes almost no sense. I can suspend disbelief when reading other people's sometimes, but I cannot do it enough to convince myself to try my hand at it. There just too much stacked against it. But outside the US, there were women in war zones and sometimes even combat situations. 

For Alice I decided to go with the French Resistance. She's friends with Charles de Gaulle's niece (Genevieve de Gaulle, active in the Paris resistance and the college Alice goes to) so right place right time PLUS she knows a lot of langauges. Thus, her place in Easy stems intimately from who she is as a human being, not what she's trying to represent (a girl in the military).

So let's look at Sveta. Her name came to me immediately because I adore the name Svetlana so I actually did zero work on first names which is not typical for me.

I knew right off the bat that we had to have a damn good explanation for how two Soviet women snipers were with the paratroopers. It didn't take me long to realize that at least one of them had to have connections to the Soviet's elite. And I grabbed onto that real quick.

It all sort of formed so fast, I don't quite remember what I thought of first. But I started to think about a combination of two things:

1. What is her personality?

2. What drives her decisions?

For the first one, I knew I wanted this girl to be very different from Alice. Selfishly this was because I want to be able to work on both at the same time, and need them to be distinct enough to be able to do that. At the same time, I also figured it was time to stretch some different creative muscles. The first thing I came up was that she's trapped.

Sveta is trapped. And her response to being or feeling trapped is anger. Bitterness. Resentment. Fear.

For the second one, her driving motivation is to get unstuck. She wants to be accepted for who she is. She wants to be liked.

So I had those two in place, but then we came back to my bestest friend, the question of WHY? Why does Sveta feel trapped? What drove this?

That's where history comes into play. About 20 years back from when Sveta would have to join the paratroopers, the Russian Revolution was coming to an end. Stalin was flirting with power. The Reds had defeated the Whites.

The Russian Revolution and the years that followed contain absolutely horrific atrocities committed against humanity by the Soviets. So knowing that Sveta had to be connected in some way to their leadership fed into her personality. I wasn't about to write a character who was in favor of the gulag system or the Great Purge.

That's when Sveta's personal history started forming in my mind.

First and foremost, her father. Alexander. It took me a few Google searches to confirm I wanted him in Stalin's inner circle, working with the NKVD (secret police, like the Gestapo of the Soviets and before the KGB). He's not a good person.

Then the question of "how much does Sveta know about his work" cropped up.

(Keep in mind that while I was forming Sveta, Flora was also exploring Zhanna, and so we fed off each other's back stories)

How much...

Well I knew immediately that Sveta had to be an only child. As an only child, she would have her parents undivided attention. She would lack companionship, friendship (this is where Zhanna's backstory came into play). This would feed into Sveta's need to be accepted.

How much...

This took me longer than anything else for her history. In the end, I decided there needed to be a moment in childhood where Sveta went from "Dad is a good and loyal Russian and idk about his work but I know he's doing what's right for the country" to "holy shit my father's involved with crimes against humanity".

With that revelation, Sveta's mother finally fell into place. Veronika (I adore her). She knows what her husband does, and she hates it. Veronika is partially inspired by Stalin's second wife, who used to get into arguments with him and one night, ended her life to get away. That's how I see Veronika. She's resisting but she's trapped.

Trapped.

There was that word again.

Veronika is trapped, and Sveta, as she gets older, is trapped as well. I was inspired in part by a different Svetlana, Stalin's daughter, who Churchill recorded a comment about.

"...a handsome red-haired girl, who kissed her father dutifully".

It became clear that Sveta had to act the part. She had to be the good and loyal Russian. Zhanna enters the picture, there, though and through the character of Zhanna, Sveta starts her own little act of rebellion. But she's still a puppet of her father and Stalin's regime. She's still putting on a front of loving what they stand for.

That's why she joins the snipers. With the Winter War between Finland and Russia already in full swing by the time she'd reach the right age to join the military, it was easy. Soviets had women in the army. So she joins the snipers to get away from her father and the politics and the drama.

But having Sveta be the only daughter of a highly important Soviet official, one who is trusted by Stalin (both she and her dad) and a trained trained sniper, opened the door back up for the next bit.

How (and why) are they in America?

and beyond that, what does being in America with the Allies look like for a daughter of Stalin's regime?