Archive of Our Own ^beta

I love these books! It was a little tricky to check how something was described in the source because I just wanted to keep on reading. I wanted to stick as close to canon as possible (and I appreciate that Rosemary Kirstein is writing a series centered around the friendship between two women and all) but I also ship them a lot so there's just a bit of that included too.

Making this vid required a fair amount of research (and scanning through a bunch of sources) to try to find clips that would represent particular scenes. Drafts did change the structure of the vid a bit, but a lot of it was also making space for new clips I'd found.

The casting for this vid is:

• Rowan: Saoirse Ronan (Ammonite, Blitz, Byzantium, Foe, Hanna, How I Live Now, Lost River, The Outrun, The Seagull, The Way Back). Also played by Freya Allan (as Ciri in The Witcher), Hannah New (as Elizabeth Guthrie in Black Sails), Adèle Haenel (as Héloïse in Portrait of a Lady on Fire), and a few other random folks.
• Bel: Laura Donnelly (Britannia (TV 2017)). Also played by Kate Winslet (as Mary Anning in Ammonite) and Bridget Regan (as Kahlan Amnell in Legend of the Seeker).

Footage of ships and maps came from Longitude (2000 miniseries),

(One unexpected challenge of the vid was that Saoirse Ronan's hair was dyed in several films in her filmography. That's possible to handle with color correction, but only if the difference isn't too large.)

There was a lot of stuff that I wanted to represent in the vid. Here's some things that I thought worked well (or was excited about):

• Saranna's Inn burning down (Lost River, Outlander, The Outrun, Foe, Blitz); Shammer & Dhree's castle exploding in The Steerswoman's Road (played by a couple things from Dune - there's no water in view, sadly, and it's not a concrete hexagonal compound, but it needed to be a large enough structure to convincingly stand in for that); Jannik's house exploding (played by Bond Manor in Skyfall).
• Shots of maps & tools! These came from Longitude (2000 miniseries), One Piece, Master and Commander, Black Sails
• Bel's Tarot reading. I had to create this footage. Shout out to sabrinahughes.com/blog/a-tarot-reading-in-the-steerswoman/ for helping me figure out what cards I needed!
• The Guidestars. Shots of the night sky are from Tenchi: Samurai Astronomer. The crashing Guidestar is from Outlander and Pitch Black. The Guidestar running Routine Bioform Clearance (and the computer interfaces) are from Geostorm. The Rendezvous Weather is from Geostorm, X2: X-Men United, and Mad Max: Fury Road, while the people experiencing it are from The Way Back and Dune. (As a side note, I was hoping to use more from Tenchi: Samurai Astronomer, but unfortunately the entire plotline revolves around predicting solar and lunar eclipses, and the world of the Steerwomen has no moon.
• Wizard's soldiers/armies. I wanted to include these battles because of their importance to the worldbuilding even though it's not really "on screen" in the books. The soldiers came from Britannia, Robin Hood (2010), Mary Queen of Scots (2018), and Legend of the Seeker.
• Drawings of demons, goblins, or other wildlife. I was hoping there might be fanart that I could use for this, but I couldn't find anything. Ultimately I ended up using Haootia quadriformis from the Late Ediacaran age to represent this because it was apparently quadrilaterally symmetrical!!!
• Filling in the map. I used the map from The Language of Power and covered everything back to the map in The Steerswoman's Road, then animated "unpainting" the covering.
• The drone sighting. I had some trouble finding a good actual drone shot, so I tried instead to evoke Rowan's experiences of initially thinking it was a hawk (because I had a shot of Saoirse Ronan looking up at a hawk!) The drone comes from Inferno, which has an extended scene where the main characters are chased by one.

Some things I wish could've been better / wish I could've found:

• Robot dragons. I ended up using the "monster" from Death Machine (1994), which was good enough, but I really thought there would be a source out there that had something more directly draconic + robotic. (Though the size requirements for Steerswoman are also pretty specific.)
• Wood gnomes. I was sure this would be easy! It's just a shot of chimps interacting with humans; how hard could it be? Well, I couldn't find anything useful. Planet of the Apes was too obviously suburban; the Jane Goodall documentary was all outdoors and visibly different film quality; and the documentaries about chimps that were studied with regard to sign language seemed like they were all in a laboratory setting / captivity, which isn't right. It seems like film studios are no longer including chimps in things (which honestly is probably for the best, but was inconvenient for me personally re: this vid.)
• Gunpowder. I was only really able to find fuses; Willam didn't have access to those in book 1, but there wasn't a great alternative.
• Willam. I ran out of time to try to cast him (and I'm not sure if I would have wanted to even given time; making it possible to tell who Rowan and Bel were was enough trouble).
• The electric street lights in Wulfshaven. While the current clip (from The Current War) gives an okay vibe, I wish I could've found something with someone literally installing a street light or similar.
• The Newton's Cannonball thought experiment. I couldn't find a video of this from someone else that felt like it would work tonally (especially because cannons aren't available) and I don't have the skills to create one from scratch myself. I couldn't even find any footage of someone drawing arcs in dirt. There's a shot towards the beginning of the vid (the first "I'm bound to these shores") which shows someone moving one tool around another in a circle - that's talking about the sun in the original source but feels like it sort of describes the motion of an orbit; that's the closest I could get.
• Rowan's childhood & the Academy. There are some really lovely specific details about Rowan's backstory that I would've loved to include but I just didn't come across them in the sources I looked through & didn't specifically need them for the vid.
• Dolphins interacting with the tall ships!
• The Annex & the Archives: There was so much that it would've been great to show - the log books on shelves, the main map room! But I couldn't find anything that felt like it would've done them justice.
• Magic - specifically, the trap on the shipment and the shock that fried Rowan's boots.
• The actual guidestar fragments!

Just to make sure I'm mentioning all the sources, I also used:

• Red Sonja (2025): wagon caravan; a book
• Enola Holmes: walking through grass; Steerswomen debating what to do about the wizards.
• Warrior Nun: cross necklace communication device ("Link")
• Stock footage/image from pexels.com: Goats, circuit boards, starscape.
• BloodRayne: Dancing in front of a fire
• Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: Bodhran player; traveling through grassland
• Wheel of Time: Drummers
• Gunpowder (2017): The closing shot of Bel & Rowan riding off
• On Chesil Beach: This is a Saoirse Ronan film, but visuals of her from it didn't work. However, I do use a clip of a boat in a harbor from it.
• Heat (1995). A helicopter shining a bright light while also displaying green & red navigation lights.

I think that's about it! Happy to talk about it more in the comments, though!