A Beginner's Guide to Shattered Salvation

[game_byrd]

A Beginner's Guide to Shattered Salvation
It's a big story. Here's what it's about.

[A Guide to Story Arcs]
A Guide to Story ArcsFirst, it helps to understand how the story was written. It started as a one-shot (which you'll see as chapter 2, because chapter 1 on FFN is the overview), then I added a different point of view on the same scene as the one-shot (chapter 3

Comments

[photoash]

I really liked your take on who is with who for what. Interestingly, I had never thought of Sylar and Peter as the OTP O_o in this story... I always liked Heidi and their relationship. I can see how she and Emma would have made their choices. Real life is so messy and complicated, and I always appreciated that about your story.

I hope there is more Heidi before I get to the end. :) I'm still in the middle of Syko (and I'm excited to see how he reintegrates himself).

I also don't think Peter is horrible in here. You just wrote Gabriel so sympathetically and the first 90 chapters are from his POV alone mostly that you empathize with him and think Peter's a dick when he's hurting Gabriel even though Gabriel does plenty of bad things himself. (Also I think Peter leaving Heidi and baby Noah with a Gabriel who could be a Sylar was really fucking low and only made Peter look even worse XD for everyone since by then you sympathized with Heidi a lot too!).

But I like Peter :) he's all messed up and confused but he does the best he can. I loved that Micah and Rebel got to be in the fic too at points! And that you wrote Micah excellently <3 he's my 2nd favorite character after Sylar and it's so rare to see anyone write him at all, much less well!

<3 congrats again on finishing this story :) and breaking 1M words!

[game_byrd]

Do what to know what really happened with Peter leaving a very vulnerable Heidi with an extremely fragile Gabriel?

I forgot.

I don't mean I forgot what happened there, I mean I forgot that there was anything Peter (or anyone else) should have been worried about. It did not occur to me as I was writing and publishing that maybe Peter, Angela, Maury, Mandy, or SOMEONE should have expressed a little concern about what was going on for poor Heidi. I've been pregnant. I've had two kids. I know how utterly fucked up a woman's mind can be (or at least how bad mine was) after giving birth. Both times, I and the infant was delivered into the hands of my abusive, manipulative husband to take care of (badly) and society considered that good. Maybe that has something to do with where my mind was in writing those scenes.

But as time passed, I looked back on those parts that started to realize how wrong that was and how Peter, Angela, etc. should be held to account for walking away. Angela maybe could be given an out because she's supposed to be evil plus you can say that her precognition told her there was nothing to worry about. Peter didn't have that out.

So I had a choice between inventing an excuse for him or having him man up and say that he made an error in judgment. I went with the error. And yeah, it looks bad for him. Looks awful. He fucked up there. But the person whose fault that really is, is mine, not the character's.