Fire Emblem 9/10 - we somehow do learn to live (Notes)
Title: we somehow do learn to live
Fandom: Fire Emblem 9/10
Genre: Family/Angst
Rating, Warnings: PG for a few things that might scare young children.
Word Count: ~3800
Summary: The boy woke up knowing nothing at the worst of times.
As it turns out, I feel weird posting a fic in three places whether or not it's 500 words. (So long as it's short of an epic effort, I suppose.) So, as with my last fe_contest entry, here are two links and some big long notes because I like talking.
FFN : @ fe_contest
I had an idea for Vanity just about the day the prompt came out. It was going to be about Almedha from Kurthnaga's perspective, with the frame story set on their return home from the Tower of Guidance and the thrust of the story told in three vignettes, the first two regarding Almedha's childhood interaction with Dheginsea and Rajaion, the last concerning her fateful departure from Goldoa. There were a lot of interesting thoughts involved -- Rajaion's pain at finding out that his sister was alive after all, Dheginsea's early conflict with Almedha, Almedha's ambitions for the throne and loving rivalry with Rajaion, Almedha's energy (and vanity) lost in her departure -- but apparently not enough to make it work.
In the last week, I had this idea for a Bastian/Lucia story in which Bastian makes the dynamic discovery that the force of gravitation is inversely proportional to the square of distance! And Lucia is not impressed. They hang around his balcony and stargaze through his telescope and they talk about deities, life on other planets, deities on other planets, and the vanity of humanity as well as Lucia's and Bastian's respective vanities that lead to their weird complicated friends-with-privileges relationship.
That lasted about two hundred words over the course of most of said week when I had a conversation with blacklacelily about my old fanfiction. I tried to say that But Maybe was seriously dire and that Fall In was better. She objected to this, I read both pieces, and I ended up agreeing quite wholeheartedly that But Maybe was the stronger piece. This also got me talking about its weaknesses, however. The motif was clearly a major weakness. Writing quality aside, I thought that it seriously underplayed the effects of Elena's death, and well, it was pre-RD but I thought that the matter of Ike's amnesia at that point was pretty interesting.
Next thing I knew, I swore I'd write amnesia!Ike fic for fe_contest right after I got out of the shower. It was 7 PM on Friday. I had a vague idea of what points I wanted to cover. I started writing. By mid-Saturday I had a vague idea of where I was going with it. I haven't made things up as I went along for a serious project in years but I guess the fact that this turned out pretty coherently is some sort of attestment to my organic-writing-fu. (If you thought this was a little meandering -- it's not just you.)
Various headcanons:
- I juggled with various ideas for Titania's form of address for Greil, considering that the Greil Mercenaries don't exist yet and "Commander" is silly. I decided that "Captain" was a fair name for his position as some sort of knight trainer in Caineghis's court.
- I figured that if Titania was close enough to Greil and his family to flee to Crimea with them, she was close enough to be in the area with enough regularity to be there shortly after The Incident.
- Sephiran used Ike's memory of his mother (from the first cutscene in Path of Radiance) as a shielding image to help smother and seal the rest of his childhood memories.
- With Greil grieving, Ike amnesiac, and Mist painfully young, Titania was really the one who enabled them all to keep it together.
- Ike represses his sorrow more than he should, and we see the beginnings of it in his response to Greil: both bawled until the man told them that they could go cry in private until they were done. As soon as he said that ... the boy all but stopped, and his tears went somewhere unreachable.
- Greil learns the rudiments of axefighting from Titania. He very quickly outstrips her. I originally had this suggested in the story, but I took it out because it didn't really belong there.
Incidentally, the working title for this fic was The Bird in the Well and there was originally an idea I had for this motif with Elena being like a bird in a really deep well but it was stupid. Not all instincts are correct, it seems.
Fandom: Fire Emblem 9/10
Genre: Family/Angst
Rating, Warnings: PG for a few things that might scare young children.
Word Count: ~3800
Summary: The boy woke up knowing nothing at the worst of times.
As it turns out, I feel weird posting a fic in three places whether or not it's 500 words. (So long as it's short of an epic effort, I suppose.) So, as with my last fe_contest entry, here are two links and some big long notes because I like talking.
FFN : @ fe_contest
I had an idea for Vanity just about the day the prompt came out. It was going to be about Almedha from Kurthnaga's perspective, with the frame story set on their return home from the Tower of Guidance and the thrust of the story told in three vignettes, the first two regarding Almedha's childhood interaction with Dheginsea and Rajaion, the last concerning her fateful departure from Goldoa. There were a lot of interesting thoughts involved -- Rajaion's pain at finding out that his sister was alive after all, Dheginsea's early conflict with Almedha, Almedha's ambitions for the throne and loving rivalry with Rajaion, Almedha's energy (and vanity) lost in her departure -- but apparently not enough to make it work.
In the last week, I had this idea for a Bastian/Lucia story in which Bastian makes the dynamic discovery that the force of gravitation is inversely proportional to the square of distance! And Lucia is not impressed. They hang around his balcony and stargaze through his telescope and they talk about deities, life on other planets, deities on other planets, and the vanity of humanity as well as Lucia's and Bastian's respective vanities that lead to their weird complicated friends-with-privileges relationship.
That lasted about two hundred words over the course of most of said week when I had a conversation with blacklacelily about my old fanfiction. I tried to say that But Maybe was seriously dire and that Fall In was better. She objected to this, I read both pieces, and I ended up agreeing quite wholeheartedly that But Maybe was the stronger piece. This also got me talking about its weaknesses, however. The motif was clearly a major weakness. Writing quality aside, I thought that it seriously underplayed the effects of Elena's death, and well, it was pre-RD but I thought that the matter of Ike's amnesia at that point was pretty interesting.
Next thing I knew, I swore I'd write amnesia!Ike fic for fe_contest right after I got out of the shower. It was 7 PM on Friday. I had a vague idea of what points I wanted to cover. I started writing. By mid-Saturday I had a vague idea of where I was going with it. I haven't made things up as I went along for a serious project in years but I guess the fact that this turned out pretty coherently is some sort of attestment to my organic-writing-fu. (If you thought this was a little meandering -- it's not just you.)
Various headcanons:
- I juggled with various ideas for Titania's form of address for Greil, considering that the Greil Mercenaries don't exist yet and "Commander" is silly. I decided that "Captain" was a fair name for his position as some sort of knight trainer in Caineghis's court.
- I figured that if Titania was close enough to Greil and his family to flee to Crimea with them, she was close enough to be in the area with enough regularity to be there shortly after The Incident.
- Sephiran used Ike's memory of his mother (from the first cutscene in Path of Radiance) as a shielding image to help smother and seal the rest of his childhood memories.
- With Greil grieving, Ike amnesiac, and Mist painfully young, Titania was really the one who enabled them all to keep it together.
- Ike represses his sorrow more than he should, and we see the beginnings of it in his response to Greil: both bawled until the man told them that they could go cry in private until they were done. As soon as he said that ... the boy all but stopped, and his tears went somewhere unreachable.
- Greil learns the rudiments of axefighting from Titania. He very quickly outstrips her. I originally had this suggested in the story, but I took it out because it didn't really belong there.
Incidentally, the working title for this fic was The Bird in the Well and there was originally an idea I had for this motif with Elena being like a bird in a really deep well but it was stupid. Not all instincts are correct, it seems.