Son of the Blue Falcon

[mark_asphodel]

This is something I won't write because it'll take too long and I don't know FE6 enough, but it's occupying valuable mental space and needs to be offloaded.

Ereb: city of the modern age, astonishingly beautiful and astonishingly corrupt. Fifteen-year-old Roy, scion of a wealthy family, leads a fairly ordinary life; he goes to school, spends time with a few friends, and tries to be the "young master" while his father recovers from TB in a sanatorium. He also, in secret, reads sword-and-sorcery fantasy comics, tales of winged horses and dragons and enchanted weapons. There's nothing like that in Ereb, though a generation ago, a team of shadowy masked vigilantes beat back a crime wave and restored order to the city.

Even as Roy reads his escapist comics, a new crime wave threatens to engulf Ereb, and the source of these crimes appears to be the very highest levels of the city's political and industrial elite. With some nudging from family retainer Marcus, Roy uncovers a shocking secret. His own father Eliwood was the Blue Falcon, leader of the masked vigilantes that once saved Ereb. Will Roy manage put on his father's mask and cape and save the city? How many other secrets about Ereb's past will be revealed along the way?

So, yes. FE6 by way of Watchmen. Anyone wants to take this and run with it, please do so.

Comments

[amielleon]

I was going to say, this sounds like a graphic novel....

Or an anime.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Blame Frank Miller. His screed earlier this week got me thinking on comic books and the morality thereof, and from there fancy took me other places.

[kyusil.livejournal.com]

Pahahaha! This is awesome. My FE6 AU is just boring and politic, heheh.

Random question: is there a particular reason fandom pegs Eliwood's illness as TB? Every time I've seen it expanded upon, that's the diagnosis.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Random question: is there a particular reason fandom pegs Eliwood's illness as TB?

He coughs?

I go with it in this case, because a recovery from TB in a "comic book land" mid-20th century kind of place is entirely possible, whereas a recovery from, say, cancer would be less likely.

Also, "consumption" (despite TB's status as a worldwide menace) still has a bit of literary glamor to it, and is also unlikely to be something most fanwriters have encountered first hand. A lot of other pre-modern illnesses have been eradicated, at least in industrialized nations (when's the last time someone caught smallpox in fanfiction?), and perceptions of present-day killers are, IMO, viewed through a highly medicalized filter.

[kyusil.livejournal.com]

Hmm, all good points. I'm not an expert on this sort of thing, but I guess I just thought there must be a wider variety of possibilities. And in a more medieval setting (ie. non-AU Elibe), wouldn't having TB pretty much make you a goner?

Then again, I suppose this clears things up. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IncurableCoughOfDeath) Especially the part about overwork.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Hah. Yeah, that page pretty much spells it up. And, as it points out, the trope has life in Japanese pop culture, too, so I don't think it's unreasonable that an illness defined by a) looking prematurely haggard and b) coughing is intended to be a case of generic "consumption" rather than something more exotic.

wouldn't having TB pretty much make you a goner?

I've read about some cases wherein patients actually were cured by a trip to the seaside or the mountains, but all of them predated the discovery of Mycobacteria, so who knows what they actually had. The disease can take years to kill, though, and there can be periods of apparent healing where scar tissue replaces the dead tissue in the lungs. Then again, it can also take a turn for the worse very fast, depending on where it spreads to.