Notes for "Another Piece of Blue"

So, way back when in this post, I outlined for a massive Archanea fic-project dubbed "Tales of the Unified Kingdom," a good-faith effort at showing a positive, if complicated, outcome for the continent after the War of Heroes.  The idea first arose from the 'fic "Homecomings," an Abel-centric story that takes place a whopping four decades after the gameplay conclusion of FE3 and which consequently required rather a lot of effort on the world-building front.

I rather liked that world.  So, inspired by shimizu_hitomi 's series of interconnected Elibe stories, I decided it wasn't a unforgivable self-indulgence to write a series of 'fics in the same continuity-- though these were primarily post-game 'fics rather than "between the games" stories (though I wrote a couple of those as well).  Writing it was a blast, especially when Valencian elements from FE2 got into the mix-- and, ultimately, some cross-references to Jugdral once we had confirmation they were all on the same planet.  As far as the characterization went, it was a challenging and frustrating project of grafting two unevenly matched halves-- the characterization from FE11 with the plot of Book Two of FE3-- and I had to make my "best effort" at extrapolating what these characters were and what they ought to become.  [And, in light of FE12, apparently I was way off.  Oh well.]  

Anyway, Abel's misadventures started the ball rolling, but the character I was most interested in pretty quickly became Cain.  So while "Homecomings" was one key part of the series, "Another Piece of Blue," which featured Cain struggling to adapt to the post-war era and its realities, was its bookend.  I sketched out a whole character arc for him to span a series of three or possibly four stories, though my interest in the later multi-part stories has flagged thanks to OCs and FE12.  But APoB, which took more than a year to write, is finally done... and at about 26K words, is about four times the length it ought to have been.  Oops.

( Fic notes and obvious references )

Well, that was fun.  Now what?