Fic Submission: "Lost Boys"
Dec. 24th, 2011 12:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mark_asphodelSo, I got Raphi in the fe_exchange lottery. Our tastes are preeeeetty compatible, so it wasn't an assignment that was really going to push me out of my "comfy zone," though it's not like I need much of an excuse to go seriously weird. A sliver of a vestige of an excuse will generally do. And I was up for writing some FE8, but none of the ideas I had wanted to go anywhere. I was throwing things at a wall and nothing stuck.
And so, the never-finished "band AU" reared its head once more. Hell, it was draft three when I started on it (again) this time, and what I ended up with here is pretty much draft six. Instead of a sprawling multi-year novella thing, I shaved down the focus to a couple of months at the end of 1967. Not our 1967, exactly.
OK, stepping back. "Lost Boys" (named for a Shearwater song) takes place in a fictionalized London. The coinage sounds archaic but familiar, the buses and tube trains still shut down early, and World War II (or is it the second?) happened with the attendant rationing and doodlebug bombings. But this war-scarred nation is an empire ruled by an Empress (could be Sanaki, even), and at any rate it's not really our timeline. There's no sign that this fictional UK interacts with a fictional US, after all, and if we're writing about pop music, that's no small detail.
And we are indeed writing about pop music. This AU FE8 is very much the story of early Pink Floyd, with Innes standing in for the young Roger Waters (sans the daddy issues) and Lyon as a kind of Syd Barret/Rick Wright hybrid. A Fire Emblem fan sufficiently familiar with the Floyd would catch a number of details of place and setting, a couple of band anecdotes brought to life, and some lyrical references. Well, OK. Very cute. But what's it got to do with Fire Emblem? Hey, man, that's the challenge of the AU. And this one was more tricky than substituting rockets for holy weapons. I tried to make everything from the supporting characters to the album titles both fit the 1960s scene and summon up some connection to Fire Emblem.
[Aside-- FE7 lends itself to evocative titles. Cog of Destiny? Pale Flower of Darkness? Those would work as albums. FE8 gives us what? Distant Blade? Unbroken Heart? The rest of the chapter titles and such are pretty meh as anything but what they are. On the other hand, FE8 gives us a lot of "normal" contemporary Western names, which is part of the reason FE8 AUs are easy to envision, IMO. "Innes, Ephraim, Joshua, and Lyon" may not have been in the top fifty of baby names for British boys in the 1940s, but it's a lot easier to swallow than "Celice, Leaf, Aless, and Skasaher," isn't it?]
I can go through a laundry list of references and in-jokes if anyone wants it. The key thing here is that "Mogall" (not!Pink Floyd) have a curious relationship with the recording artists down the hall, the not!Beatles of this particular AU. Innes refers to them only as "That Band" (names have power, ya know), and it may be hard to place who the hell "Cam" and "Mike" are supposed to be when they first pop up in the story, but it should make sense by the end. I hope.
And so, the never-finished "band AU" reared its head once more. Hell, it was draft three when I started on it (again) this time, and what I ended up with here is pretty much draft six. Instead of a sprawling multi-year novella thing, I shaved down the focus to a couple of months at the end of 1967. Not our 1967, exactly.
OK, stepping back. "Lost Boys" (named for a Shearwater song) takes place in a fictionalized London. The coinage sounds archaic but familiar, the buses and tube trains still shut down early, and World War II (or is it the second?) happened with the attendant rationing and doodlebug bombings. But this war-scarred nation is an empire ruled by an Empress (could be Sanaki, even), and at any rate it's not really our timeline. There's no sign that this fictional UK interacts with a fictional US, after all, and if we're writing about pop music, that's no small detail.
And we are indeed writing about pop music. This AU FE8 is very much the story of early Pink Floyd, with Innes standing in for the young Roger Waters (sans the daddy issues) and Lyon as a kind of Syd Barret/Rick Wright hybrid. A Fire Emblem fan sufficiently familiar with the Floyd would catch a number of details of place and setting, a couple of band anecdotes brought to life, and some lyrical references. Well, OK. Very cute. But what's it got to do with Fire Emblem? Hey, man, that's the challenge of the AU. And this one was more tricky than substituting rockets for holy weapons. I tried to make everything from the supporting characters to the album titles both fit the 1960s scene and summon up some connection to Fire Emblem.
[Aside-- FE7 lends itself to evocative titles. Cog of Destiny? Pale Flower of Darkness? Those would work as albums. FE8 gives us what? Distant Blade? Unbroken Heart? The rest of the chapter titles and such are pretty meh as anything but what they are. On the other hand, FE8 gives us a lot of "normal" contemporary Western names, which is part of the reason FE8 AUs are easy to envision, IMO. "Innes, Ephraim, Joshua, and Lyon" may not have been in the top fifty of baby names for British boys in the 1940s, but it's a lot easier to swallow than "Celice, Leaf, Aless, and Skasaher," isn't it?]
I can go through a laundry list of references and in-jokes if anyone wants it. The key thing here is that "Mogall" (not!Pink Floyd) have a curious relationship with the recording artists down the hall, the not!Beatles of this particular AU. Innes refers to them only as "That Band" (names have power, ya know), and it may be hard to place who the hell "Cam" and "Mike" are supposed to be when they first pop up in the story, but it should make sense by the end. I hope.
Oh, yes. Second and final fe_fest prompt technically completed. Whew.
