Notes and Errata of Mark of the Asphodel

Wow, Cain.

I think you just won the "Character With No Life" award for all Fire Emblem.  Given some of your competition, that's damned impressive.

In a horrible way.

And FE11 gave you a backstory of such potential.

No, really.  I think I may have to take back everything I ever wrote about you.  That's, like... 35,000 words?  45,000?  Yikes.

OTOH, after reviewing my Rody-centric stories I decided he was actually pretty much on the money and it's Cecil(le) that's wobbly in light of New Canon.

Maybe I don't want an FE4 remake after all.  :P

I left work early today, crawled home, and slept.  Sometimes there's just no other sensible option.

-x-

Anyway, after all the positive response to that fragmentary dump of "When Mila Walked the Land" (<3 <3 <3), I uploaded chapters 2 and 3.  That 'fic had not been updated since December of 2009, and the master file hadn't been touched since June of 2010.  That's a record for time between updates for me, heh.  

The project actually dates back even early, to the pre-LJ says when I was bopping around on DevArt talking to shimizu_hitomi  and almost nobody else.  I was only a couple of chapters into playing FE8 when the crossover potential smacked me between the eyes, and Hitomi's translation of the FE2 script cemented my belief that something Needed to be Done with the pretty obvious links between Archanea/Valencia and Magvel.  But at the time, I was really averse to the crackiness of a crossover that would, say, feature Marth and Eirika chillin' together and maybe hooking up for something.  Didn't like the idea.  Thought it would be lamesauce.

[Point and laugh, Raphi.  Go ahead.]

So, instead, I dreamed up a generation-gap scenario wherein the playable casts of FE2 and FE3 are twenty years older than we see them in the games, and then Eirika falls through a rabbit hole into Archanea along with bucketloads of dark critters.  Of course, she doesn't speak a word of the common language, so the chaos that ensues isn't exactly cute.

The other gimmick was a pair of OCs as the initial POV characters-- Lara (the daughter of Marth and Caeda) and Rudolf (son of Alm and Cellica).  These kids are closer in age to Eirika and thus relate to her on a different level than the adults.  Original explanation of story here.

( Read more... )

Dunno when Chapter Four will go up, because it's more fragmentary than the other unfinished chapters and my schedule sucks right now.

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?

It's been two long, rough days at the negotiating table, and this one is going to drag out a while.  The company is saying "no" across the board (okay, they agreed to a couple of tiny symbolic proposals) on every major issue, monetary and non-monetary alike.  We're not asking for a whole hell of a lot-- is it THAT crazy to think that one week of paid vacation, ever, is on the low side?  Or that maybe the health care plan ought to be funded against anticipated annual rate hikes in the 12-14% range (this year's was 19%-- ouch) just to maintain our current level of benefits? Hell, I can't even get them to back a standardized process for when employees leave the company so that the people who do leave don't walk off with any more company property.  You'd think they'd be behind that one! (I was serious, too.  It ticks me off when people walk out the door with company stuff, especially the test equipment that is often worth more than a new midsize sedan).

They're playing games, apparently.  I guess it's fun.  Oh well... I don't plan to give in anytime soon.
 
As I am in a political mood, here is the fourth installment of "Another Piece of Blue."

( Enter the Catria.... )

 Chapter Two of "Another Piece of Blue" is posted here.

Highlights include:

Marth finds out Macedon will be even more trouble than he expected.  No surprise there.

Cain gets another slap in the face courtesy of Realpolitik.

Empress Nyna has an unpleasant surprise for everyone.  Or maybe that's not such a surprise, either....

I don't have a lot to say right now, but I'll mention here that my "template" for Macedon tends to be ancient Sparta rather than any medieval or Renaissance state.  There's some other stuff that may strike readers as dodgy, but one detail about Macedon is particularly bad.