Notes and Errata of Mark of the Asphodel

I wasn't going to touch this subject, but damned if it doesn't keep coming up in different forms of media.

I like Seth as a unit and as a character.  Like him a lot, in an "I can potentially identify with this guy kind of way."  And from the beginning, I kind of connected him with Cain in the way that Cain's shown in FE3, where he's not Red Cav anymore but is instead a trusted senior knight/advisor, a right-hand-man, the guy Marth leaves in charge of Altea when Marth goes off chasing trouble.  [Orson is the Abel to Seth's Cain, with even worse results than Abel saw in FE3.]

But I stopped writing and exploring him and basically just left him alone for a while, because... reasons.  The things I liked about Seth, and found interesting about him, didn't seem to be the reasons that fandom overall was interested in him, plus I caught a general sense that Seth was overemphasized into a "semi-protagonist"[*]-- placed above his station, so to speak.  And, since I liked Seth but didn't LOVE him, it wasn't worth the grief.  I could just write about Cain or some other character that filled that same niche to me.

Part of it is, I think, the essential difference in the knight/Lord dynamic between Eirika's Route and Ephraim's.  Eirika/Seth is a problematic pairing to me, but I really dig the interaction between reckless Ephraim and cool-headed Seth... and not in a sexual way (no thanks).

Japanese FE fandom had a very useful tip on understanding Seth, knight of Renais.  Ammie helped translate it (and much else) for me.  

( In which we are NOT touching the psychosexual angles of FE8 )

This one should not be surprising at all, to anyone.

Rounding out the bottom five... Ephraim.

( He's hot. He kicks ass. He's... pixels. Sigh. )

So, 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.

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Oh, yes.  Second and final fe_fest prompt technically completed.  Whew.

ETA: located here at FFnet.

Surprise, surprise.

Mind you, this doesn't exactly incorporate anything from my STS-135 jaunt, but the experience did give me a kick in the tail.  I so want to write a sequel that's all about Ephraim, but I keep talking myself out of it, because sequels to AUs are so often fucked up and pointless (not talking about this fandom, just in general).

Speaking of Ephraim, I finally took his name off the description field of the story.  It wasn't getting me any more readers.

Oh yeah.  At Kennedy Space Center, the parking lots are numbered 1-7, each one given the name of a Project Mercury astronaut.  If you're in Al Shepherd's Numero Uno parking lot, you're special, and if you're in Deke Slayton's #7 lot, you have a hell of a walk.  This made me giggle, as I wasn't aware of the parking lot issue until last Wednesday.

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.

I don’t give up on WIPs easily. Things may go on hiatus but are never discontinued, and I dust off and cannibalize one-shots months or even years later. So it killed a part of me to neglect a serious-business FE2/3/8 crossover after I’d written 12,000 words of it, even if I’d decided it had absolutely no target audience.

So, here are some selections from the story of the prince and princess of Magi Varl, who crash-land in a foreign realm with some striking similarities to their home. The amount of meta I generated for this that has leaked into my standard interpretation of 2, 3, and 8 is kind of jaw-dropping. Clearly, I spent waaaaay too much time on this piece.

Synopsis: the prince of Valencia travels to Archanea to marry its princess. Dark creatures spoil the party. Then things really get weird.  Excerpts of each unpublished chapter follow.

I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.

( Really, really, fricking long. )

Reasons for neglecting this included 1) the joys of writing two OCs and 2) a triple dose of no1curr on account of the subject matter.  For something that'd be close to 20K words in the end, complete lack of audience appeal was something of a buzzkill.  But for those tired of crazy!Marth, he was cold sane and 100% competent in this one.  And also was not married to Caeda.

 Bleh.

I have no time to work on any of this, and don't know if I even should be.  It would've worked for the Royalty challenge over at magvel , but... yeah, moot point now, dude.

The opening scene of this scribble featuring Ephraim and his creepy niece.

( Meet Nada Kuya, Jr. )

Grr.

I did not enter fe_contest  this time, even though I liked the prompt.  I had an idea I really liked for "Vanity" involving courtship/marriage between Innes and L'Arachel in a 1930s-ish setting, an evolution of the 'fic I keep wanting to write entitled "A Simple Game of Self-Respect."

When a 'fic title is derived from Elvis Costello's "Two Little Hitlers," you know it's not gonna be very fluffy.

But honestly?  Writing something like that promised to be emotionally draining and a great deal of... work.  Work to make the dialogue actually witty, and the interaction smart and sexy... and the atmosphere what I wanted it to be.  And I really, really didn't want anything to distract me from writing "Starchild," which is a) a great deal of fun to write and b) something that needs to be finished so I can move on and not have my head filled with details of this cracked-out mashup world.  Seriously.  I've dreamed up mission logos.  I've tried to place the various continents on an actual map to figure out an orbital path.  I've wondered what sports the characters like best.  Is Ephraim more of a basketball guy or a hockey guy?  No, not baseball.  They don't play baseball in the Magvel Union.  That's what those foreigners down in Lieberia play.

Also, there's a sequel to "Starchild" germinating in my head, and it's awful.

-x-

I haven't done a meme in a while.  I guess I stole this from hooves ... and half the rest of the f-list.

Name a character from one of my fandoms, and I will reply saying:

* How I FEEEEEL about this character
* All the people I ship romantically with this character
* My non-romantic OTP for this character
* My unpopular opinion about this character
* One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

PS: I have fandoms other than Fire Emblem (Utena, Gundam Wing, Harry Potter...) I just don't write them.

Chapter Eleven.  How ominous.

I hated the first draft of this chapter and ended up totally re-writing it, which isn't normal for me as far as fanfic goes.  Original 'fic, yes.  Fanfic, no.

It needed, among other things, more Ephraim.

This chapter in its finished form introduces a couple more anvil-sized hints of sketchy stuff, a new mystery, and some references to Tear Ring Saga. (Remember how I said there was another continent to be accounted for?)  Oh, and Sephiran.

Part of the reason this chapter was troublesome was that we're halfway through the story and I really should be tying plot threads together instead of spinning more out.  And things will start coming together... somewhat... in the next few chapters, but it really is a pain to have five or so subplots[*] kicking around when we're technically into the falling action.  That's one reason I was very happy with the way Asylum turned out-- I reworked the last two chapters so that the fifth and final installment was more about falling action and resolution.  

Also, when it comes to ambitious multi-part stories, I always remember Jacquemart.  That was a post-series Utena epic by one of the best writers in that small fandom, a story that he simply could not finish.  When reading it (it had already been abandoned), I could see exactly why the 'fic was doomed.  There was no conceivable way all the different plot threads could be knitted together into anything sensible.

This is why I always (except for DSoD) have an ending in mind before I start posting.  It is damned hard to get where you're going it you don't have a destination in mind.

* Subplots:
1) Ephraim and his frustrations.
2) Eirika and her love life.
3) The doctored photographs
4) What Sephiran's up to.
5) General disorder in the pilot corps