fic talk: S11 au part II

[sword_logic]

alrighty, here's a grand old spoilery post on my thoughts.

first and foremost, carolina was the character i was (am?) on/off worried about. i certainly have Plans for her, but — i don't know, it's not that i don't like how i wrote her and what i chose for her in this part, but i genuinely love pretty much E V E R Y T H I N G about her story in the chorus trilogy and i kind of... didn't want to change it? but thanks to this fic having been plotted so long ago, and certain things later i don't want to change, her role in this part (and in part I) remains largely off-screen. i think she just does not deserve to carry the weight of a revenge arc again, which is precisely what the driving motivator is here. (or..... is it? wink) carolina had her terrible self-destructive hunt for revenge in S10 as a culmination of her terrible self-destructive spiral in the freelancer days – she deserves to recover from it all. she deserves to rest and have space. even though she didn't make that choice in canon, i (selfishly!) want her to have some time free from Burdens and Obligations. where will she go? what will she do? find out next time on (dbz announcer voice) p versus np

epsilon was also something i'd planned ages ago, and at this point, is now one of the handful of original plot threads i refused to let go of. i actually wrote a post about it ages ago when S12 was airing! while i've made peace (more or less) with epsilon's presence in S12/S13, i still really, really wish that he'd had a different role in the chorus trilogy that didn't involve... caboose and tucker getting their old friend back just to lose him again. again again. 12 and 13 set up some really interesting threads about epsilon being outdated and malfunctioning, and, well, this is my take on that.

and regarding the comments about forerunner architecture, this article by haruspis is a super neat look at halo's environments from an in-universe perspective. it's pretty heavy on halo lore, but it's a cool breakdown on reasons why the halo 4 settings look different from the first three games (aside from, well, bungie splitting from microsoft/343). i talked a bit more about halo canon vs. rvb canon in an older post, and tl;dr i decided to roll with halo canon over rvb canon. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

communication ended up being a much more central theme in this part than i'd originally planned, but i really like how it came together. communication between wash and maine specifically, of course, but also between them and others, and the planetwide communications blackout.

other random tidbits! i started writing the traveling-across-islands section after visiting the bay area in 2016, which goes to show just how much i enjoyed that trip. it's a very particular type of beauty, and i hope i did it justice. nexus was inspired by a hostel i stayed at when i was in scotland, near loch ness.

and to top this off, my favorite sentence!

And yet, the late afternoon sunlight slants over Maine’s face, spilling over his jaw and onto his neck, the color of honey sinking into damp flushed skin, shadows drawn in precise ridges over his scars.

i was truly on another level when i wrote this. i love it. i'll always love it.

that's all i've got for behind-the-scenes for now! i'll edit this if i can think of more.

Comments

[anneapocalypse]

(I'M CAUGHT UP so I can read this now!)

I'd wondered if Carolina was the character you were referring to in that post!

RvB is the kind of universe where... you can be going for total "canon" "compliance" (lol) and still have to make some tough choices about... what canon is the most canon. :P Or, more usefully, what canon works best for the kind of story you want to tell. It always comes back to that in the end.

[sword_logic]

all canon is equal, but some canon is more canon than others. i really respect people who write canon-compliant BGC fic, because... wow.

man, i was really worried about carolina. originally i'd also written her way, way different too – she was a lot more sad and directionless, and while a sadder and more directionless carolina would have been interesting to explore, it... probably would require an entire fic's worth of contextualization to show her getting from A to B to C. hell, even here, i still feel like i have so much more to talk about – which i will, wink wink, still a whole part left, but carolina is so wonderfully complex and so Much that she really deserves nothing less than her own story. (i may be considering doing a carolina-centric S11 au-verse fic some time in the future. perhaps.)