#I actually finished one animatic but that scene happened a bit further from the story so I'll post it after I properly introduce my au

[endlesspaint]

I'm planning on making a smoll animatic about my au :3

It was originally supposed to be a comic but I decided to just make snippets of content about it. It's more fun that way hehehehe

(hint: it's JD angst)

[sadevergreen]

OK so the image isn’t that important or great but i’ve been really obsessed with the song Birthday Suit by Cosmo Sheldrake and i cannot get the idea out of my head about King Rentheking’s story arc aligning with the lyrics-

(the photo is just like focus because originally i wanted to do little drawings for each of the lyrics sort of animatic style but then i couldn’t finish it in one sitting and i decided i didn’t need to finish it) so instead of doing that, i’m gonna just go through the lyrics and what part/ why i think it aligns with the storyyyy thus far!

“Weighed down by morning, in my birthday suit” - sun rise over the crastle, ren wearing his lil crown and big ol king cloak -> i think the crown and power/ responsibility has been a lot of pressure on ren and i think he is scared and desperate, he’s pulling last ditch efforts to try to live up to what bdubs accidentally(?) cursed him to

“lift up the evening, just for a while” - down in the vault w/ impulse setting up the costume party and secretly leading everyone down there -> it’s almost like accidentally a flex from impulse- he has more power than the king! it seems absurd but bare w/ me; he got everyone to conjugate together, no one actually listens to the king, impulse just gave out the kings diamonds full stop- ya see where i’m going? and some of that is ren’s own fault, like in rens desperation he is further severing his connection with his people

”backwards, upside down, and inside out. so hold on or we’ll all fall down” everyone scattering like that one scene in ratatouille all fleeing in different directions -> they all left cause they know they were doing something they weren’t supposed to and they didn’t want to be get caught. ren is a bit of a tyrant, they knew what would happened if they stayed. the ‘hold on or we’ll al fall down’ is so HDJFJJSJFJJS to me because there is something to lose on both sides almost?? like for ren, if he goes too far he’s going to be overthrown so he has to hold on to whatever he can to retain power because he’s lost support and credibility. like he broke the one thing he was hired to fix. but for everyone else, they’re already getting the short straw! they have no money anymore with rens hoarding and the stupid royal emeralds, the laws are getting more and more absurd, like what else are they supposed to do? they have to be strong and fight ren because if they don’t, he’s just going to keep digging himself into a hole and dragging everyone down w/ him.

”oh, heave the oceans too, won’t you?” like just imagine all the billboards proclaiming the laws -> more just an idea of everyone (even rens own team) becoming fed up with his bs. just like ‘oh ofc, we won’t afk or do anything apparently! great!’ just sarcasm hhh

“i’ll keep my ears on” doc chillin in his garden in the perimeter -> i love how doc literally was just like ‘no’ and made his own country- its wonderful and we love him for it <3 but yeah just doc silently overhearing everything happening and being glad he’s not a part of it and doesn’t have to abide by rens laws

“i’ll keep my eyes open” either watcher grian overseeing it all from his lil cave w/ the rift OR ren paranoid and nervously checking behind him -> ren knows he’s gonna be shut down soon, with the soup group and everything, that’s why he’s becoming so desperate. everywhere it seems someone wants his head on a stake

”i’ll keep my legs in sight and wait, ‘til we all fall down” a possible future scenario, ren being beheaded as a formal gesture of his finality -> ‘til we all fall down’ except it’s ren’s head in a basket- i think everyone is just WAITING until ren falls down and no more king!! c’mon we all know how positions of power work on the hermitcraft server smh

alright and that concludes these ramblings of a lunatic!! of you read through that, tysm!! i’ve had these thoughts for a while and i’m glad to have a space to voice ‘em. but genuinely so many props to ren for pulling this off??? like it’s very hard to play the villain and be someone that everyone hates and is wishing for their demise but he does it so well and continues to put in that one of a kind effort and flair that we’ve come to known X) UGH I JUST LOVE THIS SERIES SO MUCH JEJJFJSJCJJDJFJ OKK BYEEE AND IF YOU EVER WANNA TALK TO ME ABOUT HERMITCRAFT PLS REACH OUT LOL -jeddie

[corishadowfang]

Fic Notes: On the Edge of Daybreak

With the final chapter of On the Edge of Daybreak being posted, like...today, I thought it might be fun to get some--I guess behind the scenes stuff and fun facts about it?  Or at least, I’m interested in those sorts of things, so maybe other people will be, too, haha.

So to start off with--we have a playlist:

Full Playlist

Theseus 

Turn Around

Journey to the Past

I’m Still Here

The Paradox

Runaway

Who Is She? (Reprise)

Tell Your Heart to Beat Again

Lantern in the Night

Show Yourself

Dearly Beloved (Vocal Cover)

Honorable mentions include Falling on Angels, I Have Questions, What Did We Know?, and Fairytale.  (Yes there’s a Frozen II song on the playlist shh.)

Fun fact about On the Edge of Daybreak that I’m pretty sure I mentioned in chapter 4, but the story was originally conceptualized when I was listening to The Paradox (up there on the playlist!) and got the idea in my head, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if Skuld was hearing these stories about some weird fox, and it turned out they were about Ava, who she then had to chase across the worlds to try and get more answers on her past?”  The idea was that Skuld was doubling as the hound in the song, haha.  (I don’t remember how I initially got to ‘Skuld is chasing after Ava to get answers,’ but I think it was just because I was thinking about the ‘Skuld is Subject X’ theory at the time?)

Anyway, what I haven’t talked about is that I then proceeded to expand the story...using songs.  I kind of...mostly envisioned them as AMVs/animatics, haha, but I knew I’d never have time to actually, like...create them, but it was fun to imagine the story in my head.  (The songs I used were also somewhat different!  The Paradox was still there, obviously; Runaway was actually also still there, it was just before The Paradox, and was kind of the ‘introductory’ thing, where Skuld eventually got away from the cell and first started trying to hunt down answers.  And then I used Fairytale from the honorable mentions above as the one where she kind of got answers.)

While I realized I’d never be able to do anything with the songs...I did think about doing a fic about it.  I actually had the first chapter drafted like...I think it was nearly a year before I started Dandelion Seeds?  But I never had the time or motivation to really go further than that.

I didn’t actually stop playing around with the story in my head, though, because it was a fun thing to think about, and I kind of got to thinking about what would happen and how things might play out--and then I kind of hit on two separate ideas.  The first was thinking about how Skuld might actually get her memories back, and thinking that, story-wise, it’d make a lot of narrative sense for her to return to Radiant Garden and confront certain things about her history--and that this would be around the time that Radiant Garden was falling.  Which was just a really intense idea that gripped my imagination.  And the second was just this image of Skuld finding letters left behind by her friends and using them to learn more about herself and about her friends and using them as a way to cope and move forward.

Those were kind of the things that prompted me to actually write the story.  The playlist was kind of organized with the idea of being a pseudo-outline?  I used it to brainstorm how the major plot beats would go, haha.

...Alright, well, the playlist trivia got a bit longer than expected, so uh, here’s a whole bunch of other fun facts in bullet point form:

Originally I wanted to write out the whole thing and do very thorough edits before posting the story.  Partly I wanted to do this because it would help me avoid burnout, and partly because then I could make it a lot more polished.  But I was struggling with motivation a lot, so I eventually decided to just go with a biweekly update schedule to force myself to actually finish it.  There’s still a part of me that wishes I could’ve polished it more--but I figure a complete but unpolished story is better than one that was never completed.

This was initially supposed to be a short series--maybe 200 pages long.  I am, however, very long-winded, so it ended up growing by...a lot.  (One day I will write an actual short series.  One day.)

In some of the earliest ideas for drafts, Skuld actually didn’t want to find her past; she just felt obligated to because there were people out there who were probably missing her, and she felt like she ‘owed it’ to the person she used to be.

Zidane wasn’t always going to be a part of the cast!  Initially, I wasn’t going to have anyone but Jim and the Treasure Planet crew--but it also felt kind of weird, not having anyone come from Gaia when I had Skuld start there?  And it felt a little unbalanced with just Skuld and Jim, haha.  Other candidates for the third party member were Freya and Garnet.

Initially I wanted to play with the prose a bit so that anything that related to the Keyblade (including Ava and Luxu) was written with a lot of figurative language and purple prose-y stuff and everything else was kind of more normal prose.  I quickly realized that was going to be way too much editing for a biweekly update schedule, but you can still see some remnants of the idea.

The point of the story was always less about Skuld finding her memories and more about her being able to come to terms with what happened to her--which is why she gets her memories back before the actual climax.  She’d need to have them to be able to figure out how to cope with them and move forward.

This is probably the closest I’ve stuck to an actual outline, like...ever.  No, really, my outlines almost always fall apart like...a few chapters in, but this one worked out surprisingly well.  I have no idea how.

The confrontation between Skuld and Luxu at the end of chapter 11 is one of my favorite things I’ve written, like...ever.

Healing is definitely a process, and sometimes, the after-effects of trauma will stay with you for a long time--maybe forever.  I wanted to acknowledge that at the end of the story; Skuld is doing a lot better, but she still has some issues sometimes--and that those issues still haven’t prevented her from being able to find some sort of peace and acceptance.

No, Skuld has no idea what happened to Scala ad Caelum at the end of KH3; yes, when she finds out, she’s going to consider resurrecting Xehanort just to make him fix it.

On that note--I imagine she’s recruited a lot of people to help her rebuild!  The crew helps on their free time, but so do a lot of other people.  It’s slow going, but there’s progress.

Hinted at this a little at the very end of the last chapter, but Skuld’s been pretty busy as a Keyblade wielder!  She takes on missions to fight Heartless whenever people need her to do so; she’s pretty well-known in her neck of the woods, it just happens that that’s way away from where most of the main games take place.  It’s a big universe!

The ending bit with Skuld walking away from Daybreak Town is...actually a little bit of a pun?  She is constantly ‘on the edge’ of Daybreak Town in her dreams, and the sun’s always just about to rise, so at the end, when the sun finally rises and she walks away, she’s no longer ‘on the edge of daybreak,’ i.e. the story’s over.

As far as the title goes, it has a couple of different meanings!  There’s the very literal one mentioned above, obviously.  It’s also a little more metaphorical, in that she’s perpetually ‘stuck’ on the edge of daybreak (town), so to speak, since she’s obviously very desperate to find her past.  And then it’s also like...on the edge of a discovery/something new.  Daybreak’s kind of like a new beginning, and Skuld’s basically on the edge of a new beginning herself--she just has to get to the point where she’s ready for it.

The story was always meant to have a relatively open, ‘the journey continues’ sort of ending.  Originally, I planned to leave it with the trio getting ready to leave Scala ad Caelum, with it still up in the air whether or not Skuld would go with them or go somewhere else or even stay in Scala.  I ended up deciding to go with one set in the future so I could leave the implication that she’s about to run into some old friends again.  (Yes, she does in fact probably recruit them for rebuilding purposes.  It is partially their fault.  They owe her.)

Uh, I actually have...a lot more I could say, haha, but I never realize how long these things’ll be until I start typing them out.  This story has definitely been a journey, with a lot of emotional labor put into it, and while it’s far from perfect, it’s still something I’m relatively proud of.  I’m sure I’ll come back to it later and see all sorts of mistakes, haha, but at least for now--well, I’m glad it’s out there.