#I don't have a frame of reference for what food is supposed to cost these days

[cesium-sheep]

yay food :)

[weaselandfriends]

yo, so I checked out Rot, the Redwall fanfic you mentioned a couple asks back. I was struck by the fact that, compared to the "Bavitz" fics, it feels strangely more accessible, less overtly offputting, requiring only faded memories of a Redwall book or two and being very much SFW--all especially surprising by your standards, considering the premise of "the rot has set in and all bets are off, authorially". Some things I was interested in hearing your thoughts on:

- In keeping with the style of Redwall books as I remember them, there is no overt romance--the closest thing to it is Bristol's would-be engagement to Olly. Other cases that stood out to me were Roane's attitude towards Laramie, and of course the Alagadda/Vellis relationship.

- One of my favourite elements was the recurring motif of the "many blades", where by the end of the story many blades are given a long paragraph recounting their history. As the story unfolds and the many stories-within-the-story revealed, it becomes apparent that the cast's lives are much more closely connected than first appears, with Fentress in particular as lynchpin. Stories and blades, and the power they hold, are all closely interlinked (I'm surprised Laramie didn't stab Alagadda with the quill, but I suppose that would've been too on-the-nose). I loved the metatextual aspect where many characters' actions are influenced directly by the stories: Laramie imploring Jareck to "Remember Romsca", Bristol's use of the story as her means of escape, the many perhaps-lies Jareck tells, the vermin literally using stories as fuel by burning them, much as Alagadda's entire leadership method is to try and avoid the tropes of failed warlords in the stories she was told as a kid, and many more examples besides of characters trying to convince each other of the truth of stories (the word "Rot" itself is commonly used to refer to a mistruthful story). Jareck in particular is notably framed at the end with his face replaced by the stolen tapestry of Martin, as though he has become the embodiment of those stories, what's the deal with that?

- And where does Sosostris get her seer knowledge from, which seems to be unerringly on the mark as to what's happening theologically? How does that factor into the idea that all seers are frauds?

- The contrast between the vermin and the lizards is very compelling, with the lizards being your key point of dissonance from canon--at one point, it's alluded to that a reptile appeared only once in the original series, I think? Certainly I have no memories of lizards from those I read as a kid. I found it interesting how the natural food chain was brought to the fore with these characters--shoutout to that almost-title-drop where Laramie becomes conscious of the gore-covered/red sandstone walls of the abbey.

- Unusually for you, there are no chapter names, until ENDGAME/EPILOGUE. Was this just a stylistic choice to match the original books?

- Speaking of your usual style, I found the beat with the snake, Kennebec and Luce where you describe a "tableau" in your typical manner very funny.

- The Laramie/Alagadda conflict over creatures getting "what they deserve" (or, the goodbeast/vermin dichotomy) is reminiscent of Chili and the Chocolate Factory, which interrogates the same kind of pat moralising present in Roald Dahl's work as you do here for Jacques. Rot and Chili complement each other well, in my opinion.

- Rot's conclusion is fascinating, because after spending most of the story deconstructing Redwall, the ending conforms exactly to formula--typified by the Redwallers finally replacing all the rotten wood at the story's close, much feasting, etc. Alagadda notably is seemingly compelled to make every single mistake she initially sets out to avoid at all costs, with what happens with Conredd and so forth. Every single lizard dies. Your omniscient authorial voice is momentarily replaced by Sully-as-recorder(-as-author?), I don't remember if that's specifically a recurring element in the books. I also wasn't sure of the significance of the final epilogue with Jareck in the south.

- Why the fuck were you pretending to be a League of Legends player?

Very glad to have read this story, you perfectly recaptured the prose style as I remembered it--this may not be an all-time great story or anything, but to paraphrase a review of the first twenty minutes of The Transformers: The Movie (which consist of a slaughter much like the one in Rot, narratively speaking, intruding on the formulaic, tame status quo), it's "like the best [Redwall book] ever", providing that same sense of a "perfectly fulfilling and conclusive ending" you describe the Homestuck Epilogues as having, the Final Word on the setting.

I have not thought much about Rot since I wrote it, so I may not be able to answer all of these questions with as much certainty as I'd like. The questions I can answer:

Why were you pretending to be a League of Legends player?

I thought it'd be funny. I'm also a long time fan of professional League of Legends; many character names in my stories I've taken from pro League players (Marc El-Marghichi, for instance, takes his surname from Jonas "Memento" Elmarghichi, a Swedish player of Moroccan descent). More fun facts: In an earlier draft of Modern Cannibals, Z.'s older brother had an expanded role, accompanying Frederick and Mom Roddlevan to the convention to bring back Z., and in his POV scenes he was depicted as a professional League of Legends player who was struggling to stream on hotel wi-fi. I've also kicked around the idea of writing a sports story where the sport is League of Legends, which would probably feature Z.'s brother in a major role.

Why no chapter names?

This is a question with a probably more interesting answer than you expected. Prior to Fargo, I didn't use chapter names at all, for any of my books. My 2012 novel about Luxembourg, for instance, uses a Shakespearean Act/Scene naming system (where chapters would be named, say, Act II Scene III), and my 2013 novel about the Rodney King riots names each chapter after that chapter's POV character, similar to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. The problem I found when writing Rot was that the chapter index on ffnet looks really stupid if you have unnamed chapters:

So, when I wrote Fargo shortly afterward, I decided to give each chapter a title. I pulled the chapter titles from quotes from books I had read and as the story went on I started getting creative with what the quotes were referencing, how those references played with the chapter's content, and what tone the titles set, so the trend has stuck with me since.

Why no overt romance?

This is not unique to Rot by any means. Anything I wrote prior to Rot was equally devoid of overt romantic or sexual themes, mainly because I was extremely uncomfortable writing them. Up to the time I wrote Rot my media consumption was almost exclusively Western in nature, and Western media on the whole, unless it is explicitly billed as a "romance," often treats those elements as an utter afterthought, something that is not touched upon whatsoever until the male lead and female lead kiss at the very end of the story. Even when a Western work tries to be "sexy" it's almost always in a very clean, distanced, perfunctory way, merely evoking the aesthetic of "sexiness" instead of depicting any content that is actually lewd. (Or, in the realm of horror, the one area of Western media that is willing to get actually, tastelessly lewd, sex is usually depicted as something bad that is to be brutally punished.)

In 2014 though I started watching anime which for better or worse does not have any of those issues, and so in Fargo I was able to write a character like Delaney, who is aggressively sexual. But even then it was a difficult topic for me to grapple with in a serious way; there's a reason why the main characters of Fargo, Modern Cannibals, and Chicago are explicitly or implicitly uninterested in sex. The pornographic parts of CxC were extremely difficult for me to write, having never written anything even broaching pornography before, and I had to write and rewrite each one many times before I could come up with something that really had the ethos of porn.

Alright, now the questions that are specific to Rot:

Is Sosostris a real seer?

In Redwall, there are seer characters who are exposed as total frauds, and seer characters who seem to have actual supernatural insight into things; it depends on the character. Sosostris skirts the line, possibly unintentionally on her part.

Why lizards?

Lizards appear prominently in one Redwall book, The Pearls of Lutra, as the minions of Ublaz Mad Eyes. Lizards will also sometimes appear in other books as a one-off adversary. I kind of just plucked them out as an underutilized element of the books that I felt like I could expand on and flesh out more. The thing about the Redwall series is that it is extremely formulaic, and almost every element of its world has been probed thoroughly. But if you're just retreading all the same ground of the original work, why write a fanfic? This was also the impetus for why I decided to set Fargo in someplace completely removed from the typical Japanese urban landscape of the canon series.

Why is the ending so traditional to series, with the good guys winning and feasting and whatnot?

While I did attempt to delve into some elements of the series that were not explored, I was writing far too respectfully back then to deviate too far from its ultimate tone. Fargo is the same way; tonally, it's an exact match to the original PMMM, albeit more violent. What I wanted for the end of Rot was it to feel hollow or melancholic rather than triumphant. By the end of the story, Alagadda and Vellis are, if not sympathetic, characters with some depth, so their deaths aren't really moments to be happy about. Likewise, Jareck making out with the tapestry is the final melancholic nail in the coffin. If stories are important to the world of Redwall, that tapestry is the most important one, and Jareck pawns it off to a distinctly Renaissance Venetian city, suggesting a transition out of the pastoral medievalism of the Redwall series to the next historic epoch. Basically, a new time has come, and the world of Redwall has come to an end, even if for its denizens that end is a traditionally "good" one.