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semi-imaginary-place · 1 year ago

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FFXVI Rewrite

Read this in one long post

Read this in parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 .

FFXVI Rewrite Part 1: Introduction, Prologue, and Return to Phoenix Gate

I decided to rewrite FFXIV and point out some of the game’s more glaring flaws, play with some ideas. In addition to plot changes and overhauling the lore, some of the general changes that should be made include tighter more efficient writing, fixing the pacing, and cutting most of the filler and fetch quests and focusing in on the main plot. There are a lot of words used to say a whole lot of nothing and it sounds nice because the voice actors do a good job but the dialogue lacks substance. At the same time players aren't given crucial story information in the main story leaving many important plot points under-explained to the point of audience confusion. I also want to improve character writing and develop inter-character relationships. For Jill as a character, It feels like the writers just forget about her. Not that Clive gets much good development either, he gets some in the first arc with Cid and then stagnates afterwards. And then the writers had the bad idea of starting a half assed character arc about Clive trying to do everything on his own at the same moment they take away Jill's agency and sideline her for the rest of the game.

FFXIV's prologue also acts as its demo, as such it is not only the first chapter to the story but also a piece of advertisement, and it is incredibly successful in being an advertisement. The FFXIV prologue is a hypebeast, it's a spectacle and one of the most exciting things I have seen in a long long time. However this strategy of front loading the game and making the best demo comes at the cost of later story and pacing. We don't get to see much of how 13 years of military slavery has affected Clive. The end confrontation between Ifrit and Phoenix means that Joshua re-entrance to the plot and his reunion with Clive must be pushed further back in the story. With the prologue FFXIV wrote itself into a corner and the story only continued to fall apart more the further the game progressed.

Such is the difference in medium between short form stories like the prologue, movies, OVAs, animated shorts, and so on, and long form stories like JRPGs, books, tv shows. That different format of stories makes different characteristics more successful in one over the other. Short form by nature must be compact and efficient, it is structured to be quickly complete both in story arc and emotional payoff. Long form is about the build, slowly weaving many things together, setting things up early to pay them off later. When you apply the strategy and mindset of one form of story to another, it tends to fail. Take BBC's Sherlock which attempted to use short form format for a longer series, this is why the first few episodes are quite good but as the series goes off the story falls apart, you all these teasing plot threads that go nowhere because the whole show is written like it’s a one off. The problem with FFXVI is that it tried to have its one shot and then attach a full game to it, and that can work but in XVI's case it made a lot of the story beats in the first half of the game clunky. A common problem with the buildup strategy is that instead the beginning of a story can end up slow and boring, the anime Tatami Galaxy is an example in that when it all comes together at the end its great but the beginning is real slow. So I started thinking about how to fix these problem and rewrite FFXIV and sadly I cannot think of a solution that does not cause additional problems.

Starting the game with Phoenix vs. Ifrit in the Fallen ruins is fine but have the first chapter of the game follow Clive's day to day life as a slave to the imperial army. Make it dull, strip him of dignity, make it bleak, make it miserable. Interspersed with the bleak reality of his life are snippets of the joy and liveliness color of Clive and Joshua's childhood telling the events leading up to Phoenix Gate. Through these two stories establish the setting, the nations, the politics, the balance of powers of Valisthea. The game already does a good job of establishing Joshua and Clive's relationship so all that is added here is the contrast between the lively teenager Clive was with the worn-down man he is now. At the end of Chapter 1 Phoenix Gate happens, and Clive wakes up still an assassin, still a Branded, still fighting a war with a knife at his throat, still not having achieved his revenge.

The game handles timeskips poorly, neither the 13 year nor the 5 year timeskips feel that long, time doesn't feel like it is passing during those times. Very little changes during the 5 year timeskip from the relationships to the politics to the characters as people. I'm shortening the timeskip from 13 years to 10 years which makes Clive 25, Joshua 20, and Jill likely somewhere in between. I'm doing this because it never felt like 13 years to begin with and to better explain Joshua's lack of involvement in those years. Joshua probably took a year or two to become a functional person again after his mother betrayed his nation, killed his father, and his dear older brother tried to kill him. Afterwards he's still just a kid what can he do and I think it takes him years of introspection and research into eikon and Ultima to come to reconcile a berserk Ifrit mauling him with his loving brother Clive. At 20 Joshua is only now capable enough, knowledgeable enough, powerful enough, and mature enough, to try and save Clive. To make it more interesting Joshua on some level still fears Clive and Joshua feels immense guilt over this and that he hasn't saved Clive earlier. This nicely ties into the themes of guilt and justice present in other characters often over those they could not save, like Clive, Dion, Harpocrates, Jill, Otto, Theodore, Isabelle, Quinten, etc.

I'm cutting out most of that mysterious hooded figure in Clive's head, it’s just confusing and it adds nothing Just have like a shadowy figure with glowing blue eyes and keep the glowing blue eyes be a consistent part of Ultima's every character design or something.

Beginning of Chapter 2 is where the original game starts with Clive on a mission to assassinate Shiva. Now because of a different Chapter 1 the round table scene actually makes sense because the player knows who these factions are. In my rewrite however not only is Cid looking to interfere, Joshua is using this as an opportunity to free Clive as well from afar. Throughout Chapter 1 build up Clive's discontentment as he remembers his past, so that in Chapter 2 Clive isn't just committing mutiny because he maybe saw his childhood friend, he was already planning on leaving and that he's not killing a single person more for Sanbreque and Jill is the last straw. Also have Jill represent an act of free will and also all his yet unfinished business. The drawn-out Chapter 1 also allows Clive's assassination unit to be humanized to drive home the brutality of his life and the injustice of the Branded system. If he's going to fight Clive is going to fight because he chooses to not because he's part of the same war machine that occupied his home and branded him. Instead of Cid it is Joshua that saves Clive and secures his retreat although Joshua keeps himself hidden from both Clive and the audience not ready to face Clive and using a nondescript flame. It is as Clive is running and encountering more Ironblood that he runs into Cid.

One thing that should have been explained better was Clive's status as a Bearer. During the prologue and during his childhood we see no hint of Clive being a Bearer, it is only after being enslaved by the Sabrequois army that he receives a Brand. It is strongly established and mentioned many times that one is born a Bearer. Which raises the question, was Clive ever a Bearer? I also wonder what the mechanics/magical physics difference there is between a Dominant and a Bearer, it seems to be that there is little objective difference as both are magic users without a need of crystals. Instead "Bearer" is a class term as Dominants are too militarily/culturally important to be branded. This also implies that Rosaria is a holdover of the older magocracy that used to rule Valisthea. I suspect that although he was a hidden Dominant Clive would never have been considered a Bearer especially since the Active Time Lore states that it’s common practice in Valisthea to test babies at birth for being Bearers. Rosaria and Archduke Elwin seemed more tolerant so maybe he wasn’t tested but I think it is more likely he just wasn’t born a Bearer. This would help to explain Clive's behavior in the game, he might have been branded but he never really acts like he sees himself as a Bearer. If the Bearer test just tested for magic Clive’s Dominant status might have caught him, but it is even more likely that either Anabella had him branded just to make his life even more miserable or that the imperial army didn't care that his fire magic was from The Blessing of the Phoenix as the First Shield of Rosaria, Clive could use magic thus he was a Bearer, they certainly didn't care. I wish the game had added a line or two about this to clarify the situation.

Which brings us to the next question I had about the game, how eikons and transfers of eikonic power worked. The game establishes that both eikonic power can be shared (Joshua and Clive, Barnabas and Sleipnir) but also that power shared means the Dominant will die or go berserk if they prime (Jill, Hugo, Dion (although he didn't go berserk either)). The game is wildly inconsistent about the mechanics so I'm going to overhaul this all so that there's some internal logic. First change is that sharing eikon power is not a death sentence for the Dominant but it does weaken them. Honestly this was just done as an excuse to take away Jill's ability to fight and be an active character and I will always resent this (doesn't even make sense since Dion does it anyways), and Torgal could absorb eikonic aether just fine. Dominants can usually share their power with one person though many choose not to for various reasons, I'm going to call these people who share power with Dominants "Vassals". A line should be added in-game about how it is Rosarian tradition for the First Shield to receive the Phoenix's fire and be their Vassal because that's a little detail we were missing and players only learn about this by reading the Active Time Lore. Although this is complicated by Clive being Ifirt's Dominant and Phoenix's other half so Clive isn't quite actually Phoenix's Vassal it's more complicated than that. Leviathan doesn't have a Vassal because their Dominant went rogue. Jill does not share her power until after she has come to terms with her past and realized that she does not have to shoulder her burdens alone that she shares her power with Clive. Cid wants humanity to be independent of magic so I can understand why he didn't share Ramuh's power (if it was anyone it'd probably be Dorys except that the cursebreakers seem to have formed because of the destruction of the original Hideaway). Due to changes in Waloed's writing Barnabas inspires actual loyalty in his soldiers and Sleipnir is his vassal. Another change I am making is that Terrance is Dion's Vassal in this rewrite. Benedrikta and Hugo both love their own power so they aren't sharing with anyone.

As per an overhaul to the Waloed section later, Benedrikta's characterization is altered so that power is her primary motivation. Her desire for Cid's love remains and it is tied to her desire for power but Cid is no longer her primary motivation. I'm not sure what to do with her. I think her having a breakdown and going berserk could still happen even with the lore changesjust because of the emotional stress. Benedrikta staked a lot of her identity and self-worth on her power and Clive defeating her ripped that all away from her. In addition, this is the first time Clive unknowingly absorbs an eikon so that could have affected her ability to summon Garuda, add to this the threat of being raped by bandits and sold as a slave and I’d say that’s enough for most people to go berserk. Another idea is that the Garuda fight happens because Benedrikta decides to hunt Clive down because she cannot live with the dishonor of losing to some no name Branded and she would rather die giving it her all than lived and lost.

Clive's fights against Benedrikta and his traversal of the Fallen ruins of Phoenix Gate happen mostly the same. This part of the game of pretty good so I see little reason to change it, Clive struggles with the realization and crushing guilt that he is the Dominant of Ifrit, he was the one that killed Joshua and all the people of Phoenix Gate, and how in his quest for vengeance he has been unknowingly chasing his own shadow the entire time. In the dungeon scene Clive can keep his underwear, and afterwards Cid, Jill, and Clive and discuss eikons, how odd it is more Ifrit to exist, the other mysterious Dominant of Fire that they are chasing.

With Clive's acceptance we are switching PoV to a Joshua playable section as he seeks to stop the end of the world, setting up Ultima as well as the worldbuilding and mechanics of aether and eikons. This part is optional I like the idea of it but I don't know if I like the idea so much as to include it. These will be a series of short playable segments as Joshua explores ruins and tries to piece together, aether, eikons, history, Ultima, Mothercrystals, Bearers, Dominants, and why the world is hurtling towards disaster. This is also to set up the red herring of how the Mothercrystals might be feeding Ultima so that when Joshua rejoins the party he will corroborate Cid's hypothesis.

FFXVI Rewrite Part 2: Jill, Clive, and Joshua, Changing the Timeline

I want to continue Jill's established character as someone who gave up everything from her dignity to her morals to protect the women of Rosaria. She too is being crushed under the weight of her guilt of what she did under the Ironblood but she would still be determined to protect the people she had sworn to protect. While Clive is running around chasing Joshua and coming to terms with himself, Jill is plotting a rescue effort to Iron. This then comes to an intersection with Cid's plans to destroy the Mothercrystals. For Clive, he has just seen first hand what a decade under imperial rule has done to Rosaria, he sees its people standing up for their nation, and so him contacting his uncle Byron isn't only reconnecting with the only family he has left, it’s not only about stopping the Blights, it's about Rosaria and reclaiming for Rosarians the lives and freedom they had lost. I also do want to add to this section a quest where Cid tests and confirms that crystals are leeching aether from the land and causing Blight. Clive and Jill can also open up and bond over their shared crushing guilt. Both of them have killed large amounts of people with their eikons (though more deliberately in Jill's case), both of them of have been exploited as tools of war by their conquerors/captors. So while Clive is running around, at some parts Jill is pursuing her own agenda.

The next chapter is the assault on Iron and emancipation of the Rosarian women at Drake’s Breath. Clive is still the player character; it is plot important that Joshua and Clive are the only playable characters because Ifrit and Phoenix were once one eikon. However, while Clive might be the player and perspective character, Jill is the main character for this section, her actions drive the plot here. The party splits with Jill securing an escape route for the women with Torgal while Cid and Clive cut a path for the Mothercrystal and cause a distraction for Jill. They meet back up at the Drake’s Breath and Jill kills the priests like she deserves. During the boss fight Clive has to run around stabilizing the area and escape route while fighting off minor enemies while Jill fights the boss in the background. Additionally, Jill is the one to strike and break the Mothercrystal. Iron makes better sense at a first assault because the main power struggle in the game is between Dhalmek and Sanbreque, with Waloed waiting for a hint of weakness in Storm. Meanwhile Iron is more of a side player and so their weakening does not affect Valisthea's power balance as much as going after any of the other Mother Crystals. Jill reminds me of one of those bulls that been raised in iron shackles, the adult bull is more than strong enough to break free but because it was too weak to do so when it was younger, it stopped trying. Likewise, Jill's shackles are not of iron but they bind her all the tighter and this arc is about her breaking free and remembering that she is powerful both literally and metaphorically.

I'm changing the Mothercrystal lore in the game. Ultima came into conflict with the dragons in ancient times. In a last bid to stop Ultima, the Eldest Dragon shattered their body into the Mothercrystals to act as a seal on Ultima. The Mothercrystals drain aether from the land in order to power the seal on Ultima, but as the land is running out of aether the seals are weakening. The Blight was an unforeseen side effect of the seals. When Ultima breaks free, they then repurpose the accumulated aether from the crystals to power to their world creation spell. There used to be 8 Mothercrystals total. Now there are just 5: Drake's Breath in the Iron, Drake's Head in Sanbreque, Drake's Fang in Dhalmek, Drake's Tail in Crystalline, Drake's Spine in Waloed. Even on the map on the official FFXVI website other unknown structures can be seen in central Ash for example, 3 Mothercrystals have been lost to time. The Ten Thousand Tomes confirms Dzemekys Falls is the former location of a Mothercrystal, Drake’s Eye in the Northern Territories, Drake’s Horn in Southern Ash. The relatively recent fall of Drake’s Eye in addition to the spread of the Blight is what drove the Northern incursions into Rosaria, resource scarcity driven conflict, the exact same conditions that Elwin used to justify his proposed invasion. For Dzemekys I’m keeping that humanity angered Ultima and were smote but I’m changing that it was a Mothercrystal and changing the location of the last Mothercrystal (Drake's Wing? Drake's Claw?) to perhaps eastern Ash, islands off the coast of Ash, or central Storm near where the original Hideaway was.

When Drake's Breath is destroyed the first of the seals on Ultima is released and the beginning of the doomsday apocalyptic phenomena start happening although slightly differently in this rewrite. First is the activation of Fallen ruins, second the activation of the robots, third the wraiths, fourth more and stronger fallen and aether creatures as well as the beginning of aetherfloods. Then finally when the 5th and final Mothercrystal is destroyed and the final seal broken, all hell breaks loose and the apocalypse is unleashed upon Valisthea, aetheric storms cloud the skies and aetherfloods spread across the lands. Unlike in the game where the sky changes and the aetherfloods appear after the 4th Mothercrystal (Twinside), here the changes happen after the 5th (Waloed).

Like in the actual game when the First Mothercrystal's heart is destroyed, a portal opens with a partial Ultima that the party fights. As the party is overpowered but before Cid can go sacrifice himself, Joshua intervenes saving them but is unable to kill Ultima. I am dropping Joshua sealing part of Ultima inside himself because that had no effect on the story, that plot thread went no where in the end. Joshua as well as the Rosarian women are returned to Rosaria where they are reunited with their families, Joshua and Byron included though Joshua hides from the other Rosarians. This furthers the Rosaria subplot we seen in the game with Martha and Eastpool and the Guardians of the Flame.

A change I am contemplating is reinstating a party system into this story. This game doesn't feel JRPG enough, where's my party system? These would be AI controlled characters but players would be able to choose how many characters besides Clive are active at once with a maximum of 3. Some characters will be unavailable for certain parts of the game like Jote would not be available for eikon fights. Clive is your classic JRPG sword boy the main damage dealer. Jill is the true all-rounder with physical and magic attacks. Joshua is the healer and he's like wet tissue, he has decent magic. Jote is the tank with some support abilities but little offense. Cid is another damage dealer with big hits. Torgal is the only character that can't be incapacitated, he attacks, he heals, but most importantly he's a good boy (unlocks magic later in the game). I never said the party was balanced. Or maybe not, implementing this would be a pain as FFXVI isn't character focused so explaining why party members aren't there sounds annoying.

In this story the brothers are reunited much earlier so that their relationship can develop. Clive and Joshua's relationship is the core of the game The game starts and ends with them. Their relationship is what kicks off the plot of the game from Ifrit berserking to Clive seeking revenge unknowingly against himself. They are plot critical with plot critical powers, that Ifrit and Phoenix are the eikon of Fire split into two beings and the intended vessel to cast Ultima. And yet despite the relationship being at the center of the game, so little is done with them. Joshua is away for most of the game with Clive not knowing he survived and after they are reunited nothing is done with them. The earlier reunion gives time for Joshua and Clive to reacquaint themselves with each other. The last time Clive saw Joshua he was a 10 year old boy, the Joshua before him now is a man and in many ways a stranger. Clive never got to be there as Joshua grew from boy to man, he will have forever missed that part of his brother's life. And not only did Clive think he has lost Joshua, he thought that he was the one who killed him. The same murder against whom his quest for vengeance has been his sole reason for living for the last decade.

Another reason for the added time before the timeskip is to develop Jill and her relationships. Jill is also weighed down by massive guilt over the things she has done for Iron. Before Drake's Breath she is much more closed off and her arc with Clive is mostly about lost childhood friends because just like Joshua she and Clive are now very different and very traumatized. So pre-Drake's Breath it is about stumbling when this didn't before because they don't fit together like they used to and learning to reacquaint themselves with each other. After Iron, Jill finds closure in dealing a massive blow to Iron, killing the zealot who tortured her and enslaved the Rosarians, and freeing the enslaved Rosarians. She begins to open up after this and bonds with Clive over their shared experiences. In many ways during the missing years Jill and Clive's experiences have been similar though Jill's have been worse. Both were kidnapped as children and enslaved as weapons of war, forced to fight for the very people who enacted violence against them. To both their masters Jill and Clive were expendable tools to be exploited until no more use could be squeezed out of them and they died of overwork. Both of them see themselves as monsters over the many deaths they have caused as Dominants. The difference being that Clive fought to stay alive so that he could complete his revenge against Ifrit while Jill fought in what was probably a futile effort to protect the Rosarian women and children she had sworn to take under her wing. Jill also killed on a much larger scale in eikon battles and was likely treated worse given she was given no armor or equipment and her clothes were in tatters. Clive and Jill were also treated as subhuman by their oppressors. For a decade Jill shouldered the role of protector and champion all on her own, but through Clive and Joshua and most importantly Cid she comes to terms that she need not fight on her own, and with that realization she makes Clive her Vassal because together they can do more than each would have done alone. So before the timeskip Clive gets Phoenix as a teenager, Ifrit when he returns to Phoenix Gate, Garuda after defeating Benedrikta, Leviathan after proving himself worthy to its Dominant, and Ramuh at Drake’s Head as Cid’s dying wish. One place to put Shiva would be at the end of the first part of Jill’s arc here during the lead up to Leviathan, but there’s another place I am considering.

The next arc I am completely making up because not having Leviathan in the game throws off the elemental balance on a meta level and having all 8 would be significant in Gnosticism. Joshua is following a lead on someone who might know of Ultima, the Dominant of Leviathan and semi-rogue champion of the Crystalline Dominion. I am making this arc for several reasons. The unexplained absence of Leviathan/Dominant of Water while also establishing 8 eikons and elements was always strange, why bothering establishing 8 elements and corresponding eikons if its never explained what happened to Leviathan, and Leviathan is a classic Final Fantasy staple so it's strange that it is missing. I also always found the Crystal Dominion's neutral zone reasoning to be a bit weak, for example in real life Switzerland has a reputation of neutrality because of its difficult geography and history of shooting down all aircraft regardless of affiliation, there has to be something to back up the Crystaline Dominion because just crystal export. Giving them a Dominant gives them the military power to back up their sovereignty, and their Dominant flying the coop also significantly weakens their position and further explains Sanbreque's later invasion. Leviathan's Dominant of Water is hanging out in the Southern Isles fighting sea monsters for fun and so this offers the opportunity to introduce Cid as a master engineer as well as introduce Mid and the Enterprise. The game never establishes Cid as an engineer, we only hear about it after he's dead from Mid and that is such awkward storytelling as well as a missed opportunity. The build up to Leviathan is Joshua tracking down the precise location while Cid and Mid build the Enterprsie together. We only meet Mid after the timeskip in the actual game and we don't know how old she is. Aso, she's adopted so getting the ages just right isn't that important, and kid genius is already an established character archetype so what's one more. This would necessitate a younger model for Mid but I think it is worth it. In this story Mid builds the seaship the Enterprise here with Cid to create a callback in the final arc when she builds an airship of the same name this time without her dad. Leviathan's Dominant couldn't stand the Crystalline Dominion but is the opposite of cooperative and things escalate to a fight with Clive at severe disadvantage since priming puts the ship in danger of burning and sinking. I'm not a fight choreographer I don't know maybe they evaporate all the water in a shallow sea and then beat up Leviathan. However, she would rather die than stand down, but as she dies she spits they are fools if they think getting rid of crystals will solve all their problems. With Leviathan’s fall, Twinsides’ position weakens as they can no longer pretend to have the protection of an eikon.

Next is Oriflamme and Drake's Head, things happen similarly to in the game with Sanbreque breaking treaty to invade the Crystalline Dominion and abandon Oriflamme. This is Ultima's second appearance as another of their seals is released and they grow in power. Stronger now Ultima makes a bid to take possession of Clive and Ultima, once again he is stopped but this time at the expense of Cid. Cid dies later in this story than in the actual game because he's a great character and I wanted more time with him, to build his relationship with Mid, to show his engineering prowess instead of just being told. Since Joshua joins earlier in this story the more time allows Cid to help mentor Joshua too, in reckoning with his father's dream and legacy and how despite Rosaria falling, Joshua can honor his father's work by helping the Hideaway and Bearers. This extra time before the timeskip has also allowed Clive and Joshua to reconcile with each other. They have each lived 10 years apart from each other with only their memories, they are both changed men and it would have taken time to reconcile the old and the new and form a new relationship. The sovereignty of Rosaria is no more, both of them are nameless outlaws out against the world, and they have both seen much of the world. The children they were no longer exist and now they have to stumble through all that together.

In the game, the 5 year timeskip was mostly pointless, it had very little effect on anything, so little changed that a lot of things felt frozen in time. Thus, I am greatly reducing the timeskip to about 6-12 months. The expansion of the pre-timeskip period was partly to establish Clive's major relationships like Jill and Joshua so then when the timeskip happened change could be seen. In this story whereas before the timeskip those relationships were just starting and we see the first few steps of development, after the timeskip they have solidified, Clive has settled into the new Jill and the new Joshua. Removing the 5 year timeskip also removes Joshua's inexplicable avoidance of Clive which happens in the original game. So sorry no dilf 30 something Clive, or at least not in the main story. Clive is about 26 by this point. Despite aging the characters down especially after the timeskip I think the story still works partly because most of the characters are adults already but primarily because the amount of trauma and hardship these characters have gone through would have aged them.

FFXVI Rewrite Part 3: Rosalith, Dhalmek, and Twinsides

Hugo Kupka's destruction of Rosalith happens mostly the same as in the actual game. It is the parts before that have slight changes as the Rosalith storyline was developed a further by this point in story. The original game never goes all the way to do anything with the Rosalith situation. The game establishes that despite the many long years, people still hold Elwin's reign as a golden age and have rallied around the symbol of the Rosfield Archduke as a symbol for all they have lost. The subplot I want continues what is already in the game with Rosarians rallying with this attack and then later with the further erosion of the Empire of Sanbreque. They take Elwin as the symbol not that Rosaria is the Phoenix or Archduke but take his philosophy to heart that it is Rosarians that make up Rosaria. So as Sanbreque falls apart after the destruction of Drake's Tail, Rosaria revolts and takes control of its own borders, setting up its own defenses against Akasha in the absence of imperial soldiers. Of the nations shown in the game Rosaria seems like the most receptive to Cid's ideologies so in the game I would have like to see a closer working relationship between the Hideaway and Rosarians, like real progress being made, especially after the timeskip and Hugo's death. There was also a real missed opportunity in the actual game with Clive here in not making something of the fact that the invasion of Rosalith is the first time in over 18 years that Clive has been back to his hometown (that we know of). Does he feel guilty or responsible for their suffering under Sanbreque and now Kupka? In this rewrite, this moment means something to Clive, Joshua, and Jill. For Clive and Joshua this is the moment they can no longer look away from Rosaria, they cannot out run their pasts or its people, even if it’s from the shadows they will fight for Rosaria's people.

Having Jill be inexplicably unable to resist Kupka who she fought on equal grounds with during the start of the original game, was extremely contrived and a terrible blow to her agency as a character, it was done for the sole reason of making it a plot point that she needed to be saved. I don't see why they couldn't have fought there and skipped the whole dungeon and rescue the damsel section. Even better since Kupka's goal is to have Clive watch his loved ones die, have Kupka ambush and capture Clive first since Clive is the bigger threat and it works for Jill's character since it is established that she will surrender to save another even when she is strong enough to save herself just like she did with Iron. Really the original scene would have been fine if they're framed it differently as a well coordinated surprise attack immediately putting eikon suppressors on Jill or had her prime only to be outnumbered by a unwearied Kupka and battalion. I haven't quite decided what to do with Joshua here, I think he would stay with Clive so perhaps as bad as his health is he did less fighting, stayed to the sidelines, and slipped away with Gav. I do like the idea that Clive doesn't fight Kupka alone and that Jill beats Kupka up too. In the original game it should have been Jill since Joshua hadn't joined yet but here Joshua got to know Cid too. With everyone exhausted from the battle Sleipnir can fend off a tired Jill.

I also think the Invasion of Rosalith is a good place for the conclusion of the next piece of Jill's established character, that she was taken as a child from her family and kept as a political prisoner in Rosaria with the possibility of being shoved into a marriage alliance with a Rosfield. In the original game no one would ever know that she isn't originally Rosarian because the game never does anything with this aspect of her backstory. Really except for one line in a end game quest with a lot of requirements, there is no hint of greater complexity to her childhood. Jill was wasted on FFXVI. Jill should be allowed to resent Rosaria and Elwin who took from her the sovereignty of her nation, her family, her people, her future, her political power. So how to reconcile what Rosaria did to Jill with the Jill willing to give up everything to protect Rosarians? One way to revolve this is for Jill and us to not treat this as a problem of factions and retribution but of justice and protection. Jill sided with the Rosarians because even if they had invaded others they did not deserve to be invaded and enslaved, no one deserved to be invaded and enslaved. This is a question of universal justice not of nations or politics. This poses Jill as somewhat as a savior which complements her in game actions, Jill's goals are to stand against injustice, protect the weak, and fight for those who cannot. This also aligns Jill's goals with Cid's ideology and provides reasoning for why she's committed to Cid's and the Bearer's cause. This also sets up Jill and Clive as foils in that both are pursuing ideals of justice but Clive is focused on revenge and punishment and Jill is focused on protection of the weak. These themes of justice are developed as early as the Rosaria sections of the game but are brought together here. While justice played a part, Jill protecting the Rosarian women was also probably a coping mechanism, doing so gave her a role and a reason to live. Seeing Kupka's invasion reminds her on the Ironblood invasion of Rosalith 11 years ago and of Rosaria's invasion of her homeland though she was too young to understand it. And in seeing the violence, her belief is cemented in the commonality of humanity, that all people are deserving of justice, and that no one should be invaded or enslaved.

Jill seeking universal human rights and justice regardless of faction also puts her at an interesting contrast to much of Valisthea which widely xenophobic. In the actual game Clive got absurdly lucky pre-timeskip that he met Cid and his network, friends of friends of friends who all want to help him and let him into the network. He’s out here collecting pokemon badges and those badges really do make the difference between night and day. Clive would have gotten nowhere without Cid and his network or network of favors. Part of it is the widespread and open bigotry against bearers but a lot of the towns just hate anyone who isn't a local in general. I find it interesting how local politics and the favor of local leaders (the tokens) are more powerful than many townspeople's bigotry against bearers. And then Jill through her character arc here begins seeing beyond all this to the greater picture.

I’ll be honest I forgot that in the actual game there was a section where Clive couldn’t summon Ifrit because he could still use the Ifrit abilities in gameplay so this really only affected cutscenes and really this had little plot impact since the writers didn’t want to ever portray Clive as weak or helpless so I only remembered that this happened at all when I read through my notes. That would be one change I’d make to the game, during the Ifrit-less section don’t allow Clive to use any of Ifrit’s abilities or maybe not any of the eikon abilities so that the players can experience what it means to live on stripped of a power you once had. Let’s say that Ultima’s possession attempt partially succeeded at the confrontation at Drake’s Head, taking away Clive’s ability to prime and leaving him helpless and Clive being powerless was why Cid felt the need to step up and defend him even if it cost him his life. This also better explains the power dynamics in the Rosalith invasion rewrite since Jill is the actual powerhouse during this confrontation because Clive can’t prime. Here Clive really is once again playing back up to Jill while she fights and he would love that.

In the actual game Clive gets a mini character arc later on about how he’s been pushing himself too hard, sacrificing himself too much, and been trying to do too much by himself and its poorly done and comes off as cheap especially since this is the same point in the plot where Jill gets permanently sidelined and Clive immediately goes off to continue doing things on his own. If there was any place to do that it would be here in the Dhalmek arc, about accepting that weakness isn’t failure, that relying on others isn’t weakness, that no one can no it alone, and that we are all stronger together. If Clive is going to regain Ifrit here it is only going to be through Jill, Joshua, and all the friends he has made along the way. This is the other point at which I was consider having Clive gain Shiva’s power in a literal case of regaining his power through his friends to parallel his emotional growth, in that the addition of Shiva and maybe a little help from Phoenix is what jumpstarts Ifrit and allows Clive to once again prime. It is only through Clive accepting his own helplessness and the help of others that he regains his power, the power to help them in turn.

The next arc is the Dhalmekian infiltration to kill Hugo Kupka which turns into also destroying Drake's Head. Aiming for Dhalmek's Mothercrystal instead of Waloed's is a terrible political decision as it radically changes the power balance of the region, making Sanbreque the only major player left on Storm. In this rewrite this is a purposeful mistake to contrast the more calculated, wiser, and more strategic choices my Cid to Clive's more thoughtless choices. This is Clive's first Mothercrystal without Cid. Jill will also be priming and fighting Titan Lost because she deserves more action time, having her be in recovery after would explain her absence in the next eikon fight, and because Jill has as much a bone to pick with Kupka as Clive does. Ultima doesn’t show up here since they’ve figured out the party is destroying the Mothercrystals and that only helps them.

In the lead up to Twinsides there is still a bit of Mid's ship adventures though less than before since her arc will be concluded at Origin. I like the idea of the Mid section but its execution was slow and painful. the idea was to characterize Mid and give her closure over the death of her father after all she has had to lose her father not once but twice in her short life. However, in this rewrite Mid was introduced before the timeskip and the Enterprise already built with Cid, so here Mid is struggling with what to do now and through the efforts of Clive and the rest of the Hideaway they inspire her to seriously look into a pipedream she had daydreamed about with her father, that of airships. Mid comes to realize that Cid's legacy isn't one concrete thing, it isn't the Enterprise, its all the people of the Hideaway, its every Bearer they've helped, Mid realizes that Cid's legacy is also her and so she shouldn't be afraid of changing the Enterprise because using the Enterprise as a platform for new technological innovation is exactly what Cid would have wanted.

A major lore change is that the Fallen weren’t modern humans like the party created by ultima and gained sentience after ultima went to sleep, in this story the Fallen were the society ultima was a part of. The lead up will also include more Ultima archeology and history with Joshua as the party seeks to understand why the Fallen ruins have awoken and become aggressive with aether wraiths. They find writings that tie Greagor to Ultima as well as research into transforming draconic aether into eikons.

I rather like the Twinside arc, it helps that the lead up includes the most political intrigue in the game which I think the game could use more of, and that this section focuses on Dion arguably the best written character of the game. Maybe some earlier scenes in the game with Terrance and Dion discussing the geopolitics of Valisthea, Terrance badly need any characterization. The Bahamut fight is also my favorite fight in the game so I would mostly like to keep it the same. The only thing I’d change here would be changing Zettaflare to like Exaflare or something, keep the attack the same but change the name, Bahamut isn’t even the final boss it doesn’t deserve something that should be as plot central as Zettaflare. The first major change is that since Joshua will be a party member through the Twinside section, it will be made to shown how Clive and Joshua's relationship has changed. Joshua is also the one to know Dion, in the game Clive was ready to leave him for dead, so Joshua will play a prominent role is this arc between Dion and the Mothercrystal being central plot elements here. The brothers are in need of some more heart to hearts. So far their relationship development has been about them reacquainting themselves with each other after a decade apart but now they can move towards true friendship and brotherhood. And so, this emotional connection strengthened here parallels the fusion of Phoenix and Ifrit into Ifrit Prime in the Bahamut fight, the emotional narrative and plot enhance each other. I would like Clive and Joshua to begin confiding in each other and understanding the guilt and burdens the other carries.

Clive and Joshua have such an interesting dynamic and it’s a shame the game sets up something so interesting only to do nothing with it. Clive and Joshua are both very similar and very different and act as character foils to each other. Their personalities are wildly different but their goals and burdens are very similar. Even from childhood the two brothers are tied together by strong mutual admiration and jealousy. Joshua thinks the world of his older brother, that Clive is the coolest, Clive is strong and brave and everything Joshua is not. He thinks Clive is more deserving of Phoenix and Dukedom because everything Clive has he earned of his own merit. Joshua has the open affection and love of both their parents, Joshua is the one that is doted on and cared for. Clive loves Joshua, but Joshua is also a reminder that he's been passed over as firstborn because he does not have Phoenix. Clive loves his brother but their relationship is not only that. Joshua is the lord his has sworn his life to serve and protect so their bond is not only that of brothers but of lord and knight, and this is one of Clive's core motivations throughout the game. In the actual game too, we see that Joshua has thar exact same core motivation as Clive, throughout the game his main goal is to protect Clive from Ultima's machinations.

In this rewrite as a furthering of the themes of guilt I am adding a further parallel. We see in the actual game that Clive is crushed under the weight of his guilt because he thinks Ifrit killed Phoenix at Phoenix Gate, in the dungeon cell he begs Cid to kill him because he cannot live with it, the whole story arc leading up to Clive gaining control over Ifrit deals with this. I do like how through the game Clive learns of even more people he's killed like Lord Commander Murdoch trained him and taught Clive what it meant to be a Shield of Rosaria, he might even think he killed his father since they separated before that point and everything was incinerated. Unlike in the game, here Clive isn't magically over it even after he comes to terms with being Ifrit's dominant and going berserk. To parallel Joshua is weighed by a lot of guil. Joshua on some level still carries the trauma of Phoenix Gate which included the beheading of his father as he tried to protect Joshua, the betrayal of the nation to be his responsibility at the hands of his mother, and his brother going berserk and almost killing him. Joshua feels responsible for his father's death. Joshua feels responsible for Phoenix gate. Joshua feels guilt over his abandonment of Rosaria in favor of pursuing Ultima and protecting Clive. Lastly without the the special regenerative abilities of Phoenix anyone else Dominant or no would have died, and that first death experience never left Joshua, on some level he is still afraid of Clive and Joshua hates that part of himself and feels immense guilt over it, blaming himself for not saving Clive from the Sanbreque army sooner. In this new timeline Joshua is about 20 here so most of this really is just in his head because what was some kid going to do against the Sanbreque Empire.

As mentioned previously, in this version of events the apocalypse with the eternal dark sky and the aetherfloods do not begin with the fall of Drake’s Tail, the 4th Mothercrystal, instead the fall of Drake’s Tail has a lesser effect with an increased number and appearance of stronger Fallen enemies and aetheric enemies (wraiths, etc.) as well as more recorded aetheric instability. Like in the original game Twinsides wipes Joshua out for like a month, that fight likely did permanent damage to him and his health suffers for it.

FFXVI Rewrite Part 4: Overhauling Waloed and Barnabas

I was dissatisfied with Anabella's character in the original game. She's built up as this greater antagonist on par with Barnabas and implied to have a connection to Ultima and the greater working of the plot and then all this comes to nothing as Ultima has possessed Olivier and is the actual mastermind. Additionally, Anabella highly parallels Ultima as they are both the demiurges of Gnosticism, evil and controlling creator figures that see their creations as wholly belonging to and existing for their sake. To Ultima and Anabella their creations are not independent of them, their creations/children should have no independent will, they are the ones who make decisions and their creations obey. This like all the themes in FFXVI is underdeveloped and I intend to change that by deepening the themes of free will, creation and creator, master and slave, existence before essence, and the weight of choice.

In this rewrite I'm going to keep Anabella just as reprehensible and classist as she is in the actual game but I'm going to give her more agency as a character and this is where things really change. Here Olivier has not been possessed, Anabella think him Greagor a god incarnate and convinces the Emperor but he's really just a spoiled dependent boy. In the scene where Dion goes berserk it is Anabella that triggers it not Ultima. Anabella goads him and Olivier not really knowing or caring what is going on but of course his mother is always right joins in and goes a step further. Dion kills his father just like Anabella plans and as she plays victim screaming that he's a kinslayer she hurls an Ultima imbued shard of the Mothercrystal at Dion. The crystal connects Dion with the Mothercrystal and floods him with aether with combined with his instability causes him to go berserk. As the city burns there's a scene of Anabella riding off in a carriage holding Olivier and smirking. Then Phoenix flies overhead locked in battle and we see Anabella falter as she stares up at Phoenix.

During the first week of the game’s release, I was speculating whether Anabella was Clive's biological mother at all (or if Elwin was Joshua’s father) given the strange and tense family dynamics of the Rosfields as well as how dissimilar Clive and Anabella look. However, since finishing the game and coming to understand that Anabella was designed as a foil character to Ultima, it does make more sense that Clive is her biological son. For both Ultima and Anabella Clive is their failed creation, the one that went astray. They are both interpretations of the Demiurge which in Gnosticism is the creator of the material world, the material world being fake and an evil prison to keep people from the true holy spiritual world, so the Demiurge is the evil controlling god trying to keep humans from true existence. In this rewrite I want to enhance the existing themes in the game from its Gnostic symbolism, to that of the relationships between creator and creator, master and slave. Making clear that Clive is Anabella’s son enhances these themes. Anabella doesn’t hate Clive because Elwin cheated on her and is forcing her see proof of their unequal status and powerlessness every day, Anabella hates Clive because she feels she owns him as his mother and that he has failed her arbitrary and impossible expectations by daring first to not manifest the Phoenix and then to dare have positive attributes and overshadow her younger son who did manifest the Phoenix. Anabella hates Clive for incredibly stupid, self-centered, and petty reasons.

Now comes the hard part where I break the original FFXVI’s plot across my knee and throw the whole thing out the window because the Waloed section through to the end of the game was a mess. First let me discuss what the writers tried to do and how they failed. King Barnabas was intended as Ultima’s successful creation to foil Clive as the failed creation. Clive asserts his independent will, his desire to live on his own terms, and that he will throw down all shackles forces upon him. Barnabas has forfeited his will and individuality for a life of religious devotion as Ultima’s puppet. Conceptually this isn't bad, the problem is in execution. Barnabas ended up being incredibly disappointing and boring as a character. For all Ultima and Barnabas' discussions of severing the ties of consciousness between Clive and his companions, they don't do anything or pose any sort of narrative threat. There are no stakes to this arc beyond a distant feeling that the world might end. Ultima shows up and has pointless conversations with Clive that go nowhere, establish nothing, and do nothing to progress the plot or stakes. From a character motivation standpoint at this point of the game Clive is doing exactly what Ultima wants so there’s no reason for Ultima to keep talking to Clive either. FFXVI tries to portray religious extremism and fails miserably. The game does little to establish religion and belief as a main theme in the game despite it being present in the background, the says nothing meaningful about religion and the only thing mildly interesting to happen, happens in an easily missed sidequest for the Undying.

Originally, I did consider trying to build off of this foiling of the slave to religion vs. the free man but to make it work actually involves changing more of the plot than the alternative and it just kept writing itself into a corner. A lot more would have needed to be done with religion earlier in the game, perhaps exploring how the different culture’s in Valisthea had different belief systems and interacting with how their various beliefs, theologies, and philosophies play out. They also could have had a story arc about how religion is used to subjugate, indoctrinate, and control people. More could have been done tying Ultima to the major religions of Valisthea like how Greagor is actually Ultima. Ultima and Barnabas should have followed through with those threats to sever the bounds of consciousness and started killing off the entire cast. The Hideaway should have been invaded and destroyed and the hub area lost. Otto, Mid, Vivian, Harpocrates, and eventually Gav, Jill, and Joshua. This would all have had massive gameplay and story implications and at that point I thought this was too much work for something I’m doing for fun, it’s not like Squeenix is paying me to fix their writing problems.

The solution I decided on completely flips Barnabas’ character and ideology, and ironically that changes less of the story than trying to stay true to the writers’ intentions. In this rewrite Barnabas still foils Clive but in the completely opposite way he does in the actual game. Here Barnabas is also a proponent of free will but in contrast with Clive’s more community minded approach to raising people up, Barnabas’ meaning of free will is the ability for him to impose his will over other people. Cid and Clive respect the rights and wills of all people while new Barnabas only respects his own will. Because Waloed no longer serves Ultima, the invasions of Dhalmek and Kanver here are due to Tharmr’s global conquest ambitions and to a lesser degree him shoring up resources to take on Ultima.

Barnabas here is in some ways a Übermensch, he is someone who has transcended all measure of human morality to create his own values to live by, someone who commands, creates and strikes his own path instead of obeying or following, someone powerful who’s power comes from them and not society. This new version of Barnabas has ironically cast aside religion and gods much like an Übermensch who Nietzche’s speculated would rise in the void of faith after the fall of Christian morality, to rise above humanity and gods both as a new being. As a critique of the concept, this Barnabas is also a self-centered and violent tyrant with no care for others, delusions of grandeur, and dreams of conquest and subjugation to bend lesser men to his will in a might equals right world. Benedrikta found Barnabas’ veneer of power alluring as she too desired power while Cid initially optimistic of the new world order Barnabas was trying to forge eventually grew disillusioned and bitter at his disregard for other people. Of note is that Barnabas does not have Ultima’s magic anti-aging serum in this version of events, the similar lack of aging was why I suspected Anabella to be similarly involved early on but that just ended up being a plot hole in the original game. There are two options to deal with this, first that Barnabas is an old man in his 60’s adding a layer of desperation to his conquests though that would not explain the lull in activity in recent years in in the actual game is explained by his contact with Ultima. The other option is that the timeline is changed so that the conquest of Ash is more recent.

Similar strongman archetypes to this new version of Barnabas can be found in the Chaos Heroes of the Shin Megami Tensei main games especially the early games, and in Walhart from Fire Emblem: Awakening. I want to discuss Walhart further because this Barnabas has ended up being a very similar character. Both are ruthless dictators seeking to take over the world who will destroy all opposition with force, they see themselves as the strongest, both refuse to bow to or worship anything. They would both unite the armies of the world to destroy the evil gods who would seek to end the world and the party defeating them ironically makes it easier for the evil god characters to destroy the world as the party just removed one of their obstacles for them. This focus on power and individual merit while deemphasizing position and background likewise justifies Waloed as the only nation accepting of beastmen into its military ranks. Barnabas doesn’t care who you are he care what you can do, it’s how outlanders like himself, Cid, or Benedrikta rose so high in the ranks.

The next arc will be Waloed and the destruction of the 5th and final Mothercrystal, Drakes Spine. With the nations of Storm in shambles, the war machine of Waloed rumbles and they prepare a full-scale invasion of Storm. The party must scramble to unite factions that were just at war with each other to prepare for the full-on invasion. They aim to strike the heart of Waloed before the war ships launch hoping to throw Waloed into disarray. The plan is to split the party with one group rallying around Kanver to make a stand while another infiltrates and destroys Drake’s Spine. By this point Clive and Ifrit have gotten famous or perhaps infamous as the most powerful man on Storm and Barnabas is coming to challenge him directly as such Clive will be at the front of the defense hoping to kill Barnabas and dissolve his empire. Joshua will be leading a small party into Waloed and the one with the most experience with Mothercrystals. Joshua will then become the main playable character during this section with cutscenes showing Clive organizing the people of Storm and forming a rapport with Dion as another man who’s eikon went berserk and destroyed the people he’d sworn to protect they are both knights who failed. The rest of the party hasn’t quite been set in stone but I think Gav and Jote would go with Joshua and that Clive would send Torgal to look after Joshua. Ash isn’t quite as desolate as it is in the actual game but between the conscriptions, the heavy taxes, the blight, and the increased monster activity (Fallen, spectres and wraith type enemies) it is still pretty bad in Ash. As such getting to Drake’s Spine will involve a lot more stealth than it does in the real game but they get there as its garrisons have emptied for war and make their way to the heart of the Mothercrystal. This section of the game introduces the Circle of Malius which worships Ultima and part of exploring Ash is Joshua going to those ruins and learning how their teachings say that Ultima created humanity and that humanity should serve because it is their destiny and purpose. During the Waloed section there’s a brief cutscene of a pan shot of Anabella and an escort party walking through Fallen architecture.

While Joshua makes his way through the fortress to the Mothercrystal, the fight for Kanver begins and at the climax of both events Clive faces off against Barnabas at the same time that Joshua meets Sleipnir in Drake’s Spine who was ordered to stay behind because Waloed suspected something like this might happen. Gameplay then switches between the two battles with eikonic titans Ifrit and Odin clashing and splitting the sea, while contrasted to Joshua and Sleipnir dueling with rapiers across the crystal floor. As the Vassal of Odin Sleipnir is more than enough to hold off Joshua and Joshua is forced to semi-prime to stand a chance, further risking his health. Sleipnir here is not an egi and extension of Odin, instead he is a normal human man who believes in new Barnabas’ ideals and is loyal to him. Eventually both Joshua and Clive manage to kill their opponents, on screen it should be a split perspective for the final blow with both Joshua and Clive striking down their opponents at the same time.

The Barnabas and Clive fight is a battle of ideals. Both characters are proponents of free will and that people should be able to live on their own terms but they have wildly different interpretations as to what this looks like implemented in the real world. Inevitably some person’s terms will clash with another person’s terms. Barnabas sees this as a matter of individual strength, that one must be strong to be able to decide their own life, to rise beyond the masses and take life by the reins. The rule of the jungle where the strong have the power to do whatever they want, and if the weak want change than all they have to do is become stronger. Clive is more cooperation and community minded; it is about everyone lifting each other up to a better life. There’s the paradox of tolerance in that if a community tolerates intolerance for certain people that community will become as intolerant and bigoted as possible, so to maintain tolerance and equal rights intolerance must not be tolerated. To ensure the rights of all, some times limits need to be put on people, especially limits on the rich and powerful. I do wish the actual game had engaged with Clive’s life experiences more because he’s seen first hand the social determinants of health and how society treats those it doesn’t care about, the least protected. Another change is that I would make the Barnabas Clive fight much more exciting. Anticlimactic fights are fine but they have to be done with purpose (as I intend to do later), a fight is anticlimactic to contrast it with other fights or to drive home an emotional point in the narrative, but the lack of excitement in the original fight serves no purpose, its just boring. Some ideas I have are for the fight to be over the water with Odin cleaving the ocean into several parts and Ifrit hoping between and boiling away parts of the ocean to clear a path. I’m not a fight choreographer but this fight needs to be big and as flashy and impressive as the others in the game.

FFXVI Rewrite Part 5: Origin, Ultima, and the Ending

With the last Mothercrystal destroyed and the final seal on Ultima broken, the apocalypse begins. The sky breaks apart into dark roiling aetheric stormclouds casting the world into eternal gloom. Aetherfloods spill across the lands poisoning all life and turning it akashic, the remaining crystals fail. There is no nation left standing in Valisthea. The one force that would have fought against Ulima’s rule Waloed is in disarray. The greatest champion fighting for free will was Banabas who is now dead. Congrats on making things worse! Isn’t free will and making choices great? The party much now scramble to figure out what is going on, all the while the realization of how badly they messed up slowly dawns upon them. Like in the actual game’s post Twinside section, the party scrambles to recover from the Waloed attack while also fending off compounding problems of starved beasts, Fallen machines, akasha, and wraiths. Now though Origin has also risen into the sky destroying all hopes of salvaging Twinside. The party travels around Valisthea piecing together the deteriorating situation with the destruction of the Mothercrystals and wonders if this is what Ultima wanted since they stopped bothering them several Mothercrystals back. Doomsday cultists start popping up. In particular will be the savior cult the Circle of Malius who are much the same as the are in the actual game striving to make all people akashic as they see it as the ultimate pure state free of mortal burdens. This formerly suppressed underground faction now runs free now that Barnabas is gone.

I really do like most of the sidequest storylines especially Dion and Harpocrates’ quest, however a complaint I had was that their placement right before the final boss dropped the pacing off a cliff. In this rewrite the last section is being expanded so there is time added here for Clive to rally people and finish their storylines so that the finale can be uninterrupted. This includes the final part of Jill’s character arc where she reckons that for all that she has talked big and tried to help people, she herself still does not quite know what it means to live on her own terms, but she thinks she is finally starting to understand. Jill wants to travel the world, to help the people out there who don’t know how to fight for themselves yet and to find herself. In the actual game the Jill-Clive romance is primarily hindered by Jill’s poor writing having tried to fix her writing here I have no objections to the romance anymore. However, I was never a fan of romances and am of the mentality of that if it isn’t needed it shouldn’t be included. For example, in Tales of Arise the relationship between Alphen and Shionne is the center point around which the rest of the story revolves and while it could have been a friendship instead of a romantic one, there is no Tales of Arise without Shionne and Alphen’s relationship. This is not the case for FFXVI, even in this rewrite Jill is not the deuteragonist (if anyone it’d be Joshua), as such Jill and Clive’s relationship is not central to the story and really while I’m not opposed, I feel a romance just gets in the way of the story, if there’s to be any romance I would rather it just be implied or optional. Dion and Terrance should still kiss because that is bold and revolutionary in a way the portrayal of any straight couple isn’t, also they’re side characters so it doesn’t matter this story isn’t about them. Before the final dungeon is also the time to show how life without magic sucks. FFXVI sort of glosses over this very briefly but I think this point should be integrated into all the final storylines, without magic people have no safe drinking water or fire, disease begins running rampant, industry grinds to a halt, and food production halts so people begin starving in the streets in mass, and Clive has to see all this knowing this is what he’s done to people.

The party eventually learns of Ultima’s plans to destroy the world and enslave humanity by flooding them with aether and turning every living thing akashic. At the same time, they record increased aether concentrations gathering around Origin, as the Blights worsen as Ultima repurposes the same draining mechanisms as the Mothercrystals, He turns the very chains that bound them into his servants. Instead of loredumping via a ten minute monologue at the end of the game, now would be a good place to drop bits of lore and worldbuilding like how in this version dragons, frostwolves, and such were the original inhabitants of the world. Ultima is the last surviving active member of the Fallen whose ancient civilization made all the ruins encountered across the game. Ultima and the Fallen brought humans to Valisthea and created eikons by enslaving the power of the land’s original inhabitants. Eikons are a phenomena of the recent centuries and a sign that the seals were weakening.

As a lover of JRPGs I found it immensely disappointing that Origin was just some cutscenes and not a full dungeon so I’m making it a full dungeon in this rewrite. Ultima is trying to draw in Clive and possess him anyways (as well as the combined Ifit-Phoenix fire eikon) so they would try and cut off the rest of the party. Dion is able to break a hole in Origin that Clive enters into with Joshua, however Jill is cutoff, and under constant assault she seals the hole after them to stop pursuit. In addition, the Fallen forces are marching from Origin to turn every person akashic and Dion and Jill are needed to hold them back. As such Dion and Jill as the two that can fly stay outside to stop pursuit of Joshua and Clive, as well as to try and contain Ultima’s forces from murdering and or turning everyone on the continent into akasha. This would be a nice scene to show all the factions of Valisthea that Clive has met and negotiated with coming together to ward off extermination. Like the Trinity Accord can actually be something meaningful as a defense accord rallying humanity’s last remnants. Origin will be a classic final dungeon boss gauntlet with no way to exit until the player beats the game. Every set of floors (5? 10?) will be a boss as Ultima seeks to weaken Clive.

During the ascent to the top or Origin the final secrets of the game are revealed and the lore scattered throughout the game brought together. To reiterate, the Fallen drained the resources of their homeland and turned it into a wasteland, their civilization collapsed and the survivors fled upon the mothership Origin to a new world. Coming to Valisthea, they came into contact with the native lifeforms such as the dragons and began a war of conquest for control over Valisthea. The Fallen made eikons out of draconic aether to use as war weapons against the dragons themselves thus why eikons are elemental themed. Eventually the Fallen with their eikons and advanced technology kill most of the dragons but not before most of them were killed as well. As a last resort the last remaining dragons sacrificed themselves to seal the last Fallen away the Eldest Wyrm’s body fragments, becoming the Mothercrystals. The Mothercrystals much like dragons themselves have a strong connection to the aether of the land and while not ideal, a side effect of the Mothercrystals is that they feed off of the land’s aether to power their seals. Because this was a last ditch effort it’s full of problems including that the seals take an unsustainable amount of aether and after the land is drained of aether the seals begin to fail. Mining and using crystals sped up the breaking of the seals as well as the spread of the deadlands as the Mothercrystals drained the lands to fuel the seals. Ultima is the last active Fallen who awakened as the seals weakened. The reawakening did not go as he hoped as the other Fallen only remained as aether. Ultima seeks to flood all of humanity with Fallen aether made of his people’s souls to truly reincarnate them, replacing the original aether of the world with Fallen aether. Origin now acts as the focal point amassing aether and releasing Ultima’s forces.

At the top floor of Origin Clive and Joshua find not only Ultima but Anabella and Olivier. Anabella and Olivier transport to Ultima’s eden space ship which is revealed to be the red star Metia; Origin acts as the connecting point between Valisthea and Metia. Ultima reveals that the Fallen are the true humans of this setting. The original humans created soulless shell or dolls for them to later fill with their own aether, reincarnate, and thus save their civilization. All the characters the player has met were these husks created by the true humans, the people of Valisthea were never meant to be people on their own with wills and thoughts. Similarly, Mythos like in the actual game was the chosen vessel for Ultima to fill with the eikons, ascend to godhood, and power the casting. But like most plans, things have gone wrong and now created fights Creator. Ultima tells Clive and Joshua that they and their brethren were only ever imposters wrongfully claiming the title of humanity their masters: the true humans. As creations of humans, they belong to humans, their wills exist only as an extension of the true humans’ wills. “In Ultima's eyes, mankind's greatest sin is the awakening of free will—his servants straying from the path their creator laid out for them and forging one of their own. However, Clive contends that this is a sin by which Ultima is equally stained—and indeed, if humanity is indeed Ultima's creation, does not their every action, every emotion stem from him?” (Mysteries of the Realm: Sin).

Clive and Joshua face Ultima in his Ultimalius form as in actual FFXVI for stage 1 of the final boss fight. After beating Ultimalius, Ultima transforms Stage 2 is a giant kaiju eikon battle is space. Like in the Bahamut fight, Ifrit and Phoenix combine, however where Ifrit Prime was an incomplete fusion, this time the fusion is in full and the true Eikon of Fire emerges: Adonaios v2.11 (other possible names are Sabaoth and Belias). Ultima uses the beta testing version Adonaios v1.8; 1.8 comes from the incorporation of all 8 elements plus Ultima, 2.11 comes from Adonaios having to be split into two but left unfinished by Ultima for Clive to collect the remaining eikons. In game Ifrit Prime just looked like the Ifrit model with 2 feathers glued on, Adonaios v2.11meanwhile looks like a 50:50 fusion a molten red eikon with wings, horns, a feathered tail, and a jagged beak. Adonaios is slimmer than Ifrit but overall bigger with the feathers. Adonaios v1.8 meanwhile looks like the figure on the murals, a fusion of all 8 eikons and elements however it is falling apart at the seams even as Ultima fights with it because it’s an abandoned draft version. Late in the stage 2 fight Clive and Joshua are losing and draw upon the remaining power of the eikons of whom only Bahamut and Shiva are left. This drains the remaining eikonic power from Jill and Dion, grounding them and making the Valisthea fight hopeless, the Ultima fight now all or nothing. Stage 3 of the final boss fight takes place aboard Metia. Metia was an alien spaceship all along, but more accurately it is a control satellite from which to coordinate the revival of humanity. Clive, Joshua, and Ultima have all mostly used up all their power in the previous stage. In this final stage of the fight Ultima transcends and returns to his original appearance that of a human, Clive and Joshua are no longer fighting some strange monster but someone they would recognize as human. In stage 3 Clive cannot semi-prime. In the end Ultima is killed and his species is now extinct.

Joshua and Clive are exhausted from climbing Origin as well as the consecutive boss fights but begin to relax with Ultima dead, and then Anabella steps out. Anabella thought she could outplay Ultima by siding with him and then taking over, and now she sees her chance. She steals all the power that Ultima had been siphoning into himself to cast the spell, and redirects it all into Olivier to turn Olivier into a god and who will rule the world, doing what Ultima failed to do. It fails because playing god is a bad idea, Olivier’s body cannot handle the power and it begins mutating him into a deformed humanoid abomination with multiple arms and eyes, bodies seemingly trying to grow out of him. So, the true final boss is mercy killing a child who is falling apart and turning into an abomination but doesn't know it, as he cries that it hurts and begs you to stop. Olivier cannot be allowed to live as they will destroy the world. and the aether is warping his mind and he becomes less coherent as the fight goes on, regressing from full sentences to just screams. Ascended Olivier doesn’t really fight back, he flails around and lashes out when attacked but attacks aren’t particularly aimed at the player and he’s mostly crying and shaking on the ground in pain. Ascended Olivier has a very large health bar and the story will not progress until he is killed, the last save point is before reaching the top floor or Origin. In a game full of epic boss battle, the last is anticlimactic by design, there is no epic music just silence, there is no challenging gameplay, only attacking a child. The gameplay is boring, its grueling, and that’s the point. Clive kills Olivier and then there’s just Anabella.

Much like the Fallen were the creators of modern humans who sought to control their creations and saw them as an extension of themselves, creations that deviated and refused to submit to their will and thus were failures. So too is Anabella a controlling creator who deemed her children failures for not advancing her goals, hating and discarding them to try again with a new child. Olivier was supposed to be her ultimate creation, perfect and subservient to her with no will of his own. The parallels between Anabella and Ultima exist in the actual game so it was disappointing her role ended so early and nothing was done with this parallel. Here is this rewrite, the large-scale destruction of the world by Ultima is paralleled with the destroyed Rosfield family and this final confrontation with Anabella. Anabella is not a warrior, without her soldiers and pawns she doesn’t have and martial power, she is more or less powerless to her fate at this point having discarded all her cards and bet everything Olivier. Clive (and the player) are then given the choice to “do nothing”, “kill”, or “spare” Anabella, Clive after all was the one who suffered the most from her. If “kill” is chosen, then Clive kills Anabella. If “spare” is chosen, Clive walks away but not before Joshua steps in and kills Anabella because even if Clive can forgive her Joshua can’t. If “do nothing” is chosen Anabella kills herself unable to reconcile with a reality in which she has lost.

Clive and Joshua use the last embers of the eikonic power remaining to shut down Primogenesis and Ultima’s plans, landing the Metia at the base of the crumbling Origin. The closing shot is of gang standing together overseeing a ruined Valisthea as the camera pans showing the aether storm clearing, wraiths evaporating, and fallen machines deactivating permanently. The deadlands are still around but a new sprout is seen growing. The credits sequence plays over a scene of Mid yelling to hurry it up she wants to see stoves and water purifiers in every village by the end of the month, shots of people is Valisthea figuring out how to live without magic using technology and innovation, the main characters are seen helping repair efforts. The end card says 4 years, meaning FFXVI takes place over a total of 16 years, from the beginning of the game and Phoenix Gate to the end of the game and Origin. Sun light is streaming through a window as Clive writes in a book which he closes to the title “Final Fantasy XVI by Joshua and Clive Rosfield”. As the timeline is changed here so that Clive is younger for the duration of the game than he is in the real game, his older model can be used here. Clive is using his non-dominant hand here as his dominant hand has been partially petrified from his fight with Ultima. On the desk is a photo of Clive and a bedridden Joshua.

The game’s themes could have been better integrated into the final section of the game. If FFXIV wanted to tell a story about choice, then they should have made Clives’ choices have weight and consequence. If he wants a society free of the Mothercrystals then the game should have showed how he ruined the lives of many many people by destroying them. FFXVI would have benefited greatly from more moral dilemmas like that. There should have also been exploration of the concepts of creation, ownership, makers, what makes someone human. One missed opportunity was not bringing up the relationship between art and artist, is art an extension of the artist or its own thing. The references to Gnosticism were fine but the concepts could have been clearer. There are also just a truckload of small problems and inconsistencies in the game like how Charon is said at one point to have a wide variety of customers across the continent while at another point is said on exclusively trade to the Hideaway. There’s a sidequest about how Murdoch’s nephew joins the Hideaway because he admires Clive and then the game forgets about him (just like they forget about Jill) and only remembers him again to put him on a bus, thus having no interaction with Clive. A lot of worldbuilding is just badly done. I love mysteries but making things misleading and obscure for no reason is not how to do it. So much of it was unclear or convoluted or just pointless even after reading the completed The Thousand Tomes that I just threw the whole thing out and wrote new lore for this reimaging of FFXVI. If a change is not specified than it is the same as in the actual game. I wrote 85% of this in Jun-Jul of 2023, then stopped for lack of motivation. I only finished this for the sake of finishing it because I don’t care anymore. I’m done with FFXVI and it’s poor writing.

It says something that it ended up being easier to throw out the later 1/3 of the game. In earlier drafts I did originally try to make canon work like Barnabas being one of Ultima’s devout and purifying Waloed by turning it all akashic, or Joshua’s probable death at the end of the game. Like it would have made more sense for Barnabas and Ultima as they are portrayed in the actual game to methodically hunt down and kill every person or named NPC Clive has ever talked to, slowly isolating him from his humanity by breaking every connection he’s ever tried to make. But of course, this removes the cast from having a role in the rest of the game and makes it impossible to keep the rest of the game the same. This rewrite ended up being pretty happy and optimistic because that’s the spirit of the original game. FFXVI in the end is pretty optimistic, which I have mixed feelings about. FFXVI tries have an upbeat uplifting ending and message while also wanting to be a dark, gritty, edgy Game of Thrones knockoff, and while this is very possible for a work to do, FFXVI did not succeed in meshing these aspects into a consistent whole, XVI ends up feeling inconsistent or disjointed. So while I did eventually decide to uphold XVI’s optimistic spirit I did consider another possibility leaning into more of the darker ambience. With the rising of Origin and fight to climb the tower, every major character either is killed or sacrifices themselves for Clive to reach the summit. The Cursebreakers buy time of the ground with their lives, Dion finally gets the absolution of death he has been seeking for Sanbreque, Jill joins Clive and Joshua in the tower but sacrifices herself to hold back the tower bosses and all of Ultima’s forces chasing them up the tower. During the second stage of the final Ultima fight to turn Ifrit Prime into Adonaios v2.11 and truly fuse Phoenix and Ifrit, Joshua who is already dying burns himself away allowing Clive to have all of Phoenix’s power. Clive thus kills Olivier alone, and faces Anabella alone, his fate left ambiguous.

#ffxvi #ff16 #final fantasy xvi #clive rosfield #jill warrick #joshua rosfield #barnabas tharmr #anabella rosfield

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therunawaykind · 3 years ago

Text

Green Eyes - Part I

Pairing: Leigh Shaw x Reader

Word Count: 2.2k

Warnings: fluff/angst

Author's note: Green Eyes by Coldplay has been on repeat for the last few days. And I couldn't help but think of a story to do with it. I know I could've gone a fluffy happy route with it....but I didn't.

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Leigh had been your friend since college… well it’s a bit more difficult than that, you had somehow grown to have feelings for Leigh. Well like who wouldn’t she is the most caring and thoughtful person ever and will go out of her way to do anything. But when you realised you had feelings for her you started to separate yourself from her to not hurt yourself. You knew she was going out on a few dates with a guy called Matt Greer and you couldn’t even hate him cause he had Leigh because he made her so fucking happy like ecstatically happy. So you kept your distance.

Whenever she asked why you were so distant you always went to the excuse of college work. This worked out due to the fact you were studying music and songwriting so for you it was pretty much constant. Trying to find inspiration for songs, get out of writer’s block, find a rhythm, melody and so on and so forth. And she always understood that’s why it hurt so much.

In all of your time spent with Leigh you never once met her boyfriend Matt and you assumed she never once mentioned you since you started to well be an asshole basically. When she went out that night with her friends, that’s when you wrote Green eyes in full everything in one night. It never saw the light of day for the duration of your college education because to you it seemed too obvious.

After you both graduated from college the distance between the both of you grew quite sadly for the both of you. You would always text each other when you had free time, updating each other on everything and anything. It was difficult since she was constantly in Los Angeles living, and well your music career was picking up. Leigh was ecstatic for you she couldn’t lie, she was happy for you. But she hated not being able to see you. Yeah, sure she saw you on posters, on the TV and heard you on radio stations. But that was just the Y/N Y/L/N that had to watch what you were doing and saying otherwise everything you did would do shitty.

She wanted to see the real you again the you that let loose in college even though she couldn’t recall that you in the last few years in college cause you distanced yourself from her. She never got a reason why and as much as she would like to say she was over it and it didn’t bother that she didn’t have an answer...it bothered her. It bothered her so fucking much.

Much to your dismay when you thought she didn’t talk about you to Matt. Leigh did, she talked about you all the damn time but she never mentioned your name ever to him. As much as Matt wanted to meet this mysterious friend from college Leigh knew she never did offer for the two of you to meet up. She liked having you just to herself, knowing you get on with people far too easily and she’d have to end up sharing you with Matt as well.

As for you, you’d see the random poster, article or advert for Beautiful Beast. You were happy to know Leigh, Jules and Amy were all doing well in that venture. Whenever you saw something big come up about them you’d send the article or whatever you saw and congratulated them.

Surprisingly enough one day whilst you were in the studio as you were sorting through sheets of lyrics. Lyrics you haven’t seen for years fell onto the floor and your producer picked them up and read them as he read the music as well. “Y/N why have you never offered up this piece of music?”

You saw the name and swallowed dryly “it was written as a rough draft for something in college. I never thought it was good enough to offer up.” He starts to chuckle “Y/N, you’ve given me up every piece of music you’ve ever written. I’ve never heard something remotely like this come from you so it was not a draft for one of your other pieces.”

You nodded and licked your lips as you were racking your brain you thought surely it’s been long enough to get this out there now right? Leigh wouldn’t suspect it to be about her. You took a deep breath and nodded “okay we can record it. However, I want it to say exactly how it is very acoustic nothing big just simple.”

He walked over to you and slapped your back “you got my word nothings changing. Now get in there and we work on this thing.” As you stood up to record it you muttered a quiet “fuck”

The day you had finalised everything for the release date of Green Eyes. Leigh had text you telling you that her and Matt had got engaged. So, of course, you did what every best friend does you told her you congratulations and you couldn’t wait for the wedding. The next few weeks were madness with your song coming out. It probably well it was your biggest song yet which shocked you it was literally everywhere. You couldn’t escape it, in one way you were living your hell.

You couldn’t escape a song you wrote in college about a girl you fell in love with that is now engaged. Yet on the other hand a song you wrote in fucking college randomly is doing fucking amazing. It really was a love-hate relationship with that song. Then you got a random call from your manager telling you to come to the office he needed to ask you something.

When you arrived you were greeted with hugs and literally everything else you could think of. Then you heard the words utter out of his mouth “I got a phone call from a guy called Matthew Greer, he’s getting married soon and wants to surprise his soon to be wife with a performance by yours truly. He said once he heard the song he wanted it played, but he didn’t just want the music playing. He wanted you there since you’re so good and he wants an authentic live performance to really wow his fiancee.

You took a deep breath and stared at the floor for a few moments. You’d be going to the wedding anyway as a guest….but then Matt would know you’re Leigh’s friend and Leigh wouldn’t be shocked by you going on stage singing. Fuck. you could utterly ruin Leigh and say you can’t make it to the wedding….that may make her hate you more than she already does….but you’d still show up.

After a few moments, you nodded “fine tell him I’ll do it but no one can know a thing okay. He can’t open his mouth. Nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Niente.” Your manager ran over and hugged you “oh you’re gonna make this couple so happy!”

When you got home you stared at the RSVP in your hand, with very clear writing basically taunting you, ‘invitation to Leigh Shaw and Matthew Greer’s Wedding’. You hovered your pen between yes and no, finally you decided to tick yes. If you had to end up being sneaky so Matt wouldn’t see you there, you’d do just that to keep Leigh happy. You placed it back in the envelope and left to send it off.

As you parked outside the church you stare at the doors and mutter a “goddammit.” you walk into the church just as the ceremony is starting you stand at the back hidden away from Matt but standing in such a way you’ll be seen by Leigh. You saw Leigh’s eyes darting around looking for you. You smirked and did a low whistle that you knew she’d recognise. Immediately her head turned towards you and grinned. She motioned to you with her hand to come closer. You smirked and shook your head, the smile that was planted on her face very quickly turned into a frown. As you were watching the whole ceremony you couldn’t lie you were proud and very happy for your friend. Even though deep down you knew this was hurting you like a bitch.

You’ve been at the reception for a few hours now, how you hid from Leigh the entire time you really had no idea. At the end of the ceremony, you told her you had to leave quick cause you had something for work to sort out….you weren’t technically lying. You had a few sneaky drinks to try and calm your nerves and guess what they didn’t help. You were hiding behind one of the curtains of the stage. When you Matt appeared out of nowhere and basically gave you a heart attack. You both hugged and you mumbled “congratulations.” He was grinning ear to ear he couldn’t thank you enough for doing this and told you it was gonna make Leigh’s night considering she’s had the song on continuously. That comment had you worried when it shouldn’t have she was your friend she was supporting your new song...that’s all it was right?

As you were getting introduced by Matt you walked out on stage with a guitar strapped around you. You were met with a bunch of screams and yells, that’s when you looked out and saw Leigh, Jules and Amy all looking at you with their mouths wide open. As you sat down on the stool you adjusted the guitar and the mic as you plucked random strings. You cleared your throat “so first of all congratulations to the newlywed couple, hope you have many happy years together. I was contacted by Matt asked to play my new song Green Eyes for his new wife Leigh apparently she’s been playing it constantly.”

Leigh laughed and rolled her eyes. “I honestly couldn’t wait to make a wedding couples dream come true. So to the couple of the night let’s all raise a glass and celebrate them.” The room blew up in applause and cheers, you smirked, “And now for the lovely couple especially here is Green eyes.”

Honey, you are a rock

Upon which I stand

And I come here to talk

I hope you understand

The green eyes

Yeah, the spotlight

Shines upon you

And how could

Anybody deny you?

I came here with a load

And it feels so much lighter now I’ve met you

And honey, you should know

That I could never go on without you

Green eyes

Honey, you are the sea

Upon which I float

And I came here to talk

I think, you should know

The green eyes

You’re the one that I wanted to find

And anyone who tried

To deny you must be out of their minds

‘Cause I came here with a load

And it feels so much lighter since I met you

Honey, you should know

That I could never go on without

Green eyes

Uh-oh-oh

Honey, you are a rock

Upon which I stand

As Leigh was dancing with Matt she knew she should’ve been looking lovingly into her husband’s eyes but for the life of her, she could not take her eyes off of you. Sure she’s listened to that song continuously as you said but there was something about you singing there tonight. That had brought back all those feelings she thought she had gotten rid of all those years ago when you started to distance yourself from her.

It was in that moment listening to you sing it made sense the song was about her. In one way it didn’t surprise her since the second she heard it the only way she could describe it is she felt like it was home to her, it was just an instant love for the song. And everything about the song how it was written, sung and played was what all her favourite songs sounded like. Leigh was broken out of her trance when she heard everyone applauding. She clapped along with everyone as she felt Matt’s hand around her waist.

You walked over still holding onto your guitar and kissed her cheek and whispered in her ear “congratulations Leigh, you look beautiful.” you gave her another kiss on her cheek as you held her hand subtly.

She nodded and struggled to get out “t...thank you Y/N/N” You smirked when you heard the nickname only she called you. You patted Matt on the back and congratulated him again as you walked off. You stood near the door of the reception, watching Leigh dance with Matt. She turned her head to look straight at you. You both smiled at each other and you gave her a wink as you left.

There you both were not knowing the two of you actually reciprocated those feelings for each other. The day that was meant to be the happiest day of Leigh’s life and she couldn’t help but think what if.

Leigh danced with Matt for the rest of the night, you sat at home playing random chords on your guitar.

Both thinking it was unrequited love

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Taglist: @8bitscarlet @cristin-rjd @Ethanwoods1 @raven-ss @royalityofmultifandom @supuesto @xxxtwilightaxelxxx @olsensnpm @lovelyy-moonlight @hoeforwandanat @marie45019

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#leigh shaw x reader #leigh shaw x you #leigh shaw x y/n #leigh shaw imagine #sorry for your loss #elizabeth olsen x y/n #elizabeth olsen x reader #elizabeth olsen imagine #leigh shaw #Spotify

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celestialrry · 4 years ago

Text

stood up

3.5k

hello everyone!!!! I've been awol for literally weeks because i had absolutely NO motivation to write but i finally finished this piece ˊᗜˋ so YAY. ALSOO thank you for following me, liking, and reblogging my pieces (it encourages me somuchsothankyouireallyappreciateit-- and remember reblogging really helps us writers :))) ) here’s a hug for all ur patience and feel free to send me asks or requests i love talking to you guys! ε(♡'-')з

summary: Harry keeps standing Y/N up. (request from @ballerinrry! thank u love)

warnings: cursing, mentions of alcohol and sex, angsty but with a happy ending cause for some reason i can never let them end on a bad note

Y/N was excited.

It had been a while since Harry had asked her to go on a date, it was always the other way around recently. She couldn’t blame him though, Y/N knew just how busy Harry always was, and it wasn’t like he was purposefully not asking her to go do things, he just had a lot on his plate.

That’s what she kept telling herself anyways.

It’s what she told herself when it had been 2 weeks since they had even eaten a meal together, and given the fact that just a few months ago Harry had come back to London for a while, that was rare. So, Y/N asked him to grab lunch on a Saturday while they were lying in bed together, and when he agreed, but failed to show up, leaving Y/N sitting at the cafe, her lips morphed into a frown and her eyes not focusing on the phone in front of her, she told herself he was simply booked up with meetings and studio time and such.

Thats what he told her when he got into bed that night to apologize for accidentally standing her up. She forgave him, of course, and suggested they could just get dinner the next week. He agreed, even walked around to his calander her to show her he was marking the date off in his calendar with a heart, her first initial, and 7:00 PM etched into the little box with red sharpie.

So, the week passed with quick kisses of good mornings and good nights, and while Harry was gone Y/N had on a black dress she had been excited to wear for a while now, with those little mini silver heels and a coat strung over her shoulders as she sat on her couch waiting for Harry to swing by to pick her up. She shot him a text that simply asked “You otw? xx”

He was not.

It took about 30 minutes of waiting on their couch to realize he was standing her up, again. And it took until the next morning for Harry to see her text (his phone had been on do not disturb while he was at the studio and he ended up spending the night at Sarah and Mitch’s after a few beers), and for the guilt to seep through his veins.

He apologized, again. And Y/N forgave him, again.

Only until it got to the point where Y/N no longer remembered the amount of times Harry had stood her up, for being at the studio, or sleeping after a meeting, or simply just not paying attention to his phone, she knew there was a problem.

Harry was fully aware of the problem too. He knew that this was no way to ever treat a partner, and if someone was doing this to him, he’d dump them— well, he’s never been one to end a relationship unless it was necessary, so that’s an exaggeration, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Which is why when he got home one day around 11 PM, gave her a kiss to the forehead after she sat up in their bed to give him a hug, and a soft “Can we talk?” escaped her lips, he knew he had to fix this. So he asked her if they could talk over dinner the next night, he just wanted to sleep but also wanted to fix things with his girl, asking her if she was free of course, before telling her he’s gonna make a reservation at that nice restaurant the two of them used to go to quite often, because “it’s been a while since I’ve taken my favorite girl out”.

A grin broke out on her face because he had asked her! And if Harry was planning it, there’s no way he’d cancel or stand her up.

So yeah, Y/N was excited.

She woke up that morning with a smile on her face, and something akin to a what she thinks a rainbow would feel like running through her veins. It had only been a few months since she’d last been on a date with her boyfriend of almost 2 years and a half in person, and she was going to make the most of it. Because after this date, things would change. They’d spend more time together again and it would be like this little bump (that neither had acknowledged) never happened.

Y/N did, well, everything to prepare. Took a long shower, shaved, put on that coconut lotion Harry likes— he tended to dig his face in her neck when he smelled it while holding her—, brushed her teeth more than 3 times, dug in her closet to find that one patterned soft purple dress she bought ages ago but never had a change to wear it, until now, put on those really cute heels Harry said he liked once (“Looks like something you’d wear on a runway pet, I love ‘em.”), and even styled her hair differently than normal.

He had told her he would swing by at 8 on the dot after the studio, and soon enough, it was 8, with no sign from the man who made the promise himself. Y/N thought maybe there was traffic, he was just running late, texted him a quick, “Can’t wait to see you!! xxx” and put her phone on the coffee table, waiting on their couch.

8 turned to 9, 9 turned to 10, 10 turned to 11, and soon it was midnight. Y/N doesn’t think she’d ever felt more empty than how she felt then, walking to their shared room of a year, slipping off her heels and tossing them towards the closet, as well as pulling her dress over herself and letting it fall to the floor behind her, grabbing that one t-shirt she always wears when she needs comfort (which just happened to an extra 2018 Live on Tour shirt Harry had laying around that she snatched just 3 months into them dating), and flopping into bed.

She couldn’t fall asleep, and instead spent her time curled up in their bedsheets, a steady flow of tears making their way down her blush covered cheeks.

。:°ஐ

Harry usually didn’t make mistakes.

Sure, he had his moments, grabbing the wrong coffee off the counter when his name was called at the cafe, forgetting to text Jeff that he actually couldn’t make it to a meeting that was scheduled in a few hours. Just little things, things that didn’t matter that much, and could always be fixed. He didn’t usually make mistakes that weren’t easy to fix. He just wasn’t that kind of guy.

Until, he was.

Harry loved Y/N. He loved having her around, loved spending time with her, loved loving on her, loved kissing her, loved touching her, loved the way she went about almost everything. He was so in love with her, that hurting her was out of the question. He never wanted to be the one to make her cry, make her bottom lip quiver before the tears rushed out like he’d seen many times before, due to movies, his songs (which as sadistic as it sounds was an ego builder to have someone so close to him so affected by the music he wrote), her school work, or even her friends that weren’t being so nice.

In fact, he was so in love with her, even being so afraid of commitment (it took him over a year of them dating to ask her to move in), all he wanted to do was blurt out those 4 dreaded words. “Will you marry me?” It was a bond for life, and he was terrified of that, but with Y/N all he wanted to do was spend the rest of his living days with her.

When Harry had come back from being in L.A. for so long and finally being in the same city as his girlfriend back at their home, all they did was spend time together. Every time he saw Y/N all he wanted to do was say those 4 words that he hadn’t even fully come to terms with himself. It was dangerous, and Harry’s self control when it came to Y/N was lacking, so he simply did was every normal person would do in his situation.

He stood her up.

Many more times than he could count, and of course he felt like the shittiest person in the world— shittiest boyfriend in the world—but at least now she can’t possibly be under the impression that he wanted to marry her, which is what he wanted. Or thought he wanted, until Sarah called him up one day after he had stood Y/N up for dinner the night before and told him off. Told Harry just how fucking terrible he made Y/N feel, how unwanted she thought she was, how she felt like they were loosing their relationship, and Harry didn’t know what to do with himself. (Of course Y/N had sobbed to Sarah about it over the phone while she was drunk off the wine she opened 40 minutes after Harry said he would be there, so she really didn’t even remember the conversation).

And later that day Harry had come home, heard her wavering voice asking if they could talk, and decided in his head he would tell her how he felt, how sorry he was, and how he wanted to be with her forever and love her forever if she allowed him. He had a few expectations for their dinner, that Y/N would probably tell him how he’s made her feel, and Harry would apologize, tell her why he did it, explain he thought it was no excuse, then tell her he plans on marrying her (obviously not proposing just yet, but finally bringing up the conversation they had never had even though they were in a serious committed relationship) and they’d go back home, have the most amazing sex ever, and forget about the whole thing.

What Harry didn’t expect was to get a call from Jeff around 5 asking him to come to the studio to fix few vocals, then end up nailing down 2 songs in one night, go to a bar with the band to celebrate, get drunk, then pass out at Mitch and Sarahs flat.

But that’s what happened, according to Mitch, who woke Harry up the very next morning.

“Good morning man, wakey wakey,” Mitch’s teasing tone echoed through Harry’s (what felt like full of vodka) brain as he groaned and squinted his eyes. “Why are you waking me up at this hour in the morning?” Harry asked drearily, sighing and simultaneously regretting last night as a whole because the last thing he wanted to do while hungover was be up before at least 9 AM.

“We’ve gotta go to meet with Jeff about tour in like a hour, H” Mitch stated .

At Mitch’s words Harry sat up on their couch, eyes wide in fear. “Wait mate, I thought tha’ meeting was on Wednesday.”

“It is Wednesday H, god how drunk did we let you get last night…” Mitch said, beginning to recount some of Harry’s antics the night before. Harry however, couldn’t hear a thing with the blood pumping through his ears. If today was Wednesday, that meant yesterday was Tuesday, and he went and got trashed at a bar with his friends Tuesday night when— when he was supposed to be on a date with Y/N, when he was supposed to confess his intentions, when he was supposed to apologize for standing her up over and over, yet instead he went and did it again.

Now this, this was a mistake.

“…H. H. Harry? Are you there?” Mitch’s voice came back into focus and Harry shook his head. “I- fuck, I was supposed to take Y/N out last night.” Harry said, his voice trembling.

‘I’m sure she’ll forgive you, it’s just one night.” Mitch tried to make Harry feel better. He knew Y/N was a very forgiving person, she would get over this in no time.

“No, she won’t. I-I’ve stood her up for the past month and a half, Mitch.”

At these words, Mitch stands straight up making pained eye contact with Sarah in the kitchen who was overhearing most of this conversation with her eyes wide. She had no idea it was this bad. “Month and a half? I thought it was just that one time a few weeks ago, Harry what the hell is wrong with you?” Harry simply shook his head and didn’t reply. He had absolutely no idea how to make it up to her. “I-fuck, I don’t know Mitch!” Harry raised his voice. “I need to see her and apologize, now.” Harry said, standing up and rushing over to the front door and slipping on his shoes.

“This meeting is mandatory Harry, as much as I want you to see her too, she’d probably still asleep, and I don’t think this can be solved in under an hour.” Mitch said calmly, already knowing Harry was close to walking out his door. Harry stayed silent for a moment, weighing the options. Either go apologize to his girlfriend, or prioritize himself over her again.

“We can do it another day, I’m sorry, but I have to go see her, tell Jeff I feel sick.” And he walked out without another word.

。:°ஐ

The morning after Harry stood Y/N up again was brutal.

She stayed up all night, replaying moments with Harry in her head, analyzing if he wanted to be there with her, wondering if maybe he felt like he had to stay with her out of pity. It was torture, and the pain seemed to turn into numbness as time went by, and eventually the sun came up, and she stayed in bed, her motivation lost.

A loud crash and “Fuck!” woke her up, swollen eyes fluttering open to the invasive noise. Y/N furrowed her brows, her mind connecting everything that happened yesterday and unfortunately reminding her of the unbearable pain she went through the night before. A groan escaped her lips as she sat up and flung her legs out of her bed sheets that had been flung off the bed in the middle of the night. She began grumbling to herself as she made her way downstairs, ready to tell Harry off for making so much noise.

Her mouth stopped moving, and instead remained in limbo as her eyes met Harry’s. His mouth opened to speak, but his words were caught in his throat as he saw the state she was in. It was when her mouth pressed into a line that he could begin talking. “Y/N, baby, please I know you don’t wanna see me or talk t’me right now but I’m so fuckin’ sorry, love. So so sorry, it was an accident, I went t’ the studio to fix a few things then got hung up on the songs and by the time we went to celebrate I completely lost track of time, and I was too drunk to drive home so I crashed at Mitch’s.”

Her mouth fell open at his words. Everything was happening too fast. Hearing that he stood her up to drink at a fucking bar to celebrate himself, then coming home and accidentally knocking over a glass in their kitchen (which she put together was the crash earlier after seeing the shards of broken glass on the floor) frustrated her to no end. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him any longer, and Harry had stopped talking after realizing what he just admitted to her. Without another glance, instead of looking at Y/N’s tear stained face, all he saw was her back, walking up the stairs to their room.

“Fuck,” He said to himself before following her up the pink stairs. “Y/N, love wait-please, I’m so sorry, I just need to talk to you, I need to explain myself, please.” He begged as she shut their bedroom door in his face, his voice turning into a desperate whine at the end.

。:°ஐ

It’s been 3 days since then, and she hasn’t spoken to him. He would leave in the mornings, kissing her forehead and mumbling an “I love you” and telling her exactly what time he’d be home, before leaving and coming back on time to find an empty plate in the sink and her lying in their bed, whether it be reading, scrolling on her phone, or typing on her laptop. He would apologize many times, reaching his hand out for hers and she would simply situate herself in their bed and lay down, back turned to him.

Harry just couldn’t take it anymore.

It was when she had finally let him kiss her forehead goodnight that he decided to take his chance. “Y/N.” He spoke softly, with no response or anything to indicate she heard him. “Baby, can we please talk- or I’ll talk and you listen, I just- I really need to say some things.”

She was still faced away from him when he leaned against their headboard and he decided to keep going.

“I- um. I’m sure you know how sorry I am, but I really am- sorry I mean. Not just for tonight but for every other time I’ve stood you up. I’m so sorry for not showing you how much you matter to me, and how much the things you do matter to me.”

It was then that she slowly sat up next to him and looked at him, eyes begging him to continue. He blushed at her intense eye-contact that he had barely gotten over the past few days and took a breath, opting to look at his hands fidgeting in his lap.

“We’ve been together for 2 and almost a half years, which is the longest relationship I’ve been in, and it’s no excuse to treat you this way, but I had just been thinking about how things progress even further than now,” He coughs. “Which is marriage, and when I finally came home, all I wanted to do was ask you to marry me- I don’t- m’not proposing right now, I just- I got really scared because wanting to spend the rest of your life with someone is crazy to me,

I’ve never thought that way about anyone else until you, I didn’t even really want to get married before you, and I started to distance myself before I ended up telling you this, but obviously that blew up in my face.” He chuckled a bit, locking eyes with her unreadable ones for a moment and lifting a hand to run through his hair. “What I’m trying to say, is that I love you, so so much, and I plan on marrying you— obviously if you want to too, of course— and I’m so sorry for trying to make you think that I didn’t care about you anymore or love you any less, because it’s the complete opposite of that.”

His eyes were watery now, as he started down at his interlocked fingers, and his eyes widened when her hand was gently placed over his own. “Harry,” Y/N began. “Look at me, please.”

His head lifted to see her facing him, her brows knitted and a small smile on her face. “I forgive you, okay? I could tell you were kind of scared of commitment when we first started dating, and I wish I could say your reason for standing me up is surprising but it’s not.” They both chuckled a bit at this. “I- I’m still upset at you, I need you to know that, because 2 months of thinking the love of your life is avoiding you doesn’t feel all too great, so you suck for that,” she said, planting a quick kiss to his cheek which quickly turned pink. “But Harry, even if you asked me to marry you a year ago I would have said yes. I love you, so much, and I plan on spending the rest of my life with you as well. I’m sorry for giving you the silent treatment, it was… unnecessary and immature. So, thank you for apologizing. I love you.” She confessed again.

“S’okay, I deserved it, and I love you too. Maybe even more. So um, we’re okay?” Harry asked, a hopeful smile on his face.

She nodded with a smile and pulled him into a much needed hug and pulled away only for him to bring her into an even more needed kiss. “If you ever try to pull that shit again, I’m breaking up with you.” She laughed and he tackled her into the sheets hiding his face in her neck.

“Duly noted, love. Duly noted.”

#harry styles one shot #harry styles imagine #harry styles fluff #Harry Styles #harry styles angst #im pretty proud of this one #if I do say so myself #harry styles fanfiction #its kinda short tho sorry

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felassan · 4 years ago

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DA4 Lead Producer Scylla Costa’s BIG Festival talk, “Challenges of Dragon Age production during the pandemic”, can currently be rewatched on YouTube here starting roughly at timestamp 8:57:02 after a lil presenter blurb/intro. It’s 1 hour long. When it was streamed live, there was an English translation ‘voiceover’. There isn’t in this vid, however I want to post the link for Portuguese speakers, and also it’s neat for everyone to be able to see all the slides he presented with for themselves in context.

I don’t know if an English-language version will get put up so I’m sharing the notes I took during the talk below, in case anyone’s interested and because I might as well since I wrote them. The rest of this post is under a cut due to length.

Edit: Found a place to re-watch the English version of the talk

(Quick note: I didn’t note down everything, mostly things that caught my interest, so this isn’t exhaustive, and when I was watching I was real tired, so pls bear that in mind and don’t take these notes as bullet-proof 100% accurate gospel or direct quotes. If you watched it and think I’ve written down something wrong/misunderstood, let me know and I’ll fix. Also if you’re a Portuguese speaker and I’ve gotten something incorrect or missed something important etc, again just let me know.) **

** Edit: I’ve now gone through my notes while watching the talk again. I’ve filled in some of the gaps (although they still don’t cover everything said) and so forth, and now I’m no longer worried about there being possible errors in this post.

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For some context, this slide contained the breakdown of the talk’s structure. Bear in mind there are other slides present in the talk than the ones I’ve posted here, I didn’t include caps of all of them, just ones which were of note to me.

In the talk, chief Producer Scylla goes over challenges of DA4 production during the pandemic. He discusses the adaptations - necessary skills and learning from remote work - and he ponders on the future of teamwork.

After the launch of ME3 he became a producer, all his MMO and other experience helped a lot. He was on DAI for 3 years and MEA for 9 months, then Anthem. Today, on DA4, Scylla and another Lead Producer were the heads of the whole project, and there is his boss is the Executive Producer Christian Dailey.

^ the usual AAA game development cycle (brief introduction)

AAA games are games that are launched for several platforms simultaneously.

In BioWare’s case, the pre-production phase of the game development cycle can have from 5 - 30 people, and up to almost 60 people when they’re just about to go through the gate to production.

In the pre-production phase, they go through the game’s concepts and prototypes and start developing systems. They seek the game’s concept and focus, and its key features. They do lots of market research. In the case of BioWare, all their games are strong in narrative, so they have lots of tools related to game narratives and supporting the development of a narrative (cinematic design, dialogue system etc) that get focused on in this phase. Other parts of the team such as writers and cinematic design need these systems to do their own roles.

In BioWare’s case, the pre-production phase through to launch can take 4 - 6 years, but it does depend on the size of the team during development.

With regards to Dragon Age 4, they were coming close to the time when they would shift from pre-production to the production stage when the pandemic hit.

During the production phase is when the development of content and features takes place, with the systems mostly already existing from the pre-production phase. A few new systems may be developed in this phase. In the production phase is when things start escalating, and the team really starts growing, to like 2- or 3-fold the prior pre-production phase size.

(DA4 is currently in the production phase.)

In the alpha phase, features have to be fully implemented and systems all have to be running / working. All the game features should already be in the game by now. They test from pre-production onwards, but this phase is when they run heavy technical tests with lots of players trying to play at the same time. In the beta phase, the idea is that you should now have full content and that now you’re balancing it and running more and lots of different tests with players before launch. There are final tweaks and then the final launch, when in the weeks prior to launch, all the different business units and areas e.g. marketing team, technology team, publishing team, get together once a day and all of the game’s issues are reported and brought to the table to be prioritized. Then they decide the next steps re: these issues (this is known as ‘the war room’).

After the launch there are usually patches like day zero patches and other patches, this being standard industry practise. The last stage is the new content stage where there are DLCs and a game with more content.

On March 12th 2020, the team gathered to review the DA4 story in the new office. Everyone was very excited. (They had spent over 10 years in their last building and had noticed that with the team growing they needed more space. In August 2019 they found the new studio in the city center.)

Anyway that evening, they got an email from the CEO which contained instructions and said that due to the pandemic, they should from now all start working remotely. They had known that this happening was a possibility so they had been planning on how to have all the devs working from home, but initially less than 50% of the devs were able to work from home successfully/efficiently due to various issues e.g. you need a VPN to be able to log in remotely to do your job normally, varying home office setups. The day after this, the office was basically deserted, except for Scylla, the IT infrastructure people and one or two odd devs.

Scylla was part of the team that was working on allowing the devs to work from home. They first started looking at the short-term changes they needed to make to allow this.

“First, take care of our developers”.

When the pandemic first hit, their and Scylla’s [as Lead Producer] first priority was to look after the devs. Many of them are parents (schools and day-cares were shut, children were studying from home), others have relatives living with them, others have other personal circumstances which of course need to be taken into account when it comes to assessing what needs to be taken into consideration for this new scenario. So, they looked at each dev on a case-by-case basis in order to evaluate, speaking to each one and asking them what they could do to support them.

One of the first changes/adaptations they could implement was flexible working hours and flexibility around deadlines. Generally speaking the devs got a lot of support, EA was really good and really supported the devs especially in the first months of the pandemic (and they are still supporting them). Initially not all devs had suitable office spaces at home, some were working from the living room from laptops or at the kitchen table. The whole covid situation basically just happened over night and nobody was really ready to deal with that change. So their first step was to enable their devs to work remotely. As a producer, Scylla’s main task is to communicate with the team such as via a number of daily meetings. He doesn’t depend so much on powerful hardware.

“Enable developers to work remotely”.

This slide shows some of a BioWare audio team. Different teams have varying and specific needs in order to do their jobs and therefore in order to do them remotely. For example, the audio team need good-quality speakers and amplifiers, while the lighting and art teams need other specific equipment such as tablets and large screens. So there was a lot of work they had to do to go through each dev to understand their individual needs and what needed to be done for them. ‘Could they download the builds? Did they have the right performance [tech-wise]? Could they submit their changelists, their codes to the server?’

Some devs needed a more powerful internet connection as it would take 6-8 hours to download a build (some devs live rurally). Some needed a lot of cable, as they were working far away from their routers (sometimes up to 50m). As time went by things got better and better.

The chair devs work from is also important; a kitchen able chair etc is not suitable to sit in for long-term desk work, possibly leading to health issues like back ache and blood circulation problems in the legs.

Every 3 months they had money given to help devs buy new mice, keyboards, monitors - anything they needed really in order for their office setting at home to be improved. For a while, because lots of people [generally, in society] were needing and buying them, it was quite hard to buy things like webcams and microphones.

On mid- and long-term changes:

In terms of DA, we have to look at this from 2 perspectives, the change in the personal and the professional environments.

As a consequence of working from home, people tend to be less active during the day (even in an office, you go between meeting rooms, up and down stairs etc). Physical activity supports life quality and therefore work quality. Scylla noticed that he began to feel listless and such, and found that he needed to change his routine that he had initially developed when he started working from home, for example; having a normal start time (as in, have a semblance of structure in your day as if you were still working in the office site), get dressed at the normal time, not having meetings over lunch etc. This wasn’t just him, lots of other devs encountered this and had this experience too. Devs which adapted faster had better productivity and became more productive faster.

Scylla bought a stand-up desk which he can raise up and down, and at meetings he would be delivering a talk while standing or even while walking on a treadmill. Other devs also got stand-up desks. He tracked his body’s data on a Fitbit. These sorts of things helped improve physical and mental wellbeing. Other devs did similar things, like starting going out for jogs or began practising yoga. Essentially, everyone needed to make changes to their daily routine in comparison to what they had been doing prior to the pandemic.

The pandemic has been a thing for over a year now. In their location, every couple of weeks a new restriction is put into place or a rule is changed, and every two weeks there’s a new thing that you can and can’t do. Scylla also started moving around his property. He worked on his desk, fixed it up and painted - taking up a new hobby. Other devs picked up new hobbies too. These are good ways to be active and also to be somewhere else, i.e. to break up the working day and not be spending it all in one home office-type location. Scylla found that when he made these sorts of changes to his routine to improve his lifestyle, the data output by his Fitbit as indicators of his health/wellbeing etc improved, e.g. number of steps taken in a day, heartbeats per minute while at rest. As stated many of the other devs went through a similar process.

On the professional side of things:

They had to improve remote delivery of builds. Accessing things from home as a dev requires a VPN. They need to download a build every day and then upload it to the server after making their changes to the game. They had to work with infrastructure and research other tech, such as streaming tech to allow remote console access, in order to better facilitate this process. For remote access, they also had to work on adapting communications channels.

“Adapting channels of communication.”

In this slide, the team are working on the storyboards. Before you can implement motion capture & performance capture, you have to ‘run the storyboards’ like this. These are small illustrating drawings which reflect the drafts and are meant to quickly reflect the intention of the scenes that are to be built. Before the pandemic, the team would go to meeting rooms like this, sit down, talk and interact in person. After the pandemic, the question became ‘How do you do this over Zoom?’ You can, but it’s not quite the same; it’s harder to see peoples’ expressions, some people are embarrassed speaking over Zoom etc. Therefore they had to adapt their communications systems, and unlearn the ways in which they developed before in order to relearn and learn new ways of communicating.

Slack was a tool that they adopted on this front. Communications channels can be confusing on Slack, so there was a need to develop structure. For example, how quickly should someone reply (as a recommended convention for the purposes of work)? They had to define the process/procedures for the channels so it was clear for the team as a whole how it would all flow (this is important especially if you have a team with say 30 people or as a whole hundreds of people). Before the pandemic, they had stand-up meetings where they’d go around in a circle every morning and talk about their activities - what they’re going to be working on, any roadblocks they had encountered etc. The question arose ‘How do you replace these?’ They ended up doing Slack messages at a certain time of day and updating their statuses with some details on what they’re working on and color-coding (green - fine, yellow - need help, red - busy/blocked out).

Another issue that they faced was unforeseen - the number of meetings that devs were having really shot through the roof. When there wasn’t a good structure of communications channels, any conversation would become a meeting. Everybody began scheduling meetings left and right, and at the end of the day they would have little time left in which to actually work on their to-do lists. Hence, they had to work with the team to really analyze and be very pragmatic. ‘Which meetings needed to happen? Which didn’t? Is a specific meeting really necessary? Which meetings should be recurring? What can be done over Slack?’ This guideline had to be given to the team to help, and it improved things a lot. The number of meetings decreased a lot and they got more effective. For example, by making sure to set an agenda for meetings beforehand, and by having meeting notes (then a dev who didn’t really need to be at a meeting could skip attending and just quickly review the notes output after instead). They also decreased the standard length of meeting times from the default Outlook blocks of 1 hour and 30 mins to 55 mins and 25 mins respectively. This 5 minute change gave devs time for things like bio breaks (also 4 hours in a row at a computer in a home office with one meeting after another just isn’t good for a person).

“Adapting p-cap and mocap”.

On content:

From a content point of view, the most difficult thing in terms of the pandemic was adapting p-cap and mocap (performance capture and motion capture). They hire actors and it’s a large studio. The pandemic meant big limits to what they could and couldn’t do. The actors had to be masked and 5 meters apart in distance (although it doesn’t look like it in some of these shots due to angles). Also there could be no other person around in the studio - only the actors. The directors instead would ‘patch’ in remotely on big screens (you can see this in the second photo in the top right).

Before the pandemic, they felt that they wouldn’t be able to do p-cap or mocap properly remotely, as the directors would usually stand right next to actors giving guidance on their performance. The techs would also usually be near. But they adapted! The keyword is adapting, changing process. It’s harder and it’s different, but it is possible, and people start rethinking what is possible. What was said to be impossible before now is possible.

P-cap differs to mocap in that it also captures voice and facial expressions.

On the future of work after covid:

There will probably be more working from home and more flexibility for workers e.g. being able to work say 3 out of 5 days from home. It does depend on what a dev’s specific job is however. For example, the audio engineers require lots of specialist equipment and said equipment is of higher quality and quantity in the office. So, depending on role, devs might be working more often or less often from home.

Another development is that lots of devs are moving house. In lockdown etc people started reassessing what’s most important in life. Some are moving further away from the studio to get a cheaper rent or for example couples who both needed an office space to work from home from but their current place only had one area. Others are moving closer to nature for a better quality of life, and still others have other different reasons for doing so. Over 10 devs that he knows in fact have recently moved, including Scylla himself.

The pandemic changed certain skills being used by people on a daily basis. Scylla used as an example of this one of his soft skills, being able to tell from looking/interacting in-person with someone if they are stressed out. Obviously it’s less easy to tell if someone is stressed out when you’re remote, so you adapt different ways of checking in with people in the new situation. To continue carrying out his role as Lead Producer, he began checking in with his team pro-actively on the new comms channels and asking how they were doing.

Also, now that companies are more open to working remotely, there is going to be increased competition for hiring devs. They saw both sides of this coin at BioWare. They were able to hire devs from many places that they couldn’t hire from before e.g. Montreal, Vancouver, the US, as there’s less need for devs to relocate to Edmonton or Austin. This opens up opportunities to hire really intelligent and skilled people that they would not have had access to before.

Question and answer segment:

The pre-production phase has been concluded. They’re in the production phase.

They are not giving out a lot of details yet but Scylla is really excited as a big fan of the whole series. He thinks that with DA4, they will have the opportunity/possibility to launch the best story out of all DA games. He feels that the characters they’re making are amazing. He’s dying to say more but can’t.

When you work from home you need to keep your team as productive as possible. During the pandemic, when people started working from home, they noticed that some people became more productive and some people became less productive. They were analyzing it on a case-by-case basis so as not to make assumptions. They were interested in seeing what they could do to help. At the beginning of the pandemic, they were looking at the devs as people and seeing what they needed.

Production of DA4 still needed to continue during the pandemic because they want to be able to launch the game.

This slide shows a writer. Writing is an example of a role which is more able to work from home easily.

Their productivity did go down in the first month of the pandemic. After adaptations, some people then became more productive than they were before (this was role and personal situation-dependent, examples of this being artists and coders who were able to art and code at home without being interrupted, thereby being able to produce more). Covid has affected productivity in general, but this is part of our new reality. They have adapted and adjusted some deadlines. They have enough data (Scylla LOVES data) now to understand how long it will take them/how long they’ll need to launch the game. They have always had historical data for this purpose, but they’re doing more of this sort of thing now to ensure that they are doing things at the right time.

Remote hiring opens up the door to more talent joining, so if someone has talent geography will hold them back less. Some companies though may choose not to hire people from other countries due to labor issues, cumbersome legal aspects, time zones. But even in such cases there are activities for example that can be carried out while the rest of the team is asleep such as testing or working on the build, or there are cases where those companies still will want to hire a specifically/highly talented person even in spite of the potential legal aspects and so on.

On mental health: People were affected. There is the mental, physical and social impacts of the pandemic situation on people. EA supported them during the pandemic in terms of their mental wellbeing, there are specific companies (services offered, speaking to a therapist) that they can contact if they need something or help. EA had always been good at supporting them with this sort of thing but this has improved further during the pandemic. Another change was that they could/can take a couple of days off if they needed/need to because of the pandemic e.g. to take care of children, who were obviously not at school at the time. As a producer he had to be very mindful of all of this. How much they were monitoring peoples’ wellbeing really went up during the pandemic.

A question that was asked - in terms of DA4′s storybeats, is there anything in there that they decided to change due to the pandemic as it wouldn’t be sensitive or appropriate to include anymore, for example a plague plotline or something? Scylla’s answer is that DA and ME are games in which they try to have narratives that are relatable, which include things which people will identify with, so that players understand what characters are going through etc. Nothing in DA4′s plotline/storybeats has been changed (in the frame of this question, relating to the pandemic), as it didn’t have anything in it that could be specifically or a directly connected to a pandemic-type situation or anything. Of course the DA story has Blights and the Taint, but these are different & fantastical things and existed long before the pandemic situation. So this wasn’t the case with DA4 and there was no need to change anything, but this has happened to other games where they decided to change a storyline due to a strong correlation with something in the real world.

There were then concluding/closing remarks. The message he wants to send is that a crisis will always spark opportunities. Look at a crisis and try to see how you can grow.

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dream-a-little-bigger-x · 4 years ago

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Life in Quarantine (Part 1) | Owen Patrick Joyner

Summary: A series about being stuck in quarantine with your best friend Owen and trying not to lose your mind over being stuck inside all day every day.

Pairing: Owen x reader

Warnings: Fluff, minor swearing, lots of singing

Songs used: Don’t Let Go by En Vouque/ Washington on Your Side from Hamilton/ More than Words by Little Mix / Not a Pop Song by Little Mix -- All credits go to owners of these songs

A/N: I know nothing about songwriting and none of this will probably ever happened in real life, but it just worked for the story, alright? Alright. Enjoy!

Words: 3,372

Part 1: Not A Pop Song

Norman, Oklahoma. My home town. The place where I was born and raised. The place where I learned how to live and love. Where I learned what heartbreak is. Where I met and lost friends. The town all my most valued memories reside.

It’s also where I met my best friend, Owen. Our mothers were, and still are, college besties. So, us becoming friends was kind of inevitable. We went through everything together. Kindergarten, Elementary, Middle School and High School. Wherever you saw me, you saw Owen and vice versa. A lot of people often thought we were a couple, but that’s been off the table since day one. In Elementary School, Owen and I made a pact with five different rules to seal our friendship forever. The list only grew as we got older. But here’s the gist:

1. If one is teased or bullied, the other takes revenge 2. Always sing and dance together whenever one asks, even if you don’t want to 3. Always share cookies 4. Always play together at recess 5. Always sit together at lunch

Then the additions from Middle and High School:

6. We will never, ever, ever date each other or each other’s siblings 7. Ethan, Evan and Emmy are off limits too 8. Crushes too 9. Always go to Broadway shows together 10. Never lie even if you wanna do it for the right reasons. There is no right reason. 11. Always support each other’s dreams and successes 12. Always hate each other’s exes 13. Always share ice cream 14. Never share our secrets with other 15. Always go to parties together

That last one was added by Owen in senior year of High School when I didn’t want to go to a party since it was my exes party and we’re supposed to hate each other’s exes. But, since he’s been in LA for most of senior year to pursue his acting career, I really couldn’t say no. Him going off to Los Angeles for months, sometimes even longer, started in eighth grade when he landed the role of Crispo Powers in a Nickelodeon show called ‘100 things to do before High School’, which I religiously watched, of course. Rule 9 tells you to. After High School, the two of us split ways. I headed off to Boston to study at Berklee College of Music to major in songwriting as it’s always been a dream of mine to become a songwriter, while Owen went to LA to further pursue his career in acting. We’ve tried to keep in contact, but daily calls turned into weekly calls turned into monthly calls. Five months in, we just try to at least check in with each other every now and then, which is what works best for our busy schedule. Then December 2018 came and changed my life entirely for the better. The representative of Syco and Columbia records said he was in need of fresh blood to co-write songs with none other than Little Mix on their next album. They held a competition at Berklee College, and long story short, I won! Yay me. To say I was nervous to write with a girl group I’ve been a fan of since the very beginning is an understatement. But they were so nice to work with. We’d take turns flying to each other’s countries and wrote about five songs together of which only two made it onto the actual album. None of it made much sense to me at the time, it all just seemed like one big dream. Owen was pretty excited about it too. He knew how big a fan I was of the girls. Even though he wasn’t a big fan himself, he still listened to the album, mostly to listen to the songs I’d written. Over FaceTime, we even played a game called ‘Guess what song I’ve written’, and he’d gotten one right. The girls even gave you a full-time job as co-writer on more projects of theirs and even recommended you to other artists. This meant you had to quit college and become a full-time freelance songwriter. Thanks to Little Mix, though, you’ve gotten the nicest people to hire you. Since then, you’ve worked with artists like Meghan Trainor, Bea Miller, Isabella Merced -- who you could gossip with about Owen from her time working with him -- and even Harry Styles. The fifteen-year-old inside you didn’t know what to do with herself when that collaboration happened. But working with all those people also meant I had to move again. This time to Los Angeles. When I told Owen the good news, he immediately suggested you move in with him. It’s the thing you guys said you would do once you got older; get an apartment together. So, it was the only logical move. “Welcome to your new casa!” He said dramatically when leading me into the apartment. The tall white walls and large windows illuminated the entire place with a welcoming feeling. “Let me show you to your room, so you can drop off your excessive luggage and then I’ll give you the tour of the entire space.” I raise an eyebrow at his words. “Bro, I have excessive luggage because I just moved from Boston to freaking LA!” I exclaim, followed by an amused chuckle as I try to push him, but fail since he’s much stronger. From that moment on, I knew moving in with Owen would be the best and worst idea I ever had.

And speaking of ‘worsts’. From March 2020, the two of us were stuck at home together due to the outbreak of the coronavirus. Just when I was supposed to start working with Little Mix on their new album. I would’ve been in London now, but instead, I’m stuck in LA with my best friend who doesn’t have a job at the moment since he’d just finished filming a new Netflix show called Julie and The Phantoms. What I heard from it this far, it sounds pretty amazing. I even went to Vancouver with Owen for a few weeks. It was a fun trip and gave me some new inspiration for some songs. “Hey, Nugget,” Owen says as he walks into the room we call our studio where I’m working. “I’m kinda in the middle of something, Ace. Can it wait?” I know I shouldn’t work out my frustration on my best friend, but it kind of fell out of my mouth before I could stop myself. “Sorry, Nugget, I’m kinda bored…” I sigh exasperatedly and bob my head to signal his permission to come in. “What are you working on?” he asks as he sits down on the armrest of the armchair I’m sitting on. “This Little Mix song I can’t seem to make work,” I reply and point to the notebook in front of me. “I’ve got a few good lyrics, but the melody seems impossible.” Owen takes the notebook from me and closes it before getting up. “Time for a little break,” he says and goes to sit behind his drum kit. “Guess what song I’m playing,” he then says and starts with the cymbals, then hi-hats and when a beat finally floats through the room, my brain starts to work. This is a game we’ve been playing every time I’m in need of a break or just for fun. We’d take turns in playing a part of a song on our respective instruments and the other has to guess which song it is by singing along. “What’s it gonna be? Cuz I can’t pretend Don’t you wanna be More than friends Hold me tight and don’t let go Don’t let go Have the right to lose control Don’t let go” A smile appears on Owen’s as I get the first song right. He always underestimates my love for girl bands from the 80’s and 90’s. Though, I think he might’ve given me this one because I’m so frustrated from working on that song. “Your turn,” he then says after having hit a couple more toms and cymbals. I think about it for a moment, and then start plucking the sixth string to create a more bassy sound. Owen stares at the guitar for a moment trying to figure out what song I’m playing. Then, his eyes widen as he recognizes the sound. “It must be nice, it must be nice To have Washington on your side It must be nice, it must be nice To have Washington on your side” I let out a loud whoop in excitement, choking the strings to stop the sound. “I still can’t do that rap though!” he actually sounds disappointed in himself. “Washington isn’t gon’ listen to disciplined dissidents This is the difference This kid is out!” I proudly yell out, earning impressed applause from my best friend. The smile on his face warms me up inside. Owen has always had the most beautiful smile, in my opinion. He has one of those smiles that could just instantly make you happy. No matter how bad a day you had. “Very impressive, Nugget,” he replies with a smirk that sends shivers down my spine. Ever since I moved in, he’s gotten more and more flirty with me. I’m not sure if it’s just a change in his personality that he’s acquired in Los Angeles or if it’s something else, but it’s there. Not that I mind. Something has shifted in me too since we moved in together. It’s even gotten me thinking about removing rule number 6 from our pact. “Your turn, Ace,” I quickly change the subject, just so I don’t have to think about him like that too much. Our dynamic as best friends is too good to ruin it all. Twenty years of that is a long time to just throw away like that. “Alright, an easy one,” he says and simply starts stomping the bass pedal to activate his bass drum. It’s a slow, almost menacing thump that sounds very familiar. A little too familiar. “Oh, I need you more than words can say Oh, You saved me in ways I can’t explain Always been there for me, now I’ll do the same Oh, I need you more than words can say” It’s one of the two songs on Little Mix’s last album that I helped write. The song that means most to me since I wrote it with Owen in mind. It was a period of time where all I wanted was to see Owen and be able to talk to him and just spend time with him like we used to before his whole acting adventure. I think he’ll stop after the chorus, but instead, he picks up his drum sticks and starts playing the rest of the song on his drum kit. Deciding it could be a fun jam session, I start playing the chords on my guitar as well whilst continuing with the lyrics. “Won't forget, won't forget Won't forget when he broke my heart How you helped me through You turned, you turned, you turned a disaster into a dream Gave me the power, made my life brand new When the world try to break us, we found magic And we grew stronger, though every line, line, line Every night, every night, every night I strain and sing the truth Now, now they know that they gonna be alright, alright” The memories of when I wrote this song start slipping through my mind. I remember how alone I felt, even in a room with a dozen other people. I remember how much I missed Owen. “I find peace in every story you told I think of you, I'll never be alone It's true, true, true You know I do, do, do” My eyes lock with Owen for a moment. He shoots me a comforting smile that makes me feel right at home. And I don’t mean here. I mean home as in Norman, Oklahoma. “Oh, I need you more than words can say Oh, you save me in ways that I can't explain Always been there for me, now I'll do the same Oh, I need you more than words can say Oh, I need you more than words can say” We both stop playing and just look at each other for a while. I’ve never told Owen I wrote this song for him, but at the same time, I think he might already know. That doesn’t take away the urge to tell him though. “I wrote that about you when I missed you,” I blurt out without properly thinking about it. “Really?” he asks while coming out from behind his kit. Combing his long, blonde hair back, he makes his way over to me and grabs the guitar from my lap. “Yeah, I thought you’d know?” He chuckles, shaking his head whilst tickling the strings. I’d taught him a couple of songs on the guitar since we started living together. “You write with a lot of people, Nugget. Could’ve just been their words as well....” He isn’t wrong about that. Maybe it was a lot less obvious than I thought it was. “So, what are the guidelines for this one?” he questions. I grab my notebook again and open it on the page I was working on before he fluttered into the studio. “They didn’t want another pop song. Kind of more like a ‘fuck you’ to Simon Cowell for treating them so badly and telling them what to do and what to wear and whatnot,” I explain, showing the few lines I have already. Some of them Jade had sent me, others were Perrie’s, a couple were mine. “What are most pop songs about?” Owen queries. I know he’s trying to help me, but he’s kind of making me nervous with the constant strumming of the guitar. “Songs about falling in love, or drinks and drugs…” I sum up at the top of my mind, “Or heartbreak…” Owen nods his head whilst continuing to play the same few chords over and over again. I focus on the melody for a moment as my creative juices start to work again. “This ain’t another pop song ‘bout falling in love Or a party song ‘bout drinks and drugs No more singing songs ‘bout breaking my heart And my lonely nights dancin’ in the dark” I look up at Owen for validation. Nodding his head encouragingly, he keeps playing the same few chords but a little louder this time to support the flow of my lyrics. “If I’m a guilty pleasure I want this life forever I’ll take it all ‘cause anything is better Than another pop song ‘bout falling in love But if you wanna sing along say ‘I don’t give a fuck!’” Owen starts jumping around excitedly, and I can’t help but laugh at his adorableness. He used to get this excited whenever I sent him a demo of the songs I was working on. “Let’s record a demo!” he exclaims and, after handing me my guitar back, moves towards the recording equipment. “Let’s start with some guitar,” he says and that’s how our recording starts. First, the guitar, then Owen records some drums, and then I get behind the mic to sing the song all by myself. I can just imagine how amazing this’ll sound with the girls’ voices instead of mine. “No broken bottles Or glitter on the floor form the night before Ain’t no boy troubles If that’s what you came here for then you should know” I lapse back into the chorus one last time before we finish recording and put everything together. We listen to it a couple more times before sending it over to Little Mix and their management. Awaiting their answer, we head into the kitchen to make some dinner together. It only takes about half an hour before I get a call from Jade. “This song is epic!” she shouts into my ear before I can even say hello. “Exactly what we needed, Y/N, thank you so much!” I’ve grown accustomed to her thick Geordie accent, though it was hard to understand in the beginning. “Thanks, Jade! Owen helped me out a little,” I reply, looking up at Owen himself who shoots me a wink that sends a rush of heat from my head all the way to my toes. The girls all know about Owen. I’d told them about my best friend and how supportive he was, and they always teased me saying I was so in love with this guy. Which I didn’t realize at the time and always denied. Rule 6 clearly states no dating each other. “Give him a big snog as a thanks then!” Jade jokes, and I can even hear the others in the background. “I’m on Zoom with the girls at the moment. They say hi!” “Hi back!” I can’t stop the giggle from escaping from my lips. “I gotta go, Jade. Thanks for getting back to me about the song. I can’t wait to hear you guys singing it!” Jade snickers on the other side of the line. All while I’m watching Owen make some pasta at the stove. There’s something so attractive about him in the kitchen, I’m not sure what it is. Fuck, Jade is right. I am very much in love with my best friend and there’s nothing I’m going to be able to do about it. Stupid pact we made in the first grade. “We’ll call you later to discuss some more arrangements and stuff. Bye, Y/N!” “Bye, Jade! Bye girls!” I say loudly, knowing I’m probably on speaker phone anyway. “Bye, Y/N!” the girls chorus. I hang up the phone and look at Owen for a few seconds before bursting out into an excited cheer, dancing my way towards him. “They loved it! They loved it! They loved it!” I shout loudly, and cup Owen’s face in my hands before pressing my lips to his in an outburst of elation. I’m surprising yourself at first, but then melt into the familiarity of his embrace as his arms snake around my waist whilst kissing me back. He’s actually kissing me back. “And that’s rule number 6 out the door…” Owen mumbles when he pulls away. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have,” I mumble and step away from him, or at least try to. His arms tighten around my waist, restricting me from taking another step. “I’ve been thinking about talking to you about that stupid rule, Nugget. I’ve hated it ever since we were 16.” My eyes widen at his confession. Since we were sixteen? SIXTEEN? That’s four years ago. That’s even long before I realized I felt more for him than just a platonic love. “16? Why didn’t you say anything?!” Owen chuckles, retracting his arms from around my waist and instead tucking a strand of hair behind my ear before placing his hand on my cheek. “You were pretty enamoured with Ryan, remember?” My heart breaks at the mention of the prick’s name. Ryan was my very first heartbreak and the worst at that. Owen was in LA at the time, but when he heard the news, he almost immediately flew back to Norman Oklahoma to comfort me and eat ice cream together. “Besides, I was constantly on the move from LA to Norman, it wouldn’t have been fair to you…” “You’re the sweetest human being alive, Owen Patrick Joyner,” I tell him with a smile tugging at my lips, but then turn serious again as I flick his forehead. He lets out an ‘ow’ and shoots me a confused glare. “And the stupidest! I’ve been in love with you since I don’t know when, but I never realized until now! The girls from Little Mix even knew but I was too oblivious or stubborn to see it myself. If you’d told me, I probably would’ve realized sooner!” “Well… I told you now?” he tries, the cheesiest smile on his face that makes me roll my eyes. “I love you, Ace,” I whisper, “And not the platonic kind this time.” “I love you too, Nugget.” He leans down again after that, reconnecting our lips into a passionate kiss. The first of many. This ought to be a very interesting quarantine together.

Taglist: @hannahhistorian92 @marinettepotterandplagg @thequirkybookaholic @bookdealer5 @tenaciousperfectionunknown @hemmingsness @iainttakingshitfromnobody @ifilwtmfc @angryknightstatesmantrash @kiss-themoongoodbye @rudysbay @thedarkqueenofavalon @caitsymichelle13 @calamitykaty @wiselight @kcd15

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thetrap · 4 years ago

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why i think deancas just might go canon

i’ve been wanting to write this for a bit, but i haven’t really had the time until now. basically this is just a super unorganized collection of thoughts i have on why i think that dean and castiel actually have a fairly decent shot of becoming canon (and by decent shot i mean like.....a solid 5% chance. and that’s being generous). this is based off of the show itself (obviously), quotes from andrew dabb, and other things.

1. andrew dabb is deancas positive

i made a post a while back that never made it out of the drafts, but it was basically a summation of all the good deancas shit dabb has given us as a writer. here are the bullet points:

- the hug/"i'm not leaving here without you!" moment in purgatory (8x02)

- "don't lose it over one man"

- "he's in love.....with humanity"

- cas/colette parallel ("dean. stop.") in 10x22

- just the fight scene from the prisoner in general like......wow

- sam/jess and dean/cas parallel in 12x23

- "we've lost everything......and now, you're gonna bring him back" + dean's just generally overwhelming grief in 13x01

- "and how is it that you lost dean? i thought the two of you were joined at the.....you know, everything"

and these are just the big moments.

also notable is the fact that an activist sent dabb (and some of the other producers of spn i think) a book about dean and cas and why the fans want it/why it would be a good thing for the show. a few years later, meghan fitzmartin (who wrote the most recent episode!) was hired as dabb’s assistant, went into his office and posted a tweet a with pictures of the book, saying something along the lines of “doing some reading for work!”

the fact that dabb actually kept a fanmade deancas book for years.....the fact that he’s consistently written episodes with really strong subtext for years.....the fact that the dean and castiel romantic tension has only picked up since he took over as showrunner (mixtape, lily sunder, cas’s death, dean’s grief arc, the entirety of season fifteen, etc.)......idk i just think it’s really interesting that there has been such a marked shift since he was put in charge.

2. the mixtape

i know this was a few seasons ago, but it’s still relevant because like. a mixtape is not platonic. this scene was not platonic. full-stop.

and it’s not even the act by itself; it’s also the dialogue!! “it was a gift. you keep those.” this is more than likely a direct callback to aragorn and arwen in lord of the rings (that’s the first thing i thought of, at least).

the fact that dabb let this slide, like......he knows what this looks like. berens and glynn, who wrote this episode, know what it looks like. they knew precisely how this would be perceived, and then wrote and aired the scene anyways.

and that’s not even getting into the camerawork. like what?? was this shot???

yeah so. definitely not platonic.

3. the trap

honestly i thought about just posting this part of this overlong essay thing, because to me, this is the episode where i went okay, so this might actually happen.

there are SO many things in this episode that made me go insane the first time i watched it (”i left, but you didn’t stop me”) but the thing that stuck out to me the most was dean’s reaction to castiel saying, “you don’t have to say it. i heard your prayer,” when dean tries to tell him something.

like?????? he does not look relieved!! nor does he look particularly happy!!

hell, if you go back and watch the video you can literally see him swallow his words down like....jensen ackles is the master of micro expressions and that shit is Not Accidental. this moment 100% gives the vibe that there is something that is not being said. the camera following dean as he gives cas a lingering look is really interesting too.

3. dabb’s comments about dean and cas in season 15

this part is actually sort of related to the point above, since a lot of dabb’s comments are in reference to “the trap.” here are some interesting ones that i want to point out:

But the Leviathan won’t be the focal point of the purgatory story. Rather, it’s about what Dean and Castiel are going through. “They’re not going to resolve the emotional stuff, but it allows them to redefine their friendship a little bit in light of what’s happened especially earlier this season,” Dabb says. (x)

the key thing here is that dabb said that, in 15x09, dean and cas are “not going to resolve the emotional stuff.”

now. i don’t know about you, but dean falling to his knees, praying to cas and weeping feels a lot like emotional resolution to me. like, sure, things will probably be awkward between them for a while, but surely this is the peak moment of their emotional vulnerability with each other, right? surely this is the moment where they’ve resolved the issue between them? like how the fuck does it get more intensely emotional than this??

yet dabb seems to be implying that it will, which leaves us with the million dollar question: what is left about dean and cas’ relationship to resolve?

keep in mind that as of 15x16, there hasn’t been much forward movement on that front; that is, we’ve had some cute moments between them, but in terms of serious conversation about their relationship, there’s been basically nothing. so we can assume that this development, whatever it is, will occur in 15x18, since dean and cas will be separated for most of 15x17, as cas will be off with sam.

aka the episode where cas will likely get yanked away by the empty. aka the episode with the teary (!!!) conversation we saw in the promo between dean and cas.

also notable from the above quote is dabb saying that dean and cas are redefining their friendship. like....redefining how? to what?? that wording is just really interesting to me.

another quote from dabb re “the trap”:

(x)

it forces them to “start that process.” indicating yet again that the prayer scene between dean and cas is not the moment where whatever is between them is resolved. yet, from where we are right now, dean and cas seem mostly fine. which means that whatever they have yet to work out doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with their fight.

lastly:

a really significant chunk of what happens to dean in 15x09 is him confronting his issues with cas. don’t get me wrong - there are other important things that happen in the episode - but the fact that an episode where so much time/emotional energy is given to dean and cas’ dynamic is considered a turning point for dean is very notable and, to me, speaks to the importance of their relationship for the rest of the season.

4. dean/cas and sam/eileen being set up as units

i’m of the opinion that sam and dean will (by choice) go their separate ways at the end of the show. i think this for a variety of reasons that i wrote about here, and to add onto this, i think that dean/cas and sam/eileen are, in a way, being set up as two units.

this theory comes from two points:

1. the fact that eileen got brought back at all

this isn’t to say that eileen isn’t an interesting character all on her own/outside of her romance with sam, but the fact that they brought her back and then proceeded to set her up in this romance feels really significant to me. what’s especially interesting is how, even after she leaves in 15x09, we get a continuation of their romance in 15x14. i don’t necessarily think that she’s sam’s endgame in the sense that the final episode will show sam going to her or whatever, but i do think that part of the reason she was brought back was so that sam would have someone who he loves/someone he could potentially build a life with after he and dean defeat chuck.

2. the way the two couples were portrayed in “the trap”

like....just watch the future scenes in the bunker. there’s very much a sense that these are two couples living together. and “ever since the mark made cas go crazy, ever since i had to bury him in a ma’lak box.” note the use of i, not we. and then dean/cas and sam/eileen are directly paralleled when dean tells sam he needs to give it up after eileen’s death, comparing it to how dean has given it up after having to bury cas in the ma’lak box.

5. dean does not do Well without cas

this is probably an understatement. there have been a couple of notable instances in this season where the viewer is given a glimpse of what happens to dean when cas dies/is in danger of death/is separated from dean (in case the whole ass widower arc in s13 wasn’t enough).

two of these are from “the trap”:

1. dean freaking out/crying/praying when he’s separated from cas in purgatory

2. dean giving up on life/hunting after burying cas in the ma’lak box in the future world

3. dean’s reaction to cas temporarily going to the empty in 15x13

the one i want to spend the most time on is number two, in large part because sam was witness to it and i think that this might get brought up in 15x17.

part of my spec for that episode is that cas will tell sam about his deal/sam will find out somehow, and in reaction sam might tell cas about how dean reacted to his death in s13 - a conversation that was notably absent from the show when cas finally returned in 13x05. i also think that he might mention no. 2 above, basically telling cas that if he dies, dean is done. that he won’t be able to handle it/move past it. the show has been telling us this over and over for a while now, and it’s only been emphasized more in season 15. i think that 15x17 is the episode where this will finally be verbally expressed.

to me, all of this emphasis on dean giving up when cas is gone isn’t for nothing. in my opinion, it’s being done very purposefully to set up an endgame where dean and cas are together in some sense of the word. and a lot of what i’ve said above is what makes me think it’ll be a Romantic together.

5. bobo berens’ three part deancas saga

so we all know that berens is pretty much spn’s foremost deancas warrior, and what i want to point out here is how this season has been utilizing him as a writer.

this season, berens has three solo episodes (he wrote “galaxy brain” with meredith glynn):

1. the rupture

2. the trap

3. despair (formerly known as “the truth”)

so far, these first two episodes have had major deancas moments. you could even label them as:

1. the rupture (the breakup)

2. the trap (the reconciliation)

3. depair (???)

keep in mind also that berens wrote 14x18, where the dean and cas sort of had a preliminary breakup. he’s been in charge of this arc for a while, and the fact that so much of his writing this season has been deancas focused.......i don’t know, i just think it’s significant in part because, while berens has always been deancas positive, he also writes plenty of episodes that aren’t focused on dean and cas. but now, in the final season, the dean and cas emotional arc has been handed to him, and it’s been the primary focus on his writing.

(sidenote: berens was promoted to executive producer for this final season)

to me, this is all leading to a big moment between dean and cas in 15x18 - and the fact that it was at one point called “the truth,” only to be switched back to despair - makes me think that there will be some sort of confession involved. my money is on cas being the one to say it (especially since this would line up with the leak), especially given the glimpse we saw of (what might be) this moment in the promo. which leads me to...

6. cas does not cry

i saved this for last because the promo where we see teary-eyed cas is actually what pulled me back into this shitshow.

cas does not cry. like. ever. he got a little teary in 15x15, when jack told him of his plan to sacrifice himself, but we have never - never - seen him shed actual tears. and in the promo, particularly that shot where cas says “you have fought for this whole world,” it 100% looks like cas is about to cry cry.

cas has seen his son die. he has seen dean die. he died himself, over and over and over. and we have never seen him cry.

yet for some reason, in this moment of vulnerability with dean, he’s crying. i find it highly unlikely that cas would cry because of his impending death, for a number of reasons (for one, he wouldn’t want to upset dean more than he has to). so, assuming he’s not crying because of his own death, then what is making cas so emotional that he is genuinely crying for the first time in the twelve seasons he has been on the show?

my guys.....i can only think of one thing.

#THIS IS SO FUCKING LONG OH MY GOD #i'm so sorry for this i just have SO many thoughts about this and had to get them all down #disclaimer: i still think it's highly unlikely we'll get confirmed romantic deancas #but i do think there's a chance #and this is why #deancas #destiel #s15 spoilers #spec

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curioussubjects · 4 years ago

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come be a season 12 truther with me; or what if dean and cas got together offscreen

Originally, I wrote this post to celebrate “Galaxy Brain” airing as Berens & Glynn gave us “The Future.” It’s been a while since that episode aired, and some things have changed about this meta. As such, there are multiple versions of this post floating around, so make sure to go back to the source for the most up to date version. For all intents and purposes, this post functions as a meta manifesto not unlike shipping manifestos from days of LJ past. In keeping with that tradition, this post is a close reading of Dabb Era Destiel in which I argue that by using narrative gaps, queer coding, and romance tropes, Dean and Cas are shown to be in an established relationship. Although beyond the scope of this post, it’s worth pointing out that keeping Destiel mostly off screen was a way for the creatives to bypass network censorship while still remaining true to the characters.

This post is divided into three sections. Section I focuses on giving an overview of why earlier seasons of Supernatural aren’t as compelling as season 12 as a turning point for Dean and Cas’s relationship. That said, special consideration is given to 09.06 “Heaven Can’t Wait” as a potential rest stop in our journey due to it’s significantly placed narrative gap as well as themes in the episode. However, this post isn’t going to examine season 9 trutherism in depth, though it does coexist with and allow for it. Section II analyses season 12 and proposes a timeline and justification for the shifting Destiel dynamic. Finally, Section III will offer an analysis of how Dean and Cas’s relationship has changed dramatically from previous seasons in a way that is most like the shift from a “will they or won’t they” pairing to an established one.

Before I move to Section I, I’d like to note something this post takes for granted: Dean and Cas are the main romantic subplot of Supernatural, and, in fact, their relationship is elevated to main plot for both characters in season 15. This post won’t argue about the canonicity of Dean and Cas’s feelings for each other, therefore, and so won’t spend time looking at many Destiel defining moments. I’d also like to make clear that this post also takes for granted that Destiel is being intentionally developed by the writers starting with Carver’s Era, and more so in Dabb’s.

I. Why Seasons 4 through 11 May Not be It

The tl;dr. here is that while there are many moments throughout these seasons that Dean and Cas could potentially get together, none of those moments are ideal for a bunch of reasons that can be summed up as really bad timing. I also think the narrative is actively pushing them towards a moment that works. We get plenty of stepping stones, especially once we hit seasons 8 through 11 (and 11 most of all).

Seasons 4 & 5:

I know there’s been a lot of get together fics over the years set in this time period, but I just don’t see it. Do I see them being intrigued and drawn to each other? Yes. Do I think either Cas or Dean would act on it? Nope. I’m not arguing anything re: Dean’s feelings, but with everything going at the time I find it hard to believe he’d pursue anything with his angel friend. Most importantly here, though, is that during this time Cas was still very alien and other. There was too much angel in him, and while he obviously came to care about Dean (and Sam) very much, I just can’t see him navigating the realm of human relationships. That said, seeing human!Cas in “The End” is the first we see of potential developments for how Cas could behave without his angelness interfering. Being human changes Cas a lot, beyond even his experience existing among humans, though that of course matters too. This development will be important later /wink.

Seasons 6 & 7:

Before anything else let me just recognize that if we could see some sexual tension in seasons 4 & 5, these two seasons come with our first taste of romantic tension. The pining! Also note the difference between season 4 Cas and season 6 Cas in terms of behaviour. He is much less the angel we saw in that barn in “Lazarus Rising.” In season 6, we have a Cas making misguided decisions guided entirely by his emotions – namely, not wanting to involve Dean with the war in heaven – which is peak human, honestly. Put a pin on how sad Dean is in both seasons with Cas’s absence. Finally, put a pin on this being our first moment of Cas doing things on his own to spare Dean and it not ending well (soulless!Sam, Cas “dying” after Leviathan) because this is *the* hurdle in their relationship (along with Dean’s lashing out and self-worth issues). With all this said, the marked distance between Dean and Cas in these seasons negates the possibility of them entering into any kind of relationship. Much like seasons 4 and 5, there’s too much going on.

Season 8:

Ah, yes, the summer of purgatory. If you thought we had pining before…! I think we’re all very clear on season 8 being a turning point for the show, not only because new showrunner, but we also get the bunker. TFW now has an HQ, which pretty soon becomes home. Yes, Baby will always be home, but the bunker becomes the *unmovable* safe haven that Baby couldn’t be. The bunker is a place to coalesce, and for all the amazing things Baby is, she is not that. The acquisition of the bunker marks a shift in the psychology of the show: with the stable home space we can start to imagine domesticity, a place to come home to, the stuff of ordinary living. Most of all, the bunker is emblematic of security, of safety –keep this in mind, as we go forward.

This season also continues to see Cas go down the path of independently solving his problems instead of asking for help from Sam and Dean (his family in a way heaven never was) – note that the better together issue is at play in different ways with Sam and Dean also, but I digress. I also want to point out disastrous instance #2 of Cas’s insistence on figuring it out on his own: he loses his grace, and the angels fall. As for Dean, season 8’s focus for him has much to do with Sam, and them coming face to face with their issues with codependency, which hit catastrophic levels with the gates of hell and Gadreel plots.

So despite all the deliciously angsty get together purgatory fics and spec, there’s too much distance between Dean and Cas on Cas’s part due to his guilt over betraying the Winchesters in s6 plus slaughtering angels plus unleashing Leviathan. We do see Dean being more emotionally open with Cas and continue to voicing his wish that Cas would just stay with him and Sam, and let them help. It’s clear as day how much Dean cares. The timing is still bad, though.

Before moving on to next season, let’s take a moment to appreciate that this is the season Dean admits being kinda done with one night stands because “always with the adios.” Remember the bunker as a sign of stability? Yeah. I wouldn’t say Dean is craving a relationship, exactly, but I think we can see that he does want something more (ahem also I’m nodding to Cas refusing to stay put just cause).

Seasons 9 & 10:

The most important thing to happen between this two seasons is Cas’s stint as a human for an extended period of time. There’s been plenty of spec and meta written over the years about the effects of being human on Cas’s grace (a proto-soul now maybe?). What we can say for sure, regardless, is that Cas is much more humanized once he becomes an angel again. The understanding he gets from being human doesn’t go away once he regains his angel powers. You’ll notice that while we still see some of season 4’s characterization, Cas is not the same as he was – he is alien to angels now and is more intelligible to humans. Additionally, in an interesting reversal from previous seasons, we now get to see the depth of Cas’s feelings for Dean (thanks, Metatron) as well as seeing him be more open emotionally, while Dean does most of the pushing away (first because of Gadreel, then because of the Mark of Cain). In short, the timing is still bad as Dean and Cas are largely kept apart both physically and emotionally.

9.06 Heaven Can’t Wait

This episode is my white whale, friends. While I’ve come to fully subscribe to the idea that something did happen between Dean and Cas during the fanfic gap, I don’t actually think it’s feasible that it marked the start of a relationship -- be it sexual or romantic. My reasoning here is quite simple: the timing is bad. Were it not for external events (Cas regaining his Grace and Dean taking on the MoC), the course would have likely differed. Furthermore, Dean’s guilt over making Cas leave the bunker as well as Cas’s own hurt and self-loathing pose a significant and as yet insurmountable obstacle, which is easily seen with how Dean and Cas’s character trajectories go separate ways.

YMMV on what exactly happened between them in that Motel, but something definitely did. Perhaps one day I’ll have a proper s9 trutherism post to link to here for more details (likely won’t be written by me, though).

10.16 Paint It Black

From the point Dean gets the MoC until the end of season 10, anything between him and Cas is quite impossible due to distancing, to say the least. Again, yes, the fic is really good, but alas. One of the reasons I’m bringing up this episode in particular is because of the confession scene. One, it’s a rare bit of explicit emotional honesty from Dean, and two, it tells me that while he and Cas may be well aware of the Thing™ between them, it’s still uncharted waters. It’s scary, and murky, and they’re unsure how to navigated it or if they should even try. Makes sense, too, there’s been A LOT going on since s6. Anyway, he’s the full confession:

You know, the life I live, the work I do…I pretty much just figured that that was all there was to me, you know? Tear around and jam the key in the ignition and haul ass until I ran out of gas. I guess I just thought sooner or later, I’d go out the same way that I live – pedal to the metal, and that would be it. […] Now, um… recent events, uh… make me think I might be closer to that than I really thought. And…I don’t know. I mean, you know, there’s – there’s things, there’s…people, feelings that I-I-I want to experience differently than I have before, or maybe even for the first time. […] Yeah, I’m just starting to think that… maybe there’s more to it all than I thought.

Can I just say, first, that this confession keeps me up at night because we never actually see anything done with it explicitly? I mean, obviously, I think we do in fact see the effects of this confession in the show, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this behemoth, but still, like. Damn. Ok, so, remember when I brought up that thing in season 7 about Dean being kinda done with hook-ups? Here’s where that led us. We’re seeing a Dean here who wants more than what he has convinced himself he gets to have. He wants more than dying bloody. And when he talks about wanting to experience people and feelings differently, well, that says a lot not just on the queer coding front or the romantic front. I mean, jfc, Dean is accepting the idea that he can have more in life than just hunt until he drops, and he’s specifically talking about experiences at the interpersonal level.

Do you ever see a character having an epiphany and find yourself wanting to cry because this is it right here. Dean is just blatantly admitting he wants more and maybe he can make himself be open to that (!!!), which all culminates in season 11, so…

Season 11:

The pining is still here, but it’s worse now since it’s the whole plot? It’s been *checks calendar* 5 years of this. How are any of us still kicking I don’t know. Your slow burns could never. Cool worth noting points: Cas says yes to Lucifer (bad decision #2.5, lots of mitigating effects_I don’t actually hold it against him that much but Dean is another story & not entirely rational at this point); for the first time since the early days, Dean and Cas are on equal grounds: they’ve both fucked up a lot and have hurt each other. The issues this season are outside their dynamic. Amara and Lucifer here serve as externalizing forces for Dean and Cas’s problems: Cas checks out with Lucifer because he thinks it’s the only way he can help, Dean is caught up in the turmoil of Amara, the emblem of absence and avoidance of struggle. We do get something like an affirmation from the two of them to each other via Dean calling Cas his brother (and I want y’all to consider the historical queering of that statement, and Cas’s “I could go with you.” It feels like we’re headed to them being on the same page. By the end of the season, though, it feels like we’re getting a clean slate: Mary is back, nobody died, no end-of-the-world in sight, no interpersonal crisis. We’re also getting a new showrunner, so. No wonder. We’re gearing up for something, but I’m getting ahead of myself. What this season does that is super important is that it sets up the stage for the possibility of an actual relationship between Dean and Cas, something that has, up until this point, been pretty much impossible.

11.04 Baby

Y’all know what I’m about to quote here, right? That conversation between Dean and Sam about having something with someone who understands the life. Here we still have Dean reverting to the idea that it’s impossible, which is a direct contrast to the openness in 10.16. It’s understandable, though, considering there’s been little reason to think anything like that would be possible (see all the mess and poor timing from seasons past). The quote in question, though, marks a continuing development regarding the issues Dean is struggling with this season:

DEAN: Piper? That’s awesome. Heather. One-night wonders, man. Shoot, we’re lucky we still get that at all. SAM: Really? You don’t … Ever want something more? DEAN: I’m sorry, have you met us? We’re batting a whopping zero in domestic life, man. Goose eggs. SAM: You don’t ever think about something? Not marriage or whatever. But … Something? You know, with a hunter? Somebody who understands the life?

We wouldn’t be talking about this stuff all these years after Sam and Dean had a serious relationship if it wasn’t important, right? Also who else do we meet this season? That’s right! Eileen! And doesn’t that hit different with season 15 hindsight? And who does Dean have that understands the life? Whose stories have been intricately connected to his? Right now, this is all conjecture. A pipe dream Sam is revisiting, and Dean is skeptical about. Except, well. Look at what we get in “Into the Mystic” and “The Chitters.”

11.11 Into The Mystic

I’m bringing up this episode as a cross reference to “Paint It Black” as well as to complement the talk from “Baby,” and to show, again, that, for all the closeness between Dean and Cas, there’s still a marked distance they haven’t yet bridged. There’s still truths they haven’t told each other. Thanks Mildred for the delicious exposition:

Darlin’…If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my years on the road, it’s when somebody’s pining for somebody else. […] Oh, don’t try and hide it now. Follow your heart. Remember?

11.19 The Chitters

And here we see some validation to Sam’s imagining of a possible future with someone else. We actually see hunters who not only are married, but they both make it out alive. Jesse and Cesar get their happy ending. They make the dream come true. And the reality of it important not just for Dean to see, but Sam too.

Dean: [with realization] Oh, so … [points back and forth to Jesse and Cesar] Cesar: Yeah. Dean: Okay, that’s… Cesar puts his beer bottle on the table and looks at Dean, while Jesse is being silent. Dean: What’s it like, settling down with a hunter? Cesar: Smelly, dirty. [turns to Jesse] Twice the worrying about getting ganked.

I’d like to point out, too, that the fear of getting ganked is thematic when it comes to the tension between Dean and Cas. More on this when we hit s13.

Alright, now, having said that, let’s take a look at season 12. Bear in mind, this is the official start of Dabb’s era, even if he kinda began taking over in season 11, and the change in vibes is obvious. In fact, 12 jumped out at me as a turning point, in hindsight, after getting smacked by the domesticity of seasons 13 and 14.

II. Why Season 12

[Out of date section. Update coming soon when spoons. After significant debate, I’ve altered the definitive start of Dean and Cas’s friend-with-benefits-with-mutual-pining relationship to between 12.02 and 12.03. I briefly explained why here, and yes it’s a shitpost--still true tho.]

Finally, the promise land, y’all. Getting right to it: what s11 was for Dean in terms of setting up the relationship stage, s12 was for Cas. In its initial beats, any way. That is, until the Kelly debacle, this was the longest Cas has been around the bunker and with the exception of seasons 13 and 14, it’s one of the first times we get to see how Cas might actually fit into the bunker-as-home. Things seem remarkably chill. Of course, we’ll notice that there’s still a lot of baggage hanging around because despite Dean and Cas being in a more stable place, they haven’t actually dealt with their interpersonal problems. I didn’t single out directly this episode, but do keep in mind Cas’s declaration in 12.09 First Blood as far as how much the Winchesters matter to Cas & how we also see Dean and Cas be particularly singled out with them seating together in the backseat of the Impala. What we also see this season is Cas trying to prove he is worthy of this family, his family. He’s not fighting for heaven or to right some grievous wrong (a la s8). No, this season he’s fighting to spare the Winchester, to bring them a win. To bring Dean a win. The major disconnect is that Dean (and Sam & Mary) already sees Cas that way, he doesn’t think Cas has anything to prove. And just maybe, Cas starts believing that too – or, at least, believing it enough.

12.10 Lily Sunders Has Some Regrets

This episode, oh my god, the goodness. In the wake of 12.09 we have Dean and Cas in a tiff because Cas mistake #3 (killing Billie and “cosmic consequences”), this is a pattern. Twice the worry of getting ganked, etc etc. But where this episode really shines is through the contrast between Ishim’s obsession with Lily and Cas & Dean’s mutual affection for each other. Ishim sees no difference here and, to him, Cas’s feelings for Dean are a human weakness. Returning to my point about human!Cas, this episode underscores that Cas’s increasing humanity is what puts him in the place where he can want what Dean wants instead of either being too alien to get it (see s4 & 5) or unable to experience it properly (Ishim).

12.12 Stuck in the Middle (With You)

Cas’s trajectory culminates here with the whole I love you (@ Dean), I love all of you (@ Winchesters). Let’s note too that Cas is dying here, in a way that is much more human than going up in light. This declaration of different types of love is entirely human. It’s also a definitive step wrt to Cas and Dean’s relationship because of what happens in 12.19. This. is. it. Oh, and, of course, let’s not forget to point to Dean’s face when Cas says that “I love you,” and how terrified he is that Cas is dying. Might make one rethink some things, hm?

12.19 The Future

This episode is simply hella suspicious, and all the kudos to Berens and Glynn for writing it. It’ll haunt me forever. Consider watching it again and just questioning everything. So. Weird things:

1. Dean’s reaction to Cas no getting in touch as opposed to Sam’s. Dean is pissed, which is Dean-speak for worried out of his mind. Sam is very worried, too, and puzzled, but he’s mostly expressing his relief that Cas is back. But Cas has gone awol before, but this time Dean is much more worked up about it; Sam takes note of this, too. Now, let’s imagine that maybe the events of 12.12 led to something happening between Dean and Cas. Then Cas decided to leave to find a lead on Kelly, but eventually Cas decides to work with Heaven and goes radio silent. For days. Having taken a chance, and something having happened between them, how would Dean react to Cas just going poof and not contacting him – despite Dean having called Cas multiple times.

2. Cas knows about the Colt. Ok, nothing off there. But when he goes to Dean’s room to talk, right after Dean leaves we see Cas looking around briefly. Like he know Dean would keep it in there. Maybe Cas had looked other places already. Who knows. What we do know is that eventually he does find the Colt not only in Dean’s room, but under Dean’s pillow. Sam didn’t even know the Colt wasn’t in the safe. So how did Cas know?

3.“He came into my room and he played me.” So, this quote right there, makes it seem like some seduction for personal gain, right? But can you see Cas actually doing that if they hadn’t gone there previously? For Dean not to suspect anything and go with it? There’s plenty of plausible deniability here, but the gaps in time in the narrative make me question what is there in those spaces. The scene where Cas tried to give Dean the mixtape back doesn’t read like “playing,” so it’s about a different interaction. Hm. Hmmm.

4. Dean and Cas’s brief conversation in Dean’s room is clearly Dean just wanting Cas to stay, so they can work (and be) together – because they’re better that way. Which, yeah, truth, but also ow.

5.And most importantly: When did Dean give Cas that mixtape??? How did that happen?

Sequence of events: Cas tells Dean he loves him – Dean is clearly shook by it – Dean gives Cas a mixtape (romantic gesture, often a declaration of feelings; in true Dean speak too lolsobs) – Cas goes awol - Dean acts like he got ghosted by his new bf -?????- Cas somehow knows the Colt is under Dean’s pillow – "He went into my room and he played me."

What am I supposed to do with that, hm? Like. Y’all realize they probably had some emotionally constipated getting together moment, right? Something that Dean clearly initially thought meant things were gonna change, now. Something that Cas couldn’t allow to happen until he could give Dean a win. Y’all are seeing this, yeah? I’m not saying they slept together and were full of feelings, except that’s kind of what I’m saying. But YMMV, there are other possibilities beyond sex. The full of feelings isn’t up for debate, though, even if the whole thing is informed by ridiculous amounts of miscommunication.

III. Seasons 13 through 15 As Established Relationship

Regardless of what happened in season 12, exactly, I can’t shake the feeling that something did happen, and something did change. My reasoning here is actually really simple: in comparison to previous seasons, Dean and Cas’s dynamic shifts significantly come season 13. I know some folks have been disappointed with some of season 13 and then season 14 for having dialed back on the destiel side of things. And, hey, maybe there’s truth to that in terms of backstage stuff, but I also want to point out that...well, the dialing back isn’t quite dialing back is it? Let’s look at 13 a little more closely:

Season 13:

So I said the deancas dynamic changed, right? I also think that change caught us unaware because the pivotal turning point that would cue us in never happened on screen as well as being subsumed by Cas’s death and Jack’s birth. But if I ask you about deancas in season 13 what would come to mind? Grief arc? Brokebacknatural? How domestic Dean and Cas are? There’s just something easy about their relationship after Cas returns from the Empty. The tension we’d grown so familiar with over the years is gone. Actually, it feels like we skipped the getting together bit of their relationship and went straight to established relationship and parenting. Some of the most peak married deancas moments we see circulating? Season 13, (and 12.10). It’s a lot, and it’s different, and it’s amazing.

13.01-13.05

Dean’s grief mini-arc. He was acting like a widower. Here’s me vaguely gesturing towards the mapping of Jonh, Mary, Dean, and Sam onto Dean, Cas, Sam, and Jack. And the reunion? I can’t help but be giddy at the song choice: “it’s never too late to start all over again.” To. Start. All. Over. Again. I’m just saying.

13.06 Tombstone & 13.16 Scoobynatural

I’m not going at length about these episodes, I just want to point out that they reveal that Dean and Cas have a whole thing going on off screen: they watch movies together, Cas knows about Dean being an angry sleeper, Cas seems to have been aware of the Dean-cave before Sam was. It’s little things like this that are examples of the narrative gaps surrounding Dean and Cas that have cropped up over the years. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to wonder what else could be hiding there. And when did the movie nights alluded in “Tombstone” happen? Maybe in season 12 when Cas in hanging around the bunker? The same period when Dean and Cas seem to be coalescing into something safer and more stable? Something that we never see come to a head because plot happens and Cas dies? Something that is immediately taken back up once Cas is alive again?

Season 14:

Overall, this season is more of what we got during 13, but it had two high notes I wanted to single out before ending this already too long post.

14.15 Peace of Mind

Look me in the eye and tell me Dean and Cas talking in the kitchen about Jack doesn’t read like husbands talking about their child. Look me in the eye and tell me Cas just texting Dean to gossip about Sam isn’t couple-y as hell.

14.18-14.20

Ah, yes, the divorce arc. Awful. Terrible. The culmination of Dean’s problem in all this: he lashes out, he pushes Cas away, his anger is alienating. Cue all of us suffering. But while Dean is clearly in the wrong in how the deals with his feelings, let’s not pretend some of his anger doesn’t come from a long established, and unaddressed, rift between him and Cas, which had its last traumatic turn when Cas died in s12. Dean isn’t being rational here: he saw Cas doing something on his own, and he saw that his mother is dead. What else could happen? Why won’t Cas just trust they can work as a team? What if Cas died again? And why should Cas put up with Dean’s behavior without knowing the cause? How can any relationship work this way? But notice how caught in the middle Sam was during all this. Notice how Jack is running off and acting out. The whole family is falling apart. Divorce arc, indeed.

Season 15:

But what about what we’re building up in 15? That seems like it could be a getting together plot, too, right? Well, yeah. It could very well be. But I’d argue the tension we’re seeing isn’t a will-they-or-won’t-they because they already have. We’re are watching a getting back together plot! The tension is, instead, will-they-or -won’t-they use their words to talk about the baggage that has kept them from truly being confident about their relationship. That’s the crucial step in their togetherness that they’re still missing, which is also the bedrock of the divorce arc that spanned twelve fucking episodes -- y’all, that’s half a season.

And technically? We’re not even done with yet because Cas never let Dean finish his prayer/confession in purgatory. What’s more, Cas hasn’t grappled with his role in the breakdown of their relationship, either: that he keeps going off on his own and getting hurt (and getting other people hurt), and Dean has to deal with the fallout. The deep emotional understanding, the truly being on the same page is what we’re on the edge of our seats for. We’re waiting to see what else Dean had to say, and what will happen when Cas’s deal with the Empty comes to light.

Finally, could we still have this plot without Dean and Cas having gotten together off screen? Sure, but I think the stakes are higher if they already did have something between them. If they actually have an established romantic relationship going on. Something real and tangible and as of yet much too fragile.

"...you asked what about all this is real. We are."

#destiel #deancas #supernatural #spn #spn meta #this thing is gargantuan yikes #anyway enjoy? let's chat #my writing #this thing is half meta half my adhd unleashed

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greatqueenanna · 4 years ago

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Delving deeper into Agnarr and Iduna's story.

Ever since I wrote the first part of this analysis, I’ve gotten a pretty positive response for it - most fans recognize that, while reckless, the choice of separating and isolating the girls was the only choice Agnarr and Iduna had with this unique situation. Tragic in every way, but necessary.

However, one of the things that are still being discussed to this day is whether or not Frozen 2 addressed the separation and isolation properly - that is, if the more subtle approach and scattering it across multiple installments was enough to really delve into the complexity of the separation and the trauma the girls faced.

The main content that addresses this element was Frozen 2 (obviously), Forest of Shadows, Dangerous Secrets, and True Treasure. Given that not everyone has access to or is not aware of a lot of the side books, it makes it difficult for everyone to get the full story. Because of this, I want to explore the full story of Agnarr and Iduna and go over how each of these installments, including the film itself, addressed the separation.

Part 1: Frozen 2

While Frozen 2 left out a lot of complexities when it came to the separation, there were indeed two scenes in particular that really delved into this element - particularly for Elsa.

When the sisters find the ship is the first of these scenes. Here is where Anna and Elsa witness what their parents were willing to do in order to give Elsa a better life.

"Ahtohallan is the source of the magic - We keep going. For Elsa..."

Here, we clearly see that while it wasn't directly stated, Iduna and Agnarr realized that the separation wasn't working and that they were willing to fight the storm if it meant that they could fix their mistakes.

Elsa: This is my fault, they were looking for answers about me.

Anna: You are not responsible for their choices -

Elsa: No, just their deaths.

Anna: Stop. No. Yelana asks why would the spirit reward Arendelle with a magical queen? Because our mother saved our father. She saved her enemy. Her good deed was rewarded - With you - You are a gift.

In this conversation, we see Elsa recognizing that her parents wanted to find answers for her in order to give her a better life. Thank goodness Anna is there to redirect the conversation and explain that they made this choice on their own and that Elsa is not to blame for it. She then helps explain to Elsa that she is a gift, not a bad omen that caused misery to others.

It is through this scene that Elsa (and Anna) see that their parents wanted to try and find answers, to give them a better life. This is the sisters witnessing the parents agree that their situation needed to change and that their choices were not working.

The second scene that explores this is Show Yourself. This entire scene is Elsa finally realizing that she is allowed to be herself.

Throughout Elsa's childhood, the parents thought that Elsa should hide her emotions with her gloves in order to conceal the magic (due to their own traumas that we will explore more in part 2). Elsa felt that she wasn't allowed to be herself as it would lead to someone being hurt.

In this scene, Iduna confirms to Elsa that she is indeed allowed to be herself, directly contradicting and going against whatever fears they themselves gave her or what Elsa may have instilled into herself during the separation.

"Show Yourself. Step into your power. Grow yourself into something new. You are the one you've been waiting for all of your life."

Here we see Iduna letting Elsa know that she can be herself, and no longer needs to apologize for her powers. This leads to Elsa's full self-fulfillment because not only does she have the love of her sister and the respect from her people, but also the approval from her parents that she is ok.

Part 2: Dangerous Secrets

In this novel, we get more explanation as to why Iduna and Agnarr thought that giving Elsa the gloves to conceal her emotions was an acceptable plan. In my original post, I argued that Agnarr never intended for Elsa to hide her emotions. However, this was proven to be false in Dangerous Secrets, as we are given the origin of this mantra.

Agnarr was taught this from Lord Peterssen, his father's advisor. Because the young boy was scared to be King at such a young age and thought that his emotions would be a weakness, Petersen told him that he needs to "Conceal, don't feel" in order to appear stronger. Given that this was the only way he was taught to deal with emotions, both from this man that acted as a guardian to him and his own father, Aganrr thought that it was appropriate to teach Elsa as well.

Iduna was taught the same thing from Peterssen, but for a different reason. As Iduna was Northuldra, she had to hide her true self from the Arendellians in order to stay safe - something that was further pushed by Petersen when she wanted to tell Aganrr the truth of her origins before their marriage.

Later on, we see Iduna especially, given how she relates to hiding her true heritage to Elsa's struggles, realizes how wrong this thought process was.

"Since then (the accident), Agnarr had tried to help her (Elsa) do just that - control her emotions, control her magic(....)It hadn't worked, In fact, things had only gotten worse. "

I cringed at the idea of the coming explosion, which at this point seemed unavoidable. It could be devastating not only to her, but perhaps to the entire kingdom. That was why we had her here, tucked away, I tried to remind myself. But all the rationality in the world couldn't quash the guilt. The kind of thing villains did in the storybooks - not heroes."

"My whole life I was told to hide," I said after a pause. "I don't want Elsa to have to grow up doing the same."

We also see Iduna telling Elsa directly that hiding her emotions was not a good way to control her magic, and would only make her feel worse.

"I know that's what your father has told you," I said, slowly. "And maybe it does help, for a time. But squashing down your emotions can only work for so long. Before you feel like a powder keg. Ready to explode."

Iduna later confronts Aganrr about this, convincing him that they needed to find a better solution. Agnarr agrees, setting the expedition himself to Ahtohallan.

Part 3: Forest of Shadows

Many people put forward that Anna's trauma from the separation was not addressed. Frozen 2 focused more on Anna's dependency on her loved ones for validation. She had to lose everything in order to depend on herself. It was written very well, but there was still an element that seemed missing from Anna's development - Anna's feelings of low self-worth that stemmed from the separation. This is where Forest of Shadows comes in.

While I feel that Anna did not need the validation from her parents as much as Elsa did, given that her relationship with her parents was not as strained, it would still be nice if the story acknowledged where these feelings came from in the first place.

This book covers Anna's feelings about herself, and whether or not she can be trusted with important information and tasks. The book has Anna directly relate this fear to her parents hiding Elsa's powers from her.

"Something scraped in Anna, like a rough crumb caught in her throat. Because...well, her family's burdens and secrets hadn't been for everyone. Or at least, they hadn't been for Anna. Her father had let a mountain troll bundle away Anna's memories of Elsa's ice magic, and he, her mother, and Elsa had all worked together to keep it a secret from Anna."

This is important because it shows that Anna realizes the root of her feelings of inadequacy comes from - not from anything she herself has done but from how her family chose to approach the situation.

Throughout the story, Anna struggles with the idea if she is capable of handling important and serious situations. Anna finally gets her answer when she sees that Elsa was planning on leaving Anna in Arendelle while she went on a grand tour. Anna wanted to go with Elsa but felt that she didn't want her to go because she didn't feel Anna was capable enough. However, we come to find out that this is not true.

"I, Elsa, Queen of Arendelle, do hereby proclaim my sister, Anna of Arendelle, Keeper of the Kingdom while I sail on the grand tour. She is kind, thoughtful, and loves Arendelle with the whole of her heart. There is none better than her to watch over the kingdom while I am away."

Anna realizes that the only person that felt she was incapable was herself, not Elsa or anyone.

Of course, this is nice but wouldn't it have been wonderful for Anna to hear it from her parents as well? I agree, and this is one of the many reasons why Anna fans were upset that this deleted scene was removed. While the feelings of the parents in this scene were made canon by Dangerous Secrets, Anna still never got to hear it directly from them.

We can have some comfort, however, in the next part.

Part 4: True Treasure

Psst, you all can read the full story here. After you read, please support the writer and artist by purchasing the comic when you are able to.

True Treasure is unique in that it is a comic book that explores the sister's relationship with Iduna during the separation years. The sisters later find out that Iduna had set up a treasure hunt for them, and the girls use their memories of different events to discover the prize.

However, what is especially amazing about this book, is that it has Iduna (and Agnarr) directly apologizing to the sisters for separating them.

Later, Elsa and Anna say that they are ready to move forward and make their own futures together.

Conclusion

Thus, from all these sources, we see that the separation and the trauma it caused to the sisters were indeed addressed. Given that it was done in multiple installments, it might be difficult for everyone to see the full story. So, I wanted to provide it all for you here, so we all can know the parent's full story.

Iduna and Agnarr were taught their whole lives that they needed to conceal their emotions and true selves in order to stay safe or appear stronger. Wanting to keep both their daughters safe, and Arendelle, they thought that separating the girls and isolating Elsa would be the best choice. This was never meant to be permanent, as they both wanted their daughters to be together again. While Agnarr worked directly with Elsa to help with her magic, Iduna worked behind the scenes doing expensive research.

As the years went by, Iduna started to feel incredibly guilty about the separation and confronted Agnarr about it, who had actually come to feel the same way. They both realized that what they were taught and teaching Elsa was wrong, and the only thing it did was make Elsa's fear that she already had even worse. After creating the Treasure Hunt in hopes that the girls would be together again, the parents went to Ahtohallan to find answers for Elsa's magic, and finally, end the curse of fear that was plaguing their family.

Unfortunately, they were never able to see their daughters together again. Agnarr and Iduna are very tragic figures and knowing everything that happened only gives their story more meaning.

#greatqueenanna/analysis #Agnarr #Iduna #Agduna #pro-agduna #Frozen #Frozen 2 #Frozen 2: Dangerous Secrets #Frozen 2: Forest of Shadows #Frozen: True Treasure

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outsidetheknow · 5 years ago

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Who is policing the web? Should I get a police report or…? via /r/technology Who is policing the web? Should I get a police report or...? NOT A SINGLE WORD OF THIS IS A LIE OR AN EMBELLISHMENT...

#2 shorts and 6 feature films over the course of two years #across the board is a major understatement. All of my phones #after I wrote my first book #all of which may very well be irretrievable. This #am I? What do I do???#and again. They all went out the same way: a blinking #and don&039;t even accept mms text messages. My limited online lifestyle has made it easy for me to narrow it down to less than 10 possible #and I had given up everything to work full-time as a writer. I wrote 4 books #and lack of compassion. I don&039;t understand why #and my touchscreen (PC and phone) will stop working #and the entire document reformatted incorrectly. Would you believe that I tried to log in to my LinkedIn account to get information for a po #as if I have given up control of it.I am regularly changing my email passwords #barely eating and with barely any gas in the tank. My days are spent looking for somewhere to use a decent restroom #because the login issues are non-stop. In fact #books and articles--or how my follower count won&039;t increase after receiving new followers all the time.WTH !?!?I don&039;t know if it&#but I honestly don&039;t care to try to understand anymore. I just want to get law enforcement involved and be done with it all so I can mo #but I want to tell the world what&039;s happened to me #but I&039;m not. I live in my SUV with two pets #but nothing ever happens to them. Then one day #but what ruined me for the rest of my life #but without the "s." I&039;ve reported the accounts as bogus #by cancellation a purchase transaction at the pump #cleaning me out completely. I had to wait (an unheard of) two weeks to get my money back.There were about 3 or 3 years I spent collecting lo #did I win and someone hijacked my account? It would make sense because the state lottery has been requesting ID verification and has locked #even the brand-new one #formatting and adding updates #have all required factory resets on multiple occasions. That said #I can&039;t help but to wonder if that&039;s what happened. Like #I did a search and found a YouTube video of a teacher in Canada with my same name. Which I find odd .because I&039;ve literally been Google #I wouldn&039;t care

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purrincess-chat · 4 years ago

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Rejected Heroes Club CH1 (Adrinette Zine)

The @adrienettezine is finally out, and I was selected as Long Fic Writer. This was an idea that I almost wrote during Adrinette April, but I didn’t quite get around to it. It’s silly and cute, and to encourage you all to go read the full zine, I will be updating this every other day for the next week until all 4 chapters are posted, so if you want to read the next part go check out the whole zine ;)

Read on AO3

Chapter 1

“Marinette, are you a superhero?”

Alya’s question hit her like a brick wall the moment she entered the classroom, and Marinette would know - she’d run into several brick walls in her life.

“Am I a what?” She asked, and her pulse quickened.

Had she exposed her own identity? Had she messed up again? Would she have to go into hiding or pass the Miracle Box onto Chat Noir and lose all of her memories and move to China to live her days working in a rice pasture and never see her friends ever again and unknowingly live out the rest of her life as a colossal failure and the worst Ladybug in the history of Ladybugs?

“I’m kidding,” Alya chuckled then gestured over her shoulder to where Nino, Kim, and Max stood. “We’ve all been talking, and now that our identities are exposed because of little miss Miracle Queen, we’re realizing that Ladybug picked several people from our class to be heroes. I know you could never tell even if you did, but we’re just wondering who else in the class could have a secret identity since we’re all kinda bummed about being outed.”

“Oh,” Marinette said, relaxing her shoulders.

“It’s kind of crazy that Ladybug picked so many of us,” Nino said, leaning back in his seat.

“Well, if you consider the number of times that Ladybug and Chat Noir have interacted with our class or saved us from being akumatized, it isn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility. She and Chat Noir have become quite familiar with all of us,” Max said matter-of-factly.

“What do you think it means?” Alya said, that impish reporter’s grin Marinette knew all too well curling on her lips. “I have a couple theories that Ladybug is actually a student at our school, constantly on the lookout for potential allies, and it would make sense since she chose all of us. Maybe she’s even in our class.”

Marinette’s stomach jumped up to her throat.

“Whoa, wouldn’t it be awesome if Ladybug were walking among us? Maybe she’s even listening to us right now,” Kim said, glancing around as if he expected Ladybug to be hiding in any crevice, which, given the present conversation, Marinette wouldn’t have minded.

“What are we talking about?” Marinette jumped at Adrien’s voice over her shoulder, her heart fluttering when she turned to him.

“Just about how weird it is that Ladybug picked so many of us from the same class to be heroes,” Nino replied.

“I think it’s a little suspicious,” Alya said.

“What if Ladybug and Chat Noir were our classmates? Wouldn’t that be so awesome?” Kim said, and Marinette chewed her cheek.

Now, more than ever, it was important that she protect her identity. She’d seen firsthand the dangers that came with people knowing who she really was, and she needed to kick dirt over her trail before these speculations got out of control.

“Yes,” she said, and everyone turned to her. “I was a hero, too.”

“Wait, for real?” Alya’s eyes narrowed.

“Uh, yeah, but I was only ever allowed on one mission. Back when Mme. Mendeleiev was akumatized after she went on that show, remember?” Marinette said.

“Alternative Truth! Where everything isn’t always true, but nothing is really false!” Kim exclaimed, crossing his arms into an x.

“Right, that one,” Marinette said. “I became Multimouse. Unfortunately, I’m so clumsy and scatterbrained that I gave Ladybug my Miraculous back in front of Chat Noir, so she told me I could never be a hero again.”

“If you were a hero, why didn’t Miracle Queen’s wasps summon you?” Alya asked, and Marinette shrank under her gaze.

“Uhh, because Chloe doesn’t like me?” She shrugged, and after a moment of contemplation, Alya conceded.

“Fair enough,” she said, and Marinette breathed a sigh of relief. “But that does make five students from our class who have been picked.”

“Uh, make that six. I was also a temporary hero once,” Adrien said, and Marinette smiled up at him, remembering the day fondly. She only wished things had worked out, but it was probably for the best that they didn’t. If Adrien were on missions with her, she’d definitely be too distracted.

“What? Dude, no way!” Nino said, extending a fist to bump.

“Yeah, I was Aspik—the first person to wield the Snake Miraculous—but things didn’t exactly work out, so I let Ladybug pass it on to Luka. I probably didn’t get summoned by Miracle Queen because Luka took over my job,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Okay, this definitely adds a lot of evidence to my case,” Alya said, that determined glint whenever she found a new scoop to chase in her eye, but just as quickly as it came, it dimmed. “It’s kind of a major bummer that we all got exposed though. Now that Hawkmoth knows our identities, we’ll never get to be heroes again.”

“Yeah...”

Her friends deflated, and Marinette curled her shoulders. She hated seeing them all look so defeated. Everything really had been flipped on its head. She’d lost her mentor, her allies, and on top of that, she had way more responsibility now as guardian. It was true that this group couldn’t get their Miraculouses back, but that didn’t mean they had to stop being heroes.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Marinette said. “Since none of us can be superheroes anymore, what if we start a club for doing good deeds as civilians? We can play the role of our superhero alter egos, but instead of fighting villains, we can volunteer at the library or pick up trash. Kind of like…a rejected heroes club.”

“Great idea, Marinette,” Adrien said, and her cheeks warmed.

“You could make us all costumes just like the ones we had when we were heroes,” Nino said.

“Yes! I wanna see how high I can jump as Roi Singe,” Kim said, stretching his legs.

“Kim, you won’t have actual superpowers. It will just be a costume,” Max said with an eye roll.

“We can all even pair off into teams like Ladybug and Chat Noir. Each team can be responsible for different areas of town,” Alya said, casting a sly grin in Marinette’s direction. “Nino and I can be a team, obviously, and I’m pretty sure Kim is going to need Max to keep him under control, so that leaves you two one-hit wonders to be a team.”

Marinette’s spine stiffened as Adrien turned to her. Of course Alya would pair her with Adrien! She was only the most amazing best friend in the whole world. Marinette wasn’t sure if she loved her or hated her—she was too busy trying not to faint.

“Awesome! I love teaming up with Marinette,” Adrien said, nudging her with his elbow.

“Great! Then it’s settled. The Rejected Heroes Club starts today,” Alya said, and Marinette took a deep breath.

What had she just gotten herself into?

#miraculous ladybug #adrien agreste #marinette dupain-cheng #adrinette #adrienette #adrinette zine #my writing #rejected heroes club

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the-darklings · 4 years ago

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coa one year later & self-reflection

(*drags out a creaky metal chair and plops down on it heavily*)

Hi. It’s me, ya boi skinny--

Wait, wrong one. Do over.

Hi, it’s me, Kat, and I’m not dead. Clearly. Today being one year anniversary of COA has kinda put me in a reflective mood, so I guess I decided to sit down and just...talk about some things, thoughts and feelings I’ve been bottling inside for a hot sec. Especially given how radio silent I have gone on here and people deserve a bit of perspective.

And before anyone starts worrying, it’s all good, and I’m still around and currently in good health for the most part.

So, let’s take it back to the start. Regardless of how dramatic it may sound, we need to go back a year for that.

By technicality alone, COA actually turned one year old on October 12th. That’s when the first part was posted. However, the reason I’m treating today as the aforementioned birthday is simple: I had no intention of this story ever being more than a short two-parter. I told this to the discord gang already but COA was only going to have two parts. V was going to die in Tokyo and the rest of the story follows glimpses of John throughout the movies and it’s her ghost that haunts him. Skipping ahead, it was going to have a bittersweet ending of John eventually dying, having completed his task, only to be greeted by V, Daisy and Helen in the afterlife. A peace of sorts. Then, I realised that, well, no. I have more to say on this world and intrigue about this placeholder character V kept growing.

November 1st happened and I made a very last minute call to continue COA but with the added pressure of doing it during NaNoWriMo 2019. And boy did I. Most of the story was figured out during that very intense month. I posted Part 2 on this day a year ago because I was so eager to share it. Perhaps, in retrospect, a bit too eager.

For those of you who may not know this, I work as a writer full time for my actual every day job. I’m the main writer for an original webcomic called In the Bleak Midwinter on Webtoon.com and have been for almost two years now. Getting what is essentially your dream job is amazing. I’m very lucky on that front but it also taught me stark realities of having your job and only hobby overlap. It’s a dangerous creative mix. Especially because I was not used to being constraint in what I create or the feeling like I have to please anyone else. Writing as a job is a whole other avenue of creative exhaustion. I love my job a lot and am very, very lucky to have it but it doesn’t change the fact that those initial stages made me fall back on COA a lot for creative freedom that I craved so desperately. To an unhealthy degree looking back on it now.

But going back to November last year. NaNo time. I did it. Finished on the 24/25th I believe. A juicy final count of 52k+. All while maintaining a weekly update schedule for a fic that usually hit around 10k per update, if not more, even during those early days. Add writing an original story on top of that. Writing every day for hours on end (we are talking 10-12hr days) without any time for other hobbies or time for myself in general. I kept pushing and pushing and pushing. Losing weight and sleep in the process. I think the thing that convinced me that I should continue doing so is the fact that the outpour of support for COA ended up surpassing anything I ever expected or even dared to hope for. I’m not a huge numbers person but the outpour of love and just sheer investment in the story and characters blew me away. John Wick fandom is on the smaller side and has been going through downtime when I posted COA so my expectations were...well, small tbh. I like keeping expectations low to avoid any disappointments in general. But I’ve also always had an issue of being a massive 0 or 100 kind of person. If I love something, it consumes me. In this case, it brought me as much joy and freedom as much as it was steadily pushing me towards the ultimate crash.

That being said, I can’t thank you all enough for every comment, like, reblog and message and fanart. You’re the reason I got this far. With your support. It brightened some really dark days for me.

But.

To be frank, it’s never been about you guys. I never wrote or pushed because I felt like I had to appease anyone. That creative mindset is pure poison and I long since learned to let go of it. I kept pushing and kept working myself to the bone because I liked it. I liked how reading peoples’ responses made me feel. I liked the addictive nature of reading all the comments and theories after an update. I loved the idea of brightening peoples’ days and giving them something to cheer them up after what might have been a shitty day. Even if that was at expense of my own time/well being. But for a long time, it wasn’t. I love writing a lot but facts remain facts.

It was beyond unhealthy and burnout wasn’t a question of if but when and that when was approaching at neck-breaking speed.

So we come to the end of November. Part 4 has just come out. People were invested and I was invested alongside them. I was just finishing up Part 5 which (back then) was the biggest single chapter I’ve ever written and god I still recall my sheer dread because that was the beginning of Santino being established as a LI. Looking back on that now, it’s downright hilarious how worried I was about the reception of him and V together after John.

So honestly, I hit burnout at around Part 8. Because that’s the first time I recall struggling with writing a chapter. Part 8 came out on December 28th. I had a brief break for holidays. But my mistake was not taking longer back then. Because I continued writing with a barely healed burnout. Followed by almost a year of struggling and continuously creating through that state. It wasn’t like I eased off the pressure, either. Oh, no. The chapters grew in size, the world and the characters with it. AUs amassed quickly and while I adore every single one - again, I didn’t know how to pace myself well enough.

I’m spiteful though. The more the chapters struggled the more I pushed against the burnout. By the time Chicago arrived, however, I knew I was in trouble. I ended up writing 43k+ in a span of 2 months, I believe. And while to some it may not seem like a lot given the time frame, it’s a lot when you’re burnout to a crisp & writing an original story for work + deadlines. Which I was burned out and then some. Chicago was something I was looking forward to writing for months. I have built it up since Part 4. It was a long time coming. So while I’m still proud of it, I would be lying if I said that some scenes were not sacrificed for the sake of keeping to my invisible schedule that no one but me actually cared about. You guys have always been patient. I never felt pushed into anything. It’s always only ever been me doing the harm.

Chicago was the downwards spiral for me mentally. I felt like I was failing to live up to my own expectations. That people were drifting away from it. I was plagued by the thought that the story I poured so much into was falling apart and growing weaker. Which this has always been an issue with me: I am my own harshest critic. Always have been. In fact, I’m a downright mean little fucker when it comes to just tearing at myself. I know writing is for fun - and it is - but I still like the idea of being proud of my work which only made everything worse despite the love each update received.

This takes us to the beginning of June. Specifically, June the 2nd. Or, as I like to call it: Kat Makes Another Impulsive Decision but This One Actually Works Out For the Better. On this day, I created the COA Discord server. And damn, I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting when I did ngl. I did it for fun and as an escape more so than anything. But somehow it ended up being the best decision I made in a long while. I know some of you are reading this. So love you lots, dorks. It’s such a privilege to be able to call so many of you my friends even outside of COA now. That little community has given me some of the best memories from this year and helped me to crawl out of my own metaphorical pit I was stuck in. Mentally, I’m doing much better than I did beginning of this summer. Which could be summed up as a constant self-hatred cycle and a feeling of inadequacy.

That, however, does not mean my burnout magically disappeared. If anything Chapter 17 just put a nail in the coffin so to speak. 2020 has been a shitty year just across the board for obvious reasons I don’t need to go into here but that can only partially be attributed to my mental state. Chapter 17 was...exhaustive. To say the least. But I was determined to stick with my vision and not split it up. I was also starting to be a bit more forgiving towards myself in terms of how long I may take to write it thanks to guys on discord though the feeling of failure and worry never quite faded fully. I’m proud of Part 17. Truly. But that was also when I hit rock bottom creatively on COA. It drained me completely.

I tried writing Part 18 for weeks after, day in and day out, not getting past the first scene and hating every word I wrote. So I took a deep breath and stopped. Figured I let it marinate and wait instead of trying to piece one of the most crucial chapters in this story like some Frankenstein monster two sentences at the time.

So my solution was simple: give myself some distance from it and write other things. Get my spark back. Of course that’s always a good idea. Having multiple creative escapes is the best thing you can do for yourself creatively. There was just one tiny little problem.

I was still burned out. Still am. The problem went deeper than just being burned out over COA. I was burned out over writing itself.

Which is an issue for a person who only has writing as a creative outlet.

I don’t have any other way to express myself. So I was stuck in a runt, trying to write because it’s the only thing that makes me genuinely happy even when I really shouldn’t have. And let me tell you. It’s a shitty fucking feeling. My burnout worsened. I had a thousand ideas but every time I tried to get them down it felt forced, fragmented, and weak. Repetitive and dry. Now, this is also in part because English isn’t my native language, so my vocab is limited as a result, but I hit that sweet rock bottom in that regard, too.

So, I worked on V (but in her OC form Clara), Lucien and The Elites. All those characters have grown so much since you last read about them. I have multiple original projects planned down the line that will feature all of them existing in their own world, with their own stories and no longer constrained by JW canon.

Which, finally, takes us to the end of October and beginning of November 2020.

I was convinced that the best course of action was to do NaNo again but with an original story this time (involving V). Suffice to say, it took a grand total of maybe 5-6 days and hating every second of writing it while also feeling like this project I’m so passionate and excited to write (still am) is just...going down the toilet to be blunt, to realise I may have made the wrong call.

Still, the stubborn ass that I am, I pushed through. Convinced I can get into it if I just keep going. The realizations that I am sharing with you right now won’t have been possible if it hadn’t been for a rather curious turn of events about a week and a half ago.

I recently bought a gaming laptop, all in preparation for Cyberpunk 2077 dropping ofc. But, in the meantime, I kept recommending a game to a friend on the COA server. That game? Far Cry 5. (It’s a blast to play btw, just a side note.) And playing it brought back all the feelings of nostalgia from the days when I used to write for that fandom. So I revisited some old work. Checked the stuff I never published and that has been sitting ducks in my docs for months and hoo boy. Let me tell you it was a vibe check of the worst kind.

The stark difference in the prose and the ease with which it flowed was...startling. It made me remember why I love writing so much and how proud I used to be of what I wrote back in the day. Which is not to say I’m not proud now, but it was just such a sharp dip in quality it was impossible to ignore.

So I didn’t.

I paused NaNo, moving it to another month. I paused writing for everything but work, which with our season coming to an end I will also get a rest from soon, too. I kinda paused in general. For the first time in a while, I finally forced myself to switch off. Rest.

The reason why I haven’t been on here is simple: guilt and not having energy to be on here. I like making my blog a safe space for everyone. Similar to escape it has become for me. I couldn’t pretend I was fine when I wasn’t. I felt obliged to perform and being here became exhausting. I haven’t been checking my inbox. Haven’t done much of anything except occasionally dropping by and reblogging a random post so people know I’m alive.

And that’s that, folks. That’s where I am currently. Resting. Completely exhausted mentally but resting. Getting my energy back.

So where does that leave us, huh? If you read this far, dunno what to tell you. Thanks, I suppose. It’s still odd to think people actually care about my existence sometimes.

I know what you’re likely thinking, too. So does this mean COA is never gonna be finished? What is gonna happen to it? Are you abandoning it?

The answer: no. 17 out of 25 chapters and 250k+ in, I’m too far in not to give it a proper conclusion. Not because I owe it to anyone other than myself. I want this story to be a stepping stone for my future as a writer. I want to prove to myself that I can get this done and finish it. As of right now (as you can no doubt tell with how long it’s been since last update) it’s on a soft hiatus while I rest. This rest? Not sure how long it may last. Right now, my plan is till mid December at which point I will reevaluate. Ideally, I finish the year with an update. But my New Year’s resolution is to finish COA. That timeline has become a little more murky now but, again, ideally it’s within the first quarter of 2021. Will that happen? I don’t know. And I don’t want to make false promises, either.

All I’m saying is that it will be done. I’m just no longer sure how long, exactly, it may take me to reach that Epilogue. I don’t expect many people to stick around for however long it may take me, but if you do, thank you. Truly. I really and deeply mean that.

So what’s on the cards for this blog in the meantime? Well, CP77 is coming out in under a month (if it doesn’t get moved again lmao rip) and I expect that to be my soft return to posting my writing on here again. We will see where the muse takes me, if at all. Regardless though, I’m excited.

One doctorate thesis later, here we are at the end of this really long rambling session. I hope that this has given you some perspective on things going on behind the scenes. I spared you some of the gorier details but I think this post has been long overdue. I suppose I, myself, was just too unwilling to face these things despite knowing about them deep down for a while now. I’m too self-critical not to notice but acting on correcting this behavior has been a whole other matter clearly.

Thank you for reading this post, my writing in general, and supporting me. I’m not going anywhere. I’m still around. More is on the way in the future. I’ll be seeing you all real soon. And all my love to all of you.

Love,

- Kat.

#kat speaks #blog psa #i suppose

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planesofduality · 4 years ago

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Full Transcript edition:

“The Story Behind Solas with Dragon Age Lead Writer Patrick Weekes” by Dialogue Wheel/Video Game Sophistry

Reblog of one of my first posts ever. I didn’t understand how tumblr worked back then really, and long story short, I split the transcript of this interview into 3 parts :) I’d probably do things differently now. Reblogging it as a single transcript for my own convenience, as I still refer to some of the things Weekes said here from time to time!

Interview is from before Trespasser DLC; posted to YouTube 12/20/2019

Note: pseudo-reblog

“Interview with lead writer for Dragon Age Patrick Weekes years ago about how the enigmatic character Solas was created, here is what that magic elf could have up his sleeve for us in Dragon Age 4.” Not my interview, just wrote transcript of questions and answers for reference.

Full video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFx1nCdZFjw&t=1s

Time: 2:54

Solas, tell us about little old Solas. Talking about your other characters you created we always start at the beginning. Pen to paper - How did the idea of Solas first start? What was that first iteration?

So actually Dave and Mike both, you know, we - everyone knew who Solas was - everyone knew what the ending was going to be with him. And, you know, Dave and Mike said, “Well Dave is writing a ton of the crit path, the main part of the game. Dave really wants to do Dorian, that’s very important to him, and are you comfortable writing this guy? Are you comfortable writing someone who is going to be, in some respects, deceiving the Inquisitor for the entirety of the game?” And, honestly, how do you turn that down?

Time: 4:02

So really it was that simple then - from there, in the way you described it, they already had some ideas and some concepts about what Solas needed to bring?

Oh, yeah. Originally, one of the most difficult parts of writing him - and, you know, I said Iron Bull was the one closest to how I originally planned him - Solas and Cole are probably tied for least like how I originally wrote them. And, really, it was getting past the secret. It was getting past Fen’Harel.

Iron Bull: badass former spy, the opposite of Sten.

Blackwall: awesome Grey Warden who is not actually a Grey Warden.

Solas: He’s Fen’Harel…

Okay, can he tell you he’s Fen’Harel? No.

Okay, well what are we going to talk about?

[Pretending to be Solas:] “Hey Inquisitor, I’m still not Fen’Harel, do you have any questions?”, “I will not take any questions about whether I am Fen’Harel.” That was the big stumbling block of writing him.

I remember the first draft… the first draft all we talked about was elves. It was elves all the time. Every conversation went “Elves, elves… Elves were awesome back in the old days.. Everything was great with the elves.” And then you’d go, “You really like elves huh?” “No, shut up - I’m not Fen’Harel.” And we all kind of looked at that and went, that’s not really much of a character hook. You cannot have a character hook built on something that you only reveal after the play has watched the credits. That is how we got to Fade expert. That is something where, if something had gone terribly wrong, if we were six months from shipped and we decided not to do anything with elves in the future, we could have taken the Dread Wolf out of the equation entirely and a mage named Solas who loves the Fade, is an apostate but without all of the fear and anger that you think of when you think of an apostate, but is just this guy who wants to travel through dreams and find mysteries and explore… that was a good enough character to stand by itself. That is what it took us a couple of drafts to get to.

Time: 7:04

You mentioned the first two phases of Solas - share with us a little more of that journey, when you finally go to this character that could stand on its own. If you don’t mind, a little more of that journey- was it just those first two and now everything’s cool?

First draft was “ ‘Elves, elves’ but ‘I don’t like elves’”. Second draft was about how much to tell. I think in the next draft it was significantly closer. Anyone who looked at that draft - and, you know, I apologize to anyone who looked at that draft - but, anyone who looked at that draft you would find places where “Oh okay that’s the Solas I know and love. There he is. He likes the Fade.” That’s something that’s actually interesting. But, he lied a lot more. And it actually really weakened his character. We played it so close with both Blackwall and Solas - both characters are the liars who don’t actually lie. They will tell you almost truths. With Blackwall - he never actually flat-out says “I am a Grey Warden.” If you ask him what it’s like being a Grey Warden he will say "Well a warden embodies this and a warden embodies that… I’ve been blessed in my travels.” You know, he never actually quite says “I’m a Warden.” With Solas it’s the same way with the hand wave of ‘in the Fade’. I would start putting ‘in the Fade’ at the end of a lot of sentences. “Yeah turns out that all of the stuff you thought was true in history was wrong… because I saw it…. in the Fade.”

In revision 2, he lied a lot more. On the one hand it worked, on the other hand it made him less tragic, more of jerk when we got to the reveal. So that is how we got to what we made him into: this character who is intelligent, wise… Solas will think very carefully before he tells you anything and anything he tells you is exactly as much as he wants you to know. That actually led to one of the funny little game moments - one of the last things we do is add the places where characters will approve or disapprove. I think what I want Solas to approve us is you actually asking questions . He’s kind of unique in that regard - What Solas approves us is people who are interested in finding out knowledge. Whether they are finding it out from him or they’re talking with other people, Solas wants people to explore, he wants people to find information, he wants people to learn. What he disapproves of, honestly, more than what you do, is in many ways how you do it. You can do the thing that he wants you to do, but if you do it in a knee-jerk way, Solas hates that. He wants to know that you are carefully considering your options and taking a measured approach.

Time: 12:16

When it comes the characterization of a character that you’ve already been give at least some sort of name to. We know that this character is some sort of trickster god - when you were trying to develop and make him some a stand-alone character, did you ever have to rely on what the mythos already established of this particular kind of eighth-seat god that maybe a lot people hadn’t heard a lot about?

Well, I think, like we talked about before, one of the great things about the Dragon Age universe is everything that you learn in a codex entry is something that someone else heard in a story and wrote it down somewhere and you’re reading half of the book. So the good news on that is anything we wanted to do with Fen’Harel, there was so little and what was in there was already so sketchy that we had all the freedom we needed to play with him.

That turned out to be a nice thing because I think if we had someone that was completely by-the-books, already established, their character already given, it would feel like more of a letdown to write that as a character or you would have to play against type, you’d have to do something completely different to show he wasn’t just what the stories wrote about him. And, you know, in some ways that is both liberating but also disappointing to people who might have liked the original stories. This was a fun experience of getting to fill in some of the gaps.

The only thing I think we had to struggle against is that anyone who hears “trickster” or anyone who hears “oh, he’s chaotic and unpredictable” it feels like there is a natural urge to go to “He’s Loki in the Avengers. He’s the guy who’s gonna make large grand-standing plans.” Or, you know, “He’s the Riddler, who’s gonna leave clues to test you.” We had to get away from that: “Let’s tone that back a little bit, let’s not have him be the Jack Nicholson Joker version of the Dread Wolf.”

That’s quite a quote.

You got Dorian as a large, grandiose , extravagant figure and it would have been easy to have him go that way. It was fortunate that we had Dorian as the mage who had the larger-than-life persona already to make Solas be the quiet one.

Time: 15:21

Was there ever an instance where you were really pushed with giving some indicators to the player that Solas may have some connection to this going through the gameplay? Because you do see a lot statues of Fen’Harel. There’s many instances of where you’re discussing it, you’re traveling through those lands. Where do you walk that line, how do you walk that line, or do you just completely disregard it whatsoever?

The goal we had is we wanted the very careful players, the very sensitive players, who were playing attention and watching every scene with Solas to know that something was up and to want more answers and then go to “OH MAN” as soon as the stinger after the credits rolled. But we wanted most players to just go “Oh, okay, he’s like ‘Fade nerd.’ He’s like ‘hippie guy.’”

The other thing we wanted was everyone on their second playthrough, as soon as they talked to Solas to be like “Oh, man, he’s just saying it. He just flat-out said it right there and I missed it completely the first time!” I think we called it the “inevitable in retrospect”- or the “slap the forehead on the second playthrough” style of writing, where we wanted people to see that the most interesting thing about the trickster god is he’s not actually that great of a liar - He is almost telling you a lot of the time. And, you know, some of the tragedy is it that you never had the chance to actually ask, “Wait -are you Fen’harel?”

Time: 17:13

We talked about leaving breadcrumbs, what that meant. Now the big turn, the big scene at the ending: How did this come about, were you really involved in that sort of process and are you happy with it?

Oh, I’m absolutely happy with it. It went through several iterations,. Mike was hugely involved. The writing was definitely done by Dave; it was a huge crit path moment. He had me give a look at the Solas voice, I think I looked at it, I don’t think I actually changed a single word in the final one.

We had versions where after the main plot it was actually going to be a full plot where you the player went and were actually present when Solas confronts Mythal. We had a part where we said, “Wow that’s too big, a lot of players are gonna miss that, we’ll make it a DLC.” So it was gonna be a separate DLC where that happened. At one point we said “No, this is too big, we actually - let’s cut it and address it next game.” So it was going to be this thing that we pushed off into some future content.

I am really happy with what we went with, because, I think, you know, for my money, that short, little Marvel-style, after-the-credits stinger is what we needed. We needed something so that everyone who was paying attention and everyone who was really invested could go “oh my god!” And go, “Okay, so, just in case you were wondering, we’re not done, we have more stories to tell, and we are confident enough in what we are doing that we are willing to throw that ball.” That stinger is essentially us throwing a football to future us, trusting that we are going to catch it. Because, you know, at the end, we had that level of confidence. We felt that we had that level of confidence, we felt we made a really good game. Dave led an amazing team of writers, and I’m really touched that he has the confidence to believe that I’ll be able to carry that on for him.

Time: 19:49

When we spoke to Dave, one of the big moments that he mentioned, was when he created kind of a long-term idea for what’s going to happen in the Dragon Age universe. And to hear him say it, he mentioned that what he originally wanted for Dragon Age: Inquisition couldn’t happen - it was far too big - it wouldn’t work. And you guys had talked about taking that concept, finishing Inquisition somewhere in the middle of that concept arc, and then using at least an influence or something like that to affect the franchise going forward. Speaking with you now, as someone who has taken up the reins, do you know what I’m talking about? Am I talking crazy? Where do you see it going?

Um…

Reasonably - of what you can say on this.

So here’s the last scene of the next game… (laughs). I think there’s an extent to which no plan really survives contact with the audience when it comes to video games. We look at how fans react, we look at what hit, what rang true with everyone. You know, it’s funny, having people react angrily actually isn’t as bad as having people ignore things sometimes. Having people react angrily means they were definitely emotionally engaged, so you know you hit something there. Whereas having fans go, “I don’t know, fine, I guess, whatever” and move on means, “Okay, I don’t know if that’s what we want to go back to. We didn’t actually get anything from them there, they didn’t actually remember that later.” So that’s a phase that comes after every game we ship. We look at what hit, what missed, and where we want to go from there.

Now that said, Dave’s future plan is, I think, fantastic, epic, and heartbreaking. Our plan is to use that as our starting point. To look at where we want to go, what we want to do, and it will not be - and I, you know, Dave and I have talked about this - it will not be the story that Dave would tell if he were still here as lead writer. Because it could never be that. We can get into that when we talk about Cole a little bit, but if I tried to do that I would just be doing a bad impersonation of Dave Gaider and no one is ever going to be as good at that as Dave is. My goal going forward is to, as lead, put my own spin on that process, put my own spin on the plots going forward, on the thematic elements, while keeping those same thematic elements that we had. Because, I think, what Dave has set in motion in three games, countless DLCs and expansions, is something that can endure: The idea that no choice is ever really that easy and that the great events always stem from human-understandable motivations.

So, that is where I think where we are going to go, as vaguely as I can say.

Time: 23:30

Speaking of specifically to Solas: His continuation of the story. Adding that little “Marvel moment” at the end - what do you think that did for the crit path and the overall arc of the story that players experienced in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Do you think they would have been more satisfied if there was a DLC or is that just us gamers complaining because we can’t get everything we want right away?

Well, I think you want to leave people wanting more. “Man I wish you guys had done more” is a better problem to have than “Man I wish you guys had done less.” So, I think, looking at it from inside the studio, we didn’t have the resources to do much more than we did. So it was never going to be the big moment right then anyway. From my perspective, the reason I’m really happy we have it is, like I said, I thought it was a vote of confidence. The team is still the Dragon Age team and it is still the writers and designers who did everything else, who made such wonderful characters and were responsible for such fantastic plots.

Time 25:10

Well, again, looking at that in its completion, it’s good to see that even a character that needed to give you a stinger in your estimation didn’t take away, I guess, from the overall story you were trying to tell.

Well, thank you. Yeah it was obviously the moment we were building toward, but again, the goal was even if we didn’t have that stringer, he was still an interesting enough character that people would have not felt cheated that he was in the party.

Time: 25:35

One of the most beautiful scenes I think in Dragon Age Inquisition is the scene that you get with Solas if you play as a female elf Inquisitor. Talk a little bit about that choice to have this romance option very, very specific. It’s race- and gender- specific. Why that scene - what that scene meant and a lot of the subtext, because it is a very rich sequence of scenes, not just one. And, I think it’s really one of the most interesting romances in the game.

I love that scene because that scene for me shows how far we’ve gone past - not the make myself irrelevant anymore - but how far we’ve gone with the digital acting. Jonathan Epp the cine-designer for that scene put it together and when you take everything that Gareth David Lloyd - the voice actor - everything he did on his lines. And just putting so much tragedy, and making it clear in every line that he wants to say more than he can. And with Jon Epp the cine-designer, just in the wordless scenes: showing the tragedy, showing the heartbreak, showing how much he does genuinely care against his better judgement, and how he finally forces himself to step away.,

You know how I said when we were talking about the Iron Bull - everything, every major moment we do, is there for a specific type of player fantasy fulfillment. And you know, not all types of fantasies are the happy ones. There’s a reason why The Phantom of the Opera was on Broadway for so many years and it’s not because it has a happy ending.

The Phantom of the Opera isn’t exactly the theme for the romance - the razor was something closer to almost professor and student in some ways. He definitely comes across as a mentor in some ways. When he finally steps back it is him beating himself up, not you, saying “Wow what I have done here is actually really unfair to you, and you, player, at the time don’t know that I’m beating myself up because I’m actually 1000s of years old and not the person you think I am and it’s disrespectful to you for me to continue this relationship.” So it’s a very moral perspective for our ancient, quasi-evil, trickster god to come with.

Time: 28:41

And it’s amazing because it’s another instance of content that so few players would actually get an opportunity to see. When it comes to making it that specific, I guess, why was that choice made? Because usually a lot of your content - most of the Dragon Age content - it’s very easy to get really rich, wonderful characters right in your face and have those wonderful “eat-em-up” experiences, why for this one was it such a steep price to get in?

You know, I won’t lie, a lot of it came from some of our designers. Some of the women in the design department really, really loving his voice and saying, “You are absolutely fools if you do not make him romance-able in some capacity.” And, really, his story overall is - and, you know, I think we’ve only hinted at that but I think we have hinted at it enough that I can at least say this part of it - his story isn’t a happy one. His story is one, where, if you look at him and Mythal, there is clearly some grief, there is clearly some tragedy. And, adding in the option - even for players who don’t take it - on my end as a writer, knowing that some players will have this as a star-crossed, forbidden romance, you know, it makes him more sympathetic. It’s important to me as a writer because when you’re writing about someone who, according to Flemeth, is at least somewhat responsible for the bad guy getting the magical item that he used to blow up half a mountain in the prologue, it’s important to have something in there that you can always have, as a writer, look at as your touchstone and go “This is a real person. This is someone who experiences sadness. This is someone who falls in love.” Even if he doesn’t do it with that Inquisitor on that playthrough, this is always someone who can be like that.

Time: 30:58

Where do you see a character like Solas ending up?

(Big sigh) Musical theater.

(laughs) Right when we reach those beautiful moments, Patrick!

I think that it is fantastic that people have emotionally engaged with Solas and I hope we get a chance to explore that in some future content.

Alright and that’s the most that we’re getting right now.

Time: 31:37

Oh, and here’s a little tie in: Here Lies the Abyss, the demon that spoke to Solas - what was all that about, what was that going on?

Oh yes - the demon who speaks perfect Elven!

Yes perfectly to him, and if you remember any of that - did you have anything to do with that?

Yes, Here Lies the Abyss was mine. It was a fun plot. It was a terrifyingly difficult plot, because - I’m not sure how clear this is to players that have one done one playthrough or with one import state - but your key characters throughout the events at Adamant Fortress and then the events of the Fade, it’s a customizable Hawke. Which means it could be a male Hawke or a female Hawke and within that, Hawke from Dragon Age 2 is characterized by one of three different attitudes: friendly, grim, or sarcastic. So, that’s three attitudes times two genders, that’s six different Hawkes and three different possible Grey Wardens: Alistair, Loghain, or Stroud. So, the process of going through Adamant Fortress and then going through the Fade was a crazy juggling act of trying to keep track of “Okay, now one of these five people, these five Schrodinger’s cat quantum people, will say this line, and then another of these five Schrodinger’s cat quantum people will respond with this line.”

It’s important to remember that as we went through everything in Adamant Fortress and the Fade was taking place in that contest. There was a long period time when we were looking at that really going, “Okay, I just have to hope this actually makes sense when it’s nothing but Alistair and my sarcastic female Hawke.”

But, to actually answer your question. As I recall, the Nightmare, who as a friendly, chipper guy was basically - I do basically two types of villains: I do the villain who thinks he or she is the hero, and is misguided and has opposed goals, and is kind of tragic and tortured in that way. And then I do the mean-girl villain who says snotty high school insults.

That’s it - that’s the gambit.

Well, just about, yes. I’m looking forward to see who writes the villain in the future Dragon Age games - so get ready for either tragic pathos or really, really good high school mean-girl zingers.

As I recall, he was speaking Elven to Solas and if I remember right, he said, “Your pride is responsible for everything that has gone wrong” and I think he said “You will die alone.” And then Solas said something that translates to either “Nothing is known for certain” or “Not necessarily.”

And what does all that mean?

Well I think it’s fascinating that people are emotionally engaged, and I hope we have the chance -

It was a very asked question - it was a question that was asked a lot. Specific to that.

Oh, I’m not surprised, and I hope one day that we can tell you. But, obviously, that demon knows that Solas is hurting and Solas feels guilty about some stuff and really wanted to dig in there, and Solas was shouting back.

Literally just describing what happened (laughs). All right, so something that will clearly be talked about in other games.

TIme: 36:22

Dealing with this particular quest I really think that this was one opportunity to involve the Grey Wardens in a story, and a world, that kind of progressingly, after the first game had less and less of a need to exist - let alone in the world - but in the main characters arc. Talking to David I remember initially there was some idea for this particular mission they would just fall into the hole and be hanging out in the Deep Roads, and having out with the dwarves, so tell us a little bit about this creation.

A lot of the process of writing these large plots, like I talked about the razor, you figure out what the core concept is, you always start with a lot of things, and in most cases what you then end up having to do is cut. And if you’re not someone in the studio, talking about having to cut things sounds like you’re losing awesome content, you’re ruining what would have been clearly the best part of the plot. Inside the studio though, most cases what you’re cutting is the stuff that didn’t actually help tell the story you wanted to tell.

So yes in the original version, in a very early draft, actually this was before I was actually on the plot - this predates me - there was, yes, going into the Deep Roads, and when you fell in instead of ending up in the Fade you ended up down in the dark. And finding out what the Grey Wardens in this version of the story had been involved with the Architect from Dragon Age: Awakening. It was an interesting direction, and it was, I think, a very cool direction, but it did not help tell the story of the Inquisition. It was more a story of “Hey, if we wanted to do more with the Hero of Fereldan, here is an interesting place we could go” and it did not help tell the story of “What is the Inquisition doing?” “What is Corypheus doing?”, “How do these two organizations bounce off each other and who’s caught in the middle?” So trying to come to terms with the Grey Wardens in this game not being the protagonists, not being the group that is in the center of the action but being the group that is caught in the middle of this power struggle was something that led to us having to eventually do the re-jiggering that got us to the plot you saw.

#i remember this took forever to transcribe lol #much respect to the people and computers who do this for a living #dragon age #patrick weekes #solas #reblog

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