#even if she can't ever be forgiven by the person/people she hurt (i.e. where Ward could have gone if Wildbow was more creative with Amy)

[kyliafanfiction]

Probably a year back, I once made a comment about wanting to find a way to take the basic concept of Eilistraee, file the serial numbers off, and do something interesting with her that the owners of the IP of Forgotten Realms won't do, because they don't seem to be interested in doing anything with her.

The problem of course is that Eilistraee is such a specific thing that you file the serial numbers off and it becomes impossible. Like, how do you remover her from her context in such a way that you can still use her in a way that keeps what's interesting about her and still be sorta recognizable as her influence without just being a blatant copy

(I actually do have an idea that sort of does this and I really really need to get back to it but).

And I really want to do something like that with Amy Dallon.

Like, again, haven't read Ward, but from where I sit, what Wildbow did with Amy in Ward is, if nothing else, the most boring choice he could have made for the character as a concept, narratively speaking. One does or does not have to agree with that, because I think what I think and I don't really care if anyone else agrees with me on this one.

But like... how in the name of fuck do you take the platonic ideal of the character of Amy Dallon, who is so specific to the unique tortures of her context, and then use it anywhere else that again, isn't such a blatant riff you'd get sued or at least mocked?

Like, adopted characters with shitty parent are a dime a dozen. Sympathetic characters with an unrequited incest crush on their sibling are... rarer, but still, I'm sure they exist. Characters with spiraling guilt complexes that make them overwork and burnout - god, those are hardly uncommon.

Amy is so many things put together in a way that should feel like a franken-monstrosity of a character concept (she is the fucking platonic ideal of a character that is not a woobie but is woobifiable, istg), but like - the specific hell of open cape life on Earth-Bet, the way Earth-Bet just sucks so very hard that Carol is how she is, that no one who has the authority or position to step in any way to help Amy (by force, since Amy's issues make her unwilling to accept help because she's a fucking TEENAGER, and teenagers are already not usually mentally well to begin with) and then the way Shaper, works to mash Amy's stress levels up even more and give her the powers to do what she does and what she doesn't want to do and like -

One could create a superficial facsimilie of a character like Amy, an overstressed, overworked healer with shit mom and an incest crush and all that, but you can't just port Shaper into another story concept as is, because there's so many implications to the world if powers like that exist.

And then there's the fact that like... I don't actually like superhero media, as a genre. Worm has just the right things I need to make me enjoy the superhero concept, partly because it isn't actually a slave to the pacing and structural rules of comic books that make me not like them (also why I'm more likely, though not always, to like superhero TV shows or other superhero webfiction. My favorite piece of superhero media remains a work that is/was posted to a tg/tf kink website but remains an excellent story well beyond the excellent kink material and a really interesting exploration of a number of classic superhero tropes and archetypes).

With my serial-numbers filed Eilistraee concept, I'm still working with a fantastical setting that has many of the usual suspects - elves and dark elves and dwarves and orcs and wizards and so forth, and sure, I have my own spin, but it's still the same kind of setting that Eilistraee herself comes from.

But I would never want to write my serial-numbers filed off Amy in a superhero verse because... well, I don't want to write a superhero story (that isn't fanfic, anyway). And It's just very hard to imagine doing the things I'd want to do with a character like Amy in the kinds of sci-fi or fantasy or steampunk settings I like to play with. Superhero really is a genre well unto itself, especially in terms of power scaling.

It took me a while to come up with my version of Eilistraee and a story that included her, so maybe I do think of something for Amy Dallon as well, eventually, but I really do have a hard time imagining how I'd even start.