#i don’t plan on keeping the rewrites Exactly like the original quests/i’m changing the structure

[hsslilly-blog]

i’m wondering how my other rewrites are going to go because the other quests are much longer than on the hunt. i don’t want to break them into parts because that’s lame and uncentralised things bother me, but i also don’t want it to be. like. 20k words long lmao.

[natsubeatsrock]

The Rewrite of Fairy Tail: Bonus (Parameters)

How much do the rules matter to the changes I make in the series?

Well, it's been about a year since I started posts about how I plan to rewrite Fairy Tail. I have been thinking through the different changes I want to make long before those posts came out. I had a lot of the big structural points of the rewrite in mind well over a year before my first post about it came out. Even now, as I'm officially (and very slowly) working on the first draft, it's crazy how much is going into reworking Fairy Tail.

My first post in this series laid out the seven guiding rules I have in rewriting the series. While I've talked about my mindset regarding this rewrite, I feel like the idea of guiding rules can feel like a nebulous concept. Why do the rules keep me from doing some things but not others? So I want to talk, in more concrete terms, about what I am and am not able to do.

To start, I cannot add or subtract any arcs to the series. This seems like an easy one. I have no reason to add arcs to the story. I also don't intend to, wholesale remove arcs from the series. This includes the three anime exclusive arcs. Every single arc of the rewrite is a part of the original series.

This, of course, doesn't mean that I will do every event exactly as it happened in the series. While most of the main story beats will remain the same, many of the events of the rewrite will look different from canon. To be honest, I plan to be significantly looser in adapting the anime-exclusive arcs than in the arcs Mashima has written. However, the end results will be the same.

Again, the big exception to this is the last chapter of my rewrite and the last chapter of the series. They will look very different from each other. For starters, I don't plan on having Team Natsu go on the Century Quest, as happens in the final chapter. Also, the end of the canon series and the end of my rewrite will be the culmination of multiple different factors. So, even as elements of the original ending and the sequel will inform my changes to the ending, I am not binding myself to the end of the series as the end I have to get to.

One point of interest is how special chapters and episodes will be affected. Their incorporation is one that is worth more time than I'm willing or able to give them here. I think that, as a part of the series, they can be helpful for understanding characters and history. I don't intend to rewrite all of the special chapters and episodes, but I do want to use or reference as many of them as feasible.

With that in mind, I do allow for the creation of new events. While these are not complete story arcs, there can be some substantial moments of small significance with events that are unique from any official version of Fairy Tail, while maintaining inspiration from canon. I don't want to have too many of these. If I can write this with less than 5 such incidents, I feel that I have written enough of myself into Mashima’s work.

To that point, I should mention how I plan to break up the series. For the most part, I plan to break up the series along the same lines as happen within arcs. In writing some of the special chapters and episodes, I plan on most of them as a single chapter. Though, when grouping events involving multiple chapters, I want to keep a similar grouping to the anime episodes. Many times, this means combining the events of multiple episodes into a single chapter. Other times, as will likely be the case with the Alvarez Empire, the grouping will be slightly different from the way chapters are adapted in the anime. In very rare cases, I may adapt the elements of a chapter or entire chapters in a different chronological order than originally presented.

Characters is an interesting issue to deal with. Much of the work I'm currently doing is working on the way characters are written in canon and how I plan to change them. I want to keep as many characters as possible in the series. If a character is of even mild importance for more than one arc, I don't want to throw them out of the series as a whole. This has been a bigger exercise in self-restraint than one may imagine it to be.

On the other side of the coin, I want to keep the characters of the series as close to their canon counterparts as possible. This obviously doesn't mean I can't or won't make changes or additions to characters. It does mean that the changes I do make have to be reasonable and have some ground within the series.

On a related note, I do plan on playing around with the ships. I don't want to break up any ships that were definitely canon by the end of the series. For my purposes, a ship is considered canon if it involves two characters canonically shown to have clear romantic feelings for each other who also take actions that make it clear to each other they want to further their relationship by the end of chapter 545. I also don't want to make a ship most fans consider to be fairly crack or unlikely that still wouldn't work within my new universe. But any ship that involves characters that can interact regularly and has a decent amount of fan support is fair game for use. Considering how a number of changes affect my leniency with the former, don't be shocked if that means stuff outside the big fandom mainstays become a thing.

This also means that some character deaths can stay permanent. I don't want to undo every single death fake-out in the series, as you can probably tell from my post on Lisanna. However, as I've said in the past, characters who had serious death scares aren't necessarily safe. A few of them may be serious game-time decisions for me. At the very least, I don't plan on adding any more when rewriting the series.

I do plan on making references to the original canon. I don't plan on making them so hilariously and awkwardly overt, even as I question how such things will come across, to begin with. Essentially, I don't plan on doing stuff like, “Hey, wouldn't it be crazy if [description of the actual situation from canon]?” too often.  However, I don't want to pass up the chance to make playful nods to canon when appropriate.

As for other kinds of content, I want to keep this at a level that is acceptable for teens. One the one hand, I don't feel comfortable with writing things like curses or sex. I was even a bit concerned about writing violence at the level I did in my debut story. On the other hand, Fairy Tail is aimed at a demographic of teenage boys. I want to keep that in mind when reworking things.

Finally, there's the issue of a sense of originality. Frankly, by virtue of the changes I've already talked about making, such as my handling of the Strongest Team, the first time skip, Natsu's search for Igneel, and some more moments with Lisanna, I don't think I need to say much about this. This isn't even every change I want to make and a few of the ones I have planned to discuss are going to be a bit more out there. That should have been obvious from the jump, though. As a fan of the series with less than popular views, originality was always an inevitability.

The trick is reigning myself in on a lot of the crazier ideas that could make this series a lot less like the original version than it already is shaping up to be. One of the best things about my writing process is the fact that I work through the potential ideas that could end up derailing the main focus of this story as hypothetical universes I have thought of playing out in some way. However, the best thing keeping me in line is my writing process for the rewrite. Although, that’s likely a rant for another day.

Based on the Introduction