#they are both their own person and an extension of the original arceus

[dinoserious]

baby arc bigger. the arcs/wheel will connect where they typically do, eventually, but this is a not quite mature design. i like to roll w "pla protag is dppt protag" bc i think it is fun, and this arceus went with akari when she went back to the future. they are wearing akari/dawns survey scarf :)

[antialiasis]

TQftL rambling

(Contains severe spoilers, do not read below the cut unless you’ve read chapters 75 and 76)

What ended up as the biggest theme of The Quest for the Legends is imperfection, fallibility, flawed people with flawed motivations doing what they can given their incomplete understanding of the world, and that theme is probably never as prominent as in the revelations in these chapters. Nobody secretly knew exactly what was going on; nobody orchestrated everything behind the scenes; nobody had an amazingly clever chessmaster plan. There was just Mew, who thought Chalenor was dead, spent a thousand years wanting to die either to join him or to simply atone for the guilt that's gnawed away at him all this time, felt conflicted about trying to stop the War as a result, and rationalized it as impossible to avoid confronting it; Chalenor, stuck as a ghost with barely any ability to influence the outside world, desperate just to see Mew again and make some feeble attempt to stop the War if he can, saving Mitch’s life only to inadvertently cause him a lot of anguish; Arceus, who struck back against flawed, arrogant legendaries in anger, with violently disproportionate retribution, distorted by his own emotions, and then disappeared; and Chaletwo, who tried his confused best to stop the War with the information Mew gave him, not knowing he was indirectly the reason behind it or that Mew had lied to him about most everything. Mew made and brought back a copy of Mewtwo's body, not because he had a grand plan that absolutely required Mewtwo, but on a sudden whim, for a plan cobbled together on the spot, in a fit of manic desperation, after traveling through time simply because the uncertainty was driving him mad. Mew created Chaletwo in the unthinking vain hope of bringing Chalenor back, actually dooming Chalenor to a thousand years of isolated wandering, purely by accident. Mew created a world where nobody knew about the War or the Destroyer, and lied about Chalenor having been the Preserver, simply out of sentiment, because he wished, just this once, to create a world where Chalenor would be remembered not as the Destroyer, but as the person that he saw him as. And despite Mew's intentions, Chaletwo grew up half-resenting Chalenor, simply because he was jealous and insecure and Mew wasn't good enough at hiding the fact Chaletwo was a failed attempt to bring him back. It's just people all the way down, people and their mistakes and failures and emotions.

That theme is really important to me and to the story, and I have no regrets about how this all shook out. (I didn't originally set out to write to some particular theme; it just happened slowly as the details came together in my mind.) But that messy, ugly, flawed reality may be underwhelming if you were hoping for something more, some grand aha! moment where everything fits together, some amazing time travel shenanigans where all of Mew's actions turn out to make perfect sense in the service of some grand goal, or where Chalenor had some mindblowingly complex Xanatos gambit going on that was the key to everything. I imagine most readers have developed their own pet theories about what might come to light in these chapters, to some extent; the most extensive speculation I've had the pleasure of reading came courtesy of Negrek and Chibi Pika (thank you by the way - it was incredibly fun and helpful to get that kind of in-depth look into the minds of readers), but I'm inclined to assume their thoughts were probably reasonably representative of, if not the level of depth, at least the kind of thing many people were probably expecting from the story. These speculation posts were fascinating, and if you're interested in comparing notes after reading the chapters, I highly recommend checking them out - both for the various bits and pieces they got right, and for a lot of really neat alternative ways this story could have gone that I never thought of.

But they're also full of plans, intricate rational reasons for things - which is extremely natural, because of course people want things to happen for a reason. I too find something deeply pleasing about stories with clever puzzle solutions, where you learn something and suddenly everything slots together into a perfect unified whole. I don't think this could ever have been that story, simply because of the way it was put together - something cobbled together from random chance elements after the fact is never going to be as neat as something precisely planned from the start - but ultimately I'm kind of happy it's not. I've mentioned before here that I'm a fan of a good deliberate anticlimax, and I think there's some similar instinct in me that finds an elegance in the fact the solutions to the mysteries here are ultimately relatively simple and largely boil down to characters making hasty decisions on the fly in a particular emotional state, in the fact it is all just people. Is that a letdown for regular readers, though? It's hard for me to tell, and probably depends on the reader.

All I can hope is that what the story actually is manages to have some of the emotional resonance for you that it has for me. I have no delusions about the fact that at this stage I'm completely unable to tell if Mew and Chalenor's story can be remotely emotionally effective for someone whose exposure to these characters actually just consists of what's in the fic, instead of having been thinking about it for literally more than a decade. The betas liked it, but beyond that, who knows. (I'm really really interested in your thoughts on it, by the way, if you have any.)

Either way, I love this story and the pileup of mistakes and imperfections that ends up forming the core of these chapters a lot, and I stand by that. I hope you all enjoyed at least some part of it. Thanks for following my ridiculous fanfic and seeing it through to this finally being posted.