#worldbuilding and overcomplicating things i could've and should've kept simple are passions of mine

[nonsensical-shitposting]

oh no i made a new au

Since he’s been a fan of Bug Fables for much longer than me, I decided to run the initial premise for it past my brother to see what he thought. It went something like this.

Me: So I’m calling it the Team Snakereverse AU as a placeholder name for now. The basic idea’s that Vi, Kabbu, and Leif all start off the story in roughly the opposite position from canon. Here, I’ll send you what I’ve written down for them so far.

Him, reading it over: Alright, so to summarize, Vi accidentally became a communist revolutionary, Kabbu got a soul-crushing desk job, and Leif ripped off the Yeerks from Animorphs?

Me: ...that’s grossly oversimplifying it, but I know you’re just trying to be funny, so whatever. Anyway, now I just gotta turn it into a fic...

Him: Okay, but don’t go overcomplicating it. The base concept you’ve got there is good enough on its own. You don’t need to go changing anything else about the canon situation and making more work for yourself-

Me, already having several tabs open in Firefox to research oligarchic thalassocracies in the Middle Ages Mediterranean, the phonology of Panamanian Spanish, tire manufacturing, mercenary organizations throughout history, Jungian analysis, whether there’s any historical precedent for militarist-theocratic diarchy as a system of government, bombardier beetles, and the sociocultural effects of rapid industrialization: -okay, setting aside the issue of reversing Astotheles’ ideological underpinnings while keeping his personality as similar as possible, what if I swap the bandit hideout with Metal Island so the former gets reworked as a kind of underground Las Vegas and the bandits are based out of the latter? That actually works pretty well in conjunction with both the Snakemouth Den-Rubber Prison swap and flipping the Termite Kingdom’s canon isolationism so it’s an imperialist surveillance state- hm, but if I’m gonna go with the idea of the termites seizing a cultural hegemony, I can’t half-ass it, I need to figure out all the ramifications...

Him: WHY DO YOU DO THESE THINGS TO YOURSELF JORDAN

Me, in the process of sketching out a termite anatomy-based political compass equivalent: I don’t know what you’re talking about, this is child’s play compared to the convolution of The Strings We Pull. Ooh, hang on, what if the termites set up a system of submarine-based public transport that takes the place of the ant tunnels in canon? I gotta map this out-