Entry tags:
Notes: A Tale or Two
A Tale or Two (Fire Emblem 9/10)
Genre: Experimental/Satire
Word Count: 3000
PG-13 for coarse language and non-explicit gore
Summary: Ike and the shopkeeper: the most famous lovers of Tellius. A portrait through space and time about history, myth, and love.
For![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fe_contest's 18th challenge, Love. With thanks to blankspectrum for betaing and art expertise.
Due to formatting restrictions on every other site, this one's only available at Archive of Our Own. (The fact that I'm even saying something like that is a good heads up to the level of pretentiousness going on here.)
This story is about a couple of things. It's about history: perspective, politics, and distortion. It's about people transcending -- or eroding -- to myth.
It is also about the weird way everyone seems to care a shitton about who Ike's banging, not even gonna lie. You could call this the pretentious cousin of that other thing I wrote.
I knew from the outset that the idea of telling a story through fragments of a variety of different types of texts would probably be incredibly esoteric and alienating, so it was my hope that it would be redeemed through its silliness. Or, at least, I put in things I found funny.
Of course, it's probably ungraceful to explain all my jokes, so I won't. But here are a few things with regard to names:
- References I wanted to make but didn't fit in-universe were made with names with "R" and "L" swapped. For example, "Nola" is "Nora," from a certain Ibsen play.
- Tremblance comes from "tremble" + "lance".
- Early on I had planned to incorporate a "Tellius as far-past Jugdral" crack theory into this, but I decided that it was too much to think about all at one time, so all of those (r/l swapped) references are now merely decoration. As for "Roki", you should see the bottom of this page. I thought "Ropt" or "Roptous" would probably still be too overt and confuse readers. "Pamela" is a Jugdralian name, technically, but I figured no one cared about her. Also I suck at coming up with names.
- "Dummi" is in analogy to "Moroni".
- The footnote about names in Baskus's writeup is a joke on exactly what you think it is. The characters provided there are the original katakana. For what it's worth, many real fields that study ancient people and their languages do get into arguments about how certain names in iconography were supposed to be read.
Since the story's focus was on the matter of Ike's love life, you might be wondering about all these throwaway references to external matters in far-future Tellius. With the exception of the silliest parts (for example, that there existed a Tellian Shakespeare) and the Fifth Epoch stuff, this honestly does reflect my headcanon.
Of course, I didn't go and meta out political events for the next few thousand years just for this piece. This story built on the mental foundation of at least three discarded former projects (two of which were over 7k words when I ditched them). I've always wanted to write a far-future Tellius fic about history and change, and I'm glad I finally figured one out in its entirety. Obviously the answer was to add more Aimee.
EDIT: More detail on that here.
I decided for far-future Tellius to date years in "Epochs" because that has been the favored method of dating in many civilizations throughout time. The establishment of Begnion must look like a paltry thing compared to the events in Radiant Dawn, and whether to emphasize the relative insignificant of Begnion, or to put a name to the change in atmosphere between eras, I can easily imagine later generations breaking history into periods.
Thus the First Epoch extends from the beginning of the Zunanma to the establishment of Begnion; the Second Epoch until the end of RD; the Third Epoch until the return of Ashunera (Which I took to be a little less than 1200 years from the end of RD); and the Fourth Epoch, a dark age, until some sort of enlightenment, which brings us to the Fifth.
There is one last thing I want to note. Some of you may wonder about the use of (faux-)Shakespearean language in a world like Tellius, and the apparent "reversion" from modern language to archaic language to modern language. If it comforts you, please consider this fanfic only a translation of different stages of a language no one on Earth understands, and as translator I worked to preserve the tone of each text as would best preserve its relationship to the reader. :)
I mean, it's not like there's any good reason for Tellian common to really be English or Japanese.
Genre: Experimental/Satire
Word Count: 3000
PG-13 for coarse language and non-explicit gore
Summary: Ike and the shopkeeper: the most famous lovers of Tellius. A portrait through space and time about history, myth, and love.
For
fe_contest's 18th challenge, Love. With thanks to blankspectrum for betaing and art expertise.Due to formatting restrictions on every other site, this one's only available at Archive of Our Own. (The fact that I'm even saying something like that is a good heads up to the level of pretentiousness going on here.)
This story is about a couple of things. It's about history: perspective, politics, and distortion. It's about people transcending -- or eroding -- to myth.
It is also about the weird way everyone seems to care a shitton about who Ike's banging, not even gonna lie. You could call this the pretentious cousin of that other thing I wrote.
I knew from the outset that the idea of telling a story through fragments of a variety of different types of texts would probably be incredibly esoteric and alienating, so it was my hope that it would be redeemed through its silliness. Or, at least, I put in things I found funny.
Of course, it's probably ungraceful to explain all my jokes, so I won't. But here are a few things with regard to names:
- References I wanted to make but didn't fit in-universe were made with names with "R" and "L" swapped. For example, "Nola" is "Nora," from a certain Ibsen play.
- Tremblance comes from "tremble" + "lance".
- Early on I had planned to incorporate a "Tellius as far-past Jugdral" crack theory into this, but I decided that it was too much to think about all at one time, so all of those (r/l swapped) references are now merely decoration. As for "Roki", you should see the bottom of this page. I thought "Ropt" or "Roptous" would probably still be too overt and confuse readers. "Pamela" is a Jugdralian name, technically, but I figured no one cared about her. Also I suck at coming up with names.
- "Dummi" is in analogy to "Moroni".
- The footnote about names in Baskus's writeup is a joke on exactly what you think it is. The characters provided there are the original katakana. For what it's worth, many real fields that study ancient people and their languages do get into arguments about how certain names in iconography were supposed to be read.
Since the story's focus was on the matter of Ike's love life, you might be wondering about all these throwaway references to external matters in far-future Tellius. With the exception of the silliest parts (for example, that there existed a Tellian Shakespeare) and the Fifth Epoch stuff, this honestly does reflect my headcanon.
Of course, I didn't go and meta out political events for the next few thousand years just for this piece. This story built on the mental foundation of at least three discarded former projects (two of which were over 7k words when I ditched them). I've always wanted to write a far-future Tellius fic about history and change, and I'm glad I finally figured one out in its entirety. Obviously the answer was to add more Aimee.
EDIT: More detail on that here.
I decided for far-future Tellius to date years in "Epochs" because that has been the favored method of dating in many civilizations throughout time. The establishment of Begnion must look like a paltry thing compared to the events in Radiant Dawn, and whether to emphasize the relative insignificant of Begnion, or to put a name to the change in atmosphere between eras, I can easily imagine later generations breaking history into periods.
Thus the First Epoch extends from the beginning of the Zunanma to the establishment of Begnion; the Second Epoch until the end of RD; the Third Epoch until the return of Ashunera (Which I took to be a little less than 1200 years from the end of RD); and the Fourth Epoch, a dark age, until some sort of enlightenment, which brings us to the Fifth.
There is one last thing I want to note. Some of you may wonder about the use of (faux-)Shakespearean language in a world like Tellius, and the apparent "reversion" from modern language to archaic language to modern language. If it comforts you, please consider this fanfic only a translation of different stages of a language no one on Earth understands, and as translator I worked to preserve the tone of each text as would best preserve its relationship to the reader. :)
I mean, it's not like there's any good reason for Tellian common to really be English or Japanese.