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Assorted Jumpy Notes for "Vessel"
A partial list of things I'm unhappy with, just to get it out of the way:
- I wish more things happened in Act I than just being set-up.
- I wish that scene in the middle of Act II weren't so infodumpy.
- I wish I knew the characters better.
All right. Now let's talk about this fic with my moping aside.
The issue of where child-character-parented Morgan comes from has been a topic on my mind for some time, and nonconsensual circumstances had always been my favored explanation. For the sake of argument, I also considered what Robin and Inigo propose in the epilogue -- maybe it isn't actually over. Maybe Morgan came back from a universe where Chrom put Grima to sleep. Essentially, maybe Morgan came from a future that "branches" late in the game, where Robin meets time-traveling children before any Grima apocalypse occurs.
But I always favored the noncon explanation, because I'm a terrible person who likes terrible things.
Not that I had any particular motivation to write about it at the time. It was just one of many various horrible but irrelevant bits of headcanon I had.
Then, just a few days ago, I read Mark of the Asphodel's The Right-Hand Path, a very different story that involved, as part of its moral conundrum, the issue of the Dark Lord continuing his reign through an heir.
And suddenly it clicks for me--that's how the noncon happened. Not because Grima's into pleasuring himself upon humans, or sexually humiliating them, because he really prefers it when they go splat or crunch or maybe boom; but because he needs them for practical reasons. Because people have pretty pathetic lifespans and dragon-minded Grima wants a proper reign, preferably one that goes on indefinitely.
I was immediately taken with this idea and contemplated it further while going about on pointless errands for work. I toyed with the notion of having two Morgans, with one from Robin's actual marriage. I love Bad Future Morgan. I love her spiny ruthlessness ("I was ready to kill my own friends") and her scheming defensiveness ("That's not your concern! Why did you tell me you're in league with the Ylisseans? Not a sound strategy, is it? What if I'm with the enemy? I could report your arrival and summon more Risen." "You won't get me to talk, no matter how you torture me. I know where my allegiance lies.") and her terribly sad hangup on a parent who is no longer.
There's a reason all of Act I abstains from Morgan's point of view, and it isn't just to avoid revealing her scheme involving Aversa.
Was Morgan already set on double-crossing Grima from the very beginning? Or was she buying herself time with eggs in every basket she could carry? That's a question I didn't want to commit to answering.
By the time she's an adult who's lived in the most apocalyptic of apocalyptic futures, she's certain that resistance is the right answer and she that's the frame with which she remembers the past. After many years of living with and under schemes, she thinks she's more brilliant, more certain, and more cruel than she really was. Ironically, it's hard to say if the elder Morgan is truly Robin's daughter, or Grima's--and which mother she's letting go of.
I gendered elder Morgan as I did, partly as an indication that this is no Morgan we're familiar with in our happy universe (Chrom-fathered Morgan is male as far as we know) and partly to make my life a lot easier later on when an inevitably male Morgan turned up.
Although girl Morgan's unusually messed up no matter what universe we're talking about. Have you read F!Morgan/Yarne? Talk about uncomfortable. A certain lack of respect for people as individuals seems to be inherent in her nature.
Randomly, Morgan doesn't actually come from the German word for morning, but some ambiguous Welsh origin that may have involved seas and circles.
I think this explanation fits well with canon in several ways -- Morgan's convenient lack of memories of his father being one of them. There's only one bit I'm unhappy about: the part where Morgan pulls out two copies of the strategy manual from her robes in her conversation with Cynthia in the Hot Springs DLC. If you take that seriously, your explanation has to somehow involve a future that a Robin traveled to.
For now, I think I'd rather push that aside in favor of narrative elegance.
Anyway, Vessel was conceived as a forgotten origin story, but I'd had a different impression about how it was supposed to feel. A tremendously flawed protagonist, grand schemes and betrayals, digging up important macguffins, matricidal confrontations -- I hadn't put it into words beyond "like an old play," but maybe my beta's word "Shakespearean" is better. Hence the second title, The Tragedy of Morgan. It's not about explaining Morgan. It's about telling his story, and her story. Or screaming it in the middle of a hurricane.
As for Inigo -- I chose him partly because of my OTP, and partly because he had the right temperament for this kind of role. Enough of a hero and a leader to form up a resistance after his escape, and wishy-washy enough to be a sad breeder slave for a few weeks without getting killed, killing himself, or decisively hating Morgan for the rest of eternity afterward.
I briefly considered Henry!Owain in the role, before I'd made up my mind about most of the elder Morgan bits of the plot. Something about Owain's mixed bloodline. But then I decided that the plot with Chrom!Morgan was more elegant.
I had thought from the beginning that I might want to frame the story with pieces from the continuity that little Morgan ultimately lands in, but it wasn't until I finished Act II that I was sure that it fit in. I knew Act II must end at or shortly after the part where Morgan screams "You are not my mother anymore," but when I got there I knew it wasn't the right ending to the story. Too much momentum.
So I capped it off with sickening happiness, because I enjoy making happiness look macabre about as much as I enjoy making sadness feel satisfying.
And then the true ending -- because nothing is quite as moving to me as having something, but not enough.
EDIT 7/3/13:
I realized just now that I'd left out one crucial thought that went into this, too. I had batted around, at one point, a fairly different idea in which naive young Robin!Lucina and Henry!Inigo (the ones native to the universe) in a Chrom-ending world birth the next vessel for Grima. That didn't get very far because I was convinced it would either end in infanticide or a long epic about Grima's return that I didn't want to write.
Funnily enough, the case of Inigo!Morgan let me handle a very similar dilemma with a satisfying solution that I hope neither horrifies, nor feels too cheap. And without writing a giant epic I didn't care much for.