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Joining of Worlds, relevant localization changes, and (bonus!) things that are my own damn fault
By the time the NoA version of Fates had come out, I was some 80,000 words deep into Joining of Worlds (to the end of Chapter 18). I had made my decisions regarding character motivations, their overall plotlines, and the shape of the world based on my knowledge of the text, back when canon only existed as the Japanese version of the game which I had played upon release. As such, I decided at that point that it made no sense to go back and somehow revise the story to be in line with the official English language version of the game, because many important parts of the premise had been trampled in localization.
Most people are probably aware of the general ~censorship issue~, but I thought I'd put in one place all the individual changes that greatly affect Joining of Worlds.
The Concubine Wars
In the original version of the game, it was completely canon that there had been times when children of Garon's concubines killed each other. The clearest reference had been in the Leon/Elise supports, but there were a bunch of other references to it in the Nohrian royal siblings' dialogue. Some of those references, such as Marx's supports with Nyx, were ambiguous in the Japanese and in the localization unambiguously point to the battlefield and not the concubine in-fighting. Some of those references, such as in Camilla's A support with Zero, were basically intact if watered down ("Our mothers were the lowest of the low, trying to claw their way to a better status. Naturally, they used us as bait in all of their conflicts."), but read differently with the context of the Leon/Elise supports missing.
As such, many people in the English-speaking fandom innocently assumed that there were four Nohrian children from start to finish, whereas the Japanese side of fandom had been absolutely rife with art depicting massive crowds of slain heirs.
It's not canon who exactly killed who and how many siblings there used to be. It is a fandom assumption that Camilla has done it before, given the yan in her yandere that's easily witnessed in Birthright.
Zero/Niles
Look, guys. Zero and Niles are just completely different characters. There's no two ways about it.
Zero will make a little girl cry just for the pleasure of schadenfreude.
Niles is just trying to give her tough love.
Zero tells Harold that he's a bitter man full of suffering who enjoys making privileged people uncomfortable.
Niles just flirts with Arthur I guess.
Zero was apparently forced to engage in prostitution to get by as a child, and it's traumatized him.
Niles gives no indication it ever happened, both in his Corrin supports and every other reference to the event.
I stand by every last thing Zero does in Joining of Worlds as IC. I think the only thing about which jfen might disagree is whether the circumstances in JoW are enough to cause a rift between him and Leon.
But I would totally agree that Niles would never do any of it other than whisper things huskily into Takumi's ear.
Camilla
The tone of her character was somewhat inconsistently revised. Tone is always a difficult to thing to talk about when imperfect fan translations provide the only window into the original text for many people, but the change comes across clearest in places like the Camilla/Hinoka support (localized version here). Some English fandom friends have mentioned to me that they felt that Camilla was OOC when she went all yandere in Birthright--ironically, that's probably where the original characterization was best preserved.
The most important factual change is that of her epilogue, which was originally:
マークスの即位を見届けた後 After Marx took the throne,
暗夜王国の王族から籍を外す。 she removed herself from the Nohrian royal family registry*.
以降は各地に伝承を残すが、 Here and there, there remain legends of what happened afterward,
その足跡から察するに、どうやら but one might guess from the traces that somehow,
[Avatar]のことを陰ながら she appears to have chosen her path in life as secretly watching over [Avatar].
見守る人生を歩んだらしい。
* registry: In Japan, people are registered into an official family tree of sorts--sort of like how we give everyone a birth certificate. I can only imagine that in a Fates context it's supposed to mean that she's disinherited herself, like a more dramatic version of her adbication that we see in the Birthright epilogue where she passes the throne to Leon.
For the record, I was never really happy with who Camilla was in the Japanese version. Part of the "point" of Joining of Worlds was to question Camilla's Avatar-obsessed characterization and give her a deeper reason to leave her family behind and go to Kamui.
But then NoA also took issue with original Camilla and decided to fix it by outright changing her epilogue to have her start an orphanage or something like that, and, well, JoW can't really speak to that version of events because I'd made my decisions about Camilla's plotline starting from Chapter 1.
Leon/Leo
So, here's the thing...
Given how dramatically so many things have changed in the localization of Fates, it's hard to say that Leon was changed a lot.
However, because I had extrapolated so heavily from the parts that got changed, in a sense, the few changes to Leon's character were really important to Joining of Worlds.
For one, Leon's most vulnerable moments were reworked.
When you defeat him in Birthright 18, in the Japanese version, he's stunned to silence, then he apologizes quietly, and then, in a unique voice line played only in this spot, he says his line aloud--"・・・嘘だよ", "it was a lie"--sounding to be on the verge of tears.
In the same scene in the NoA version, he gives this giant exasperated sigh, then, with much great composure, offers his apologies.
In another passage that also changes Azura's character, Leon/Aqua S, Leon's fears of rejection come across as much more deep-rooted and sincere in the Japanese, while the English comes across as a charming battle of wits running toward its inevitable conclusion.
And sometimes, if he's your husband and you've called him into your room, he sounds... dare I use this word... uke? (No really, he does, listen!)
I think I have generally erred in making Leon too vulnerable in the earlier chapters of Joining of Worlds when I was still trying to get a handle on what I was doing with FE14 and hadn't quite decided what I was going to do with some of the story. But what looks like a little too much for j!Leon probably looks like histronics for e!Leo.
I was probably a lot more upset about this difference back when NoA!Fates first came out.
The second thing, and the really important thing to me, is that he originally had a very different relationship with Camilla.
You've probably heard about the developers' notes in the Making-Of book that Leon has a "more than familial" love for Camilla, considering all the drama it's caused, and fandom can argue all it wants about whether a note for the developers that isn't textual counts or not.
But even before that revelation in November 30, 2015, I had written fifteen entire chapters of Joining of Worlds. I had not, until the developer's notes come out, quite realized that their intent was for him to be the first male incestuous blond brown-eyed valkyrie. But I had observed that he had a deep-rooted obsession with shame that makes him lash out powerfully against his own gender-nonconforming son. He felt artificially charming and fake with most women, but seems genuine with Elise as a big brother and strangely clingy toward Camilla in his supports (which were way way toned down in localization), a vibe that I was certainly not the only one to sense.
Up until the siscon dev notes coming out at the end of November, I'd tossed around "is he gay and can't accept that in himself? does he objectify women causing him to be unable to have meaningful relationships with them? is he really attached to a sister who's obsessed with kamui instead?" The dev notes came out with "well, we were thinking, that maybe he has dark shameful feelings for Camilla," and I was like "oh. OH!"
But, for what it's worth, my thoughts on the Leon and Camilla dynamic have deepened with time as well. I don't think it's so straightforward as "Leon secretly wants to bone Camilla ur hurr hurr." I think it's one big piece that ties in with everything I'd been thinking about before--the way he objectifies women, the loveless circumstances of his childhood, the sexual circumstances of his very birth.
What do I think is really going on his head? I don't want to spoil it here, because as I see it, this is Leon's half of the story that JoW has to tell.
Other Stuff
Here are some smaller concrete details that matter, but not in some deep sense I need to explain for five paragraphs.
- Leon (Leo) and Takumi are into ancient philosophy rather than military history.
- Elise and Sakura are as young as they look.
- Aqua (Azura) is quite a bit more melancholy.
- Obviously, a lot of names were changed. In some cases I sided with the localization (Nohr and Hoshido convey the sense of each country much better than Anya and Byakuya for an English-speaking audience; Jakob struck me as a better name than Joker) but in most cases I just sided with myself. I made a mistake in deciding to render Takumi's bow as Fuujin-yumi when I first had to write its name. It's actually "fuujinkyuu" in Japanese (lol onyomi! I should've seen it coming) as confirmed in the drama CDs, so "Fuujin-yumi" is a little bastard child of a name that's not fully original nor localized, oops.
Also, Hoshido would constantly slander Nohrian Scum, but Nohr actually never talks shit about Hoshidans in the Japanese version. I had a rather lengthy discussion about this with Sukesou, a Japanese fan, and she thought Hoshido's virulence against Nohr was obviously due to their suffering at Nohr's hands, and was baffled that I would suggest that Nohr should also hold racist sentiments against the nation they're conquering.
The idea that the conquering nation should be racist against the nations it's subjugating for resources probably seems like second nature to a Western audience, so I'm not surprised that NoA took the liberty of having Nohrian characters return fire.
In JoW I took a middle ground where for the most part Nohrian racism against Hoshido takes the form of somewhat innocuous ignorance ("I thought Hoshidans were reserved about romantic matters anyway."), and Nohr isn't quite the historically dominant conquering country anyway.
"Wow, so it's like JoW is a glimpse of the original Fates!"
NO. NO NO NO.
I have seen people say this with the best of intentions but I don't agree with this at all.
Joining of Worlds is fanfiction. My first work of FE14 fanfiction, where at first I was merely playing with ideas to try to get a sense of the FE14 canon and how I would write within it and what I could do with it.
For the first few chapters I tried to stick to canon's tone--Screw ecology! Wave your hands and Nohr can somehow exist without sunlight! Life is fun! Cultures are fun! Wear kimono! Receive the love of your people! Yell catchphrases like "I'll crush you!" as you shoot an arrow through a guy's head!
But in chapter 7, I had to stare the topic of recovering from trauma right in the eyes. Here's a topic that, unlike shooting an arrow through a guy's head, was close enough to home for myself and my likely readerbase that any BS would smell awfully foul. By then, I'd made my decision. I'd rather stick with my gut than water my story down to canon's level.
After all, I wanted my story to talk about good people doing bad things in the face of a harsh reality. I wanted my story to talk about the lasting scars of wounds that canon wanted to put behind itself the moment the zombie-king fell. I wanted to talk about the indignity felt by all these little forgotten nations forced to put on a smiling face for Hoshido in-game.
And if canon would, every time, turn its eyes away from these unhappy matters in order to preserve its fun innocence--well, how could there be any way to tell this story while keeping a tone that sounds like canon?
Now, I didn't go fully realistic because I couldn't. Fates gives us a world where one nation receives no sunlight except for on top of Furry Mountain. Science says Nohr should be literally frozen over, and there is no way on earth that the people would have enough food to eat to form cities. I firmly stayed in the realm of fantasy. I waved my hands sometimes in favor of keeping a Fire Emblem vibe, like in the Fuuma chapter.
But wherever possible, I chose to preserve emotional realism as much as I was able. I wanted to tell a story about these characters' psyches. And so I was forced away from where the light shines, away from the wealth of canon catchphrases that one yells when shooting a guy in the head in a cool way, and into a deeply speculative realm of situations that canon has never directly touched, where I could only move forward based on my own understanding of each character as a whole--an understanding that couldn't help but be subject to my own biases and faults as a person, especially when my own life demanded my full attention as I struggled to construct chapters 16-18.
(In hindsight, I wish I had waited to write 16-18. I feel like it should've been 25% shorter and 20% less dramatic.)
If I had the time and energy to do it over, I would probably completely redo Chapter 1-6. I would start with the Chevalier arc, restrain Leon on the letters, and have them talk more philosophy. In particular, there are some lines from Machiavelli and the Tao Te Ching I wish I'd been able to incorporate. (Aside from not knowing that Leon's self-sacrificing style of rule would be a big deal at the time, it wasn't until several chapters later that I'd even determined their favorite philosophers. Remember, I started this thing back when the game first came out and few people had straightened out their deep thoughts about the text yet.) I would introduce Hoshidan political problems earlier. I'd trim the hints of subplots that ended up not going anywhere. I'd fix the goofs I made where I forgot that they can talk about the other world now. I would do more with Elise and do more to expose the fault lines between Marx and Leon prior to Chapter 14. I would try to excise the need for the bickering in chapter 17 that kind of stagnates there.
But, ultimately, I might not've written Joining of Worlds at all.
My big interests in life and art aren't in culture clash and politics. If anything, I have a certain level of disdain for culture in general, and I tend to see politics in a dry, statistical fashion that makes for a dull story. And the kind of people I understand best are not at all charismatic or great leaders, which a royal cast of this sort demands. I tripped and fell into this story while playing with Fates's potential. It is what it is, and I don't expect I'll ever bother writing anything quite like it again.
If you felt tricked by the first few chapters, I apologize. If you've enjoyed this story, I'm glad.
Most people are probably aware of the general ~censorship issue~, but I thought I'd put in one place all the individual changes that greatly affect Joining of Worlds.
The Concubine Wars
In the original version of the game, it was completely canon that there had been times when children of Garon's concubines killed each other. The clearest reference had been in the Leon/Elise supports, but there were a bunch of other references to it in the Nohrian royal siblings' dialogue. Some of those references, such as Marx's supports with Nyx, were ambiguous in the Japanese and in the localization unambiguously point to the battlefield and not the concubine in-fighting. Some of those references, such as in Camilla's A support with Zero, were basically intact if watered down ("Our mothers were the lowest of the low, trying to claw their way to a better status. Naturally, they used us as bait in all of their conflicts."), but read differently with the context of the Leon/Elise supports missing.
As such, many people in the English-speaking fandom innocently assumed that there were four Nohrian children from start to finish, whereas the Japanese side of fandom had been absolutely rife with art depicting massive crowds of slain heirs.
It's not canon who exactly killed who and how many siblings there used to be. It is a fandom assumption that Camilla has done it before, given the yan in her yandere that's easily witnessed in Birthright.
Zero/Niles
Look, guys. Zero and Niles are just completely different characters. There's no two ways about it.
Zero will make a little girl cry just for the pleasure of schadenfreude.
Niles is just trying to give her tough love.
Zero tells Harold that he's a bitter man full of suffering who enjoys making privileged people uncomfortable.
Niles just flirts with Arthur I guess.
Zero was apparently forced to engage in prostitution to get by as a child, and it's traumatized him.
Niles gives no indication it ever happened, both in his Corrin supports and every other reference to the event.
I stand by every last thing Zero does in Joining of Worlds as IC. I think the only thing about which jfen might disagree is whether the circumstances in JoW are enough to cause a rift between him and Leon.
But I would totally agree that Niles would never do any of it other than whisper things huskily into Takumi's ear.
Camilla
The tone of her character was somewhat inconsistently revised. Tone is always a difficult to thing to talk about when imperfect fan translations provide the only window into the original text for many people, but the change comes across clearest in places like the Camilla/Hinoka support (localized version here). Some English fandom friends have mentioned to me that they felt that Camilla was OOC when she went all yandere in Birthright--ironically, that's probably where the original characterization was best preserved.
The most important factual change is that of her epilogue, which was originally:
マークスの即位を見届けた後 After Marx took the throne,
暗夜王国の王族から籍を外す。 she removed herself from the Nohrian royal family registry*.
以降は各地に伝承を残すが、 Here and there, there remain legends of what happened afterward,
その足跡から察するに、どうやら but one might guess from the traces that somehow,
[Avatar]のことを陰ながら she appears to have chosen her path in life as secretly watching over [Avatar].
見守る人生を歩んだらしい。
* registry: In Japan, people are registered into an official family tree of sorts--sort of like how we give everyone a birth certificate. I can only imagine that in a Fates context it's supposed to mean that she's disinherited herself, like a more dramatic version of her adbication that we see in the Birthright epilogue where she passes the throne to Leon.
For the record, I was never really happy with who Camilla was in the Japanese version. Part of the "point" of Joining of Worlds was to question Camilla's Avatar-obsessed characterization and give her a deeper reason to leave her family behind and go to Kamui.
But then NoA also took issue with original Camilla and decided to fix it by outright changing her epilogue to have her start an orphanage or something like that, and, well, JoW can't really speak to that version of events because I'd made my decisions about Camilla's plotline starting from Chapter 1.
Leon/Leo
So, here's the thing...
Given how dramatically so many things have changed in the localization of Fates, it's hard to say that Leon was changed a lot.
However, because I had extrapolated so heavily from the parts that got changed, in a sense, the few changes to Leon's character were really important to Joining of Worlds.
For one, Leon's most vulnerable moments were reworked.
When you defeat him in Birthright 18, in the Japanese version, he's stunned to silence, then he apologizes quietly, and then, in a unique voice line played only in this spot, he says his line aloud--"・・・嘘だよ", "it was a lie"--sounding to be on the verge of tears.
In the same scene in the NoA version, he gives this giant exasperated sigh, then, with much great composure, offers his apologies.
In another passage that also changes Azura's character, Leon/Aqua S, Leon's fears of rejection come across as much more deep-rooted and sincere in the Japanese, while the English comes across as a charming battle of wits running toward its inevitable conclusion.
And sometimes, if he's your husband and you've called him into your room, he sounds... dare I use this word... uke? (No really, he does, listen!)
I think I have generally erred in making Leon too vulnerable in the earlier chapters of Joining of Worlds when I was still trying to get a handle on what I was doing with FE14 and hadn't quite decided what I was going to do with some of the story. But what looks like a little too much for j!Leon probably looks like histronics for e!Leo.
I was probably a lot more upset about this difference back when NoA!Fates first came out.
The second thing, and the really important thing to me, is that he originally had a very different relationship with Camilla.
You've probably heard about the developers' notes in the Making-Of book that Leon has a "more than familial" love for Camilla, considering all the drama it's caused, and fandom can argue all it wants about whether a note for the developers that isn't textual counts or not.
But even before that revelation in November 30, 2015, I had written fifteen entire chapters of Joining of Worlds. I had not, until the developer's notes come out, quite realized that their intent was for him to be the first male incestuous blond brown-eyed valkyrie. But I had observed that he had a deep-rooted obsession with shame that makes him lash out powerfully against his own gender-nonconforming son. He felt artificially charming and fake with most women, but seems genuine with Elise as a big brother and strangely clingy toward Camilla in his supports (which were way way toned down in localization), a vibe that I was certainly not the only one to sense.
Up until the siscon dev notes coming out at the end of November, I'd tossed around "is he gay and can't accept that in himself? does he objectify women causing him to be unable to have meaningful relationships with them? is he really attached to a sister who's obsessed with kamui instead?" The dev notes came out with "well, we were thinking, that maybe he has dark shameful feelings for Camilla," and I was like "oh. OH!"
But, for what it's worth, my thoughts on the Leon and Camilla dynamic have deepened with time as well. I don't think it's so straightforward as "Leon secretly wants to bone Camilla ur hurr hurr." I think it's one big piece that ties in with everything I'd been thinking about before--the way he objectifies women, the loveless circumstances of his childhood, the sexual circumstances of his very birth.
What do I think is really going on his head? I don't want to spoil it here, because as I see it, this is Leon's half of the story that JoW has to tell.
Other Stuff
Here are some smaller concrete details that matter, but not in some deep sense I need to explain for five paragraphs.
- Leon (Leo) and Takumi are into ancient philosophy rather than military history.
- Elise and Sakura are as young as they look.
- Aqua (Azura) is quite a bit more melancholy.
- Obviously, a lot of names were changed. In some cases I sided with the localization (Nohr and Hoshido convey the sense of each country much better than Anya and Byakuya for an English-speaking audience; Jakob struck me as a better name than Joker) but in most cases I just sided with myself. I made a mistake in deciding to render Takumi's bow as Fuujin-yumi when I first had to write its name. It's actually "fuujinkyuu" in Japanese (lol onyomi! I should've seen it coming) as confirmed in the drama CDs, so "Fuujin-yumi" is a little bastard child of a name that's not fully original nor localized, oops.
Also, Hoshido would constantly slander Nohrian Scum, but Nohr actually never talks shit about Hoshidans in the Japanese version. I had a rather lengthy discussion about this with Sukesou, a Japanese fan, and she thought Hoshido's virulence against Nohr was obviously due to their suffering at Nohr's hands, and was baffled that I would suggest that Nohr should also hold racist sentiments against the nation they're conquering.
The idea that the conquering nation should be racist against the nations it's subjugating for resources probably seems like second nature to a Western audience, so I'm not surprised that NoA took the liberty of having Nohrian characters return fire.
In JoW I took a middle ground where for the most part Nohrian racism against Hoshido takes the form of somewhat innocuous ignorance ("I thought Hoshidans were reserved about romantic matters anyway."), and Nohr isn't quite the historically dominant conquering country anyway.
"Wow, so it's like JoW is a glimpse of the original Fates!"
NO. NO NO NO.
I have seen people say this with the best of intentions but I don't agree with this at all.
Joining of Worlds is fanfiction. My first work of FE14 fanfiction, where at first I was merely playing with ideas to try to get a sense of the FE14 canon and how I would write within it and what I could do with it.
For the first few chapters I tried to stick to canon's tone--Screw ecology! Wave your hands and Nohr can somehow exist without sunlight! Life is fun! Cultures are fun! Wear kimono! Receive the love of your people! Yell catchphrases like "I'll crush you!" as you shoot an arrow through a guy's head!
But in chapter 7, I had to stare the topic of recovering from trauma right in the eyes. Here's a topic that, unlike shooting an arrow through a guy's head, was close enough to home for myself and my likely readerbase that any BS would smell awfully foul. By then, I'd made my decision. I'd rather stick with my gut than water my story down to canon's level.
After all, I wanted my story to talk about good people doing bad things in the face of a harsh reality. I wanted my story to talk about the lasting scars of wounds that canon wanted to put behind itself the moment the zombie-king fell. I wanted to talk about the indignity felt by all these little forgotten nations forced to put on a smiling face for Hoshido in-game.
And if canon would, every time, turn its eyes away from these unhappy matters in order to preserve its fun innocence--well, how could there be any way to tell this story while keeping a tone that sounds like canon?
Now, I didn't go fully realistic because I couldn't. Fates gives us a world where one nation receives no sunlight except for on top of Furry Mountain. Science says Nohr should be literally frozen over, and there is no way on earth that the people would have enough food to eat to form cities. I firmly stayed in the realm of fantasy. I waved my hands sometimes in favor of keeping a Fire Emblem vibe, like in the Fuuma chapter.
But wherever possible, I chose to preserve emotional realism as much as I was able. I wanted to tell a story about these characters' psyches. And so I was forced away from where the light shines, away from the wealth of canon catchphrases that one yells when shooting a guy in the head in a cool way, and into a deeply speculative realm of situations that canon has never directly touched, where I could only move forward based on my own understanding of each character as a whole--an understanding that couldn't help but be subject to my own biases and faults as a person, especially when my own life demanded my full attention as I struggled to construct chapters 16-18.
(In hindsight, I wish I had waited to write 16-18. I feel like it should've been 25% shorter and 20% less dramatic.)
If I had the time and energy to do it over, I would probably completely redo Chapter 1-6. I would start with the Chevalier arc, restrain Leon on the letters, and have them talk more philosophy. In particular, there are some lines from Machiavelli and the Tao Te Ching I wish I'd been able to incorporate. (Aside from not knowing that Leon's self-sacrificing style of rule would be a big deal at the time, it wasn't until several chapters later that I'd even determined their favorite philosophers. Remember, I started this thing back when the game first came out and few people had straightened out their deep thoughts about the text yet.) I would introduce Hoshidan political problems earlier. I'd trim the hints of subplots that ended up not going anywhere. I'd fix the goofs I made where I forgot that they can talk about the other world now. I would do more with Elise and do more to expose the fault lines between Marx and Leon prior to Chapter 14. I would try to excise the need for the bickering in chapter 17 that kind of stagnates there.
But, ultimately, I might not've written Joining of Worlds at all.
My big interests in life and art aren't in culture clash and politics. If anything, I have a certain level of disdain for culture in general, and I tend to see politics in a dry, statistical fashion that makes for a dull story. And the kind of people I understand best are not at all charismatic or great leaders, which a royal cast of this sort demands. I tripped and fell into this story while playing with Fates's potential. It is what it is, and I don't expect I'll ever bother writing anything quite like it again.
If you felt tricked by the first few chapters, I apologize. If you've enjoyed this story, I'm glad.