MozghuzCon (new fic)

[airlock384]

Hoo, this is it. Bernadetta can feel the heat building in her palms. And the empty cold in her guts. Her heart drums out of control. But she’s managed to come along so far already. If she just keeps up the momentum a little longer… type this, type that… close the eyes and hit Send. 

… 

That wasn’t Send. Okay, the eyes stay open, whatever. Get this over with.

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Read it on Ao3!

for my nagamas gift of this year, I just committed nearly 11k words of Bernadetta/Marianne modern AU. it is not only gay, but also, trans -- extremely trans. trans enough that it's perhaps a little too deep of a cut into the trans experience for a fic that I was writing as a gift for a stranger, whoops

anyway, it's the read for you if you enjoy formatting wackiness to cover various forms of internet-based communication, or faux IM conversations featuring a narrator who won't stop analyzing/calling out everyone's messages and the social anxiety brimming out of them. or you can just read it for trans lesbian nerds on a cosplay adventure, I guess

anyway, for my next magic trick, I'm going to steal the thing that queenlua does and put out a whole lot of backstage writing things that nobody asked for. oh, be sure to read the fic first before you continue through this post, yes? dinner, then dessert? and there's naturally going to be spoilers, in whatever sense there might be a whole lot to spoil in this fic anyway.

so the first, foremost, and perhaps most obvious thing that there is to be said about this fic is -- good fucking lord it's long. like, not by a regular fanfic readership's standards it isn't, but at 10k words (almost 11k) it dwarfs all of the other one-shots I have up on Ao3 (only a couple even breached 2k). it has enough wordcount to almost make it up there with my multichapter fic (12k, almost 13k). ... but that probably won't be the case as soon as I get around to writing and posting chapter 4, huh--

so, does that have something to do with how late I ended up turning this thing in? well, truth be told... I don't think so. I've full-on requested time extensions in the past to come out with less nagamas fic in hand than this. not to mention, I almost finished within the deadline this time -- and then things kept getting in the way of me putting on the final strokes.

the likelier explanation for this sudden jump in productivity is, well, the same thing that has been getting longer meta text posts out of me than ever lately -- I am oan the vyvanse now, babey.

although that's not to say I did an entirely good job scoping this thing, because boy, I did not. it's a lot of fun to come up with goofy AU parameters, and then you have to write the story you were going to write in there. and it's probably not going to use half the stuff you spontaneously came up with and fussed with writing down. in short, it's worldbuilding all over again. even having written the story, I think I've ultimately given it a veneer of at least like 50% character study; there are so many little moments that ultimately moreso accomplish painting a portrait this AU world and the characters who are spinning around in it, than they accomplish, well... moving the damn plot along.

and speaking of things that didn't necessarily go the way I'd originally planned them -- how was that goofy narration? I'd say that it was, first of all, a dead giveaway of the fact that I spent much of last November watching Kaguya-sama: Love Is War-- the whole premise and tone of this fic kind of is just that, too. I mean, it's two people in love, wading through all of their own most ridiculous hangups on the way to each other, and the narrator eagerly overanalyzes every dumb ass thing they do. but eh, I'm not super making a secret of that, either; I know what inspired me to write this fic the way I did, and that's that. I did, however, get to thinking that this particular over-the-top narrative voice needed a little bit of a different stroke from the Kaguya-sama narrator. after all, that guy talks like he's covering a thrilling tale of war and subterfuge, which is something of an accurate representation of how the idiots involved see the whole situation -- but for my idiots, it's not war and subterfuge. it is, however, a hotbed of insecurities -- and accordingly, I set out to write a narrative voice here that somewhat emulates the irritating voice of anxiety itself. a voice that says "she's stupid" when someone thinks "I'm stupid", a voice that says "there's no way in hell she can do this" when someone thinks "there's no way in hell I can do this", and so on and so forth.

... what I ended up with is, I think, some bizarre mashup of that proposition; still the Kaguya-sama narrator; myself; and, somehow, Brás Cubas. oh well! if I had a better idea for how that narrator should sound, that would've been the idea that I put in the final draft.

anyway, that's more or less the top of it; now for some smaller, more specific little notes of trivia

• y'know, for all I bothered to come up with in this setting, the one thing I didn't fuss over was the specific timeline of the characters' lives. this is why you'll almost always see "some years" and stuff like that, instead of a concrete description. even with the presence of a Golden Deer high school class planning on a class reunion, it's no given that these people's high school years align with canon's military academy age, and nor did I ever specify that they'd be meeting again after five years here. in fact, the only concrete number that survived the whole way down is... Bernadetta's age, stated right at the beginning.
• I genuinely do not know what would be a good word that means crafty/good with one's hands, and that one would put in a resumé. thankfully, I am exactly not that, so I don't need to go find out. (that said, "well-versed in hand-type activities" is such a special kind of terrible that it took me multiple passes to come up with it-)
• it's probably not too hard to tell what the thought process was behind Marianne's chat username, grey_mane_13. it looks exactly like the kind of username that you come up with as an edgy teenager and end up having to keep. and, of course, it plays into Marianne's adoration of horses as well. now, Bernadetta, on the other hand, seems to be using a more recent nickname; it is, at least, openly feminine in a way that she might not have considered being in the past. oh, and of course, it's based on a carnivorous plant.
• all of Marianne's typos were put in intentionally. I hope. any other typos that might be left in the fic are, presumably, just on me though
• numerous glipses of all the fuzz ultimately made it to the fic, but boy, the Pyral Guardian series probably exemplifies precisely how insane I went with with the background world stuff here. I charted out the full timeline of the series, which is pretty much precisely an upside-down version of the Fire Emblem series' history. that's probably too nerdy to put even in this nerdy ass post, but some funny highlights include: that Pyral Guardian received less and less representation in the Mega Blast Friends (Super Smash Bros.) series over time, with the latest title passing up the series completely; that the ever influential, er, Kazou Shouga, first comes into the scene here after attempting to sue CleverMechanisms, after which point they hire him; and that the one missing title in the storyline is, naturally, this setting's correspondent of Fire Emblem: Three Houses -- although Pyral Guardian Activate! actually still did have Byleth in it, just as a reference to a real-life historical figure (their real-life, of course).
• speaking of which, for those Reddit-style posts about the upcoming Pyral Guardian title, I handpicked some Fódlan characters who seemed like plausible gaming redditors to me, as well as well providing, let's say, a variety of temperaments. RoseMaster is Lorenz; bl4d3_w0lf1703 is Felix (and yes, that's his birth year here); from_Dagda is Shamir (and don't give me that glare, I've run into plenty of usernames that are just "from_[place that not many people are from]"--); and milfapreciater420... is Sylvain.
• you might also note that the spoiler that Marianne drops on Bernadetta is reverse of something from the Archanea Saga. there, a previously heroic character becomes a primary antagonist -- here, a primary antagonist becomes a heroic character! (... and that IS a spoiler, but hey, in our world, that game is literally decades old.)
• and while we're at it, let's have a look at how all the blorbo names used in this story were reverse-engineered. Aleph is a variant on Ares, done similarly to Marth as a variant to Mars; Blumela is a name derived from a word for "flower", just like Florina; Esvana is a name that I made up on the spot -- and did you know, that it was a different writer who made up the name Vanessa on the spot?; Pomma is similar to "puma", which is in turn a designation that often overlaps with "cougar" -- and Kugar is the original japanese name of one Cormag; Brynhild is the name one of the valkyries from norse mythology, as is Sigrun; Antonella is a name derived from Antoninus, as is Nino; and lastly, I sort of had to handcraft that scene from Bernadetta gaming instead of directly referencing something from Fire Emblem, but I still did pick out the characters' names based on another pair of characters, of which one was a tragic unrequited lover who committed betrayal, and of which the other was the one who has the most choice words to lob onto that individual. so anyway, Luval is plucked out of Luguvalium, the ancient Roman name of a city in England that the English know as Carlisle, and from which the name Carlyle derives; whereas Issa is one of several Arabic variants of the Hebrew name Yehoshu'a, of which one western variant is Joshua.
• incidentally, something funny about that scene. I wrote much of this fic with a pretty clear idea on where things would go wrong, and what they'd look like once they got better -- but it was staggeringly late into the process that I realized that I hadn't thought of just how I'd be crossing the streams between these two ends; how I'd be spurring on the reconciliation between Bernadetta and Marianne. and then, the idea of what I had to write there came to me spontaneously... well, not while I was playing a videogame like Bernadetta, but while sitting in a swimming pool on New Year's Eve, having done a spot of reflection on years past. I suppose that's also how the turnaround there came to be one of the most important themes in the story, despite the scene that it came with having been such a late addition
• Marianne's, ehum, de jure hometown, Hatimopolis, was named based on Hatim, an arabic name -- the same origin of all the Almyran names. you're welcome to come up with your own story on that one.
• something a bit funny to note is that, having retained both the characters' canon full names and many canon location names (aside from the unexplained -- and which I won't explain -- Fódlan Federation, in which there's a city called New Enbarr), I have a whole lot of people running around with their home state in their surname, while otherwise being ordinary people, rather than, say, the lord of that land. but eh! there are plenty of regular people out here with surnames like York or Pernambuco, too. it just might be weird for a lot of such people to have ended up in the same high school class-
• y'know, it's not unusual for me to hit up my writer friends like "ey, help me figure out what to do with this passage" -- but it was my brother that I turned to when I wanted to make sure I had the funniest variation that I could think of on that reference to the Here's How Bernie Can Still Win meme-
• typing "Abra scrolldabra" into a doc is a unique (and majestic) feeling, by the way.
• an embarassing bit of the absolute overdetailing of Pyral Guardian is that I bothered coming up with the games' alternatives to pegasi and wyverns, only letting it occour to me too little too late into the writing that dragons are also just real in Fódlan and still heavily referenced in the series' titles. oops. but hey, if they pass for mythical creatures in this era, maybe Edelgard managed to-- hmmm. no.
• I credit queenlua  with helping me to help Bernadetta slander sparrowkind as thoroughly as possible. even though that is exactly the opposite of what she normally does with her birding knowledge in fanfic--
• it was a bit awkward to insert a reference to real-life, our-world history, in the middle of all the AU history that comes with this fic -- but in case you were wondering, yes, "the ancient legislator who once lamented that there was not a greater punishment to prescribe than the death penalty" is a real historical figure. Drakon of Athens, from whom we get the term "draconian laws", because yeah, you can imagine. although, if he really couldn't come up with a punishment worse than the death penalty, I'll accuse him of not trying hard enough to -- the Code of Hammurabi precedes him by about 1000 years and boy, that document contains some ideas for punishments worse than death.
• the e-mails are not all clearly labeled, but they are, in order, from: Hilda; Claude; Lorenz; Raphael; Leonie; Marianne. I suspect it's fairly easy to tell anyway, aside from maaaaybe Leonie. I think I was going to have her e-mail be one of the signed ones as well, and then, well, I forgor
• the words that Claude said to Marianne in order to hatch her egg are, yes, lifted almost verbatim from the Claude-Marianne A support conversation in Three Houses. I omitted only a cohesive element that isn't needed for quoting those lines out of context, and a bit where Claude directly says Marianne's name -- which she wouldn't have come up with yet here. incidentally, it is an exercise left to reader here if Claude and Hilda in this story are also trans, or just very good allies-
• now, when Claude goes about quoting, well, himself, in his e-mail, that quote is not at all verbatim -- but I feel that, when it comes to historical quotes, the version that we end up repeating around is very unlikely to be a clean match for what the historical figure said. we end up adding levels of formality and gravitas that probably weren't there originally.
• the bit with the self-drag -- you know, where the narrator attempts to hypnotize you? -- was added as part of the final draft. naturally.
• when Bernadetta is "Pondering the leviathan ahead of her" -- yes, I do mean this leviathan specifically-
• and lastly -- you know, I've never been to a con myself, nor have I ever cosplayed. so here's hoping I was able to dance around those issues adeptly throughout writing this. but hey, if you were wondering why it is that the fic ends just as Bernadetta and Marianne are actually about to go that con they've been talking about this whole time...
• ETA: BUT WAIT, THERE'S ONE I FORGOT TO PUT UP ON HERE so while we're at "background detail that didn't make it into the fic ultimately", here's one more. the fic ended up not getting into the matter of how Marianne's adoptive father received her transness, but I did have a whole idea of it. the way it'd go is, she comes out to him, and then he's like "hmmmm well I am ignorant of this subject; I will have to see what the research says". anyway, the research then points him in the general direction that letting trans things roll is ultimately better for career prospects and so on (cfr: it's harder to build a career when terminally depressed and/or dead), so, all of a sudden, he's all-in on her corner. Marianne does see that this is better than not being supported by your parents at all, but can't help feeling that, while materially extant, this form of support is... callous, calculistic. (and well, the way I picture Adoptive Dad Edmund in a modern AU world would be something like... the physical embodiment of this one time I was in a bookstore, had a glance at the Economy section, and all the books were some shit like "you wanna get rich huh???? you wanna become a millionaire tomorrow??? you wanna make money without working???? take my business advice you piece of shit")

and phew, that's... but so much nerdery. it's neverending. have yourself a bite, I guess

Comments

[airlock384]

I remember pondering what goofy new name I should go with for Super Smash Bros and while staring firmly at the original name, at some point a thing hit me like "wait... smash brothers... kinda sounds like bash brothers... was that the idea all along?". anyway, no clue still if it /was/ the idea, but I figured that regardless, picking something like that would help to compose something with the same cadence. anyway, at first I tried to make something work with "fellow travelers", but I couldn't think of an adequately punchy violence-related word to substitute in there, so instead, I tried it with "best friends", and bam, blast friends.

that IS a fantastic mental image. oops, looks like someone forgot to bury their gender deep enough in the closet before they passed by The Eggshell Inspection Crew

he WOULD BE that's why I also had him throw out a casual militant atheist-ish line like "not-the-Goddess"-

hell yeah, teaching people enough history to understand my obscure quips one tyrannical figure at a time-

maybe one of these days when eventually, hopefully, maybe, just maybe, we actually get through the whole pandemic thing- also someone would probably have to drag me, it doesn't sound like a great time to attend alone and while having social anxiety. but hey, if anyone around here is offering that service-