How do, fellow online nerds!

This unchecked post is about where I am with stuff (From Shadows to Stars, mainly) and life in general. I am a waffler, so sorry if the run-on sentences bring back bad memories of that Romantics class from uni!

But don’t worry, as always I have gifs and I intend to use them!

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Soooo I don’t know if you all heard but there was the little thing that got released called Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes.

It released a whole load of extra details that technically replace some of the stuff I’d already written (thanks Intelligent Systems :P) and presented it is perhaps the most tedious way possible: as sparklies hidden around the camp site (which I hate as an exploration space) across three different pathways.

Anyone whose read this fic knows that I put a lot of world building into it. This is partly to make the world a little ‘fuller’ but also because it helps me visualise and try out a few ideas I have for original works I have in mind.

But on the other hand, it’s given me an excuse to go back and re-write From Shadows to Stars‘s earlier instalments, which you may have noticed me starting in earnest.

Prelude and BtS&S have been tweaked and I’m well underway with finishing Afterglow. I’ll likely stop the tweaking once I get to The Mirror of Life, as I don’t think Entanglement with have too much out-of-date stuff because aside from Claude having one of his implied multiple sibs named, nothing massively crazy was revealed about Almyra so, there’s that.

At least I don’t feel obligated to do a complete rewrite with the information provided as, for the most part, there was nothing released about the characters that would undermine anything in the story so far. For example, there’s nothing to say that some of my original characters, like Lynette Fae Rowe (i.e. the niece of Count Rowe who’s almost engaged to Ashe as of The Mirror of Life) or Lucretia von Arundel (i.e. the real Volkhard’s natural daughter/Edelgard’s maternal cousin) could exist somewhere in the background. Or probably be killed in a bloody or brutal way. In some ways, I’m grateful that for all the weird detail that the game tossed in about some of the Houses in Fódlan (especially the Kingdom), they revealed next to nothing about the things I’ve actually written about. Thales does away with his Volkhard mask almost immediately. As for House Rowe, it’s almost funny how little is revealed about Count Rowe, the ruling lord in the west, even his name. They confirm he has no natural children, which we knew anyway because he adopted Yuri.*

So yeah, I lucked out there.

*Though what’s not so ‘phew, lucky’ is the impication that Yuri was the victim of SA, which I assumed before but sad to see it was semi-confirmed, at least as gossip.

Also, in case I haven’t mentioned this before, I write out of order. Therefore this has resulted in a lot of material and needing to organise it. This also means I’m deciding how to release it. Usually my updates are a minimum of 6,000 words but often closer to 15,000 if you look at the Dimitri chapters for Before the Storm.

This means I am (finally) toying with the idea of shorter updates.

Ooookay… back to progress news. In the spirit of openness, here is what I’m juggling at the moment.

Fun Fact: When planning a series like From Shadows to Stars, each instalment gets not only its provisional title but a one-sentence summary. So I’m sharing a few of them below, yay!

Dimitri: Before the Storm

Oh, his angst brings all my insecurities to the yard…

Here’s what I noted down for the next Before the Storm update.

The Levin Strikes, follows on from Before the Storm in the series timeline. Edit: Add as 3rd (and likely 4th) chapter to BtS.
Summary in one sentence: “Dimitri learns some shocking news when he reads [REDACTED]’s letter.”

There’s the final update for Before the Storm. It’s called ‘The Levin Strikes’ and was originally going to be a separate update. However, on reflection, I felt it probably worked best as a final chapter for Dimitri’s first POV update. ‘The Levin Strikes’ provides a better conclusion over all.

Once ‘The Levin Strikes’ is out, the next Dimitri chapter will be (provisionally titled) Through the Haze. I was going to make this 2 or 3 chapters, but if I start doing shorter updates or bursts, it might end up being multiples. Problem is that I don’t really think Dimitris POV lends itself to the shorter burst approach, hence why I’m debating with myself how best to do this.

Through the Haze won’t be out until we’ve hit a massive narrative beat in the Byleth POV anyway, so I still have a little while before I have to stick my flag in the ground and commit to a plan.

Back to ‘The Levin Strikes’, I initially thought I might only manage to update this after I’d released something else from Byleth’s POV but right now (again, because I write out of order) I might actually get TLS out first, not least because…

Byleth: The Vessel of Knowledge, and some other stuff, oh my!

There’s a lot of Byleth stuff I’m trying to sort through.

Deciding how best to order the series is giving me a bit of a headache (not great when you have eyestrain lol!) At first, I thought I’d throw out whichever one got done first. Here is the low down:

The Vessel of Knowledge, follows on from Entanglement in the series timeline.
Summary in one sentence: “Byleth and Nader hash out their differences over tea.”

• It’s a pretty longfic and I think I might split it into two, with the Byleth & Nader stuff going into The Vessel of Knowledge and Ancient Truths as the aftermath. So yeah…
• Entanglement obviously left Claude’s relationship with Nader a little frayed, and Byleth is accutely aware of this fact. So, she decides to do what she usually does and invite him to tea. However, she’s going to get something of a… bombshell. I’ll leave it at that but some people might already suspect where this is going.

Also, there’s this…

• Though Stars May Fall, one of the reasons for this is that it’s pretty different because, while I’ve listed it under Byleth’s section, it moves between POVs.
  • My issue with this fic is that a part of me wants to write and release it almost as its own thing. By this I mean, it is technically the prequel to From Shadows to Stars, but I want to write it as a shorter, multiparter that doesn’t ‘linger’ too much.
  • From Shadows to Stars is very character-study-y, whereas I want to bear down Though Stars May Fall as a plot-focused “This-Is-How-It-Happened” thing. It probably won’t have heavy adult-content (i.e. no hanky-panky except implied). There is some of that stuff that I have written set in this period in the timeline, but I’m thinking of taking it out and working it into Ancient Truths instead, which will be very retroactive on Byleth’s part anyway.
  • While I consider PttD as the ‘hard start’ to the series (hence why it’s got ‘prelude’ in the title) one of the reasons I made this a series on AO3 as opposed to a multichapter is because I wanted the freedom to write out of order. i.e. it’s harder to go back and rewrite a multichapter as opposed to a series with a set scenario (Azure Moon Dimitri + Claudeth).

Ah! Also, this one would be split POV (i.e. not just in Byleth’s POV but other characters, too. Well, Claude. Since Dimitri wasn’t there in Almyra when things got ‘kicked off’, so to speak, it’s just Byleth or Claude. Insert a gif with Claude in it here, because I’d hate for him to be left out).

That isn’t to say I don’t have some ideas about giving the side-characters ‘a voice’ in their own little stand alone, but that’s a while off. There is more stuff in the future but these are the parts I’m routinely working on, editing and pulling together with the intent of releasing them over the next few months.

The Bottom Line

There’s quite a lot going on behind the scenes.

I might also try to put together a timeline post somewhere here with a summary of the story so far, so people can catch-up easier. Might also help me organise my own thoughts a little bit, too.

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Oh, right.

Considering I semi-b*tched about it early, I should probably give a few preliminary thoughts. You may have noticed I left the following ‘Author’s Note’ all over the series late last month:

As of now I have completed all three of the ‘Good Ending’ pathways (Scarlet Blaze, Azure Gleam and Golden Wildfire with Byleth) + the ‘Bad Ending’ of Scarlet Blaze. The only reason I really did the ‘Bad Ending’ for Edelgard’s pathway is because there is a “bigger” difference (and I say that with a snort) because there are two different versions of the penultimate map in Ailell, depending on whether Byleth is with you or not. In comparison, from my understanding, (I might be wrong), there isn’t a massive map difference for AG or GW aside from at the very end – and, of course, a few of the cut scenes and a bleaker ending narration. So, when I can be bothered, I guess I’ll drag myself through the ‘bad endings’ for those two paths.

As for my general impressions about this Warriors game: it was alright.

On the face of it, it’s fun. Hacking down swaths of enemies with your favourite Three Houses characters (well, almost all of them, justice for Cyril and Alois!!!) is an okay way to take out your frustrations at the world. Also nice (and funny) to see that Claude is just as broken in this game as he is in Fire Emblem: Three Houses once he’s throw on his wyvern and gets access to the Aurora Shield. He seriously makes Dimitri and Edelgard feel like trash in comparison. Well, that and I generally don’t like armoured units especially in these Warrior games, so the latter never had any chance of impressing me personally.

So yeah, the people who make the actual Warriors games (i.e. the mechanics etc.), well done. It’s much better than the first FEW game, which I personally disliked. A part of why it is better is because we’re engaging with the world of the original games as opposed to a random new world that the characters have been pulled into.

The Fódlan characters are also interestingly written being put into different situations. Sure, the supports are pretty bland (sorry, not sorry, they are a handful I liked but most felt a bit pointless and the way they’re distributed is weird), the canonical in-story stuff is kinda interesting. Dimitri’s like a bomb about to go off, Edelgard’s just her usually hubris-driven self, and it’s fun to see Claude run around Fódlan like his arse is on fire all while longing for for that missing piece of the puzzle. (Seriously, it’s cute that of the three, he’s the one who “misses” Byleth the most– as in he feels like she ought to have been with him the whole time and feels incomplete, it’s interesting and plays fairly nicely into his belief in fate).

But when it comes to the “plot” of each path overall… heh. It’s not good. Really, really doesn’t make sense. Here’s a gif that captures my feelings:

[Slightly OT: Seriously, there were two instances when I literally burst out laughing while playing this game and this was one of them: Byleth’s reaction above to Jeralt laughing at Alois’s terrible joke in Golden Wildfire. IDK it’s only here and not the other two, where he doesn’t make a joke at all in AG and Byleth just sighs in SB, but this reaction was gif worthy in GW. Feel free to use.]

Anyway, regarding my rather irritated opinions on the plotholes in this game, I’ve put them in what I’m calling my patent pending (lol j/k) /rantbox. And yes, the text getting smaller is by design and also a joke. Feel free to skip it if you really don’t care or want to wait for a more thoughtful blog post that I might write at some point. Maybe.

If you skipped that, here’s the TL;DR in the form of a gif:

I think it sums it up quite nicely. It might be how you’re feeling if you did just read all of that!

Again, I want to stress that the above was rambling that I typed out without much thought so it probably doesn’t make sense. Like I said, I might do a proper write-up on my thoughts. I’m already working on the meta for From Shadows to Stars. I feel I have been using and abusing my comments section on AO3 with my long form responses.