An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Alien Stage (Web Series)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Relationships: Ivan & Till (Alien Stage), Ivan/Till (Alien Stage)
Characters: Ivan (Alien Stage), Till (Alien Stage), Mizi (Alien Stage), (mentioned only for now...), (who knows where the road may go....)
Additional Tags: Till-centric (Alien Stage), Angst, Post-Round 6 (Alien Stage), Pre-Round 7 (Alien Stage), POV Till (Alien Stage), Canonical Character Death, Bittersweet
Summary:
Only at night, a night like this one, cold and quiet in his blank room, can he think of one person at a time. And sometimes, their names are all that he can say in a day.
Mizi.
Ivan.
He taps out the syllables of their names on the floor beneath his ragged sleeping cot, packaged in pairs. The rhythm of it replaces the monotony of the night.
Till's days are haunted by his past, especially after a disastrous Round 6, where his love for singing starts to become a ghost as well. Tonight, his dreams end up no different, and a pleasantly alive and well Ivan visits him in his sleep.
quite possibly the whitest fight scene i've ever written
[ID: fanart of buddy dawn and kipperlilly copperkettle from fantasy high junior year. buddy and kipperlilly are drawn fighting each other inside a printed photo with burnt edges. buddy is holding a shotgun, and kipperlilly is holding her dagger while on fire. in the background, completely colored in blue behind the photo, are gems (bottom left corner), buddy's broken helio staff (bottom right corner), a complicated women magazine (top right corner), and notebook paper (top left corner). end ID]
i think that bacharath looks how buddy perceives himself. cassandra looks like kristen in sophomore year (and has not yet changed her appearance to fit kristen in junior year) because the reflection of follower are not one-to-one; they're shaped by the follower's perception.
buddy mentions that bacharath needs a "fiendish champion". therefore, i think bacharath does not look like buddy as he appears, but looks how buddy perceives himself. that is to say, infernal.
fhjy finale sort of spoilers, read at your own risk
i’m gonna be so totally real. the knowledge of kipperlily willingly taking a rage star is actually incredibly sad for her.
like she is a teenage girl who believes herself to be so uninteresting and un-special that she needs to go out of her way to corrupt herself in order to get the outcome/advantage (as she puts it herself) in life that she wants.
like. she’s the only of the rat grinders (that we know of) who willingly took a rage star, she willingly let herself become so full of anger and hate and rage because she thought it might give her an upper hand on other adventures like the bad kids who “got unfair advantages in life” because of the traumatic things they experienced.
i looking at it from the standpoint of her, much like the main characters of fantasy high, being just a teenager makes her choices that much more interesting but ultimately also sad.
quick thoughts after the final episode, so massive spoilers for fhjy ep20!
buddy dawn creating a new deity, bacharath, out of sheer strength of belief is very comedic! of course i understand how it's funny to see yet another reflection of kristen bounced off into a strange new direction.
BUT. though i'll be thinking more about this when i've got time to totally wrap my head around the finale, i think that him creating this new deity out of blind devotion and running right back to his grandfather is very sad, honestly.
throughout the show, buddy has been shown to have a very impersonal connection to helio, the deity he draws his power from. when talking to kristen in the hallways, he mentions how helio uses him as a conduit to unleash his will into the mortal will, and that he has no control over what spell comes from his hand. of course, from the way we know clerics and worship works in the world of fantasy high, we know that this doesn't make sense and is not true. ankarna's followers used her powers to kill her sister's followers and kill in her name. she had no agency in this matter.
instead of a truth of buddy's relationship with helio, this moment read to me as a reflection instead of how his worship is conducted: muscle memory and memorization. he puts none of himself into worship and devotion because all that thought comes outside of him, totally impersonally, from his grandfather's ideologies.
we don't see this method of worship change when he changes his deity that is, to him, an unnamed god of rage. instead, he doubles down. "of course bacharath has to be the true name of the deity, we just aren't believing hard enough." the way he devotes himself (aka: impersonally, without introspection) has not changed. only the subject of his devotion has changed.
now, how did s1 kristen create a new deity in the first place? throughout fhjy, so many talk about how impressive this is. she creates a new deity by understanding deep fundamental truths about the universe.
this idea is cheapened by the fact that buddy dawn creates a new deity. he isn't shown to understand a deeper truth about the universe at play, and he isn't shown to change how he worships. instead, he believes so so hard, exactly the way he has his entire life, and this method of worship is then substantiated as legitimate by the narrative.
and then, he goes back to his grandfather.
now, i get that all this is a set up for a potential fh senior year, which is another can of worms that i won't get into now. but, in terms of just this season, i find this ending very sad for buddy.
