Well it’s about time to talk about what my special little hobby/interest has been for the last five months, introduce it and all. Like 4 people are going to read this and care to check it out, so, I don’t care bear with me.
The Starbound Path.
The Starbound path, is, for all intents and purposes, a re-imagining of the Web Animated Series, RWBY, that started in the fall of 2024~ during my finals for college majors as a multi-media fanfiction, powered entirely by caffiene and my begging for mercy ‘tism diagnosis. While several works go into my inspiration, the least of which not being the works of Alucard45, TrackHawk and SirDarkVid of Broken Wings and One Last Patch AO3 fame, it ultimately came down to a day of me sitting in my room bored out of my mind, and thinking “hey, what if I made my own?”
Considering the existing published chapters are at 18 with a 10 chapter lead, and over 155k words of that, it’s safe to say I got a little carried away making my AU. I did not make this alone: a fellow Writer and friend named MaggeeMoo has been an immense help, and I suggest checking out her fanfics as well.
Now. What is it? Why should anyone care? Why are you rambling so much you idiot?
Great questions!
Effectively, I’ve reworked major aspects of the story, and more importantly, the overall worldbuilding, political setting, and others into what I want to be a genuine living world that the characters are in. I’m like, in the top 4% of RWBY Fans, but I won’t deny its issues: those issues are what made this into a work in the first place. Massive concepts in a barren world bugged me.
The main point of this story though, is to tell the story of RWBY on a grander scale before we get to any picture Esq endings. Volume one will almost entirely focus on just Team RWBY figuring out one another and their boundaries- or lack there of, and the slow cascade into strained polyamory. Moreover, to steal a quote from RWBY Volume 4’s soundtrack, the song Lets Just Live: “Let's forget about our problems, Let's fall in love with life, And just be free!”
This is to be a story about love, loss, trauma, and so, so many things, but it’s primarily about friendship, and learning to deal with issues of key characters in healthy ways- and the consequences of not handling those issues properly. Things will not always work out well: bad things do happen for a reason, as rough ad it may be. There will be a happy ending… in time, but happiness is worth fighting for.
For Example: While in Canon there are 4~ major kingdoms, Atlas, Mistral, Vale and Vacuo, this story has around 10, being in descending order of population, Vale, Mistral, Solitas(atlesian Commonwealth,) Vacuo, Rhodes(Ruby and Yang’s Homeland,) Vytalian Confederacy, Menagerie(and surrounding islands,) Argus, Draecia(northern tip of Vacuo,) and the Principality of Arcadia. And, characters and backgrounds come from all over, political figures like Sienna Khan hailing from Draecia, or with history spanning back a few thousand years.
Concepts about harder, stricter rules for Aura and Weapons, huntsmen specializations like search and rescue or diplomacy, variance of huntsmen between major states are all on the table in my admittedly insane writing. I have problems, if it wasn’t obvious by now.
And i, along with my cowriter, have been hard at work setting up… a very messy story, that starts with some troublesome circumstances: Ruby and Yang, cousins turned step sisters, Pyrrha and Weiss, stepsisters in remarriage, and Blake with her mentor Adam all try and stop a dust robbery at the same time, the week before classes start- and land in a heap of trouble. If that sounds chaotic… yeah it is, and I hope it sparks interest.
That said, there’s… a lot that’s going to be handled in this story. Religious trauma, SA, abuse, maiming, gore, discussions of theology, amputation, racism, homo/transphobic parents, Incestuous tendencies and other things, just to name a few, and they’re all things I want to handle relatively seriously.
With no exaggeration, Jaune in this story is the adopted older brother of Coco alongside Saphron after being kicked out by their father when Jaune was 14 because he experimented with crossdressing, and an Alcoholic at 19 Weiss due to her older step brother Henry Marigold through her fathers side getting her addicted at a young age.
So while I love this story, and this insane blog post will be tagged to my main page, I’m letting you all know now, some things in this story won’t be for everyone, and that’s fine.
There’s a lot of work to do, and ultimately this story may never actually finish: but, volume 1 of 3 is, in terms of overall content, nearing the halfway point of drafting, with the next major arc to be written soon after the time of this post.
This page will, slowly, transition more to a page for storing multimedia related to The Starbound Path, like commissioned art, side stories, blogs about religious systems or worldbuilding, personal creations, and of course, immunity feedback.
This likely isn’t the most coherent read, and, I understand that so, without further adieu:
https://archiveofourown.org/series/4592578
This is the overall story link
And this is the link to chapter 1 of Volume 1: started with a kick
https://archiveofourown.org/works/62217643/chapters/159161878
Thank you for reading my insane ramblings, and, I hope to talk to anyone interested in time: feedback is encouraged as time goes on.
