#1 Rose Red Enthusiast

Sideblog of @sparksandstarsandstories. kat, they/she, mid-20s. Mostly ouatis at this point but there's occasional general mechs and podcast stuff too. Askbox always open! Header from art by @chekhovdraws

[miralines]

Kat’s OUATIS Fic Highlights

Hi! I write the series One Thousand and Three, a 350,000-word (and counting) fanfiction series about Once Upon a Time in Space. For easy reference, here are a few of the best/most useful to start with/my personal favorites!

the art of losing isn't hard to master: A character study about the first twenty years of Cinders' life and everything she had to grieve. T, 11k words, 1/1 chapters.

a princess who would hold me: The story of how Rose and Cinders fell in love. M, 11k words, 2/2 chapters.

made in glory: Cole asks Rose to help him make the Rose Reds. T, 2.8k words, 1/1 chapters.

remember me, I sing: A character study of Snow, her ambitions, and her vast and secret sin. T, 11k words, 1/2 chapters.

out of time, out of favor: An account of Briar's time on the Aurora. T, 13k words, 1/1 chapters.

as the decades passed: Snapshots from General White's life across the years of the rebellion. T, 5.6k words, 1/1 chapter.

rest your bones on the killing bed: Freckles Luck, a former Rose Red, endures his post-war assignment. T, 2.8k words, 1/1 chapters.

oh, lover, we’re not finally through: After the war, Briar poses as Rose on a publicity tour to help stabilize the newly-liberated galaxy. T, 101k words, 20/20 chapters.

The Army with a Single Face: Firsthand Accounts of Rose Reds from the Crown War: An in-universe nonfiction book about what happens to the Rose Reds after the war ends. T, 67k words, 15/15 chapters.

[miralines]

Currently blasting once upon a time in space to distract myself from the fireworks

[astrangeraccoon]

It was really a dick move on King Cole's part to kidnap Rose on her wedding day. Like come on could he not have waited for the next day at least? Doesn't he know how much a wedding cost?

[astrangeraccoon]

Rebloging with @miralines tags bc I had no idea of all this backstory? And this is so cool?! The mechanisms world building is so cool?!

[miralines]

Isn’t it??

Admittedly, a lot of what I’ve written is extrapolation from what we do know, but there is so much more lore than what’s in the album! It’s hard from just the songs to get clear pictures of who most of the characters are, but there are more hints in the fiction on the Mechs’ website.

For more context, here are the pieces of canon behind all my assertions in the tags:

Midnight is a short story about Cinders’ backstory. In it, we get glimpses of Cinders and Rose’s courtship and their wedding. Relevant to this post, we learn that they met through Rose being assigned as the commander of the prison Cinders was being held in (more on the implications of that here) and that Cinders broke out for the wedding, which suggests it was not sanctioned by Cole. From that, we can guess that Rose subverted or disobeyed her orders when it came to her relationship with Cinders.

We also learn that Cole had Cinders’ father shot in front of her, and that she is being held in prison rather than facing a worse fate as an example of Cole’s “mercy.” This makes it extremely unlikely she holds any level of positive sentiment towards Cole, and very likely he would find her troublesome as a free member of his nobility (let alone as a mother to the next generation of said nobility).

We learn in the album that Rose and Snow belong to “the noblest family in the kingdom”. From this, it seems likely that they would have some level of personal relationship with Cole (and some level of expectation to serve and obey him), hence my belief that the Wedding Day Slaughter was also to punish Rose for betraying that relationship.

Given that height of nobility and the vastness of Cole’s imperial holdings (“a thousand suns”) to extract wealth from, we can infer that their family also has an amount of money larger than is even possible on our single planet Earth.

That height of nobility is also what leads me to think that, while Snow’s politics were more peaceful than the Empire’s as a whole and probably irritating to Cole, her position still kept her from standing against less overt forms of imperial violence and likely even led her to condemn resistance against that imperial violence (more on why I think that here).

In A Fireside Chat, we see some of the propaganda that emerges out of the Wedding Day Slaughter, and how Cole’s government blames the rebellion for a senseless tragedy that inspired Rose to give her life for the Rose Red Project. The slaughter gave Cole weapons both in the form of the Reds themselves and in the rhetorical opportunities their origins create (if you twist the truth), both of which were opportunities he seems to have happily taken.

I love all the little details in mechs lore so much (especially ouatis) and have spent so much time thinking about it. None of this is even getting into what we learn about the ouatis galaxy through stories about Colonel Belle, the Red Hood, or other characters. There is so much to dissect and I am always delighted by the opportunity to do so

[astrangeraccoon]

It was really a dick move on King Cole's part to kidnap Rose on her wedding day. Like come on could he not have waited for the next day at least? Doesn't he know how much a wedding cost?

[soilmicrobiology]

when i am thinking about snow ouatis i always think about her decision to become general white as killing herself and i keep starting to say that as shorthand but i forgot that killing herself has like. a different meaning

something something rapid transformation of the self

[lutesial]

hc that Tim fought against King Cole on the side of the rebellion

not because he cares about whose 'right' and whose 'wrong'

not even because he cares about what King Cole is doing.

But because King Cole reminds him a bit too much of a certain Kaiser.

[rqbossman]

Huh. So @jonnywaistcoat I guess Denny's the restaurant chain is disappointed in your face?

[jonnywaistcoat]

Yeah, a lotta people are.

[stjohnstarling]

I’m not a mad scientist, I’m just a disappointed scientist.

[saintofbadpuns]

The Twins-Once Upon a Time (in Space)// Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors// Sisters, by Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes// Antigone, Sophocles// Antigone sentenced to death by Creon by Giuseppe Diotti// Chapter The Last-Once Upon a Time (in Space)// The Iiald, by Homer//Laid in Blood-Once Upon a Time (in Space)

[rattprince]

General White <3

[bird-brainz]

happy fuck you and fuck your train friday to all who celebrate!

[louchie]

Having one of my favorite characters ive ever made be named Freckles Luck is so damn absurd.

She's a clone. She got her name from having a fuck ton of freckles, generic quirk of her batch. The rest of her sisters got them too, bit shes the only one who lived last 3.

He didn't really understand names, properly, and was really frustrated by them when he had to pick a last one. Chose the one thing he had going for him.

Freckles Luck

[soilmicrobiology]

there's just no way that cinders and rose would have been happy if they'd gotten married normalstyle and lived on new constantinople because even though the love was there i can't see cinders happy living under the kings rule and pretending everything is fine and i can't see rose understanding why cinders is unhappy. the problem of the rose reds aside

[the-goddess-of-annoying]

it's always "hanged man your prophecy's groundless" or "hanged man your words make no sense" and never "wow hanged man it sounds like there was information i didn't know. it sounds like i might've been wrong about some things i'll think about that and try to figure it out"

[cinderswife]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

no such thing as heroes chapter 2: fractals in rainbow, devil in red

In which Cinders doesn't kill herself.

[soilmicrobiology]

they should make it so you can only post about dr carmilla if you can answer 3 riddles and do open heart surgery. aand listen to exhumed and unplugged #truth

[louchie]

being really territorial abt fandom tags is still really funny to me. its so nothignburger but god do i get territorial. small fandom hell.

when i was a kid ppl would always post heros of olympus or 1st series pjo art in the Trials Of Apollo tag and it would piss me offffffffff. this was diretly followed by the hostile takeover of the mechanisms tag by tma fans (ongoing) and the hostile takeover of the ouatis tag my mechs crew fans (ongoing)

so tell me WHY the steam poweredgiraffe tag is suddenly all PHM bc of a fire fire animatic. stay AWAY from my PETER FOUR

[imaloregremlin]

. . . . . . . okay but like I personally do nawwwwt put tma shit in the mechs tag unless there's an actual crossover with both characters from both things?

who the fuck is coming into the gay space pirates tag and posting the INFERIOR archivist in comparison to Ivy (just saying IVY never started any apocalypses that they didn't want to... /silly)